One ringy-dingy. Two ringy dingies. Pick up, pick up.

“What now.”

It was a male voice. Rough. Husky. Kind of middle-age sounding. I pictured a kind of fat Louie DePalma type, but the kind that’s always busybusybusy and you’re bothering him as he chomps on a stogie, unshaven, unkempt. Basically an asshole, of course. I kept my speculation to myself, willing him to say something else. He obliged.

“If you’re calling to try to back out again… I don’t care what you feel, how long it’s been, who’s dead, who’s alive, if it’s raining snowing sleeting or if there’s a goddam tornado breathing down your neck. There are bigger things in the world than your little life, sweetheart, and you got responsibilities. You made promises. You have obligations. LIVE UP TO THEM. Hello? Englethorpe?”

Englethorpe? What the… ok, I had to stop saying that. I spoke up.

“Who the fuck is Englethorpe?”

*click*

Well, I hadn’t really expected an answer. But fuuuuuuuuck! I was getting pretty god damn fucking sick of all this fucking MYSTERY. I put the phone in my pocket and headed off after Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie Englethorpe? Nah.

I tried to head off after her anyway. I took two steps and something got caught between my feet and sent me sprawling on the wet concrete.

Turns out Howie actually saved my life, because just like in a cheesy movie, as I fell a series of loud THUNKs of various textures smacked against first the cab door, then the concrete by my head, the concrete by my hand, and finally one kind of wet SPLAT sort of thing.

It doesn’t take as long as you might think to figure it out when somebody is shooting at you, even if you can’t hear the gunshots. The first spray of concrete in your face, the sight of a new hole appearing in a burst of skull and hair above the left ear of the battered severed head you just tripped over, the screams of the cabbie who just got shot through the door of the cab you were walking by when you tripped. These are clues.

I stayed on the ground, natch, and scooted my ass under that cab, desperately hoping that another movie cliche wouldn’t come true and the cab turn into a fireball when it took some bullets in the gas tank. I saw on TV that that one’s particularly full of shit, but hey I just pulled off the old “Bend To Tie Your Shoe At The Precise Moment The Sniper Pulls The Trigger” trick so you never know.

Except this wasn’t really a sniper, I guess. Do snipers use machine guns? Sure I had dodged the first spray, somehow, my luck holding up, but even huddled under the cab I was pretty much a sitting duck if he figured out he could ricochet the bullets under the car. The poor cabbie was screaming bloody murder in the cab above me, until another spray of bullets came out of the darkness and ended his screaming with a sudden jerk and gurgle. They kept coming, those fucking bullets. Must be two shooters now, I thought. They hit the tires and the cab sank down on one side. I closed my eyes and crept further under the cab, intending to head out the other side and the entrance to my apartment building. The one that was supposedly on fire. OK, forget that idea, let’s aim for the alley. The entrance to the alley, completely out of the cover of the nice friendly cab conveniently keeping the mean old bullets from boring into my tender flesh.

Falling bodies and stuff tend to draw a crowd, but even though this accident scene was strangely unpopulated by passersby or my fellow tenants, the machine gun fire sent anybody standing around screaming into the night by that point. I wondered idly if that guard had ever called the paramedics. I looked over to where he had been standing. He wasn’t standing anymore. If the paramedics were on their way, they had a new patient.

There was a pause. I looked out from my hiding place and was startled by movement in the wheel-well by my head. Ibex peered out from his perch on top of the tire. He looked sleepy. Unaffected. Cool under pressure, my cat.

I couldn’t hear footsteps through the wind and the rain, couldn’t see anybody out there. Were they reloading? Had they gone away? What the hell should I do? Certainly not huddle under that cab waiting to be shot.

When I was 12, I went through a ninja phase. Totally obssessed, I made a ninja costume out of a black t-shirt, black shorts (it was summer), and a black ski mask. Mom wouldn’t let me buy any cool ninja gear, so I made my own nunchucks out of some dowel rods, nylon string, and this hand drill my dad had for some reason. I didn’t know how to use a power drill, plus Mom might have heard me using it. That would have been Bad.

I made throwing stars out of paper, a little origami thing some kid at school had brought to his classmates. For a while there, paper throwing stars were the bane of sixth grade. You’d fold paper into a throwing-star shape, then wrap it in masking tape, sometimes putting a penny on either side to increase the weight. You could make them big, small, whatever. They didn’t fly very straight, but if you got hit with one it really hurt, as Tom Waltman found out one day when he took one in the eye. Dude.

Our highly-developed senses of humor found it really amusing to loudly speculate, just out of his earshot but within hearing range of the Cool Gym Teacher who’d just chuckle and shake his head, that Mr. Peters was a die-hard Alpha Sigma Sigma man. But when the principal brought out his corporal punishment tool– his fraternity bat– the smiles died as fast as the nerve endings enflamed on our reddened little smartasses. That was the end of paper throwing stars in school.

But not at home. I had a large collection of throwing stars, of all sizes and with experimental techniques, none effective in the least. to try to make them fly straight. I loved those paper throwing stars. My Mom found my stash one day, pitched them into the trash, then gave Mr. Peters a run for his money with her own corporal punishment tool– the back of a wooden spoon. This was only the day after Mr. Peters had dealt with us. I swear, I literally didn’t sit for three days. I slept on my stomach, but wasn’t yet convinced of the folly of my ambition.

Part of my ninja quest involved learning the techniques and skills of the ninja. Mostly the stealth skills. Ninjas, so my sources informed me, were nearly invisible. They walked silently. They could be standing right next to you and you’d never know it until you took a poison dart in the… well, in the neck.

I worked on my ninja skills all summer. I did my silent ninja-walk everywhere I went, to the point where my mother threatened to give me the beating of my life if I didn’t “stop that weird goose-stepping you’re embarrassing me what are you John Cleese in black pajamas knock it OFF.” Whoever John Cleese was. I didn’t discover Monty Python until I was fifteen.

That threat, and the discovery of an entire stack of old Playboys in some boxes in the attic, pretty much ended the whole ninja thing. I didn’t really know what to do with the Playboys, but I knew I had to do something. Eventually, with some oh-so-casual, it’s-for-a-friend, hey-have-you-ever advice interrogated from Amy Fitzimmon’s older brother Bart, I figured it out. And then spread the word. And then got the back of the spoon again.

But huddled under that cab, under the judgemental scrutiny of my cat, terrified of feeling a sudden “sting” in my bicep or thigh (I read too many trashy novels), mysterious assailants out there in the darkness under cover of storm trying to fill me fulla lead, it wasn’t the magic of Playboy or the finely-honed powers of self abuse I developed over that Summer vacation that I called upon. It was the spirit of the Ninja. Japanese Warrior Assassin. It had been years, nearly twenty, and they were long-disused and rusty and never really there in the first place, but obviously ninja skills are like riding a bike. I could do this. It would work. I’d ninja my way to that alley and they wouldn’t even know I had escaped until they looked under the cab and were like “whaaaa? where’d he go? he’s like…. some kind of ninja!”

Ok, I wasn’t even fooling myself, but to be the part you gotta act the part. I nodded to Ibex, scrabbled out from under the cab and duck-walked ninja-style to the alley beside my apartment building feverishly sending out ninja-no-seeum vibes. I’m not here… I’m not here… I’m not here…

Of course my Dad and sisters had just been generously playing along all that Summer when I managed to sneak up on them or jump out at them from the depths of shadow to their great surprise, because I was so cute and ridiculous in my cobbled-together ninjawear. So it follows, obviously, that my Ninja Power of Invisibility was basically invisible to the dudes with the machine guns out there in the rain. And by invisible I mean they saw me right away.

Bullets came spattering all around me almost as soon as I emerged from the cover of the body of the cab. The duck-walking had worked though, letting me stay out of the open until I was almost in the alley. I didn’t straighten completely, but sort of dove and ran at the same time into the alley, fallling over again as bullets hit the walls, the ground, everywhere but me. Well, one did take a chunk out of my shoe. My good old, comfy Steve Madden shoe! Argh! Somebody was going to pay for that.

Those guys are terrible shots ran through my head for some reason as I got up again and ran down the alley. The idiots land a huge chopper on an unsturdy roof, then Howie doesn’t just shoot me when he has a chance, and now two guys can’t hit the broad side of a barn with what amounts to a firehose spurting bullets. This was not a finely-tuned organization staffed with highly skilled agents.

The alley opened out onto the sidewalk on the next block. I heard a shout behind me, and running. Finally, the shooters had some kind of physical presence. What now, what now…. I looked around. Do I run? Keep going, try to find Anne-Marie maybe at the hotel? I had the cell phone in my pocket, maybe I could trace its origin somehow. I could run somewhere else and hide out, then go back to the apartment building and see what was going on with the wreckage of the helicopter. I could go to the police again…

Or I could fight.

The next block was filled with construction equipment, work being done on a building near mine. Fucking jackhammers all day long on a Saturday. God. For a Long John Silver no less. Just what I need! I’m addicted to Long John Silver, but until then the nearest one had been about five miles of aggravating traffic away. Even had a helicopter not fallen through the roof of our apartment building, and a dude been cut in half and dropped on a cab out front, we probably would have had to move.

But my delicious-battered-seafood crisis would have to wait until I dealt with this here situation. Some worker had forgotten his hard hat and left it lying across two sawhorses. I put it on, smooshing it down on my head. Bit small but not too bad, it would stay on my head at least. I filled a hand with a brick, then spotted a three-foot long piece of rebar to fill the other. Putting my back to the wall next to the alley, I lay in wait. The old Run Down the Alley but Stop To Ambush The Pursuers trick.

If they hadn’t been so incompetent up to that point, I would have just kept running. But this whole squad seemed to be made of fuck-ups, and they had fucking fucked up my fucking life. Among other things, they shot me in the shoe. It wasn’t a new shoe, but I loved it and they don’t make them any more and now there was a big old rip it and water was getting in and where was my cat and where was my wife and who was my wife and I hadn’t had any coffee all day and ARRRRRRRRRRGH!

Enough was enough! I was scared, yeah, terrified even. But my overriding emotion right then was anger. Just pissed-off, cold fury. And I was going to fucking take it out on whoever came out of that fucking alley. I tilted my borrowed hard-hat down over my forehead, re-gripped my brick and length of steel, and waited as two sets of footsteps pelted down the alley. Two of ‘em, OK, like I thought. Good. This was going to be fun. A grim smile etched its way across my face.

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