Cover, being a highly flexible term, in this case meant the curb-side of some little two-seater car about as big as your average lawn mower. I hunkered down low and tried to see the legs of the guy lacking the brick-sized hole in his chest.

I didn’t see the legs. Not at first. But I did see that little gun, recently dropped, wedged just behind the rear passenger-side wheel. Looking ready for action. At the same time, I realized that I was pressing low into the grating of a sewer drain, which was getting kinda flooded with the rainwater still sheeting down.

Could I get down into that sewer? I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t. Maybe I could.

And so I had a choice, or at least possibly I did, the ramifications of which still follow to me to this day: I could shimmy down that little sewer like a rat, and live to fight another day. Or I could try to grab that gun and show these assholes that even I have a breaking point.

Sometimes, not always, when in a crisis, the mind slows everything down. I’m not saying I had time to write up a Benjamin Franklin list of pros and cons, but I did have time to make a decision.

And what I decided was that rats don’t live to fight another day. They live to run away another day. And another, and another, until something finally kills them anyway. And that’s no kind of life at all. “Cowards die many times before their deaths.” So said Caesar (or Shakespeare’s version of him, anyway).

I was sick of dying.

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