Mathew Klein
Monday, 7 March 2005
Klein came out of the building just in time to see a kid leaning into his car through the broken driver’s window five cars down. The hood was open. The alarm had been clipped.
“Hey!” Klein yelled at the kid. The boy was Hispanic and short. All tattoos and shoulders in his white wife-beater.
The kid barely looked up at Klein, said, “Fuck off, honkey.”
“Wha–?” said Klein, no longer angry. “An oldy but a goody, I guess. Worth the paper work,” he said to himself. He stepped back and leaned against the wall with his arms folded. He watched the kid’s progress with getting the stereo out of the dash.
“Hey kid, I think that’s a cop car,” called Klein.
“You don’t wanna get hurt, mind your business, fucking joto.” The kid had the stereo half out of the dash.
“I’m saying, I’ll bet there’s a gun under the seat.”
The kid still didn’t look up but fished his hand around under the seat. He extracted himself from the broken window with a black, full size Para-Ordnance .45 in one hand, the stereo in the other.
“Fuck yeah,” said the kid, “Good call, ese.” He raised the gun in a friendly salute.
Klein’s regular carry, a Heckler and Koch Mark 23, jumped out and coughed twice, crackless subsonic rounds, fast as that. Both shots hit the kid in the center of his chest. So close together the ME would be unaware it was two shots until digging out the flattened round that didn’t make it all the way through.
His eyes open, arms dropping limp, the boy fell forward to the street. He hit perfectly flat and bounced forward a few inches. The back of his bleach white tank top a shiny contrast, black with blood in the noon sun.
“Yeah,” said Klein, scanning the street around him, “Pretty sure that’s a cop car.”
