Death by Chocolate Read Free

been a
kid. And like Grandma Flynn, she had a disapproving scowl on her face.
    “What do you think you’re
doing there, son?” she said. ‘You shouldn’t go waving a gun around like that.
It might be loaded. You could put somebody’s eye out with that thing.”
    Ferris gouged the guy in
the ribs with his gun. Hard. The old man stood up a little straighten ‘You and
your wife better get over there with everybody else before we kill you both,”
Ferris told him.
    Yeah,” Rodney said, feeling
a surge of power that he’d never felt before in all of his twenty-two years.
‘Yeah, you’d better do what you’re told or I’ll shoot you... just like I’m
gonna shoot this stupid bitch over here who doesn’t wanna give me her ring.”
    He turned away from the
grandma and returned his attention to the young woman with the big, sparkly
ring on her finger. “I’m tired of waiting around for you,” he said. “I think
I’ll just go ahead and blow you away. That way everybody here will know that
we—er.... that is—I mean business.”
    He glanced over at Ferris.
Ferris had a stupid little grin on his face, a grin that meant he didn’t think
Rodney had the balls to do it. Yeah, well, he’d soon see....
    “You don’t want to do that,
son,” said the old woman behind him. “And I’ll give you three good reasons...”
Rodney turned and was somewhat surprised to see that she wasn’t looking at him;
she was talking to him, but she was looking at the guy she’d come in with. The
guy was looking back at her kind of funny. Like they had some sort of secret
between them.
    But Rodney couldn’t
immediately figure out what it might be, so—like most things Rodney couldn’t
understand—he ignored it.
    “One,” the woman was saying,
“when they catch you, you’ll be charged with murder instead of just plain ol’
bank robbing.”
    “They ain’t gonna catch
us.” But Rodney wasn’t as sure as he had been when they’d walked in. There was
that camera in the corner, and there they were with their faces hanging out—no
masks or pantyhose—plain as day.
    “And two....” She fixed him
with eyes that were star-tlingly blue. They cut through him like icy knives and
made him feel sick and small, just like he had a second before Grandma had
whacked him with Grandpa’s big leather belt. “It’s just wrong,” she said, “and
if you do something as wrong as killing somebody, you’ll pay a really big price
for it.”
    “Shut her up!” Ferris
yelled at the guy. “Shut your old lady up before I blow her head off.”
    The man’s face changed; it
actually twisted into some sort of an angry grin. And all of a sudden, it
occurred to Rodney that—except for the gray hair and the baggy clothes—he
didn’t look all that old, or weak.
    “What was that you were
saying, honey?” the guy asked the woman with the walker.
    “I was saying.... I have
three good reasons why you shouldn’t be doing this...”
    Time seemed to slow down
for Rodney. It was a moment he would play over and over again in his mind for
years to come and remember every detail: the young woman who wouldn’t give up
her engagement ring, softly sobbing behind him, the bank employees and other
customers shaking and pale in a tight circle behind the counter, the gal with
the walker, moving still closer to him, talking....
    “Three reasons, and all of
them good ones. Like I said: One, they’ll give you the needle when they catch
up with you. Two, it’s just wrong, and three—”
    Rodney didn’t know what hit
him. At least, not at first. Later, much later, they would realize it was the
old lady’s walker.
    But at the time it was just
a blur of silver, the gun flying out of his hand, an awful pain across his
face, and the taste and feel of warm blood gushing out of his nose and down the
back of his throat as he fell backward to the cold marble floor.
    He was only dimly aware of
a scuffle on the other side of the room. Ferris’s cry of pain. The dull