The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis Page A

helmet or a pneumatic nail gun that he needed to pick up. I gave him a flat no each time. I explained to him that I had to get myself home.
    I had to work tonight.

7
     

    I had settled on a plan, or rather, a plan had percolated up from my subconscious. As I drove home to get cleaned up for work, I began entertaining a fantasy of Owen walking into Vanguard like he had two nights ago, attempting to intimidate me, to slap me around. I imagined myself just thrusting the gun into his face and clenching the trigger, bursting the back of his head out like the cap popping off a shaken up soda bottle, spraying blood and brain matter ten feet behind him before he slumped into a boneless pile on the maroon floor mat. I would claim self defense. I would say he was trying to rob the store. I would say I found the pistol in the bushes outside and the cops would never be able to prove different. There might be a trial, I might get charged with some watered-down violent crime, but I would know for the rest of my life that I had executed the son of a bitch who had raped my girlfriend.
    I wanted to be attacked, that was my entire plan; and, once attacked, I wanted to lash out with righteous and devastating force and kill Owen Ferguson. It amounted to a kind of jujitsu; it relieved me of the tension and responsibility of being the aggressor, allowed me to react rather than initiate.
    And now I was armed for that reaction. I put on my old brown derby jacket that had been a favorite garment for too many years. It was separating at the seams, the pocket linings were shredded, the collar frayed. But I stood before a mirror wearing it, with the pistol in the right pocket and the knuckles in the left, and it made sense. The pockets had zippers so I could keep the weapons in place, and my hands were practiced at finding the tab and slipping the zipper down. I went through a couple of practice draws and found the pistol slid free without snags and was in the open air, ready to kill in a few heartbeats—although it caught on the strips of torn lining and pulled the pocket inside out.  
    But nothing happened. The shift crawled by peacefully. Several times my heart began jumping as I thought I saw Owen’s car rolling up, but it was always a cheap imitation. I called Jill at her mother’s at
eight o’clock
and was told by her stepfather that she was out somewhere and she would call me back. She never called and it set my nerves on edge, left me agitated and reckless. I closed the store at ten, activated the alarm and let myself out. I locked the door and turned back toward my car in the empty parking lot, only then seeing the two of them advance.
    They were both Mexican, wearing the gangland uniform, the combination cholo and black gangsta gear—both in baggy pants and baseball caps and oversized T-shirts. And they were coming on fast.
    It was no good. I wanted Owen, but he sensed, maybe, how close to the edge I was. Or maybe he wanted to show me that I was light-work, that beating down a white punk like me was beneath him. Whatever had happened, he had elected to send these two thugs, probably paid them in coke or pot, maybe just said he’d consider it a favor if that one white boy who works at Vanguard got his ass beat.
    I watched them strutting and rolling toward me in the dark parking lot, their arms wide, hands open, bodies loose and ready for action. I stood still until they were ten feet off and then I slid the zipper down, took out the thirty-eight and extended it toward them.
    They stopped mid-step. A car whisked by on the street beyond the shrubbery. A parking lot light rained down on the empty pavement behind them and turned them into silhouettes. One was anorexically thin, the other thick but strong, a weightlifter under a layer of fat with the proud posture and jerky energy of a gamecock.
    The same light making the gangsters into silhouettes must have made my every detail visible to them. I was aware of my pocket lining hanging out,