I’m Fixin’ To Play Dead (Number 47)
Right when I succumbed to slumber during the wee hours while hiding out in the rear of Sissy’s backyard while waiting to ambush the murdering taxi driver, Red Sexton, whom I was convinced was coming for my money and for mine and Louise both lives, he last thing I had remembered was the bright and flickering stars displayed in the vault of Heaven above me.
The next thing I saw were the stars again, but this time there was no dark and velvety background, and they were colored. They looked like they were orange and blue colored—and they hurt, and somehow they seamed to be appearing inside my head instead of the sky. Then I sank into blackness as dark as ink.
It seemed like eons before I awoke, and when I did, my head hurt so bad that I just wanted to sink into nothingness again, but I fought it off and climbed back into the world. It was painful, not only to my head, but to my entire body. I was lying on cold, hard concrete and I could feel the rough texture of it against my face and hardness of it against my body.
When I attempted to sit up everything around me swirled causing me to sink back down. Gathering my strength, I made another attempt and made it into a sitting position this time after which I decided to try to stand up. That’s when I realized I couldn’t separate my feet. Looking down I saw they were bound together with silver duct tape.
When I tried to reach down to unleash them I saw that my wrists were also bound together. The next thing I attempted was to cry out, only to feel an extreme tightness around my mouth, which was also covered by duct tape.
Feeling a warm draft of air from my left I rolled toward it and saw the open door from the kitchen. I was lying on the patio. In a near state of panic I struggled to sit up and make an attempt to rip the tape off of me. I was halfway up when a shadow emerged from the open kitchen door. I looked up and saw a pale face outlined with bright, red hair!
It was Red! He put one of his feet onto my chest and pushed me firmly back down on the concrete. My head bounced off it and I saw fresh stars, but I didn’t go out. I watched while he pulled a chair our from the patio table and sit down.
“Hello, Ralph,” he said with a triumph tone, “what did you think, that I was just going to walk into the back yard and let you shoot me. Unlike you, I took a little something to help me stay awake.”
He reached inside of his jacket and pulled my pistol out. He twirled it on his finger, then gripped it and placed the muzzle of it against the end of my nose and said, “I might just shoot your eyes out, like you shot my tires out.”
I felt the cold tentacles of fear wrapping around me and wondered if I was going to die there on the cold cement, but I breathed a temporary sigh of relied when he said, “But I think I’ll wait until I know where that old suitcase is before I proceed. You want to tell me where it is? If you do I might just leave you here like you are. If you don’t I’ll try and convince you to real slow.”
He sat back down into the chair, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled deeply, blew a thick cloud of smoke over me and said, “If you hadn’t been so greedy, wanting all that old man’s money for yourself, then everything would have been okay. We could have split it and gone our merry way, but no, you wanted it all for yourself. Come after me with a gun! How the heck did you manage to catch up with me anyhow? It’s no matter now ‘cause I done caught up with you.”
Suddenly he dropped to a knee, grabbed my jacket and jerked my face up to his, nose-to-nose. “You listen to me, boy! I intend to have that money, and the woman it came with; in fact I believe there are two women involved now. I done been through every inch of this house and found no women and no money. Now I’m going to take this tape off your mouth and you’re going to tell me where to find the women and the money. If you yell I’ll make you wish you hadn’t!”
The pain of the tape being ripped off of my mouth was mild compared to the pain still in my head. But when the tape came off, suddenly my whole being was filled with fury and I couldn’t help myself when I spat at him and told him to go to hell.
It was a short punch, a jab, but the blow from his fist was hard when it crashed into my mouth. I felt my lip split and could taste the saltiness of the blood on my tongue. I spat it out on the concrete.
“You got a smart mouth, boy,” Red said as he produced another strip of duct tape and pressed it across my injured mouth. “Now, you can choke on them words and on your own blood.”
He dragged me over so that I was directly underneath the light and said, “Let’s see if you got anything else on you,” as he began to rummage through my pockets.
“What’s this piece of paper here?” he said as he pulled it from my pocket and unfolded it. “Why it looks like it’s map to somewhere. I wonder where it might be fixing to take us?”