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slope of the garage floor.  In his business, he had
probably seen people shot through their own trunk lids, I guess.  I told him,
not to worry. He wasn’t worth killing.
    I picked him up, gently crammed
him into his own car trunk.  I shook the ammo out of his revolver and threw the
gun into the trunk.  I was about to put the Nickel plate in too, when something
came over me and I stuck the Colt in my coat pocket.  I don’t usually do stuff
like that, but I figured as long as they found a gun in the car no one would
notice.
    “Don’t do this, dude! Let me go.”
His screaming trailed off into unintelligible rambling.  It hurt my head. I
closed the trunk lid.  This muffled things nicely. I could barely hear him
through the old Detroit metal of the trunk lid.
    As I walked back to my car, I
heard Cedric screaming at me, pleading for me not to kill him. Shooting
somebody through the trunk of their own car was cold.  Not my style.  I was
calling the cops.
    When I got back upstairs, I took
two more pictures of the perfect paint job on the Jag and hopped into the
Chrysler.  On my cell phone I called Officer Billingsworth at KPD and left a
message as to the whereabouts of the mugger, telling the dispatcher to check
the security company’s camera records for evidence of the attack.  I hoped that
these records would not make it seem that I over reacted.  I took the loaded
nickel-plate and tossed it into the glove box with my police special.  I had
never bothered to reload my own pistol after Billingsworth had taken my
bullets.
    Downtown Knoxville was pretty much
vacant late Saturday morning. It was a good time for a mugging. No one would
hear the victim, or the mugger, cry for help.
    Back at the ranch, my little house
was in need some work.  After a very busy afternoon of grass cutting, leaf
raking and, believe it or not, car washing, I decided to check my email.
    Afterward, I typed the word
“teleportation” into my best search engine and hit “go.” My internet search for
“teleportation” hit five million web listings. After looking at a few, I was
reminded that all I had learned to do in physics class was play spades. Most of
the web sites were both condescending and nerdy. Theories on how teleportation
might work flew back and forth. Then the listings quickly trailed off into a
bunch of Star Trek Sci-Fi crap.
    I got cleaned up from my afternoon
chores, and left to take the long way to Orby’s Place.  I swung by Ashes for a
bottle of wine and drank most of it at Savelli’s with fried ravioli and a
salad, table for uno.
    At about nine and I drove over to
Orby’s Place for the second night in a row.  Imagine the Alamo made out of
cinder block and neon, that’s what it looked like.  Tammy must be a hell of a
woman to have me hanging out in a dump like this.
    Loud country music blared and the
parking lot was a repeat of last night.  The only difference was the gleaming
white Chrysler convertible in the parking lot doing its best to be snazzy.  It
was still a pretty wimpy ride by Orby’s standards: no V-eight and no four by
four.  This could be my last visit to this place. Tammy could be a no show. Or
she could have changed her mind or her story or both.
    She was there. Looking just as
pretty in a red shirt, knotted above her waist, showing a little of that
midriff.  I waved and sat at a table and she waved and brought me a Budweiser a
moment later, without even asking what I wanted.  She leaned in and said hello,
told me to relax, she would be done pretty soon.
    The next two hours seemed to last
for about three days.  I was being pounded with the worst in country music and
electric slide type wannabees. The PA was being pushed beyond its limits into
distortion. No one seemed to notice me. I watched Tammy bob and weave through
the increasingly busy room.  I was day dreaming about that old movie The
Fly, where the scientist is stuck in the spider web at the end screeching
‘Help me! Help me!’  I