cream dork bird honey Paris sautée speeding fountain
Wilson made a living and a life of being a security guard. At first, he rented his dumpy bachelor pad on minimum wage from a department store. Then, he bought a half-carat diamond solitaire ring on his two-digit salary at an exclusive men’s clothier. He branched out to an armored truck and a gun long enough to buy a house. But when his first child was born, Wilson felt that work too risky of his health and peace of mind. He turned next to a jeweler.
“Who the hell does jewel heists anymore?” he thought the first time a robbery was attempted on his shift.
The young thieves were inexperienced, and Wilson was sure someone else—a third person not present in the store with them—had been in charge. There had been only four more attempts during Wilson’s 26 years keeping the diamonds, rubies, and sapphires safe. But at age 56, Wilson decided he needed to spend less time on his feet. Ten years had passed since the last attempted robbery. And he knew full well he couldn’t stop the next one. To ease his way into retirement, Wilson found himself an easy parking lot gig, complete with a heated security shelter and all the coffee he could brew and drink in a nine-hour shift.
∞
Wilson was walking back to his desk when the cream-colored VW Bug crashed through the gate. He heard the crash from the speakers attached to the bank of monitors because he wasn’t at his desk to see the crash. “What the fuck?” he said as he trotted over to the desk. “Shit always happens right when I walk away,” he added.
To be precise, the incident occurred while Wilson was walking back, not away, but he wasn’t one to quibble over details.
Wilson peered at the view from Camera AA on Monitor A. The exit gate at ground level on Pearce Street lay in splinters and shivers from the street to about ten feet up the ramp. Some of the shards still twirled after their flight into the air. On alternating Monitors B, C, and then D, the Bug zoomed up the parking structure.
“Who the fuck is this maniac speeding up the down lanes of the parking garage?!” Wilson asked no one in particular since he was alone in the security booth, as always.
He watched the vehicle swirl up the whirlpool of the garage from level to level. On Level 4, the Bug swung wide and sideswiped a parked mini van. It was so close to Camera DD by the elevator, that Wilson saw the Awful Tower, as he liked to call it, car deodorizer hanging from the cracked rear view mirror. Automatically, Wilson’s mind flashed to a view of the tower as he’d seen it: surrounded by the occupied streets of Paris in 1942. “Bet that’s not how this asshole sees it,” Wilson grumbled.
∞
In the Bug skidding around a bend, Darius Rucker crooned from the speakers, “Is it me? Or is it honey?” As it rounded the fifth floor, the driver shot the bird toward security Camera EE.
∞
Wilson saw the finger and a wide, wide grin. “Fucking dork. I guess I better call the cops. Who knows what shit is going on here. Wonder what he’s gonna do at the top? Fucking cops are gonna ask me that, I bet.”
Wilson was right. The 911 operator and the two beat cops who showed up within seconds in two cruisers asked that very question as if Wilson should have an answer. The cops didn’t let him ask how the hell they’d gotten there so fast, though. He wondered about that later.
It didn’t occur to any of them, not even for an instant, that on the roof level the Bug would ram into the side barrier, flip over like an over-hard fried egg in a sautée pan, and plummet down to the fountain in front of City Hall.
“Good luck cleaning up that shit!” Wilson shouted to the cops as they ran out of the security booth calling into their walkie-talkies.