Looking Over Your Shoulder

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  Abe sat still in the dark, waiting, for a long time. He watched out the windows of the car and checked the mirrors constantly, looking for anyone suspicious. And everyone was suspicious. Any dog walkers, drunks, kids out partying, whatever; they were all suspects. He was pretty sure he had lost any tails, but that didn’t mean that their spies couldn’t find him. They were everywhere. He had found graffiti everywhere in the city, evidence that they had been there ahead of him and had spies and messengers everywhere. He couldn’t believe how big the organization must be. It was bigger than any organized crime group that he’d ever heard from. Should he have left the city? Probably. That was the only safe choice at this point. But Ursula and the kids wouldn’t leave. Abe had the unwavering desire to both keep them safe and to put the criminals behind bars where they couldn’t ever hurt him or his family again.

  He’d tried to tell Ursula about the men who had attacked him. Malloy, with his tattoos and chainsaw, and the man who’d stood behind him and shoved him into the chain saw. He tried to explain to her that they too were part of the plot. That this was an attempt on his life by the jewel thieves. But she just shook her head, arguing in a frustrated tone that those criminals had nothing to do with the jewel heist. She said that it was totally unrelated, just one of those frustrating things that happens randomly.

  If her brain only worked like his did, she would see that there was no such thing as random. It was all connected. Sometimes the connections were obscure, difficult to make out, but they were there. Like the whole “six degrees of separation”, it was all related. Everything was related to everything else by the spider web of time and space. It was up to Abe to make the connections, to see what no one else could see, and to prove who it was that was involved in the jewel heist. Only then could he rest.

  He heard footsteps on the pavement before he saw the shadow moving down the street behind the car. The studied the silhouette closely. A man. Above average height. Solid, but not broad. He moved like a cat; smooth, graceful, panther-like. He wore blue jeans and a dark t-shirt, almost invisible in the dark. Abe slid down in his seat, so that he wouldn’t be obvious when the man walked by the car. The footsteps stopped outside of the car. Abe was looking up through the window, but couldn’t see anything. Then there was a crash and roar of sound, and the world spun around Abe. The door opened, and he briefly saw a face, a hard looking expression with a cropped or shaved head. The lips were tight and thin. A gun came up and leveled at Abe. There was a horrible noise and smell and a blow to his chest. Abe clutched at it.

  “You just couldn’t back off,” the face said in a brittle, monotone voice.

  And that was the last thing Abe heard.