A Head Of Lettuce, a short story

A Head Of Lettuce

Michael Zorn’s day began when his son woke him from a sound sleep at one in the morning. “Dad-I’m-in-jail.” After the call, Zorn couldn’t sleep. That stupid kid, twenty-three, and no more brains than a doorstop. No cheap bail for DUI with vehicular homicide, and I’ll need a lawyer and every damn dollar I can get my hands on.

Hours later, unshaven and gritty eyed, he beat the morning traffic and punched in for his 6a.m. to 4p.m. shift at the QuickMark Grocery, where he learned two associates had called out sick. Associates. What bullshit! Sick, my ass.

His day had began sucky and didn’t improve. At 8p.m., fourteen hours after punching in, he attempted to erase exhaustion from his face. The rubbing only made the skin below his eyes sag lower. He was stuck until at least closing at eleven, maybe midnight. His mind turned back to the boy. God damn that kid! Blew .31 on his blood alcohol. Ran the light and killed a kindergarten teacher, for Christ’s sake. Topped it off by taking a swing at the cop. Idiot!

Only Zorn and a cashier staffed the store, and Zorn would likely clock eighteen hours before he’d escape. Maybe more if the drawers didn’t balance or something else turned to shit. Plus, he had to be back at 6a.m.

His head hurt. He should take a break, drink some water, eat something. But if he stopped working, what would his mind do? Think about where he’d gone wrong as a parent, mull why all his bosses’ kids always did better in school and snagged real jobs. Maybe wonder if his first wife had conceived the boy by cheating with an imbecile. Then he could take another turn at second guessing his own miserable life, why his marriages failed, why he once had his own DUI.

He adjusted his QuickMark apron. Goofy looking thing, he hated its sick green color, how it made him sweat.  It embarrassed him. The apron—QM scrawled across pouchy pockets in gaudy letters— did only two good things: it held his box cutter and phone, and it hid the small automatic he kept tucked in his belt. If they knew, they’d fire him in an instant.

He didn’t care. When he went outside at night to gather carts and dump trash, he had a right to protect himself and stand his ground. To hell with QM’s rules. He wasn’t going to be stabbed by some dumpster-diving druggy in the parking lot. No way.  No stinking shopping cart was worth Mike Zorn’s life.

***

Outside the store, while Zorn tightened the strings on the apron he despised, neurological surgeon Ajit Patel pulled into QM’s side lot, a few blocks away from his hospital. He checked his phone but saw no update to his wife’s earlier text: “Ajit, honey, I forgot to buy lettuce when I picked up the kids. Puleeze? XOXO.” Sure, sweetie, he thought. A great veggie. It protects against macular degeneration.

Except for his car—its black metallic finish looking sinister in the poorly lit lot—Patel saw only one other vehicle, an abused pickup truck parked beneath a sporadically functioning outdoor light. Two men stood next to the vehicle, their backs to Patel, the night’s damp mist giving their bodies an amorphous quality. Light flickering off, they disappeared. Seconds later, light on, they rematerialized in a fit of yellow illumination as they cast furtive glances in Patel’s direction. What they examined and passed back and forth could not be seen.

Patel slid from his car. The moist air chilled him and he zipped up his leather jacket, its polished black collar almost touching his short ponytail. After a day wearing a hospital scrubs cap, the ponytail was his cool Antonio Banderas look, an affectation encouraged by his wife. His hair and jacket complemented the shiny darkness of his car.

The two men at the dinged-up truck didn’t match the neurosurgeon’s urbane coolness; they matched their vehicle. Unlike Patel, they appeared to be muscular men in their late twenties or early thirties, men who cut their own hair with a beard trimmer to save money, tough laboring men with dirty fingernails. Their voices were muffled, but as Patel stepped from his car, he heard snatches of sentences amid the angry geese sounds of occasional car horns and nearby road noise:  “. . .  won’t hire . . . work cheaper . . . nice weapon . . . registered . . . legal?”

A pang of worry germinated in Patel’s gut, quickly rooting itself as unease. This anxiety was incompatible with his Banderas look, and he contemplated the QuickMark closer to his house. The two men turned toward him, and he imagined mean, narrow eyes assessing his car, his size, his strength. In a moment, they began walking toward the store’s main entry, a path that would place them between his car and the building.

Patel’s trepidation blossomed. Leave? Stay? His rational, physician’s mind kicked in. Come on, Ajit—just working guys doing what you're doing: buying lettuce, rich in K and C.

But then he weighed past advice of his hospital colleagues. “This is America, Ajit. At least keep one in your car. You’ll be one of the good-guys with a gun.” His gut muscles tightened and he decided, reaching beneath the driver’s seat for his small automatic. Shielded by the car door, he clipped the holster on his belt.

At the store, an entry door opened, and a wave of relief swept over Patel. A man in a QM apron was exiting, probably coming out to gather grocery carts.

***

Hitting the  humid air, Zorn’s head throbbed as if a miniature man were counting cadence with a sledge. As his eyes adjusted to the nighttime gloom, he noticed two men walking from the rear parking spaces. Directly across the lot, a dark-skinned man in black clothing stood behind the open door of a large sedan. The man closed the car door, and Zorn caught a glint of metal as the man lowered the flap of his jacket. The man shot a quick glance at Zorn but immediately shifted his attention toward the two men approaching from the rear of the lot.

Zorn saw the first of the two men tugging at something beneath his jacket. In a moment, a shot rang out and that man yowled and fell to the ground. Zorn had seen no muzzle flash, yet the booming reverberation of the weapon seemed to come from all directions in the brick-walled parking lot. The wounded man writhed and twisted on the ground while clutching at his waist. “You, you, you!” he seemed to shout.

Zorn looked back at the black-jacketed man near the big sedan and saw he now crouched behind it with a handgun. Zorn turned to retreat into the store as a second gunshot dwarfed the wounded man’s howls and Zorn felt searing pain in his left shoulder.

***

Moments before the shooting, the two men had been talking as they walked toward the store’s entry. One said, “I know they told us to stick to the shopping list, but we need some beer.”

His friend agreed. “Can’t gripe if we get a six-pack. We’ll tell the wives we did it for them.”

“Yeah, be heroes.”

 Midway to the store, Can’t-gripe looked toward the black-jacketed man. “Check that,” he whispered, “7-Series BMW, jacket, hair. Guy looks like a cartel hitman.” The dark-skinned man was giving them a hard stare.

“Yeah,” muttered his friend, “here to take us out.”

Both men snickered, but Can’t-gripe unconsciously reached beneath his jacket. A shiver of fear and vulnerability swept through him; he needed the reassuring feel of his gun. As he reached under his jacket, his watch caught on the metal snap that secured the weapon in its holster. Something felt wrong about the gun’s placement, but he didn’t want to lift his jacket in the open parking lot. Another yank and jerk, and his hand was on it and he shoved the weapon back in its holster.

Suddenly, and for no reason he could later defend or explain, the gun fired and he bellowed in reflexive distress. Contorted in agony, he grasped at the cause of his pain and pulled the gun from its holster. His fingers spasmodically opened and closed about the gun. It fired again, its erratic bullet ricocheting off the building behind the malevolent looking BMW. The slug whined past the dark-jacketed man and struck the retreating QM employee, who immediately yowled in protest, twisting away from the pain and impact.

***

Spun around by the shot, Zorn’s eyes fell on the driver of the BMW, who now crouched behind his car, his gun pointed toward the men in the middle of the parking lot. After a lifetime of frustration and denial, opportunity and validation at last bloomed in Zorn’s life, and he ignored the faucet of blood that spilled from his shoulder. Fate finally allowed him to right so many wrongs. His son was a screwup, but Michael Zorn would enjoy vindication.

He shouted, “Got you, you back-shooting SOB.” In the center of the parking lot, the wounded man lay on the ground as his friend tried to assist. The shooter—the leather-clad professional stooping behind the black BMW—shouted something at the two men on the ground. Zorn didn’t understand the exchange but knew what he must do.

***

Dr. Ajit Patel couldn’t comprehend why people were shooting at him; he’d only wanted to buy lettuce—of which a mere one hundred grams provided more than twice the daily requirement of vitamin A. Terrified, he shouted, “What in God’s name are you doing?” In his distress he shouted his question in his native Hindi, something meaningless to the QM employee and the men in the lot.

The second man, who didn’t realize his friend had shot himself accidentally, grabbed his friend’s pistol and joined the man from the QM in firing at the black-jacketed shooter who hid behind his hitman luxury car. 
The ponytailed surgeon returned no fire but instead slid beneath his car; he’d lost his Banderas cool. A moment before QM-man Michael Zorn fell unconscious from his wound, he fired one more shot at the rear of the shooter’s car. His slug hit the BMW’s gas tank, which took neurosurgeon Ajit Patel to his afterlife in a great woofing flash.

***

Hours later, following surgery on his shoulder, Zorn woke in a heavily sedated state in a hospital recovery room. Outside the room, before entering, a nurse exchanged a few words with the uniformed police officer guarding the door. After checking Zorn's vital signs, she detailed his recovery process and identified her hospital. Zorn mumbled, "Think my son was here once. He was ten, twelve. Donno. Fell off his bike. Bad head injury. A young Indian doc saved him.”

“Oh,” said the nurse, "you mean Dr. Patel. I’ve worked with him in the ER for years. Such a nice man.” She turned away for a moment. “I’m sorry. It’s a tough night for us. Dr. Patel was killed in a robbery gone wrong at the QuickMark. It’s just a few blocks from here. You know where it is. They told me he was going there to buy a head of lettuce for his wife."

Zorn's eyes widened. With a hint of a smile, the nurse reached for the pain med IV hanging above Zorn's shoulder and zeroed the flow to nothing.

The End
 © Copyright Richard J. Schram