My jaw drops open, but I can’t seem to make my voice work.
“Where’s Toni?” he asks.
I blink a few times, hoping my heart is going to start working again real soon. I’m on the verge of passing out from sheer terror and also a severe lack of oxygen.
He wiggles the gun at me. “Are you deaf? I asked you a question. Where’s Toni?”
“Uhhh, in bed?”
The guy leans in closer, giving me a better look at his scraggly face and a heavy dose of his morning coffee breath. Damn. My hand goes up on its own and slowly waves the space in front of my nose, trying to clear the air a little.
“You think this is funny, huh? You know what this is?” He pushes the gun in through the window, stopping the end of it just by my left eye.
I blink a few times. My eyelashes literally brush up against the metal. “That’s a gun. I’m pretty sure that’s a gun. It’s kind of hard to see when it’s resting on my eyeball, though.” My breath is coming out in little gasps. I look up at him, pleading with my eyes. “Please tell me there aren’t any bullets in it.”
His southern accent is thick. “Now, why in the hell would I pull a gun on you and not put bullets in it?”
“Because you don’t want to go to jail for shooting me?” A girl can dream.
“Unlock your doors.” He pulls the gun away from my eye and points it at the corner of my door.
“You want my car?” My fingers move very slowly over to the unlock button of my door, like they have no choice but to obey.
In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that if I were watching this happen to someone on a television show, I would know the right thing to do. I would probably be yelling at the girl in the car, telling her, “Don’t open the door, dumbass! He’s going to kill you!”
But I’m not watching television. I’m sitting right here, the star of the show, and it’s a really bad scene. I find that there’s a certain amount of paralysis involved in being terrified. My body does not want to listen to my brain right now. Maybe it’s the gun. Maybe that’s the real problem here. When there’s a gun pointed in my face, I find I’m very motivated to do exactly what I’m being ordered to do. It’s so much easier to ignore an armed criminal from the comfort of my family room. How very inconvenient.
The locks go up. I expect him to tell me to get out, but he walks around the front of the car, pointing the gun at me the entire way. Next thing I know, he’s climbing into the passenger seat.
He shoves my computer onto the floor to make room for his fat ass.
I find this very offensive. So offensive, in fact, that I momentarily forget to be terrified. “Could you not break my computer, please?”
He settles himself in the seat, turning partway to look at me, his girth making it difficult for him to do so comfortably.
“You don’t seem to understand what’s happening here, girly. You don’t need to be worried about your laptop; what you need to be worried about is not getting shot.”
Tears well up in my eyes. All I can think right now is how sad my babies would be if I never came home again. “Please don’t shoot me. I have three kids. And my ex is a total asshole, so if I die, they’re going to grow up with him as their only parent, and they’re going to be seriously messed up from it, I can promise you that. He tried to steal a watch from me. A gift he gave me for my birthday. What kind of guy does that?”
“Cry me a river. I don’t give a shit about your kids or your ex.”
The man is obviously a criminal and is either already a murderer or is possibly about to become one. His answer is not surprising at all, but I find it unacceptable. It pisses me off. Do I expect him to have party manners? Apparently, yes. I do. Clearly, I’m nuts. Being threatened at gunpoint does not bring out the hero in me. It brings out the crazy. I can’t seem to let his bad manners slide. They eat away at me until I can’t stay quiet any longer.
“Don’t say that about my children.”
His mouth falls open a little. “Lady . . . are you nuts?”
I squeeze the steering wheel with both hands and stare out the windshield. My brain is buzzing. I can hardly think straight. All I can remember is that this guy does not give a shit about anything, and he’s threatening my life and thereby threatening to leave my kids mom-less.
“Yeah, I might be nuts. Just keep saying mean things about my kids and see what happens.”