Weekly Writing – February 11 2023

It seemed like a clever name at the time. Cocking a gun called Just You Wait makes a man a little bolder no matter how many are shooting back at him.
But lately, the nickel-wrought wink of that name on its barrel has started to feel like a threat flashed back at me. I never expected to have to shoot so many with it.
Crouching behind the bullet-riddled body of a forklift in a warehouse currently shipping nothing but high-speed lead, fumbling another six bullets into the cylinder, that flash looks an awful lot like just you wait. Maybe I’ll jam on you with the next shot. What kind of workhorse do you take me for?
I never did. It was supposed to just ride on my hip and make me look tougher to the sort of man who looks at another man’s hip first to see if he’s worth anything. If I hadn’t forgotten my coat in the bar that night, I never would have shot it at all.
If I’d just kept walking, let the booze in my veins burn off the snowflakes landing on my face. If I hadn’t gone back, slipped in quiet, if I hadn’t heard what the man who signed my cheques and the man who signed his cheques were talking about in one of those booths with a curtain, at the back…
If the lighter hadn’t fallen out of my pocket, clattering to the floor as loud as a forklift taking its weight in bullets. God, the bar went so quiet then. We were the only three in it, and I knew I’d just heard what my own funeral would sound like.
Both of them peering out through the curtain…it would have been almost funny otherwise. But I could see them deciding to shoot me the same way they would tap ash off a cigar, and so I grabbed Just You Wait off my hip and…
And now here I am. Crouching behind a forklift with nowhere to go. Just you wait. They’ve all decided I’m the enemy, a hired hit from the docks or even the Gilt. They wouldn’t hear me try to explain even if I tried to yell over the gunfire. They wouldn’t care.
So it’s just me and Just You Wait. For as long as that lasts. Shouldn’t be much longer now. I snap the cylinder shut, and I’m not about to stick my head out there, so I settle in to sit behind that forklift, and I wait.