Free Chemical Burn by Quincy J. Allen Page A

say it’s the next alley over, you mow-rahn!” Natalia yelled back from the truck in an equally thick drawl. “He said there was a key under a big black rock by the back door, didn’t he? Do ya see a big black rock?”
    I’ll have to thank her for that later, I thought.
    I spotted the rock to the right of the back door. “Yeeee Hawwww! I sure as hell do! Come on in, sweetie!” I flipped over the rock, grabbed the key and, stepping up to the door, quickly drove it home in the keyhole. As I did so, I palmed the orange sphere in my right hand and closed my fingers around it, making sure to depress both buttons. I twisted the doorknob. Through the window I spotted the black suit of a fat man standing behind the door.
    Amateurs , I thought to myself.
    I took a few steps into the kitchen and drifted right a pace or two towards the middle. I would need room to move, and I wanted to give Natalia as much space as possible. On cue a gun poked into the back of my head, and I stopped dead in my tracks.
    “Don’t take another step,” a thick Brooklyn accent came from behind me. “You picked the wrong fuckin house, cowboy.”
    “Whoa!” I hollered, raising my arms. “Hold on there, partner.” I saw a second man holding a gun step into the kitchen from the sunroom. I heard the footsteps of two people upstairs, one coming down the hallway and one coming down the stairs.
    “Sweetie-pie, did you find the beer?” Natalia asked as she came in the back door. The man standing near the sunroom casually pointed his gun at Natalia, silencer attached, and pressed his index finger to his lips to get her to stay quiet. “Oh!” she yelped, acting surprised as she put up her hands. She put her back against the wall so no one could see her Glock.
    “Vinny!” the man behind me hollered to someone upstairs. “Go back and watch the alley! That Russian bitch might still show up.”
    “You fellers know Billy?” I asked, keeping up the façade. “He sent us over for some beer, honest.” The footsteps above us retreated back down the hall. I tried to drag things out. I wanted to at least get the third man in the room before starting anything.
    “We heard you the first time, redneck,” the man behind me said. “You’re in the wrong fuckin’ house.”
    “Is everything okay?” we heard from a walkie-talkie. A goombah appeared in the front hallway. He held a silenced pistol in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.
    “We got this,” the new man said into the walkie-talkie as he pointed his gun at me.
    “What’s going on?” the radio voice said. I recognized it as the goombah who had given me the thumbs up in the first alley. He must have taken the walkie-talkie away from the driver.
    “Just a couple of drunk hicks. Stay where you are.”
    “Want me to call Joey in the other car?” the man on the other end of the radio said.
    “NO! I said we got this,” the goombah barked.
    I cringed at hearing about the other vehicle.
    “You want I should take ’em downstairs and get ’em outa’ the way?” the man from the sunroom asked.
    “Yeah, Guido, do that,” the man with the radio confirmed. Guido took two steps towards me.
    I released the bottle of beer and the orange ball simultaneously, and I snapped my fingers before they made it to my chest. “Shit, I dropped it!” I yelped.
    The man with the walkie-talkie depressed the talk button, “We’re gonna …”
    Natalia and I closed our eyes while the three Italians naturally stared at both the bottle and the ball dropping to the floor. The beer hit first and shattered with a foamy crash. The ball, an instant behind the bottle, hit and went off like a gunshot, blinding all three gunmen with a brilliant flash of light. The Italians yelled in pain and covered their eyes with their hands.
    Natalia and I leapt into action. She crouched and rolled forward along the floor. The silenced pistol of the Italian in the hallway thumped, and a blind shot hit the wall where Natalia had