The Crippled Man's Ammunition
三島和希
Kazuki Mishima

He knew that he was fully prepared when he felt the weight of the pistol land in the pocket of his favorite hooded sweatshirt. He glimpsed the spray he had used to clean his licenses plates and make them clearly visible to the security camera that now caught a brazenly clear image of his dark figure. Upon returning the spray bottle to his glove box, he discovered the list of phrases he had written about a week ago – short, demanding phrases he had memorized to accompany a strategic brandishing of the weapon pressing reassuringly against his side. Before he opened the car door and stepped boldly into the fluorescent gas station night, he felt a brief moment of guilt for what he was about to do to the cashier watching him on the monitor, but knowing that the man waiting inside would recognize him immediately gave him the composure to pull on the car door handle.

The cashier, a short man with thick limbs and all the pimples of his adolescence, once again began to peruse the latest issue of his favorite news magazine, keeping the outside monitor constantly at the edge of his vision. When the car pulled neatly into a disability space by the door, he knew that the Penguin had arrived. They called him the Penguin because he walked like one – in that, slow unsteady gait of the flightless bird. Only he would have parked with such deliberate, at this hour in that deserted parking area. But tonight's visit was different; the Penguin stepped from the car with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled tight around his head, and upon arriving at the door ostentatiously pulled a gun from his pocket. The cashier, of course, called the police.

The man with the gun was reflecting on his school days as he reached for the handle of the convenience store's door. He hadn't fit in at school, but he had always done what he was told to do, and he had been just fine. As he pulled the door with all his weight, he thought that prison couldn't be much different. The door was locked; he couldn't enter. He turned to face the cashier just soon enough to see him take cover behind the counter. He cursed softly and turned toward his car. By the time that the armed man reached his car, policemen, one of them a rookie, had arrived at the location of the attempted robbery with sirens sounding. They surrounded the suspect.

The surrounded man decided that he had better act like a criminal and aimed his weapon at one of the officers.

The rookie, targeted by the suspect's gun, forgot all the training he had received. He discovered that he was pointing his own pistol directly at the threat and fired it into the rigid air that shattered like glass.

Lying on the ground, the shot man realized for the first time that the policemen could not have known that his gun was empty and that it had been empty since he had bought it on the day he decided that he must live the rest of his life in prison.