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Big Joe sat at the table on the patio, eating his submarine sandwich. It was a cool night for summer in southern Alabama: it took only ten minutes for the sweat to soak through his shirt and stain the areas where he creased.
The pretty blonde woman walked up and toward the corner, and as she rounded it, she cast him a furtive glance over her shoulder. He could see in that brief flash of her eyes her whole life on one plane. A look is all it ever took for Joe. Black Men Are Dangerous. That's what her eyes said, what a lifetime of looking furtively over her shoulder told her and what she believed with the ferocity of truth.
She disappeared around the corner as Joe looked down at the sandwich and took another bite. And then he heard it. He almost expected it, as though he felt it coming. A short, shrill shriek, almost a gasp. It rarely happened this close to home.
Big Joe heaved a big sigh as he chewed, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at the entry door to his business enterprise. He thought about calling out to his number one man, Rodney Ricks, the one everybody called "Steel." The papers used to call him "Steel Rod," but the kids heard innuendo in it, and the teasing was ceaseless until he appealed to the media to stop using nicknames for him. They met him half way and satisfied themselves with "Steel," and Rodney was placated.
No. Big Joe Sadlack decided to take this one himself. Besides, he could use a little practice.
The big man rose effortlessly and seemed to float to the corner of the building. There, just beyond the alley he saw them, the pretty blonde lying on the concrete and pinned beneath the scrawny blonde white kid who held his knife in one hand and his weapon in the other. He had just forced her knees apart when a huge brown hand grabbed the collar of his shirt and hoisted him high into the air.
Big Joe felt a smile break across his face as the kid scrambled to pull his pants up, offering no resistance to Joe's assault. Joe released at the top of the arc, and the kid flew through the air, crashing with a sick thud high against the brick wall of his building, and with a sicker thud when he landed on the sidewalk, a puddle of urine spreading out beneath his unconscious body.
Joe helped the woman to her feet and turned his back while she composed herself.
"Thank you," she stammered, but Joe simply held up his hand. That look he had seen in her eyes was gone now, replaced with confusion.
Joe walked in the front door of his business and saw the other folks on his payroll. Sadlack's Heroes. Like Joe, trouble always seemed to find them, and they always knew how to make it go away.
