WHEELCHAIR BOUND

 

Roy Dorman

 

        Bobby Nelson wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

        It had been pointed out to him in those very words enough times in his twenty-five years that he’d recently purchased a switch-blade from a pawn shop. 

        The next person who said something like that about him within his earshot was going to get cut.

        Bobby was somewhat successful at small-time stuff like burglary and holding up open all-night convenience stores at 3:00 AM, but Bobby had a vivid imagination and had recently been planning something big. 

        Probably too big for Bobby.

        He’d purchased a small delivery van at an auction when a bakery business had folded. At five hundred bucks it was a steal.

       Bobby didn’t bother to repaint the truck. In his line of work, he thought driving a yellow bakery truck might be the perfect disguise. With brightly colored loaves of bread, cakes, and doughnuts on it, it was excellent cover for his pre-dawn work.

        He pilfered two short two-by-sixes from a construction site and then purchased a couple lengths of nylon rope from a hardware store. 

        Bobby was in business.

***

        Maple View Nursing Home was an upscale organization in a residential neighborhood in the Bronx.

        Bobby had cased the area and had made note of how certain things were repeated on a daily basis.

        The main entrance was about twenty feet from the street and there were usually a dozen or so residents sitting in wheelchairs near the entrance, mainly just to be outside instead of inside.

        Bobby had seen that staff wheeled most of them out just after lunch and then left them to themselves for as long as a half-hour.

        His plan was to kidnap one of residents and demand ransom money from their family.

        He wouldn’t ask for too much, just $25,000 or so, thinking that maybe the family would just want to pay without risking their loved one by involving the police.

***

       Bobby parked the truck in a loading zone two blocks from the facility. He opened the back doors and positioned the two-by-sixes to act as a ramp.

       He walked up to the nursing home and went to the first person in a wheel chair who made eye contact with him.

       “Hey Grandma, it’s good to see you,” he said with a big smile.

       “Tommy?  Is that you?”

       “Yeah, Grandma. Remember I called to say I’d stop over today and take ya for a walk?”

       The woman looked puzzled. “No, I don’t remember you calling,” she said. “But I’m glad you’re here. Let’s go.”

       There were no aides around for Bobby to ask for permission to leave with her, so he just moved behind her wheel chair and started toward the sidewalk.

       None of the other residents took much notice of this as they continued to doze in the sun.

***

      When they got to the van, Bobby positioned the wheelchair and pushed it up the make-shift ramp. The inside of the van still had the metal shelving that had been used to transport the bakery goods.

       “You’re new at this, ain’t ya?”  the old woman said as Bobby was fastening the wheelchair with the nylon cords to the shelving.

       “I know how to tie a knot, Grandma.”

       “I mean new at kidnapping. You didn’t do your homework. I’m one of the last people in New York you’d wanna kidnap. And I ain’t yer fuckin’ Grandma.”

       Bobby ignored her. He finished securing the wheel chair and hauled in the lumber that had been used as a ramp.

       He climbed into the driver’s seat and took off.

       “I’m Esther Gates,” she called to Bobby.

       “Yeah, so what?” said Bobby.

       “If you’re thinkin’ about gettin’ ransom money for me, you’ve got another think comin’,”

       “Why?  Does yer family think you’re a cantankerous old bitch and not worth shellin’ out a few grand for yer safe return?”

       “Oh, you won’t be gettin’ any money from my family,” she said. “You’ll just be gettin’ dead. My son is Eddie Gates. The name mean anything to you?”

       Bobby thought about that. He’d heard of Eddie Gates. Eddie Gates was a mob kingpin who for many years controlled the Bronx. Bobby thought he’d heard Eddie Gates had retired…

       “…and he’ll have his boys tie a cinder block around your ankles and toss ya into the Hudson…”

       Retired, but probably still well connected. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…

       “…even if ya took me back now, he’d still find ya and…”

       That’s it. Take her back. Just drop her off a block away for somebody to find her…

       “…they got security cameras all over that neighborhood if yer thinkin’ about taking me back…”

       Security cameras. Bobby pulled over to think. But it was hard to think with that woman going on nonstop like she was.

       “Shut up a minute, will ya?” he called back to her.

       Slowly, a plan started to materialize. He’d paid cash for the van at the auction and hadn’t given the auction people his real name when they signed over the title to him. He never got the van registered at Motor Vehicles and the plates were stolen. He could drive down to the wharves by the Hudson and leave the old lady and the van by one of the abandoned warehouses. Nobody could trace the van to him and somebody would find her and have the cops take her back to the nursing home.

       Bobby parked the van in a No Parking zone down by the docks and started walking. 

***

       Ninety-year-old Rebecca Connor, who was not Esther Gates, watched him through the front windshield as Bobby left her.

       Her son was not a retired mob kingpin here in the Bronx, he was a dentist in Albany. He would get the news from the nursing home and then file a lawsuit, but that would probably be as much as he would do. He hadn’t visited her in more than six months.

       Rebecca had seen a news story recently that had had Eddie Gates’s daughter, Robin, talking to a reporter about how her father, Eddie, was in the hospital with terminal lung cancer.

       Rebecca thought that by telling Bobby she was Eddie’s mother she could scare him.

       And she had. Maybe too much.

       Rebecca tried to make a mental list of her pluses and minuses. She’d just had lunch and staff had taken her to the restroom before wheeling her outside. So, she wasn’t hungry or thirsty, and had on an adult diaper. In the minus column, she hadn’t seen anybody walking on the sidewalk since that dirtball Bobby had left the van.

       As night came on, she found that the minuses were adding up and the pluses were disappearing. She thought that if she could slide out of her wheel chair, crawl to the front, and get into the driver’s seat she may be able to attract some attention.

       She dropped from her chair, and with much painful struggling, made it to the front.  Climbing into the driver’s seat took almost ten minutes. Once there, she found the lights and turned them on.  And then she rested.

       She woke up when her chest had blown the horn. Why hadn’t she thought of that before napping?

       Because she’d been exhausted.

        She blew the horn until it became a dull moan. She saw that the lights had also dimmed while she’d been asleep. The battery was old, and just before dawn it died.

       Rebecca decided another nap was in order.

***

       A week later, a NYC employee operating a street sweeper had to drive around the van and notified Parking Enforcement. A couple of days after that, a Parking Enforcement employee found Rebecca while putting a parking ticket on the van’s windshield. She was still leaning on the steering wheel.

       From the outside, she looked to be asleep.

       The City Coroner estimated that Rebecca had been dead for at least five days.

       A dentist in Albany took an early retirement after his attorneys settled a lawsuit with Maple View Nursing Home. Whether he feels any guilt about the way he managed to retire early is his business.

***

       Bobby Nelson is housed in a Rikers Island Prison facility. 

       About six months after his failed kidnapping escapade, a night clerk at a 24/7 Quick Mart was watching Bobby in one of the store’s security mirrors as Bobby stuffed some candy bars into his coat pocket. If that was all Bobby was going to take, the clerk was planning to let it slide. 

       But then he noticed the flyer taped to his side of the check-out counter. 

      There was a grainy photo taken from a security camera and the face on it was close enough. He called 911.

      The police arrived just as Bobby had pulled a Sig Sauer from his belt and was pointing it at the clerk.

THE END

 

Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 70 years.  At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer.  He has had flash fiction and poetry published in Black Petals, Bewildering Stories, One Sentence Poems, Yellow Mama, Drunk Monkeys, Literally Stories, Dark Dossier, The Rye Whiskey Review, Near To The Knuckle, Theme of Absence, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, The Yard, and a number of other online and print journals.  Unweaving a Tangled Web, published by Hekate Publishing, is his first novel.

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Chris Bunton is a writer, poet and blogger from Southern Illinois.