The Hands Gang

What it came down to was that the kid in the Celtics jersey just wasn’t looking where he was going. Maybe he was nervous, so when he crashed into Conor, the gym bag he was carrying hit him right in the knee. Conor’s knee’s was really sore already and it really pissed him off . So he grabbed the bag pretty much by instinct and he hung on to it and tore it out of the kid’s hands. He was just going to wave it around a bit to jerk the kid’s chain. But the kid in the Celtics jersey started going mental. “Give me the bag!” he started shrieking in this panicky voice and he tried to grab for it. So Conor pulled the bag away and held it behind his back. He couldn’t believe that a guy who he outweighed by about a hundred pounds was getting so intense. Then the kid pulled out the gun. He reached under his Celtics jersey and pulled out a pistol and aimed it right at Conor. Conor stared. He’d never seen a real gun before and especially not pointed right at him. He just stood there staring because he didn’t know what to do. Neither did the Celtics kid. The kid didn’t want to shoot a guy right in the middle of the mall and Conor didn’t want to do anything to get himself shot, so they stood there kind of frozen, which was when Pete came around the corner. Pete was wearing his security cop uniform and it was Celtics who saw him first, so he stuck the hand with the gun under his jersey to hide it, but he wasn’t going to go anywhere without his green gym bag. He didn’t want Pete to see the gun and it didn’t look like he had. So Conor went over to Pete and started high-fiving him and jumping up and down, doing the chest bumping thing that he always did with him in the Weight Room. What Conor was really doing was trying to get behind Pete, and he did. Celtics just stood there hating them both and seriously wanting his bag back. Which was the moment that Looey turned the corner and was amazed when Conor jammed the green gym bag into his belly like a football hand-off and shoved him in the back so hard that he almost fell trying to keep his balance as he staggered down the hall with a head gesture from Conor to keep going. Looey tried to do what he thought he’d been told and he started running as fast as he could, tucking the green gym bag under his arm like a football. Celtics wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew that Conor didn’t have the gym bag any more. He started to chase after Looey, so Conor stepped in front of him. The kid crashed into him and fell to the ground. Conor looked down at him and took the opportunity to introduce him to Pete. “Pete, this kid in a hurry is a Celtics fan. Isn’t that your favourite team?” “Celtics, this is Pete. He’s head of security here in the mall.” So Pete stuck out his hand to help the kid up, but the kid didn’t want to stick his hand out because he still had the gun in it. But Pete was a friendly guy and he was sticking out his hand and so the kid had to decide what to do. So what he did was to scramble to his feet, trying to keep his right hand under his shirt. Then he tried to avoid shaking hands by sticking out his left hand to do this props thing, but Pete thought it was weird and stood there looking at him funny. The kid couldn’t take it any more, so he started telling Pete that he wanted his bag back. Pete just kept looking at him funny. Conor kept blocking his path. Then Celtics started going seriously mental. The green gym bag was getting farther away every second and here he was talking to this fool security guard. This was the point when the kid made his big mistake. He started swearing. Pete did not approve of bad language. This kid was using every word he could think of, trying to get Pete to understand that his gym bag was gone and he wanted it back. Right fucking now. His motherfucking bag. Pete was a good church man and he did not care about any gym bag. He cared that this rude boy was swearing in his face. He decided to remove him from the building. He put his hand on his own gun in the holster at his side and looked down at it. He suggested to Celtics that he should proceed with him to the exit. The kid thought about his options for a second and then decided to follow Pete’s suggestion. He walked down the hall with the security guard, but every few steps, he glanced back with hatred at Conor. Which was how Conor came to be walking down the hall, trying to find Looey and the gym bag. He couldn’t believe what had just happened. He was thinking how lucky it was that he hadn’t got shot. He was also thinking that he really wanted to know what was in that green gym bag.