by James McDuffie
Feb 22, 2001
It was an ordinary day, I had just finished my final class of the week and was looking forward to heading home and eating some dinner. I knew that I could get home in no time on the bike I had bought several years before. I was proud of that bike, we had been through so much together. My bike and I had toured all over Atlanta. We rode to Stone Mountain and back on two seperate occasions. We risked our lives on Peachtree for a ride from campus to Lenox Mall and back. Yes we had been through a lot together. Now, I refer to the bike in past tense because my friend is no longer with me. Some asshole in the course of the hour long class I attend, managed to make off with my bike. I walked to the bike rack and noticed only my front tire was still there. I knew that not getting enough sleep had finally cost me. I had made a grave mistake when I forgot to lock the frame. The fact that my bike was stolen in broad daylight, in what I thought was a heavily traveled area made me most angry. I decided then to get even on all bike thieves.
I know revenge is not what one should do, but I am tired of being a nice guy. It is a shit or be shit on world and I want to shit on as many people as I can. I am not in the buisness of random acts of violence. As you can see I have focused my violence to a specific type of person, the bike thief. Some may say that I am just using the bike thief as an outlet for pent up agression. Well, I don’t care about the deep psychological reasons. I just want to beat the shit out of someone. Who knows, it might be the same bike thief that took my friend. Furthermore, I will probably save someone else the misery of coming outside to notice that their transportation is gone. I have no doubts about the illegality of what I am about the describe. But, those that I have thwarted probably think twice when they look at a bike and covet it.
I am not alone in my quest. There are several companions that will aid in my righteous infliction of justice. My first friend is Mr. Louisville Slugger, a well built friend made of top quality American wood. Next in the line-up of characters is Mr. Concealing Coat. Mr. Coat has the great ability to be able to hide Mr. Slugger from plain view. For added secrecy I wear a belt modified to easily hold Mr. Slugger tight to my body without the need for hands. Last of all is my good buddy Mr. Running Shoes. Mr. Shoes helps me flee from the scene of my latest transgression. Coupled with my swift feet and athletic nature Mr. Shoes amd I can be gone before people are able to identify the man with the baseball bat. Together with my friends, we are a mighty force.
The first night I staked out the bike rack I did not know who to expect. I had all these visions of a huge meanacing figure who could carry five bikes under each arm and cut locks with his teeth. The actual experience, thankfully, did not live up to my expectations. I hid in some high bushes across the street from a bike rack I thought would be the easiest to steal from. I waited for many hours until my first foe arrived. It was cold and I was about to head home when he stopped in front of the bike rack. He was a medium sized guy with a beard, work pants, a blue work shirt and an old netted baseball cap. As he stood in front of the bike rack he looked all around to see if anyone was watching. He smoked a cigarette in order to concel his loitering as nothing but an innocent nicotine break. But I knew what he was there to do.
After he was sure that no one was watching, the fiend flicked his cigarette thoughtlessly onto the pavement and started to check for an easy target. He knew this was an easy spot, it was behind a building and had a hill that hid him from view in the direction adjacent to the building. I could not strike until he actually took a bike without using any sort of keys or legal means to undo a lock. After checking the rack for a while he turned around and made sure no one was watching. Assured that he was alone he withdrew some large pliers from his pocket and went to work on a bike that had only a normal chain and a padlock securing it. He knew that every once in a while someone does not realize how easily a simple chain is cut through. One of my friends lost his bike that way and I knew immediately what the pliers were for. I also knew I had to act.
I loosened the bat from its holster and clasped it my hands. Very carefully I tip-toed over towards the thief. As I headed towards him I pondered whether to hit him with a surprise attack or whether to make a noise and face him head on. As I moved closer and closer he kept his hunched over status whilst working on the bike. When I finally got several feet from him he noticed me. The wind had blocked the noise I made up until that point. Now I was close enough that the wind did not hide my presence. I raised the bat and hit him with force on his back just as he was turning to see who I was. The force of the blast made him loose his balance. He fell towards the bike rack and the side of his face stuck against the top part of it. As he fell I geared up for another strike. However, once he hit the ground he did not move, he just lay there face down. For half a second I regretted what I had done, but only for a little while.
I waited a bit to see if he was faking. I even gave him a slight kick to the ribs to make sure. Assured that he was either dead or unconcious I turned him over to check out his status. The first thing I noticed after I turned him over was the patch on his work shirt that said "Facilities." The second thing I noticed was the tooth that lay on the ground where his face had previously been. The third thing I noticed was that he was breathing. Once I knew he was alive I decided to leave before anyone came to help him. I ran as fast as I could stopping only to press the emergency button on a phone so that at least someone would come to help him. Next to the call box I noticed a little facilities golf cart. In the back were two bikes, one was missing a front tire, but neither were mine. Too bad I thought, that might have ended my reign of terror.
I stopped running as soon as I got into a more populated part of campus. I wiped the sweat from my brow and changed my path to make it seem as if I had come from a different direction. As a cop car passed at full speed I knew that they would assume I had been walking down the sidewalk and had not just crossed the large field that led to the bike rack. The fact I was a young college student and walked in a normal manner kept my secret safe. They had no idea why the call box emergency button had been pressed. Most of the time the emergency calls were hoaxes, so the police have become less sympathetic to the answering of such calls. Back in my room I reflected on what I had just done. I pulled the bat from under my coat and noticed it had a few spats of blood on it. I decided to clean it in the morning after a good night of sleep. And sleep I did, very soundly because I was tired from the assault.
I decided that next morning to wait a week or two till things had settled down. I could only imagine what had happened after I left. That Friday the school newspaper came out. One of the headlines was: "Facilities Employee Assaulted, Stolen Bikes Found In Posession." I went on to read about how police went to answer an emergency call box and upon a search of the area found the man barely breathing near a bike rack. The man was rushed to the hospital and was in a stable condition. The bikes in his cart were found when other facilities workers had gone to return the cart to the facilities depot. Police speculated that the man had been assaulted when someone came upon him trying to steal their bike. And of course the article concluded by saying that GTPD had no leads but were on the case. Good luck in finding me, I knew their track record.
The scare created by the assult would probably deter thieves for only a little while. Given enough time they would settle back into their old routines and behavior. So, I did not go upon my second act of violence for several weeks. Bur after several weeks I was even more comfortable with my actions than I had been initially. I reasoned that any stepped up patrols were no longer being made. I felt secure that time and lax policing had returned things to normal. Once more I positioned myself for an attack.
It was night and I chose a different spot for this act. The new spot had many of the same attributes as the previous one, making it a great site for would be thieves. This time around I had different expectations. I now suspected that I would encounter another opprotunistic employee. I wondered about how the previous victim had explained the bikes in his cart. He probably got fired on top of having been beaten up. His life was not going so well now, which made me glad. It served him right to pay for his transgressions. Maybe, I thought, I could expose more of these people and make no one ever want to steal bikes from this campus again.
After hours of waiting my target arrived. He was different than the first one. This guy appeared to be a homeless man according to his clothing. Layers of coats and dirty patched up pants said to me that this man was probably gonna steal a bike and pawn it for liquor money. As the other had done he looked around and made sure he was alone. This one was less cautious, he did not seem to have the same patience of the first guy. He spent significantly less time making sure he was alone. An amateur, I thought, well this will be his first and last attempt. He chose the wrong night to start on this "career."
The thief noticed a bike which was only locked by the front tired an proceeded to utilize the quick release on the bike to loosen it from its constraints. The similarity to the theft of my own bike made me loose it. I welled up with anger and hate and burst forth with great speed from my hiding spot. I striked my bat across his back and then across his skull as he turned around to defend himself. Blood splashed me in time with the crack against his head. Once the bastard was on the ground I kept hitting him in the head with the bat. I was in my own world, one where I sought out to rid the world of this pathetic looser who could only booze himself up all day and not get a real job. I was quite out of control.
I was so out of control that I did not see the barage of police who stormed me and threw me to the ground. The first thing I thought about was how fast they had responded, this spot was quite far from their station. The second thing I thought of was how much blood was splatted upon the ground. The third thing I thought of was that the man was no longer breathing. This time I thought a fourth thought: "Man I am so fucked."
So that is how I ended up in this prison cell awaiting trial. It will be quite a while since they are all the way up in Indiana. It is also in this jail cell that I learned that the second man was really an undercover officer. When the first guy suddenly took a turn for the worse and died the mayor had commanded the police to actively get the vigillante off the street. So I had killed two men, and will probably get either life or the chair. They found too much damn evidence when they catch me in the act. They matched the blood stains I had failed to remove from the bat with the first victim. I guess I better work on acting insane, my lawyer says that it is the only way I can get out of going to the chair. So with all this new free time I will try and act insane, that is if I don’t go insane for real first.
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