Serpent's kiss

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When he was dying, there in the street, the ambulance still on its way, he started crying.

The cop who'd shot him, kneeling next to him now on the quiet back street, felt embarrassed for him. The cop hoped when his own time came, he didn't start blubbering. Pretty goddamned embarrassing with all these people around.

Anyway, what was this sonofabitch crying about? He was the one who'd escaped from a mental hospital named Hastings House and then brutally stabbed three teenage girls.

But the killer started to sob, and hold his stomach where the cop had shot him. Blood bubbled in the corner of the man's mouth.

And so the cop, cursing, said, "Hold on; you'll make it."

But the man knew different, of course. And so did the crowd of poor black people who'd gathered shoeless in the ninety-degree midnight of the ghetto. Some teenagers had bottles of wine stuffed inside greasy paper bags. Others toked openly on joints. One plump young woman breastfed a tiny, shiny black infant.

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