Wrong Place, Wrong Time

There was a terrible event in the North-West of the city just days ago, in the small hours of last Sunday morning. The two girls were not drunk, but they were happy. They had spent an emotional evening celebrating the elder's birthday. They were on the main road, heading for a cab office nearby. They paid no heed to the dark sedan that was approaching them slowly.

The first thing anybody knew about what was going on,  was when two deafening percussions assailed their ears. Immediately there was a mighty roar of acceleration. The sedan thundered into the night. The elder girl was prone on the sidewalk, her life blown away. You can imagine how a brief paralysis of shock gave way to a panicked bedlam, soon augmented by the converging klaxons of the first responders,  medics, armed policemen.

As they woke, the city's sleeping denizens learned of this atrocity, and of the detective's first conclusion, that the dead girl was  killed by “mistake”; those bullets were intended for another. Leave aside the first thought, that was was some anonymous woman out there in the city who was lucky to be alive. We cannot know if she had been nearby, if she had seen another felled by a destiny that was meant for her.

I struggle to capture the cosmic enormity of such an “accident”, which stained a sidewalk with innocent blood, bringing to an end a blameless world.

Look, she was on our hit-list. OK, we didn't get her, and now they're all muttering against me.
Nobody said, hey, it could happen to anyone. She was supposed to be there, it was all supposed to be smooth. I was worried that I was having to rely on an ancient weapon, unsilenced. Just one chance, then we had to be gone. We roared away up the main road, before we turned into  one of the local estates where we had another waiting.  We shunted the sedan into one of the deserted lock-up garages. We shifted ourselves into some kind of small, anonymous hatchback, and drove away like we were a bunch day-tripping pensioners.

We were still high on a job well done. No one had any inkling yet that we'd killed a dummy. You just don't that's all. Before anyone in the gang knew it, our shadow world was flooded with light We had done the job just right “drive by bye bye”. Everything right, except the target.

We just made targets of ourselves.