That Time I Got Ambushed in Chicago
All I wanted to do was find the nearest ATM, but life had other plans for me — which proved more valuable than a routine cash withdrawal.
This is a story about something that happened to me — but in order to describe it I need to tell what happened when Mattie Campbell first walked through the door.
As soon as I laid eyes on her, two thoughts popped into my mind. The first had to do with how young and pretty she was. The second thought said, “Oh-oh, here comes trouble.”
I would soon learn that Mattie Campbell had already seen trouble. She’d given birth to two babies that died a couple of months after they were born. Believing she was cursed, her husband left home and never came back.
By the time she reached the boarding house that day, she was a wounded pigeon with only one thing on her mind. How to make her husband come back. And she was willing to pay somebody to find him.
But while she was waiting, Mattie got distracted by a sweet-talking guitar-man living in that same boarding house. He told her he had a “12-pound hammer — and knew how to drive a nail.”
Mattie understood that this was not the real thing because the guitar-man told her up front that all he wanted…
