6

Flo screams, her hands flying to her face like a mask made of fingers.

The girl on the floor whimpers and looks up. Her face is a mass of ragged bloody scratches. The rain has smudged her mascara into raccoon-like circles around her glassy eyes. Her lipstick runs clear across her cheek. She looks at us all in turn as if she’s just realized we’re here.

My ears are ringing.

I wait for Wintry to look down, to assess the damage like folks do in the movies before they finally acknowledge a mortal wound and drop to the floor. Wintry’ll make a hell of a thud when he falls. My mind races, trying to think of something to do or say, but that shot might as well have passed through my brain.

“Wintry…” Flo sobs.

But when the smoke that coils like low fog between the big black man in the parka and the couple by the door finally dissipates, it’s the kid who staggers back and drops to a sitting position, his back against the door. On his face is shock, and confusion; on his shirt is a blossoming crimson flower.

“My, my,” says the Reverend.

I hear Flo’s breath catch in her throat.

Smoke continues to drift out from beneath Kyle’s table. The kid came here tonight to shoot someone, but the bullet that has my name in it now sits lodged in the belly of the man I was supposed to kill. I’ll wait to ponder the irony of that. There’s no time now.

Silence weighs heavy in the room. At last I find my tongue. “Wintry, go on.” He does, stopping by the girl, though his eyes are on the wounded kid, and the gun that’s still in his hand.

Cadaver, in an uncharacteristically animated move, emerges from the shadows looking grim, his black plastic raincoat swirling around him. His hip jars the table; another coin drops from its tower. Aside from Wintry and the girl, he’s nearest the kid, and knows it, and so hurries to his side, hunkers down and gives the kid a sympathetic glance before relieving him of his weapon. The kid doesn’t resist. Because the little microphone that Cadaver needs to press against the metal box in his throat to enable him to be heard is back on his table, he wheezes his words, and no one but him and the kid hear them. The kid stares at the old man as if he believes Death himself has come for him and replies, “Brody. James Brody.”

And just like that, my nightmare is complete.

“Fuck,” I mutter and squeeze my eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

There comes a crashing sound and everyone jumps, startled, no doubt wondering what calamity has befallen us now, maybe the storm, God’s Hand, has come to smite us all one by one, like we damn well deserve.

But it isn’t anything so dramatic. It’s Flo, who has swept her arm across the bar, sending a bunch of glasses and bottles crashing to the floor.

“What the hell?” Cobb stands up, looking down at himself and the shattered remains of his Bud, but I know what she’s doing and silently commend her for it.

“Bring her here,” she calls to Wintry, and he lifts the girl as if she weighs no more than an empty sack.

Kyle’s still watching Brody, who’s gasping in the corner like he’s taken a slug in the lung. If he had, I figure he’d already be dead, but it’s hard to predict any man’s reaction to having his body insulted by a bullet.

Cadaver, still with Brody, looks over his shoulder at me and mouths the words, “Needs fixin’.”

I know he does, but the Reverend’s presence is like an extra shadow at my side, reminding me of the futility of our actions. Whether we patch those two unlucky kids up or not, they’re still going to die before the night ends. But Cobb is with Flo now, looking like the world’s unlikeliest orderly as they lay frayed towels out across the bar. Gracie is talking in soothing tones to the girl, who I can see now has a wide gash across her chest, another somewhere in the tangle of her hair that’s sending rivulets of blood down the back of her neck. Flo takes her hand as Wintry lays the girl down on the bar and heads back for her boyfriend. With the exception of Kyle, who I guess is in shock himself, the Reverend, and me, everyone is helping, even though we’re all privy to the same awful truth, truth we have no business knowing.

Those kids are doomed.

But right now, that doesn’t seem important. After all, they’re here when they shouldn’t be, and the keys to my truck, the keys to their fate, are still in my pocket.

So I do the only thing left to do. I go to Kyle.

I stop a few feet from his table, blocking his view of the wounded kid by the door. “You all right?” Another dumb question, but the only one I’ve got.

“What do you care?”

“You did the right thing, you know. If you hadn’t, it’d be Wintry bleeding to death on the floor. Any one of us might have done the same thing.”

“But you didn’t.”

“We would have if we’d had the opportunity.”

He looks up at me slowly and blinks, all of the hostility gone from his face, along with the color. “Is he dead?”

“No, but he’s hurt bad.”

“He going to die?”

I consider my answer, then decide on the truth. “Hell, everybody does, but maybe not tonight.”

“I’m going to Hell.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I murdered him.”

“Not yet you didn’t. And even if it’s too late and he expires on account of that bullet in his belly, all you did was hasten what was coming his way tonight anyway.”

“We’re all going to Hell.”

“Probably. Doesn’t mean we have to be in any hurry though.”

“That bullet wasn’t meant for him.”

“I know, but we can either stand here debating who should be dead and who shouldn’t, or we can help these kids out.”

“Why?” He frowns and the sweat pools in the creases. I’m overcome with a sudden and alarming urge to hug the boy, just crush the fear out of him. But to do that I’d have to be calm myself, and I’m a long way from that right now. Besides, while I suspect he’s shot the last man he’s ever going to, I’ve been surprised before, and I’m in no rush to test the theory. Not yet, anyway.

“Because they need it.”

He laughs soundlessly, a wheeze that could have come from Cadaver’s mouth. “I could put this gun in my mouth right now.”

“Sure you could.”

“Would you stop me?”

“I reckon I’d try.”

“Why?” When he looks up at me, the emotion in his eyes is more powerful than any bullet, powerful enough to make me drop my gaze and immediately feel ashamed of it.

I clear my throat, the words like glass tearing their way up my throat, slicing open my tongue. “Because no matter what you think of me, you’re still my son.”

He scoffs. “My father’s dead.”

“No I’m not, I’m standing right here. You’re looking at me, just as you’ve been looking at me every night since your mother died.”

“Since you killed her.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Yes you did. You killed both of you.”

“If that’s true then why do you come in here every Saturday night with a gun pointed at me? Can’t kill a dead man, y’know.”

I’m fighting a losing battle to keep my composure. I want to hug the little son of a bitch, squeeze the hate out of him, reclaim him while I still have the chance, force him to understand.

But I don’t understand it myself.

“The bullet wasn’t meant for you either,” he tells me and finally brings the gun out from beneath the table. I recognize it of course, seeing as how it used to have a home in my holster. No police issue weaponry in Milestone, no sir. You just take whatever you think you’ll need to get the job done. Back when there was a job to do, that is. “It was for me,” he says, and I feel my heart shatter into a thousand pieces.

Whatever I might have said, whatever magic words I might have summoned from the ether are blown away by the woman’s scream. Both of us turn toward the bar, and see Carla convulsing, chopping that scream into stuttered wails as Flo, wincing, presses a damp cloth to the girl’s chest.

“Jesus.” I give the kid one final glance, hoping he sees the plea for another chance to talk this over, then I’m gone, storming across to the girl, my heart and soul in ruins as surely as if I was the one stretched out on the bar.

I haven’t gotten far, when Brody, slung over Wintry’s shoulder, calls out, “Go easy on her. She’s pregnant.”

And that takes what little wind is left in my sails right the fuck out of them.

I turn on my heel and Reverend Hill slams his glass down on the table and stands. “Enough.”

I want to kill him. Rage boils within me, fueled further by regret over Kyle and his intentions, rage at my blindness, at my cowardice, for never questioning the speed with which my world grew dark, or the pain I dealt the people fumbling around within it. “You son of a bitch. You never mentioned a child.”

“What difference does it make? People who cause fatal accidents very rarely get the luxury of counting their victims beforehand. Had everything proceeded here as it was damn well supposed to, you’d never have known any different, and that murderer’s conscience of yours would have been spared an extra little slice of reality.” He steps close, until our noses are almost touching. “Never forget, Sheriff, that I am the only thing standing between you and eternal damnation. I’m the closest thing you have to God, and as such I own you, so it would behoove you to stop questioning it and accept it as truth.”

“This is eternal damnation,” I counter, “And it seems to me that God would know what the fuck was going on, which you clearly don’t.”

Brody moans with pain as Wintry sets him down in his own chair next to Flo. Even in times of stress he knows better than to seat anyone in Cobb’s place.

The Reverend looks over my shoulder at the kid, then smiles. “Then let’s find out why things haven’t gone according to plan, shall we?”

***

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