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“The worst thing about a contact shot to someone else’s head is getting their brains, hair and skull fragments washed off my face.”
I cock the hammer back. He sobs harder. “If you’ve never tasted a man’s grey matter tinged with gun powder and revenge you have an inexperienced palette.”
The man is on his knees before me, facing away, hands tied behind him, crying, .44 Magnum squeezed against the back of his skull as tight as a waterproof seal.
“Then of course, you have no idea what diseases the guy might have had.” I blow smoke. It crowns his head. “But the money is good.”
Smoke drifts off my cigarette, lazy and weaving in the air. The souls of dead soldiers rising from a battlefield. I drag and watch ruined ashes flutter off the cherry-like leaves from a long-dead tree, tracing spirals through the night down to their deaths before my feet.
Winter in Saint Ansgar might as well be winter in Anchorage, if Anchorage never fully woke up from a nightmare. The sun is shining, eyes are open, but every corner is razor-sharp and every shadow has gritting teeth.
Here, outside on the street, frost dances in the predawn hours like devils of ice cavorting around a fresh kill. We’re south of the river that cuts Saint Ansgar from west to east in a beltline of ice floes and estuary water. Here, in these half burnt-out urban developments, the graffiti and the chalk outlines, people know where they are by the police crime scene tape and stained concrete.
Street lamps keep vigil over the empty traffic ways. Aged guardsmen cast from ironworks during the Great Depression that have seen these streets constructed and then turned over to scum and felons. Here, outdoors, we’re alone as far as the eye can see. It must be extra cold kneeling on frigid concrete.
“Please mister...I have a wife. She’s a worrier anyways and I—you’d love her. She’s blonde and hilarious and and—oh God...my wife is gonna be wondering where I am soon and—”
“Your wife will find out from the police where you have been. Or you can tell me where she is and you can go home right now.”
“Tell you where who is? My wife? She’s at home like I—” He shuts up with a stern whack from my iron.
“Who? For Christ’s sake who?”
“Alisha McDonald.” I say.
“No, no nono—”
“Yes, Francis. Her.”
“No, I had nothing to do with—”
“Missing nine weeks now.”
“No, you sonofabitchno I—”
“Alisha McDonald, age seven, sandy blonde and brown, four-foot-one, last seen—”
“Fuck you, pig, and fuck your mother I am—”
“With you.”
