by Sean May
We rode off into the night, out to our little shack outside of Blood Canyon by about three miles. I slept really well that night.
That morning, though...it's a morning I'll never forget.
I woke up to the sound of gunshots, which wasn't the first time that had happened, but it'd be a while.
"You McClure boys get your asses out here right now!"
I opened my eyes and looked around the room. Liam was already sitting up getting his boots on. We had to have known there would have been some payback, some retribution, but this was quick.
I walked out and saw what was waiting for us. Four men on their horses. One of them was Stanton, mouth sewn up like a ragdoll, he looked fucking ridiculous. The other two I recognized as deputies in Blood Canyon, one named Daniel Lucas and the other was Tommy Milton.
"You McClure boys sure did a number on Mister Stanton here last night, didn't you?"
"You've got no proof, lawman." Liam said.
"Whole mess of folks saw your brother other there behind Wilson's Saloon shoving a long blade into Mister Stanton's mouth." Tommy Milton said.
"Don't even know what knife you're talking about." I smiled, something Stanton was unable to stop doing from now on.
"Listen, Mick, you and your brothers need to get out of here right now or this is going to get ugly fast." Milton said.
I looked around at the modest homestead me and my brothers had built up in the time we'd been here. "You think that tin star's going to make us do anything you say?"
"Maybe it won't." Milton pulled out his revolver and pointed it at me. "But maybe this will."
I drew on Milton with the Colt I'd picked up in Kansas City on our way out here to Blood Canyon. "I've got one too, deputy." Liam and John pulled out their revolvers, we'd bought a set of three back then.
"I'm giving you one more chance to turn yourselves in, boys, or I won't have any problem putting all three of you in pine boxes."
I shot Stanton in the middle of the chest. His horse ran away, dragging the poor bastard behind him as he ran away spooked. I laughed again...realized that Ron Stanton had provided me with a good bit of comedy over the past few hours.
Milton reared his horse and started flinging lead me and my brothers' way. The first couple shots buried themselves in the side of our house, but the third one nicked Liam along his collar bone, that's when we started returning fire. I got a couple of shots off, but the Colt must have been curved or something because those bullets didn't come close to Milton or Lucas. After I'd missed, Liam and John had to stand up to get a better angle on the lawmen. John got a bullet into Lucas that twisted him around but he stayed on the horse. He slumped down and the horse just stood there, his dead rider just flopping around on top of him.
Milton's first shot caught John in the throat, sailed clean through and came out the other side. He grabbed his throat to stop the blood, to keep himself alive, but it was far too late for John.
The second two shots Milton fired off hit me and Liam. Liam took a hit right to the side of his head...his fate was the same as John. The bullet meant for me smacked into my leg, six inches or so below the hip. I went down, the pain exploding and travelling down my leg and up my right side. As I hit the ground, John landed on my leg, making things that much worse. I was laying on the ground between my two dead brothers, blood everywhere, the sound of gunshots still ringing my ears. I heard Milton walk his horse around a little bit, probably checking if we were all dead...I guess he assumed he got me with a good enough shot to put me down. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the clopping of his horse's hooves on the hard packed dirt as he walked away from the whole bloody scene.
I spent the next six weeks nursing myself back to health. The time I'd spent fighting for the Union and acting as a medic helped me out to where I didn't need to saw my leg off, thankfully, but the bullet left a scar a mile deep in my leg that's never going to heal, and there's a good chance I'll have a little limp for the rest of my life. But I came back. I came back, I buried my brothers and I wondered how I would fix all of this.
That's why I've come here today, Father. All this confessing, it really feels like I've lightened my load a little bit, telling you all the things that have happened to me over the past couple of months. But Father, that's not the only reason I came here to this holy place, in this confessional booth.
You see, when I was healing myself up, I looked into this Tommy Milton, the bastard that shot my brothers and me. Bastard, that's sort of a fitting title for him, isn't it Father? When I was able to walk again, I spent a hell of a lot of time at saloons around Blood Canyon, killing the pain in my leg with plenty of alcohol, and I also spent that time talking to the girls in those saloons, girls of lesser reputation. They told me that Tommy Milton was the son of a whore from Santana, just over the Mexican border.
You've been to Santana, haven't you, Father?
No need to answer, I already know...you spent a good bit of time out there. Now, of course, you being a man of the cloth I'm sure you went down there for only the holiest of holy purposes. But I get it, a man gets lonely...and a shepherd so far away from his flock probably figures to himself that word doesn't spread, and all those years of restraint, all those years of keeping it in your pants...Jesus, it's enough to make a man go mad. So I don't blame your lack of morals in the situation...I'd have done the same thing.
And I have to applaud you reaching out to Tommy, letting him know you were his father, in secret of course, but you kept that relationship alive. You couldn't really let it be known to the world, but the bond you and Tommy have, it's something magical. Really is.
But Tommy Milton killed my brothers, Father, but I know he didn't feel bad for a second about it. We're criminals, and he's a deputy. It's his job. Doesn't make it any easier for me to live with it, though. Now I could hunt Tommy Milton down, shoot him in cold blood and run from the law for the rest of my life. But I don't think that just killing Tommy would make things bad enough for the poor bastard. If he was dead, he wouldn't have to live with the loss of something near and dear to him.
Father, I think I've found the solution to all of this. If you look down, through this little screen that's keeping us apart, you'll see that Colt I was talking about a couple of minutes ago. It may have not been able to hit Tommy Milton at twenty feet, but I figure it's a pretty straight shooter at two.
I hope you've made your peace, Father, because I've found mine, right here in this confessional booth.
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
But you're not much of a fucking angel yourself.
Former Glory
Lynne sat in her Expedition in the parking lot of Grab-N-Go. She looked through the big windows that formed the front wall of the convenience store. She wondered how she was going to do this, but she knew she had to. She was doing it for Hannah. Her little girl didn't need to know how mom got the money for the trip to Washington, D.C., the admission price for the attractions, the share of the gas money. She just had to have a fun time.
It was late, but Lynne was still frustrated by how many people were still in the store. The store was always packed in the mornings when she went by on her way to work…that is, when she still had her job, but even now she counted three people milling around the store, shopping for who knows what.
She looked at the newest school picture of Hannah, the one she had tacked to her dashboard. At ten years old, she was finally starting to resemble Lynne more, with her sharp features and high cheekbones that betrayed her tomboy posing she put forward so often. She'd come around to being a woman soon enough, and once she did, Lynne knew she'd have an impossible time keeping the boys away from Hannah once she got to high school. She knew she'd have to keep Hannah from doing the very things she'd snuck off at two in the morning to go do with boys in the back of their cars. But right now Lynne was sitting in her car at two in the morning getting ready to do something she hoped Hannah would never even have to imagine.
Lynne reac
hed into her Coach bag, a holdover from more prosperous times, and pulled out the long pistol and the ski mask. She knew where Robert, her husband, kept the gun and the bullets, and she'd packed away the family's snow gear from last year's vacation in Vail, so she didn't have to ask anyone where the accessories to her crime were. She held the gun in her hand. It felt a lot heavier than she imagined it would. For something so small, so compact, she was sure it weighed at least ten pounds. She clicked the safety switch off, remembering the tutorials Robert had given her "just in case".
Holding the gun, the black ski mask resting in the passenger seat mere inches away, Lynne thought about how she'd gotten to this point, this nadir of her life. Things had been going so well for the past seven years at the office where she worked as a junior ad exec for a mid-sized marketing company. She wined and dined clients, made gigantic sales that impressed even her cynical superiors, and was all around an exemplary employee...she even had the plaques to prove it. Then something happened; a recession Lynne didn't see coming hit her company hard and completely blindsided her, who watched clients who had twenty year standing accounts with her company disappear from the books overnight, turning all the black ink in the office to red. It didn't help that when the recession began stirring up, Lynne was in a bit of a slump...a slump that would be overlooked in any other economy or perhaps with a bigger firm, but not where she was. One day, Lynne's boss looked over her performance from the past couple of years and compared it to the drain she'd put on the company credit cards she was issued. All the charges were legitimate, save for a couple of airport novels here and there and maybe a Yankees cap for Robert one time, but she didn't think any of the charges were excessive, and all were spent entertaining clients or shuttling herself around the country as the ambassador for the firm. He didn't see it that way, calling her spending "frivolous" and demanding that she took a pay cut for the next year that was proportional to the amount of company money she'd "wasted." Maybe it was her pride, maybe it was because she felt like she was being thrown under the bus just to free up money to cover for lost profits, but Lynne decided she wasn't going to take it anymore and quit on the spot. She knew she'd have a half dozen headhunters on her case by the end of the week and she thought nothing of it.
Then the Dow dropped four hundred points in one day, and the calls didn't come, and her already shaky 401k was depleted to nothing within a month.
Lynne never told Hannah or Robert that she'd quit her job, and she even kept up the illusion that she was still working fifty hours a week downtown. Most days she'd drive off to another town and look around in shops, but never buy anything. She even packed her own lunch in a bag, scared to spend even a cent on a sandwich at Panera. Somehow, the money kept evaporating, and soon Lynne saw her checking account drop to $34.40. In a week she wouldn't even have enough money to pay for gas to keep up the charade of her fake job.
At first, her mother lent her money based on Lynne lying to her. She always said it was for Hannah, but in truth it was just to escape Hannah, to escape Robert, to escape the question of "mommy, why are you home all the time?" Her mother was good for a month or so and gave Lynne $2,000 unconditionally, but everybody has their limit. She told Lynne that she was on a fixed income, and even with her retirement portfolio there was only so much she had to give her. So she left her mother one afternoon, calling her a cunt to her face and slamming the door. She hadn't spoken to her mother since then.
The next month or so, Lynne was buoyed by charity contributions from her better off friends, and Lynne used pretty much the same excuse that it was for a fundraiser Hannah was involved with, saying "in this economy, we have to dig deep, but I'm sure you can find something for a good cause" to all of her friends, knowing she was only partially lying to them. It was going to a good cause...the cause was that Lynne didn't want to ruin Hannah and Robert's lives by being a deadbeat laying on the couch waiting for her unemployment checks to roll in...unemployment she was too ashamed to start collecting.
But the friends dried up, too...people's pockets only run so deep based on friendship. So Lynne went to visit Jeff.
Jeff was a senior exec at her office, and she knew that he'd had the hots for her, his stare always lingering for a couple seconds longer than polite, especially when Lynne was dressed in a semi-provocative outfit for one of her more chauvinistic clients. Most of the time she thought Jeff was a pig, but sometimes she liked the attention. Robert never said a word when Lynne went out the door wearing the bra that pushed her tits up to her neck and made them look amazing, but she knew Jeff appreciated the effort.
"So what brings you in, Lynne? How's the job hunt coming along? I'm sure you've got something better already, right?"
Lynne sat across from Jeff at his office. She was wearing _that_ bra. She shifted and gave Jeff a good look at everything.
"Things aren't going so great, Jeff...that's sort of why I came in here today. It's been, what, four months? Four months and I still can't find anything."
"You want your job back? You know I'd love to, Lynne, but I can't do that, we're tightening our belts down to the last notch here...hell, we had to let a couple of copywriters go just last week."
"No, I...I don't want my job back, Jeff." She furrowed her brow and checked with herself once again that she wanted to go through with this. Then she remembered Hannah, remembered that just yesterday she'd told her that she was so proud that her mom was able to keep her job even though a lot of kids in school had parents that had lost theirs. The illusion was necessary, and Lynne was willing to do whatever it took to make sure Hannah never saw behind the curtain. "...I've always noticed that you seem attracted to me."
"Well, yes, I do think you're pretty good looking."
"And, because of that...I was wondering if I would..." Lynne fought her urge to run and just get the hell out of the office entirely "...if I would...give myself to you, if you could give me some money."
Jeff leaned back in his chair and sized up the proposition. She noticed he glanced at her cleavage longer than he'd ever done before.
"Lock the door and strip naked." He ordered, not even mulling it over for a second, like he'd planned on this happening for a long time.
And Lynne did it, stripping out of her clothes and laying herself across the desk while Jeff got her from behind. She thought sex with Jeff wouldn't be that bad...even though he was a good twenty years older than her thirty-one, he seemed vivacious and young for his age, but as he slid his calloused, scaly hands down her back, as he held her body down onto the desk, forcing his briefcase into her ribs, she detested what she was doing. He was thankfully done within a minute or so. She put her clothes back on and Jeff threw two hundreds down onto the desk and said "thanks, come back on Wednesday."
So she came back on Wednesday, and the Wednesday after that, and every Wednesday for the next three months.
But even pity fucks have to come to an end, and Lynne quickly began to experience diminishing returns for her services. After a month, he took fifty off the price of her “services”. Even though it was all for Hannah, Lynne finally had to let it go...there was a fine line between scraping together cash and degrading herself, and Lynne knew she was degrading herself by going into Jeff's office.
Lynne thought about what could be more degrading than what she did with Jeff, and then she looked down at the gun. This was her low point, this was her nadir. In six months she'd gone from heading up accounts worth fifty million dollars to sitting in the parking lot of the Grab-n-Go waiting to hold it up.
Two of the people left the store, and Lynne knew she wasn't going to get much better of a window to do this. She'd deal with the other person, maybe pistol whip them like she saw in the movies, and then she's work her way to the counter and force the clerk to hand it all over. She slipped the ski mask over her face and popped the locks on her SUV, then got out of the car.
Lynne walked up to the store with her arm fully extended, holding the gun up so the clerk and the customer could see that s
he wasn't fucking around. The doors slid open and Lynne charged her way in, the cool blast of air from the store traveling up her spine and pumping her up even more.
"Alright, this is a holdup!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, deepening her voice to add a little bit of threat to her usual girlish tone. The customer in the back of the store, a late-night castoff of nearby Westlake University coming to the Grab-n-Go for some study food, spun around from his position at the drink fountain. He dropped the drink to the ground, in shock, and ice and Pepsi went flying across the floor.
"On the ground!" Lynne moved over to the kid, her gun still at full arm's length. She was getting in her zone, and she actually felt that she was doing pretty well at this for a first-timer.
When the kid took a look at Lynne in her flower-print blouse and smart black pants, he laughed at her a little bit. "The fuck are you, the Soccer Mom Bandit?"
"...Just get on the goddamned floor!" Lynne pleaded with him, but she could tell he wasn't buying her threatening pose.
"Or what? You're gonna use that thing on me? How'd you even learn how to fire that thing...time off between baking batches of cookies?"
The kid was testing Lynne's nerves, and being a misogynistic asshole at the same time...Jeff had trotted out those soccer mom lines every once in a while, saying he'd never fucked an actual soccer mom in his life.
"I'll blow your fucking head off, I swear, get on the ground!" Lynne was happy that she was wearing the ski mask, because it hid the tears streaming down her face at the kid's insults.
"Fuck off, I'm out of here." The kid knocked Lynne's gun arm out of the way and sauntered across the tile floor of the store, a swagger in his step showing that he was the one coming out on top of this situation.
Lynne lifted the gun and ran towards the kid. "I said don't fucking move!" She rammed the barrel of the gun into the back of his head, wanting to scare him into submission, and then for some reason, maybe it was her nerves and adrenaline getting the best of her, maybe it was the momentum of her run across the store, but for whatever reason it was, she didn't have too much time to think about it as she felt her finger press down on the trigger.
