by Nick Cutter
On the desk sat a box. Inside the box was an old-style syringe kit. Early 1900s vintage, before companies began manufacturing disposable needles. She’d found it in an antiques store in Sedona, Arizona. It was the sort of thing she could imagine a genteel morphine addict using—a brain surgeon or a bank manager. The initials G.P.G. were stamped on its copper plating. Who the hell bought a monogrammed drug needle?
The syringe was two inches long, polished steel, with a large-bore needle. The antiques store owner had sold it to her for twenty bucks. He said she had a fine eye for this sort of thing.
An eye for what, needles? she had thought. Oh yeah, you betcha.
Seven or eight thermometers also sat on the desk. She’d bought them at a Rite Aid earlier that same day. Inside each was a drop of mercury. She remembered her father telling her a story about the medicine men who used to travel around in the Old West days, selling mercury as a restorative. Laird’s Bloom of Youth, goofy names like that. Those quacks would claim it’d put the apple back in a woman’s cheeks and restore the ruby to her lips. Which was pure horseshit. Painting your face with quicksilver was about as restorative as gargling pony piss—but at least piss wouldn’t kill you.
But then, Minny did want to die. It was just about the only thing she wanted out of life anymore.
She set a plastic spoon on the desk and cracked a thermometer open over it. The glass snapped crisply, depositing a bead of silver into the spoon. She did the same with the rest of the thermometers, then drew all the mercury into the syringe. She looped a bootlace round her arm above her elbow, clamped one end between her teeth and cinched it. Her arms were thin, so it didn’t take much to raise a vein.
Once upon a time she’d heard the whispers. That girl’s so skinny she could take a bath in a shotgun barrel. Or: Like a snake on stilts, that one. But she hadn’t heard those whispers in many a moon. In a weird way, she missed them.
The needle slid into a fat vein. Her skin dimpled, and the tip punched right in. The first time she’d tried swallowing the mercury, but she’d just gone dizzy and thrown up. No, right into the bloodstream seemed best.
She inhaled deeply—she could taste the poison at the back of her mouth: warm, with a metallic edge—and retrieved her pistols from their case. They slid into pancake holsters on either side of her rib cage. She pulled her long duster coat on over them.
Maybe tonight. She hoped to Christ so. Christ or whoever might be up there looking down on her small life, on all humanity, our every sad endeavor.
Please, she thought, show some mercy. Just a little. Haven’t I earned it?
The answer came on the wind that fussed with the drapes edging the open window.
Oh no, my child. You haven’t suffered nearly enough yet.
THE MOTEL BAR was practically empty. A stag-antler chandelier cast its glow over the interior. The sound system was playing “Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste of Honey. A pair of rubby-dubs occupied seats in opposite corners, where they drank with quiet desperation. A third man was shitfaced, smoking a cigar at the end of the bar.
“Whiskey,” she said. The barkeep brought a glass.
Minerva said, “Leave the bottle. Oogie oogie.”
The bartender was heavy, with a walrus mustache and old-timey sleeve garters. He looked like a big fat idiot, and she almost told him so. She could feel him clandestinely taking her measure. What he saw was a tall woman of tubercular slenderness, pale eyes, dark hair shaved nearly to the skull. But if he considered her closely—if he looked directly into her eyes, so different from those of the four-bit whores he doubtlessly trafficked in—he would see . . . well, something. It spun and capered behind her golden irises, which seemed to tick clockwise, snipping off each second.
But he would not look too closely—no man ever did—because Minerva’s gaze had a withering effect; it seized something precious inside of you, shriveling it like a cellophane wrapper tossed onto an open flame.
Minny drank a shot of whiskey, another, another. Her arm pump-handled the hooch into her mouth. She felt good—more to the point, she felt like day-old owl shit. The mercury was percolating merrily through her system. It hurt quite badly, but she’d withstood much worse. She hoped she could force enough whiskey into herself to dull things further without throwing up.
If I do this right, she thought, any donkey dick with a gopher gun should be able to irrigate me right between the eyes.
Minny had made other attempts to do herself in. The first time had been . . . Christ, when was that now? A pauper’s cemetery near the Mexican border. She’d killed a man, or maybe it was two or three. They died as they always did, with screwed-up looks on their faces that said they had witnessed a terrible reckoning just before the door slammed shut. Afterward, Minny had perched on a tombstone and socked the barrel of her Colt M1911 under her chin. She cocked the hammer, wanting it so badly but knowing—without even pulling the trigger—it wouldn’t work.
The deal didn’t work like that. It was a compact etched in blood—hers and the Englishman’s and Micah Shughrue’s, too. Their blood, and the blood of the black thing that had tendered the deal.
You can’t walk it back. You can’t welsh on a deal that fills your very veins.
She’d pulled the trigger anyway. What was the harm in trying? Hah! There had come a lifting sensation, her body a sail filling with wind . . . She came to sometime that night, though it could’ve been the next. The moon shone over the gravestones. Her hair was matted with blood and hardened curds that she instinctively identified as her own brains. But she was fine. Intact. Nothing but a small coin-shaped scar on the top of her head where she used to part her hair before she’d taken to shaving it.
She’d tried other ways, sure. Pills. Hanging. Slitting her wrists with a barber’s straight razor. One night she paid a man eighty dollars to stab her out back of a porno theater. The man had seemed the sort to stab a woman for eighty dollars, though he might have done it for free if she’d proposed it. There was little negotiation or discussion. He’d just smiled and begun to stab her with a bone-handled fillet knife, powerful thrusts to her belly and chest. The pain sizzled through her as the knife sliced sideways, sawing through velvety muscle. The man was a dab hand with a blade; he might have had some butchery training. They were both grunting: she from the pain and the air whoofing from her lungs with each knife thrust, he from plain old exertion. Minny had braced her hands on his shoulders to stay steady and aid him at his task. She’d stared into the man’s bright magpie eyes as her blood splashed the oily cement, until she slipped gratefully into the black . . .
When she came to, the man was dead, his neck slit so deep that Minny could see the gleam of his severed windpipe. She was fine, of course. A few shallow scratches on her stomach. She had then dragged the man’s body behind a dumpster, leaving him beside a box of sun-bleached porn magazines with titles like Old Farts and Fifty and Nifty.
But right now, tonight . . . yes, it would be different. She couldn’t kill herself, and she couldn’t induce someone else to do it. The deed had to be committed fairly. She had to lose. Well, she wasn’t a sore loser. Tonight she’d get herself good and properly killed.
“Boogie Oogie Oogie” segued into “I’m Your Boogie Man,” by KC and the Sunshine Band. Had she stumbled into some kind of half-assed theme night? Minerva dropped another shot of whiskey down her throat. A woman came out of the men’s bathroom. A jaundiced-looking businessman followed her out, hitching up his slacks.
The woman elbowed up beside Minny.
“How about it, pal—you want a ride?”
Minny turned to face her. The whore leaned back.
“Ah, shit,” she said, pronouncing it as sheeee-it. She was stoned out of her gourd. “I thought you was a dude.”
Her laugh was nasty. Her hands were covered in scabies, and her nose had been busted a few times. “Well, so what?” she said, more to herself than Minerva. “It wouldn’t be my first time with a chick.” She wiggled her hips. “What do you
say?”
“Oh, I imagine not,” Minny said breezily. “I’d rather eat cat shit with a pair of chopsticks, to tell you the truth.”
“I will leave you to it, then,” the whore slurred, unfussed, and sidled down the bar toward the drunk smoking the cigar.
Minny heard the growl of a pickup truck. The light of headlamps washed over the bar’s dust-clad windows. She tossed another shot down her throat.
The door squealed open on its rusted hinges. The clopping of boots.
“You the one they sent?”
Minerva turned sluggishly. Dizzy, sick, drunk. Good.
“Yuh,” she said, and burped. “I’m all of it.”
The man looked like they always did. Leathery, rawboned, a face raked by the wind. A hard man made harder by the awfulness he had committed. A man untroubled by his past. She could not tell by looking if he felt any remorse for the things he had done—the things that had put his name on the breeze, put him in the wheelhouse of her employers, put her on a path to this very meeting. She did not rightly care. He probably saw himself as a fox set loose in a sheep pen—how could he be blamed for doing what came naturally to him? And who knows? Maybe he really was that fox. Sadly for him, she was a wolf.
“The lady shootist,” the man said. “I heard of you, but I thought you wasn’t real. Just a spook story.”
Minny said, “You will find that I’m real enough.”
The man’s gaze was cold, but then they always were right up until the end, when they turned fear-struck and childish.
He smiled. “I hear my head’s worth twenty grand.”
Minny shook her head. A heavy lead block had replaced her brain. “You’ll fetch five grand per ear, if I’m lucky.”
“That’s not too shabby,” the man said, proud at the price.
“I’ve done better.”
The man’s smile evaporated. “I’m sure you have. But what about taking me alive—you get any more for that?”
Minny said, “Never bothered to ask.”
The man’s jaw set. “What if I go without a fuss?”
“Do you have a mind to do so?”
The man shook his head.
“Then I saved myself the haggling,” Minny slurred.
The man said: “Look at you! You’re drunk as a tick!”
Minny laughed at the odd turn of phrase. Then she spoke so everyone else in the bar could hear. “You best all clear out. And none of you even think about calling the authorities. This will be done soon enough.”
The patrons obediently departed. Minny’s sight was failing, but she could see shapes behind the bar’s front windows. The parking lot lights glinted off shotgun barrels.
“You brought help.”
“I heard about you, was all,” the man said evenly. “Got the devil’s own luck.”
It isn’t luck when all you want to do is die, son.
“What do you say we part company in good faith?” the man said. “You go your way and we ours. There are other bounties, aren’t there? Other men.”
“The only time I ever shot a man in the back was when he was running away.” She opened her palms to him. “There are things a man can’t run away from, boy. And I am sorry to say that tonight you’ve run clean out of road.”
The man opened his leather bomber jacket. A pistol was tucked into his belt above his Confederate Eagle belt buckle.
“I ain’t your boy, bitch. I’ll kill you,” he said. “Dead as a beaver hat, that’s you.”
This fellow was a fount of old-timey sayings, wasn’t he? Instead of laughing, Minny swooned. Guts heaving, bowels thudding, eyes screwed tight like pissholes in the snow. Dead as a beaver hat? How quaint. I like your spirit, boy.
She made no move for her pistols. Her arms were crossed. The man’s hand twitched above the grips of his own gun.
Be a crack shot, she prayed. Put one slug through my pump house, another through my brain box. That would meet the terms of the pact. All fair, all final.
It happened then—right that very instant—even though she did everything to fight it.
The Sharpening.
That was what she called it. Some natural mechanism snapping on. Her every sense became more attuned. Her view of the world expanded and shrank at the same time—she could see everything, the tiniest detail. The sweat on the man’s forehead, each bead set to pop from his skin. The curve of the men’s jaws beyond the windows, the tension of their fingers on the triggers of their scatterguns. Everything came into perfect focus: it was like staring at things through a huge magnifying glass. And she could operate within this view with total confidence and speed while everyone around her struggled like ants in molasses.
The man went for his gun—too slow, too goddamn fuckingly cocksuckingly slow.
Come at me, man! Quickly! Fill your Christing hand!
Her own hands uncrossed and moved toward her weapons with sickening swiftness. The next moment her fingers had wrapped around her Colts—I should have fixed them in the holsters with Krazy Glue, she thought—the barrels coming up smoothly. The guns kicked as bullets leapt from their muzzles, wasping through the air and hitting the young man spang in the heart and head, flinging him backward before his pistol had even cleared his hips.
Minny swiveled, no longer fighting it, giving herself over to the devil in her bloodstream. Perfect holes snapped through the windows—pip! pip!—as bullets drilled through the glass and into the men outside, slugs slamming into their bulging eyes and coring through the obliging softness, then out the backs of their skulls in a gout of sticky pink.
By then the Sharpening was already retreating. Like a sneak thief, it came and did its filthy business and left without a trace.
The young man’s body had been blown clean out the door. His boots stuck straight up in the air. Something between a sob and a scream built in Minny’s throat.
Goddamn you. I’ve had enough. Goddamn you. Let me die.
The answer came in the wind curling between the dead man’s boots.
Suffer. Suffer as you have made me suffer . . .
She shouldered the door open, stumbling outside. The dead man’s skull shone in the moonlight, the scalp blown apart and a bubbly purple foam emitting from the brain with a pressurized gurgle. His wide-open eyes stared at the sky, the corneas gone milky in death.
. . . or you may come to me, child, the voice taunted. You still know the place, don’t you? We can face each other as deal makers do. Strike a bargain.
Her marrow went cold. She felt it that way exactly: the brown bone soup crystalizing into ice inside her bones, as cold as hoarfrost in a mountain pass.
Come to me, girl. Why play at this? Let us end these silly games.
She walked in the opposite direction of that voice—which was impossible, as it came from all points of the compass. It whispered inside her head in a voice she dared not name.
3
THE GARDENER
THE MAN the townsfolk knew as Gardener walked into the Glory with a Deathstalker in a glass jar.
The man had gone by other names in other places. Some had known him as English Bill (though his name was not William) or simply the Englishman. Others had known him as the Whispering Death. Still others had known him by no name at all—his presence had been nothing but a shadow darkening their periphery before their lights were snuffed out.
But the people of Old Ditch, a decaying boomtown on the border of California and Arizona, knew him as Gardener. If townsfolk insisted on a proper name—and sometimes they did, as folks in small towns can be suspicious of nameless people—he would answer to Elton, though this was no more his name than William was. The mail that arrived at his house was often addressed to other names, too, none of them his own.
But the people of Old Ditch knew him as Gardener. The fact that he was black helped in this regard—in the South, it was not uncommon for black men to be hailed by their jobs rather than their birth names. It might be Cook or Baker or, yes, Gardener. There was rarely any cruel
ty to it, despite the fact that it was dehumanizing. It was simply how things were done. Everyone accepted it, more or less. Even Gardener did, now. Years ago he would not have been so obliging—in fact, he might have cut your tongue out if you refused to call him by his Christian name, or whatever name he commanded.
Gardener had earned this name in the common way. He was a gardener. When he’d arrived in Old Ditch, the Rawlston Paperworks was going great guns; the surrounding woods were harvested, pulped, rolled out in sheets of clean white hundred-bond and shipped off to the ivory towers of academia, to Wall Street, to mom-and-pop shops around the country. The women married to the Paperworks executives hired him to tend their flower beds while they fanned themselves on their whitewashed porches and said, “Good work, boy, very good”—calling him boy despite the fact that he was often their elder. He tended the grounds at the Mission Church, making sure the marigolds and snapdragons were in full bloom from spring through early summer, and the orange glories and peonies on into the fall. Come the cooler months he’d sweep the church and do odd jobs for the pastor. It was a good and quiet existence . . . in the daylight hours, anyway.
The Glory, a bar at the end of Old Ditch’s straggle-ass main street, was deserted when Gardener stepped into it that day. It was not long past noon, an unseemly hour to be seen inside a drinking establishment. Many of the buildings lining Old Ditch’s main thoroughfare lay empty, their doors boarded over. The Paperworks had eaten the woods and shuttered its doors before moving on to another patch of unsullied wilderness, leaving the town to rot into itself.
Gardener limped to the bar and sat down under a poster for Camel unfiltered cigarettes; it featured an overweight police officer smoking against the door of his patrol car, the sun sparkling off his aviator sunglasses. Have a REAL cigarette—have a CAMEL. Gardener could see his own reflection in the fly-spotted mirror behind the bar. His hair, which he had once worn long and straight, was clipped close to his skull and flecked with gray. His skin was ashy dark, as it had been uncommonly warm of late and he washed with carbolic soap, which dried his skin. He set the glass jar with the Deathstalker on the bar.
