by Nick Cutter
“I can’t. Christ. I can’t do it again.”
She dropped a dime in the box bolted onto the TV. It bought her a couple minutes of flickery black and white. She needed the distraction. Micah and Ebenezer were in the bar now, waiting for her to change her mind. She had to hold out. One drink and they would surely leave.
She tuned in to an episode of The Waltons. Usually this kind of saccharine shit made her teeth ache, but right now it was just what the doctor ordered.
“Good night, John-Boy, you pig-fucking little bastard,” she muttered.
A commercial came on.
“What’s inside this little blue egg that keeps Barbara Eden looking slim and trim?” asked the jovial announcer.
“Who gives a flying fuck,” Minerva said.
“Oh, there’s only one answer to that—it’s L’eggs control-top panty hose! L’eggs slims and trims but doesn’t bind, so you get comfort and control!”
The meter clicked. The screen blinked out. Minerva went to drop in another dime. She stopped. She swore she could see something in the smoky square of the dead TV. Something jesting and capering . . .
Human fears obeyed a hierarchy. Minerva had discovered that as a girl. She had never been as scared as on that sunny afternoon when her brother was taken by that snake. Her fear had held different layers: the helplessness, the heaving revulsion, the understanding that the world could yawn open at any time and take what was most precious. That afternoon—those few minutes within it, dominated by the sound of the snake’s mouth opening to ingest her still-breathing brother, so much like the stretching of a thousand wet rubber bands . . . Minerva never thought she would know a terror to rival it.
Her belief had stood until one night in Little Heaven, when she rounded the edge of the chapel to spy a boy sitting cross-legged in the moonlight. The darkness twitched all around him, moving with a trillion sightless eyes. The boy turned, knowing she was there though unable to see her. He smiled—so sweet, so innocent—with his eyes the color of smoke. He was holding something in his hands. Beyond him lay the feasting darkness of the woods. From behind the trees had come the sound of something consuming its prey . . . but not in any natural way.
Minerva sank down on the bed. It was there again. That old squirming fear creeping up her legs like gangrene. It got inside and ate you from within, squandered and reduced you until you were helpless to fight it. That kind of fear could ruin you—you and those around you, too, because you were no use to anyone with that dread lodged in your heart.
She sat for a few minutes, thinking. Was she seriously going to do it? Was she actually contemplating hurling herself back into that horror?
She was just a sack of skin. That was how she saw it. Hell, that’s all anyone was. She was a sack, and Micah was a sack, and Ebenezer—oh, he was definitely a sack. Billions of sacks colliding with one another every goddamn day. Sometimes two of them collided and something good came of it. Sometimes two or three or more collided and something awful happened. But that’s all life was—sacks of skin bumbling around, bumping into their fellow sacks, and stuff happening.
But she had to admit that Micah Shughrue, ole Shug, he was about the best sack of skin she’d ever bumped into. That said, she owed them nothing. Not the Englishman, for damn sure. Not even Micah. The debts still due were their own.
But then, what else did she have? What was her life? She killed people. She was denied the mercy of death. She woke up screaming more nights than not. She owed, and she was paying. Maybe it was finally time to follow that line back. Pay a visit to her old benefactor. Renegotiate their deal.
Isn’t my life hell anyway? Minerva thought. Isn’t that why I want to die?
There are worse hells than this, a voice whispered softly in her ear.
4
SHE FOUND THEM in the bar.
“I’ll come.”
Micah said, “Okay.”
“Don’t go getting all dewy-eye on me, Shug.”
Micah said, “Okay.”
1
AFTER THE SEABORN APPLETON matter had concluded to Micah’s satisfaction—ultimately Shughrue had allowed Appleton to continue to suck breath, though it’s possible Appleton would have preferred death to the state he was left in—the three outlaws hid out on a farm on the outskirts of Angel Fire, a town in Colfax County, New Mexico.
In later generations, it would be difficult for two men and one woman with a history of illegalities to disappear quite so easily. But in the sixties, when records were written out in longhand and transferred to carbons and put in files that went into filing cabinets in dank basements infested by mice and mold, it was still a possibility. You could live off the grid, in unmapped places, sheltered from the long arm of the law. If you kept to yourself and paid in cash and didn’t get sick and drove at the speed limit, well, there was a chance you might never run afoul of those government agencies whose job was to track the movements and intents of its citizenry. You could just . . . vanish.
Micah had done some work for the farm’s owner back when the man had made his living by rawer means. There was a mutual respect and fealty between them. Johnny Law did not come searching for them. What had they really done, anyway? Tried to kill one another, without success, then ganged up to mutilate a drug dealer. The law had more pressing matters to address.
Over the following months, their wounds healed—not perfectly, but then, wounds rarely do. Micah took to wearing a patch over his squandered eye. Ebenezer’s unrelaxed hair mushroomed into a massive Afro. Minerva kept her own hair razored tight to her skull. They slept in the hayloft above the horses. During the day, they walked the fields alone, testing their strength against some unknown eventuality. The scent of cut garlic leached out of the earth, perfuming their skin. They were happy. As happy as people like them could be. They had no family. Many of their old friends had been eaten by the war.
At night they slept fitfully, like wolves from separate packs forced to share a den. One night, Ebenezer awoke to find Minerva staring at him. Her eyes were a peculiar blue in the drowsy light of the barn.
“See anything you fancy?” he asked.
“Can’t sleep.”
“Try thinking pleasant thoughts.”
“That’s hard, looking at you.”
Ebenezer laughed softly. “Oh, you are truly an incorrigible flirt.”
Minerva would kill him eventually. She was as certain of that fact as she was that the sun would rise in the east—even more sure, in fact, because if the sun failed to rise one day she would still kill Ebenezer in the dark. Ebenezer believed her actions had been motivated by monetary concerns. He did not fear or suspect her. And Micah was right—it would taste all the sweeter for the wait. Minerva had read that people who had the ability to delay gratification were the most successful people on God’s green earth.
ONE DAY, the farm’s owner summoned Micah to his kitchen.
“There’s a job needs doing.”
Micah said, “I thought you were quit of all that.”
The man said, “It ain’t mine. Still needs doing. I figured your crew might be up for it.”
My crew? Micah thought. They are just a couple of strays.
“Payroll job,” the man said. “Hungarian gang operating out of Albuquerque.” He snorted. “How they ended up there, you got me. Good payday. But it’s not a one-man job.”
Micah nodded. “I owe you.”
“Don’t owe me much. Just reckoned it would get you back on your feet, is all.”
Micah floated the idea to the other two. He was surprised when they both readily agreed. Ebenezer was a mercenary at heart, happy to join any cohort so long as a payday was involved. Minerva was the real surprise—but she was sick of bounty hunting, and her old outfit was unlikely to take her back now anyway. They were all poor as church mice, too.
She said, “Even splits?”
“Even splits,” said Micah.
“Then I’ll do it.”
THEY TOOK A GREYHOUND to Albuquer
que. Micah bought a Dodge Dart at a used-car lot, signing the ownership papers under an assumed name and paying cash—the last three hundred dollars in his wallet.
Micah drove to the payroll swap site. A hardware store on Euclid Avenue. When the delivery van showed up, Micah strapped a hockey helmet on his head and gunned the Dart’s engine and charged out of a blind alleyway, slamming into the van, T-boning it, and rocking it up over the curb. His head slammed the dash, blood leaping out his nose. He gazed out the busted windshield and saw Ebenezer and Minerva—who had been sitting at a bus stop directly across the road—hauling open the van’s rear doors and dragging out a pair of stunned deliverymen.
Micah staggered out of the Dart. A Hungarian mama with a corrugated dust-bowl face ran out of the hardware store with a machete. Still woozy, helmet on, he leveled his pistol at her. She got the point and dropped the blade. Ebenezer retrieved the cash bag. They dashed down the blind alley and onto another street. Sirens, distant but closing in.
They walked into a pet store. Micah still had the hockey helmet. He took it off, left it on the stacked sacks of dog kibble. They breezed past caged puppies and lizards and twittering birds, exiting out the back door. They walked down another alley to a park where kids were playing baseball. Minerva bought a lemon Italian ice from the ice cream truck. They were sweating, but so was everyone else.
Ebenezer tried to hail a cab, but nobody stopped. One did for Micah, but only once Ebenezer had hidden behind a bus bench. When Eb hopped in, the driver made a face like he’d sniffed something rank, but he kept his lip zipped. He took them to a bar on the outskirts. The cash bag sat under their table. Ebenezer played the pinball machine. Minerva played “Sugar Shack” and “Blue Velvet” on the jukebox. Micah pretty much stared at the wall.
After a few hours, another cab dropped them at the bus station. They caught the 6:30 Greyhound to Angel Fire. Back at the farm, the farmer counted their take. There was also a pound of heroin in the bag. The farmer claimed it was “primo stuff.” Micah didn’t care. He’d had his fill of drugs.
The job had gone off without a snag. They worked well together. The farmer said there were other jobs. The three of them didn’t have much else better to do.
2
AND SO THEY FORMED a loose association. They had no obligations, no taxes on their time. It was not a natural fellowship. Each of them preferred the sound of one hand clapping. Plus one of them nursed a blood grudge against another.
But something happened during their flight from Mogollon, their recovery at the farm, and the jobs they did under the farmer’s supervision. They came together in a manner none of them could credit.
They were professional and declarative in their actions. Judgment did not enter into their thinking. As they were good at their chosen endeavor, for many months they prospered. Between jobs, they would drift apart for a week or two, leaving the farm to pursue their own amusements. Then they would return like honeybees following an old pheromone trace.
This was the nature of their existence for months. Then a woman entered and changed everything, as women often will.
Afterward, Micah Shughrue would dwell on this idyll of good months and the two people he shared it with. He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins.
Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.
3
MICAH KNEW THE WOMAN was watching him. When a man spends a lot of his life with a target on his back, that man had better develop a sixth sense if he wants to keep drawing breath.
He had driven into Angel Fire in the farmer’s pickup to purchase sundries: flour, sugar, molasses, a new button for his duster. Also ammunition. He’d been practicing on the farm, pegging cans off the corral fence. His aim was screwy with only the one eye—even though he used to squeeze that eye shut when he fired. He had never been a crack shot, anyway. It was more that he never flinched in the cut.
He exited the gun shop with three boxes of 7.62 mm cartridges. He crossed the road to a small groceteria. It was cool inside, an old Westinghouse wall-mounted A/C pumping, the tinselly ribbons tied to its grate fluttering. He walked the aisles. A sack of sugar. A five-pound bag of Gold Medal flour. A box of Sugar Sparkled Rice Krinkles—all men had their vices. He passed a cooler and grabbed a six-pack of Blatz. He felt like blowing the foam off a few. He picked up a church key, too.
He had spotted her by then. First, when he came out of the gun shop. She was lingering across the road, pretending to be absorbed by the display window of the hardware store: a heap of men’s work gloves. Why would she be so interested in those? She wasn’t. She was watching him in the reflection of the glass.
She was tall. Not stork-like, the way Minerva was put together. A hint of power down through those legs. Her dark hair was cut in a bob. She wore dun-colored Carhartts and a T-shirt of palest blue.
She had followed him into the grocery store. Maybe she was craving a Hershey’s bar or a pack of Now and Laters. She didn’t seem threatening. He caught her reflection in the fish-eye mirror at the head of each aisle.
A bag boy put Micah’s items in a brown paper sack. The woman idled behind him. She didn’t have a thing in her basket. She seemed to realize this, and tossed a pack of chewing gum into it.
His truck was parked around the side of the store in the shade of a bur oak. He dropped the tailgate and dug a can of Blatz out of the bag. He punched two holes in the lid with the church key and took a deep drink.
The woman rounded the store. Her face was startling. Her eyes were a peculiar blue—the blue of the water in an Arctic lake—and her hair was so black it reflected the sunlight. But neither of those details was jarring. No, it was the skin on the left side of her face, trailing under her ear and along her jaw, on down her throat. The flesh was mottled and runneled like wax that pooled around a lit candle.
She stopped. She put her hands in her pockets and rocked forward at the hips. Micah was not worried about her—but he scanned behind her, waiting for someone else to show.
“Micah Shughrue?”
She took a step toward him. It was one of the worst facial burns Micah had ever seen. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened or who might have done it to her. She would have been beautiful without it. Micah could not say that she wasn’t, even with it.
“Sherri Bellhaven told me I might find you here,” she said. “In Angel Fire, I mean. Not the grocery store.”
Micah knew Sherri Bellhaven. He’d done a few jobs with her fellow, Leroy Huggins. Bellhaven had been a bank clerk. A square john with a taste for rough customers. Micah had liked Sherri, but believed those tastes would get her in trouble eventually.
He said, “I used to know her.”
“She’s my sister. I’m Ellen Bellhaven.”
Ellen pulled a pack of Doublemint from her pocket and unwrapped a stick. Micah hitched his foot up on the tailgate, balancing his elbow on his knee. Glugged some beer.
“How is she?”
“In jail.” She balled up the foil and flicked it off her thumb. “Up in Tacoma.”
Micah just drank his beer.
“She trusted the wrong people,” Ellen Bellhaven said when it became clear he wasn’t going to speak. “Same old story, huh?”
Micah finished his beer and dropped the empty into the bag. He dug out another can. The woman, Ellen, watched him. Did she expect him to offer her one? He’d give her one if she asked.
“She heard you were out here. Jailhouse intel,” she said.
Eight months ago, Micah had sent Leroy an envelope with the ten dollars he owed. He forgot what Leroy had loaned him the money for, but he never forgot a debt. The letter’s postmark had been Angel Fire. Perhaps that was the how as to why this woman was facing him now.
Ellen laughed. “Like I know a thing about jail! I hardly even got
grounded as a kid. The good girl, that was me. Sherri, on the other hand, got grounded so often that her windowsill had grooves in it, she had to sneak out so much.”
Ellen was babbling a little. Micah understood. Normal people tended to do that in his presence.
“Listen,” she said, “are you . . . ah, for hire?”
Why did some people think he was available for scut work? You want someone to pull your kitty out of a tree? Call a fireman.
“No.”
Her throat flushed; the blush carried up to enflame her unburned cheek. “Oh. Okay. It’s just that my sister said maybe you could—”
“You in trouble?”
“Me?” She shook her head. “No, no, it’s my sister. Her son, actually. Nate. He’s been abducted, I guess you could say.”
“So call the police.”
“No can do. He was taken by his father.”
“You call that an abduction? Your sister is in the clink.”
Ellen nodded. “Sure. Where else is the kid going to go, right? It’s not that Reggie—that’s his father—it’s not that he’s taken Nate so much as where he’s taken him.”
Micah raised an eyebrow.
“Little Heaven,” Ellen said. “You heard of it?”
Micah shook his head.
“It’s some kind of a compound,” Ellen went on. “Survivalist? Really, I don’t know the who or why of it. Religious nuts. Reggie nearly died two years ago, yeah? He was a mailman. Heart attack on his route. The doctors hit him with those shock paddles to kick-start his heart. He woke up blubbering in tongues. A real come-to-Jesus moment. Sherri says he started going on and on about taking his faith to the next level.”
“When I knew Sherri, she was with Leroy Huggins.”
“I remember Leroy,” said Ellen. “Decent guy. Good for my sister, apart from the criminal tendencies.”
