Feel The Pain

by Michael Bracken

I screwed the barrel of my .38 into the spot behind Jeremy Wilson’s left ear where his jaw attached to his skull.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Give me a reason to pull the trigger.”

Jeremy slowly raised his arms. Blood dripped from his knuckles and down the backs of his hands.

“Get your clothes, Cassie,” I said to the plump brunette with the pulped face.

She stared at me through eyelids nearly swollen shut.

“Now!”

Cassie Wilson pushed herself away from the wall and scooped her clothes off the bed, holding them against her naked chest as she hurried across the room.

As soon as Cassie stepped through the open door, I drove my knee into Jeremy’s groin. When he doubled over, I introduced my knee to his face and smashed the butt of my revolver against the back of his head. He folded like a bad poker hand and I left him face-down on the worn carpet.

Outside the motel room, I holstered my revolver, then steered Cassie toward my car, opened the passenger door, and pushed her inside. I walked to the other side and climbed in beside her. Then I keyed the ignition, dropped the Chevy into gear, and pointed it toward the highway. As the front tires bucked up onto the two-lane asphalt road from the gravel parking lot, I glanced at my passenger. She hadn’t spoken and she still held her clothes against her chest.

“Your father hired me,” I explained. “He wants you home.”

She didn’t respond.

Half an hour later I stopped at a clean and well-lit convenience store/service station. I pulled the car around back, next to the restrooms. When Cassie made no effort to leave the car, I went into the men’s room, wet a handful of paper towels, and returned.

I dabbed them against Cassie’s face and she winced with pain. After wiping away most of the blood, I saw the damage her husband had done. I walked around the building and inside, returning a few minutes later with antiseptic and bandages. I did my best to patch up Cassie’s face, wondering how much her father would ultimately spend on reconstructive surgery.

I finally convinced Cassie to release her death grip on the wad of clothes in her arms and I slipped her blouse onto her. I didn’t bother with her bra — I’d never been good getting one off a cooperative woman and doubted my ability to slip one onto an uncooperative woman — and I didn’t bother with her skirt. When I finished buttoning her blouse, I slipped one of my business cards into her pocket.

Then I drove through the night, only the occasional pair of on-coming headlights and the two cars that raced past us reminding me we weren’t alone on the nearly deserted two-lane highway. Two hours into the trip, Cassie asked, “Why’s he want me home?”

I glanced at her in the darkness of the car. Cassie hadn’t moved since I’d dressed her.

“He didn’t say.”

She didn’t speak again.

Dawn arrived in Waco only minutes ahead of us. I exited the interstate at Valley Mills and a few minutes later found my client’s home on Austin Avenue. I pulled into the circular drive and stopped before the wide brick steps. Before I could climb out of the car, the front door opened and Richard Masterson greeted me. He wore blue silk pajamas under his blue silk robe. Behind him stood Carvel Casey, a thick-chested bruiser in skin-tight jeans and a loose gray sweatshirt.

By the time the two men had descended the steps, I’d slid out of the Chevy. As they approached, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “She’s inside.”

Masterson and Carvel helped Cassie from the car, up the steps, and into the house. I followed, stopping in the foyer while they assisted Cassie up the sweeping curve of the staircase to the second floor. From behind and below, I saw the holster at the small of Carvel’s back, the one usually hidden by his sweatshirt.

I paced until Masterson returned.

He pulled twelve C-notes from a gold money clip, counted the bills twice before placing them in the palm of my hand, then said, “Send me a bill for your expenses.”

I didn’t count the money, didn’t even look down as I closed my hand around the crisp green bills and stuffed them into my pants pocket. I said, “Soon as I get to the office.”

Elroy Johnson sat at my desk, awaiting my arrival. When I opened my office door and stepped inside, he asked, “Where you been all night?”

“With a client.”

“Fat little brunet?” he asked. “Face like a pomegranate?”

“Why?”

“Got somebody says they saw you walking out of a motel in Texarkana about six hours ago. Drove off with a brunet. Motel clerk says two people checked in. You wasn’t one of them. The brunet was.” He paused, pulled an unfiltered Camel from the softpack in his shirt pocket, and lit it with a silver Zippo. “So was the dead guy y’all left behind.”

I’d hit Jeremy Wilson hard enough to knock him stone cold, but I hadn’t killed him. I didn’t react to Elroy’s narrative.

“Single bullet, back of the head,” Elroy continued after a long drag from his cigarette. “Somebody messed him up good, first.”

“The police?”

“My guy won’t remember you by the time they find him.” Elroy took another long drag from his cigarette, then tapped the ash off into a paper coffee cup from which he’d been drinking prior to my arrival. “The girl?”

“She’s home.”

“She say anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing important.”

“That’s good,” Elroy said. He took one last drag from his cigarette, then dropped it into his cup. The cherry died with a quiet hiss when it hit the coffee dregs.

Elroy stood, walked around my desk, and dropped the cup into the waste can next to the door. He gave me a two-finger salute, then stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him.

Texas is a big state, made smaller by men like Elroy Johnson. With loose connections to Families in Kansas City, St. Louis, and New Orleans, they laundered money, brokered deals with the Mexican Mafia, and shared news of important events across the state. I’d known Elroy since childhood when I’d played high school football with his nephew, and our paths crossed more often than I ever cared to admit.

I replaced Elroy in the chair behind my desk, feeling the still-warm leather against my backside. I booted up my Macintosh, prepared an expense report for Masterson, then prepared a deposit slip for most of the money he’d given me earlier that morning.

With nothing scheduled for the rest of the day, I thumbed through a couple of science fiction magazines my kid had left behind the last time my ex had let him visit, then filed all the paperwork associated with a workman’s comp fraud case I’d closed the previous week.

By the time Millard Wayne Trout — “Millie” because his family still called his grandfather “Millard” — stuck his head into my office and asked about lunch, I’d been dozing face-down on my desk for nearly an hour.

“Not today,” I told him. “I have errands.”

Millie nodded his shaved and tattooed head. “Suit yourself, Moe Ron. We’re getting wings.”

He returned to his shop in the front of the building and I slapped myself awake. Then I grabbed the deposit and Masterson’s expense report and stepped out of my office. Only two other businesses remained in the building. An empty suite across from mine had once been occupied by a finance company too legitimate for the neighborhood and I walked down the hall between Millie’s Tattoos and Piercings and Big Mac’s Bail Bonds into the blinding midday sun.

The rest of the week passed into history without another job landing on my desk. I felt every second tick away my bank balance, and I briefly considered looking for some kid’s missing poodle in hopes of earning the fifty-dollar reward.

The following Monday, Cassie Wilson stepped into my office. Even though the swelling had subsided and carefully applied makeup covered most of the bruising, she couldn’t hide the bandage across her flattened and reconstructed nose.

I stood.

“This you?” She handed me my card. Neatly thermographed on the front were my name — Morris Ronald Boyette — and my contact information.

“Yeah.”

“Father says you brought me home.”

“Regular chauffeur service.” I directed her into one of the two guest chairs, then settled into my seat.

“I don’t remember much about that night.”

“Wouldn’t expect you to.”

“You shoot Jeremy?” she asked.

“It matter much one way or the other?”

She thought about her answer for a long time. Then she shook her head.

“Then why’d you come?”

She pulled an envelope thick with cash from her purse and dropped it on my desk. “Your expenses.”

I let the envelope lie where she’d dropped it. “Your father could have mailed a check.”

“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For — for whatever you did that night.”

I stood.

She stood.

I walked her from my office and down the hall to the street. A silver Mercedes idled at the curb, Carvel behind the wheel. He watched our reflection in the rearview mirror as I opened the rear passenger door and helped settle Cassie inside.

“I ever need anything…?” She let the question hang.

“Just call,” I said.

I closed the car door and Carvel dropped the Mercedes into gear.

Millie stepped outside and stood on the sidewalk next to me as the Mercedes pulled away. “Nice piece of work, that one.”

“Too rich for my blood.”

“What’s with the nose?”

“She had some work done,” I said.

“Just the face?”

“Far as I know.”

Millie scratched the top of his head. He wore a wife-beater, exposing the tattoos covering his arms, hands, and fingers. “Up for lunch?”

I thought about the envelope of money still lying on my desk. “It’s on me.”

When I returned with burgers, fries, and sodas for each of us, Millie said, “Elroy’s in your office.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes, tops.”

I grabbed a fistful of fries and walked down the hall. I pushed my office door open and found Elroy sitting in my chair reading one of my kid’s science fiction magazines.

“Get this,” he said without looking up. “The Hansel and Gretel witch? A time traveler. Where do these guys come up with this stuff?”

I ate my fries and waited.

Elroy closed the magazine. “Got a problem in Texarkana,” he said. “Good news, my guy, bottle of Thunderbird and he forgets his mother’s name. Bad news, he’s not the only one saw you there.”

“Who else?”

“Doctor. He’s at the motel boffing one of his nurses. He’s married, she’s married, still he does the Good Samaritan thing and steps forward.”

“Identifies me how?”

“Make, model, and color of car. Partial plate,” Elroy said. “Won’t be long before you’re questioned.”

I knew the drill. Even though Elroy wasn’t my client this time, I’d worked for him many times before — even taking a bullet meant for his nephew. By collecting Cassie Wilson from Texarkana, I had stepped into Elroy’s shit and he wanted to ensure that I didn’t track it all across the police department’s carpet. I nodded.

Elroy stood, then picked up the magazine he’d been reading. “Take this?”

My son wouldn’t miss it. “Sure.”

He stuffed the science fiction magazine in his jacket pocket and stepped past me. He turned at the door and looked back. “By the way,” he said. “They recovered the slug.”

“Thirty-eight?” I asked.

“Yep.”

Jeremy Wilson’s family had his body transported home when the Texarkana coroner’s office finally released it. The mortician couldn’t reconstruct his face, so the family held a graveside memorial service in Crawford.

Cassie Wilson attended her husband’s funeral, accompanied by her father and Carvel, and I met her upon her return home, arriving as they were ascending the front steps. I followed Cassie into and through the house, admiring the way her hips moved in her widow’s black dress.

She settled onto a love seat in the garden room and motioned me into a seat opposite her. A moment later Carvel brought drinks, then backed out of the room and closed the pocket doors.

“The police visited yesterday,” Cassie said.

“And?”

She tasted her wine, then continued. “They asked questions, wanted to know how I’d gotten home.”

“What did you tell them?” I slowly spun my tumbler of Jack-rocks in my hand.

“I told them I didn’t know.” She sipped at her wine. “I must have blacked out while Jeremy was beating me. Next thing I knew, I woke up in my own bed.”

“They buy that?”

A smile played across Cassie’s lips. “Had to,” she said. “It was the only thing I was selling.”

Even though I had already seen Cassie naked, something about the way the black dress clung to her figure and the way she touched her hair and wet her lips with the tip of her tongue affected me in a way that her blatant nudity hadn’t. I felt my body respond and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

“And what are you selling now?” I asked. I placed my tumbler on the table, then stood.

Cassie stood, too, and stepped close enough I could feel the heat radiating from her body. She placed one hand on my right biceps, feeling the muscles beneath my jacket. The hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “I never thanked you proper.”

She stretched upward and planted her lips on mine. I felt her warm breath against my cheek, saw her eyes half close, and then I pushed her aside.

I wiped her lipstick away with the back of my hand, then opened the pocket doors and left her standing in the garden room.

Masterson stopped me in the foyer.

“You married, Mr. Boyette?” Masterson asked.

“Once, long time ago.”

“Kids?”

“One,” I said. “A boy.”

Masterson looked back toward the garden room, where Cassie now stood in the open doorway watching us. “Kids,” he said. “They’ll break your heart.”

The next afternoon Lester Beeson had a job for me. He’d taken over Big Mac’s Bail Bonds twenty-seven years earlier when a disgruntled client emptied a shotgun in Macdonald Pearson’s face, and he called on me whenever one of his clients jumped bail.

He tossed a Polaroid across the desk and I stared at the scarred face of a biker who’d spent time inside.

“Assault-and-battery. Assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted murder. Discharging a weapon within city limits. Littering.”

I looked a question at him.

Lester shrugged. “He dropped the gun when he fled the scene.”

Lester gave me Delbert “Deadwood” Woods’s last known address and the addresses of his known associates.

“Like to have this one back,” Lester said. “His mama stands to lose her house, and she’s in the church choir with my mother. Won’t make Sunday dinner a pleasant thing if one of my mother’s friends comes up homeless.”

I took the job and spent the afternoon on the phone, calling around until I found a mutual acquaintance who knew where to find Deadwood. Then I walked down the hall and offered Millie a few hours of evening work.

Just before eight p.m., we found Deadwood’s Fatboy parked on the front lawn of a mobile home in Bellmead. The single-wide belonged to an anemic blond stripper who earned extra money servicing some of the town’s backsliding Baptists.

Millie stationed himself outside the mobile home’s back door while I approached the front. I knocked but received no response. I tried the knob and found it locked. I stepped back, braced myself against the porch rail, and kicked.

The door crashed against an end table, knocking a lamp to the carpet and sending a gray tabby screeching past me and into the night.

From the back of the house, I heard a loud thud like a body falling to the floor and then a woman began crying. A door slammed open, heavy footsteps pounded halfway down the length of the mobile home, then another door crashed open and I heard the ringing sound of metal against flesh.

“Hey, Moe Ron!” Millie shouted. “Come on back.”

I followed the sound of Millie’s voice and found him standing over the half-naked body of Delbert Woods. Millie had found a shovel leaning against the back fence and had swung it like a baseball bat when Deadwood crashed out the back door, catching the bail-jumping biker in the face with the flat of the shovel and dropping him to the ground.

“He was carrying this.” Millie handed me a Glock nine-millimeter and I tucked it into my belt at the small of my back.

We trussed up Deadwood, stuffed him into my car, and drove him downtown. While Millie walked him into the police station and answered a few questions, I tossed Deadwood’s Glock into my glove box. When Millie finished, he rode with me to the tattoo parlor and slipped into his own car — a 1965 Mustang he’d rescued from a junk yard. I went to my office.

“About time,” a woman’s voice said when I opened the door.

I snapped on the light. Cassie Wilson sat behind my desk, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on my desk and a nearly-full shot glass in her hand. Her sheer white blouse had been half-unbuttoned and she wore no bra.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Because I figured this is where you’d be,” she said. “Sooner or later.”

Cassie stood and stepped toward me. It could have been the drink or it could have been on purpose, but she stumbled and fell against me, her heavy breasts pressing against my chest as I wrapped my arms around her to keep her from falling. I smelled her shampoo, her perfume, and the Jack.

She tilted her head back. “I didn’t finish thanking you.”

I tried to stand her upright. Before I could, Cassie wrapped her hands around the back of my neck and pulled my face down to hers. At first I resisted, but when she covered my lips with hers, I surrendered.

She buried her tongue in my mouth and I sucked hard. As we kissed, she peeled off my jacket, dropping it to the floor. I pushed Cassie away long enough to slip off my shoulder rig and hang it on the coat rack behind the door.

A few minutes later our clothes were strewn around my office and I had her bent over my knee.

“I’ve been bad,” she said. “Very, very bad.”

I spanked her naked ass again and again, so hard I left red palm prints on her pale white skin.

I liked it and knew I shouldn’t. She liked it and didn’t know any different.

Then I turned her over and pushed her onto the desk, spreading her legs and taking her hard and fast, spilling Jack Daniel’s on the carpet and sending paperwork flying all over the room.

Afterward, before I even had a chance to catch my breath, she dressed, finished the taste of Jack remaining in the overturned bottle, and left me sitting naked and spent in my leather office chair.

A moment later, light from the alley behind the building brightened my entire office. I spun my chair around, lifted the corner of the window shade, and watched as Cassie slipped into the back seat of a silver Mercedes. I continued watching as Carvel drove the Mercedes out of the alley and around the corner.

Early the next afternoon, two plainclothes officers from the Waco Police Department visited my office.

“When’s the last time you visited Texarkana?” the tall one asked.

I told him.

“Purpose of your visit?”

“Professional,” I said. “Picking up something for a client.”

“There’s a .38 registered in your name,” the short one said. “Still got it?”

I opened my jacket and showed them the shoulder rig.

“Could you place it on the table, please? Use two fingers.”

I lifted the revolver from my holster and placed it on my desk, covering a science fiction magazine that now smelled of Jack Daniel’s.

“There was a guy killed in Texarkana the night you visited,” the tall one said. “Shot in the head with a .38.”

“I heard.”

“Why didn’t you come forward?” the short one asked.

I shrugged. “Lots of people in lots of places get shot with .38s. Don’t have a thing to do with me.”

“Mind if we take this?” the short one asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He wrapped a handkerchief around the revolver’s handle, then lifted the gun and slipped it into a paper bag.

His partner issued me a receipt. “We’ll run a few tests and get back to you.”

“You do that,” I said.

Millie brought a late lunch and we sat in my office eating wings and fries. When Elroy Johnson pushed the door open without knocking, Millie quickly excused himself and returned to the tattoo parlor up front.

“Now the doctor’s not sure what he saw,” Elroy said, after closing the door. “Turns out the nurse’s husband is a divorce attorney. Suddenly the doc don’t want to admit where we was, who he was with, or what he was doing there.”

“Too late,” I said. “The cops’ve already been here.”

“Tell them anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing to tell.”

Elroy fired up an unfiltered Camel, took a long drag, then let the smoke out through his nostrils. He pointed his cigarette at the science fiction magazine still on my desk. “You going to read that?”

“Take it.” I pushed the magazine across the desk and Elroy picked it up.

“Jesus,” he said. “Smells like you dipped it in whiskey.”

“Close enough,” I told him, remembering the bottle that had spilled while I fucked Cassie Wilson on my desk.

Cassie hadn’t finished thanking me. The next night we drove downtown for Mexican food, then returned to my little brick two-bedroom home just off of New Road. I’d barely closed the door when she began tearing my clothes off.

I carried her to the bedroom, where we had hard, violent sex that left finger-shaped bruises on Cassie’s breasts and hips and thighs where I’d clung to her. Afterward, I pushed myself off the bed and paced the bedroom, stealing glances at her as I thought.

She sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, the sheet pooled at her waist.

“You like being slapped around,” I told her.

Cassie didn’t seem surprised by my revelation.

“But Jeremy went too far, didn’t he?” I asked. “He began to like hitting you as much as you liked being hit.”

She shrugged.

“Why did your father really send me after you?” I asked. “Why didn’t he send that lap dog of yours?”

“Carvel?”

I lifted one corner of the shade. “He’s out there right now, sitting in the Mercedes, waiting for you.”

“Carvel’s harmless.”

“Then why the gun?”

“To protect my father’s interests.”

I turned toward her. “You?”

She lifted the sheet and tossed it aside, spreading her legs. “Think you can do it again?”

For a few minutes, I forgot about the man outside.

Two hours later, dressed and standing in my living room, Cassie asked, “You take anything else from the room that night?”

“Just you,” I said. “That’s all I was hired to do. Why?”

“My suitcase didn’t make it home. The police didn’t find it in the room with Jeremy.”

“What was in it that’s so important?”

“Clothes,” she said. “Just clothes. Hate to have to replace them.”

I didn’t believe her. “Take you home?”

“Carvel’s still out there,” she said. “He’ll take me.”

I opened the door. Before Cassie could step outside, I pulled her into my arms and kissed her. She bit my bottom lip and I jerked away in surprise.

I tasted blood.

“I’m not the only one who likes pain,” she whispered. Then she stepped through the open doorway and hurried down the walk to the waiting Mercedes.

“Jeremy was a bag boy, worked for her father,” Elroy explained. We stood at Lion’s Park, watching go-karts circle the track.

“Cassie know?”

Elroy shrugged. “Jeremy wanted a bigger piece of the action, but couldn’t figure out how to get it. Their little sex games went too far and he took his frustration out on his wife.”

I waited.

“Then you showed up,” he said.

“And screwed the pooch,” I said. “Somebody’s plans went all to hell when I pulled Cassie out of that motel room.”

“Whose?” Elroy asked. “I thought we had things under control.”

Richard Masterson moved money through one of Waco’s smaller banks, an opportunity Elroy had presented to him many years earlier when Masterson’s inability to cover bad bets had jeopardized his position at the bank. Elroy had monitored the banker’s activities ever since.

I’d been thinking about it for two days before I talked to Millie. “I need your help,” I said, then explained what I needed.

I’d been fucking Cassie every night and that night wasn’t much different. We skipped dinner and went straight to my place. I slapped her around, getting her in the mood, then I stripped her and threw her on the bed. I had climbed on top of her when the phone rang.

I rolled off of Cassie and lifted the receiver. “Yeah?”

“I have it,” Millie said. “How much longer?”

I glanced at Cassie. “Twenty minutes, tops.”

“I’m on the way.”

I dropped the telephone handset into its cradle.

Cassie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, her heavy breasts brushing my chest. “What was that?”

“Business,” I said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

I grabbed her wrists, twisting until she grimaced in pain. Then I rolled her off of me and onto her back. She spread her legs and I buried myself deep inside her. Like before, the sex was hard and left us both bruised in places not usually shown to others.

Afterward, we dressed and I walked her to the door.

She stepped outside and hesitated on the front walk. Then she looked back at me. “Carvel’s not here.”

“I’ll phone a cab.”

She looked up and down the street.

“That’s not like Carvel,” she said. “He’s never far from me.”

Hours after the park had closed, I met Millie and Carvel at Lover’s Leap, overlooking the Brazos River in Cameron Park.

“What the fuck is this about?” Carvel asked.

“Willie has the suitcase,” I explained. I held my hand at my side, my fingers wrapped around Deadwood’s Glock, the safety off and my finger resting lightly on the trigger. “He found it in your apartment.”

“What suitcase?” Carvel stood next to the rock wall. He stepped back so he could watch both of us. He stopped when his ass touched the wall and he could go no further.

“You were in Texarkana same time I was,” I said. “You’d followed Cassie and Jeremy, protecting her father’s interests. You saw me take her from the room. You saw how messed up she was.”

Carvel’s gaze darted from me to Millie and back. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“You knew we didn’t have the suitcase so you went in after it,” I continued. “So what happened? Did Jeremy surprise you, start to get up, what?”

Carvel shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter why,” I said. “You shot him.”

Carvel charged.

I lifted the Glock and squeezed the trigger. A single bullet ripped into Carvel’s chest and knocked him back onto the stone wall.

Millie walked up to the wall, pressed one boot against Carvel’s side, and pushed. The body tumbled down the side of the cliff. Then Millie dropped Carvel’s .38 over the side.

We left the silver Mercedes parked at Lover’s Leap for the police to discover and Millie rode with me back to the office. Along the way, we stopped long enough to dispose of Deadwood’s Glock.

Millie moved the suitcase from the tattoo parlor into my office, then he drove home. I drove up Austin Avenue to Masterson’s house.

I leaned into the doorbell and waited until Masterson finally pulled the door open. He hadn’t been expecting me and he wore gray sweatpants that he’d hurriedly pulled on before opening the door.

“Yes?”

Cassie appeared at the top of the stairs, saw me standing in the open doorway, and hurried down the steps to the foyer.

“Where’s Carvel?” she demanded. She wore a red terrycloth robe that she held closed.

“He’s with your husband.”

Cassie slapped me. The robe gaped open and I took one last look at her naked body, seeing the bruises I’d left on her during our sex only a few hours earlier.

Masterson’s eyes narrowed while he considered the implications of what I’d said. “Know anybody looking for work?” he asked. “Someone trustworthy.”

“I think of anybody, I’ll let you know.”

Police found the abandoned Mercedes about the time dawn arrived in Waco, and a few hours later a jogger running along the riverfront path found Carvel’s body. Over the course of the day, the police found Carvel’s .38 and the spent shell from Deadwood’s Glock.

That afternoon, Elroy met me at my office and I handed him the suitcase Millie had found in Carvel’s apartment.

“You clean on everything?” Elroy asked.

“Clean as I can be.”

“The gun?”

“Bottom of the Brazos.”

Elroy opened the suitcase and handed me a banded stack of hundred dollar bills. “Finder’s fee,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Jeremy planned to double-cross his father-in-law,” Elroy explained. “The money was for some of my associates in St. Louis. When Jeremy didn’t show at the meet, they knew something had gone wrong. They wanted me to resolve the issue so I had a guy lined up for the next day.” Elroy paused, pulled an unfiltered Camel from the softpack in his shirt pocket, and lit it with a silver Zippo. After a long drag, he continued. “Then you showed up, followed only a few minutes later by Carvel. Changed all my plans.”

Elroy carried the suitcase to the office door, then stopped and turned back.

“And give this to your kid, next time you see him.” Elroy pulled the latest issue of one of the science fiction magazines from his pocket and tossed it on the desk. “It’s a good issue,” he said. “Just don’t spill nothing on it.”

I counted the money later and split it with Millie — $30,000 for him, $70,000 for me.

The lab later confirmed that Carvel Casey’s .38 had killed Jeremy Wilson. Texarkana closed their file on the murder of Jeremy Wilson. Waco’s file on Carvel Casey remains open but inactive. Richard Masterson disappeared one day after an intensive interview with local police and I suspect that Elroy Johnson or his associates gave Masterson a one-way ticket to the bottom of Lake Waco. Cassie Masterson Wilson moved to L.A. where she started a members-only web site for pain lovers. And my bruises finally healed.

Two days after finding Carvel’s body, the police phoned to tell me the tests on my .38 had turned up negative and that I could retrieve the revolver at my convenience. They never did ask any more questions.

Michael Bracken (www.CrimeFictionWriter.com) is the author of several books, including the private eye novel All White Girls, and approximately 1,300 short stories. His crime fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories, and many other publications. A recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement, Bracken has won two Derringer Awards and been shortlisted for two others. Additionally, Bracken is editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and has edited several anthologies, including the Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash