by Sam Sisavath
“And why would I do something stupid like that?”
“Maybe because you’re not a pussy?”
Squinty chuckled, but his eyes betrayed him. Smith saw the killer instinct in the man warring with his pride.
Or, at least, Smith hoped that was what he was seeing.
“Well?” Smith asked.
“Well what?” Squinty said.
“Are you or aren’t you a pussy?”
Squinty grinned.
“That’s not an answer,” Smith said.
“You really wanna die, don’t you?” Squinty asked.
“No, I don’t. In fact, I could have left here and gone my own merry way and never looked back.”
“But you didn’t…”
“…but I didn’t.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to find out how good you really were.”
“Good?” Squinty asked. “What does that mean?”
“With that gun.”
“I’m good enough.”
“Show me.”
Squinty chuckled again.
And again, Smith didn’t believe him.
“Prove it,” Smith said.
“Fuck off,” Squinty said. “I don’t have to prove shit to you.”
Smith looked down at Freddy’s body, crumpled up on the wet pavement. As far as Smith knew, the redhead had died where he fell. The other guy, the blond, was still near the makeshift firepit, his rat-on-a-stick lying next to his prone body.
“That’s Freddy?” Smith asked.
“What?” Squinty said.
Smith nodded at the redhead. “Is that Freddy? I didn’t know what he looked like.”
“Yeah, that’s Freddy.”
“And I guess that’s Mack,” Smith said, nodding at the other guy.
Squinty narrowed his eyes some more. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the guy who killed your friends back on the highway earlier. Dunbar and two other meatheads. I don’t remember their names.”
“That was you?”
“Yeah. That was me.”
Smith allowed his gaze to wander slightly over to Donna. The girl had big eyes, and she hadn’t looked away from him ever since he stepped back underneath the highway. Maybe, like Squinty, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing because it really, really, really was a dumb thing to do.
Then Smith recognized something else in her eyes. It was fear, but also something else—
Determination.
Grim determination.
Shit. She’s going to do something.
She’s going to do something!
“This isn’t the Old West, and we’re not cowboys,” Squinty was saying. “And you shouldn’t have come back—”
Donna bit down on Squinty’s forearm. The man howled in pain and instinctively lessened his grip around Donna’s throat. She jerked her entire body downward, slipping free of Squinty’s grasp even as he groped for her with his hand—
Smith drew, and Squinty fired at almost exactly the same time.
Squinty’s round drilled through Smith’s left shoulder, and he was twisting slightly to that side when he fired from the hip. Instead of Squinty’s forehead, Smith’s bullet struck the man’s left ear, taking a chunk of flesh with it. The round continued and pekked! into the concrete wall farther back of the underpass.
Squinty jerked his head back and shot again, but Smith had sidestepped in the right direction, and something hot zipped! harmlessly past Smith’s body and vanished into the cascading rain outside. If he’d gone left instead of right, Squinty’s bullet would have hit Smith square in the chest.
Smith squeezed off two more shots in quick succession, hitting Squinty both times in the stomach. The man doubled over, blood dripping from his destroyed ear and midsection. Somehow, he managed to remain on his feet.
At least just long enough to look up a split second before Smith shot him in the face.
Twenty-Four
“Sorry about your dad.”
“It’s okay. He wasn’t a very nice guy anyway.”
Smith smiled. “Anyways…”
“Anyways,” Donna said.
They sat in the two front seats of an old SUV that smelled faintly of dead animals. It wasn’t enough to send them outside into the rain, though. The thunderstorm raged against the windows around them even as it wracked Mist City from end to end. It hadn’t slowed down since it began, and looking out at the harsh downpour, Smith wondered if it was going to take longer than a day for it to ease up. Fortunately, they had enough supplies that if it did take more than twenty-four hours, they would be fine.
Smith’s shoulder itched, and the hole in his side had numbed over thanks to the meds he’d taken. There was a little bit of pain, but he’d take a little bit any day of the week. Donna had been surprisingly adept at bandaging him up despite her own wound, though he’d had to talk her through a couple of steps. Still, the girl didn’t seem especially perturbed that Smith had just shot her dad to death in front of her, and his body still lay on the ground behind her as she helped Smith to not bleed out.
But, like she said, Freddy hadn’t been a very nice guy. Smith guessed she’d know more than him, having seen the man kill her mother—his own wife—and all. Smith had been right, though; the redhead was Freddy. Mack was the one with the rat on the stick, and Squinty’s real name was Harrison.
Smith didn’t ask Donna any details about any of the three dead men. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to lose sleep over killing them, and it was probably best for the teenager that she wasn’t forced to dwell on it.
What’s done was done, and dead was dead.
They sat in the SUV and watched the rain cascade down the windshield, washing away every little inch of dirt and grime still clinging to the vehicle when they found it parked a few meters from the highway underpass. The car was turned in the opposite direction, so they didn’t have to keep seeing the bodies behind them. Of course, all Smith had to do was glance at the side mirror to ensure they were still back there.
The last five times he’d looked, they were.
Donna hadn’t asked him anything about Margo or Clark, and Smith suspected that the teenager already knew. Either she’d seen them get shot or had heard the conversation between Freddy and the others about what had happened to them. Possibly, she had guessed all of it just by Smith’s lone presence.
However she knew, the kid didn’t bring the topic up, and Smith left it alone, too. Instead, he fell asleep to the rhythmic pek-pek-pek of rain against the roof of the SUV. That, and the medicine he’d taken made it easy to drift off.
When he opened his eyes again, it was dark and there was a slight drizzle outside.
Smith immediately looked over at the driver-side door to check the lock. He couldn’t remember if he’d locked it before drifting off and was relieved when he saw that it was. Had he done that?
“I locked all the doors,” Donna said from the front passenger seat next to him.
He glanced over. She was looking at a map that she’d found in the glove compartment earlier. She had it spread out in her lap and seemed wide awake despite the early morning hours. To look at her, he wouldn’t even know she was wounded, or that she’d just lost her dad in a violent shootout.
Tough kid, Smith thought.
He said, “What are you doing?”
“Looking for someplace to go.”
“Why?”
“I have to go somewhere, don’t I?”
“I guess.”
She gave him an amused smile that reminded him just a little bit of Margo. “You don’t know where you’re going after this?”
Smith shook his head. “Haven’t thought about it.”
“Where were you headed when you bumped into us?”
“Nowhere.”
“Nowhere?”
“Nowhere.”
“Then you can come with me, if you don’t have anywhere to go.”
“You don
’t even know where you’re going.”
“That’s why it’ll be fun.”
Smith chuckled. “I’m not looking for fun.”
“What are you looking for, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, then how do you know it’s not fun?”
Smith stared at her in silence for a moment.
Then he said, “Why would you want me to come along with you anyway?”
“Duh,” Donna said. “Maybe because I’m fourteen and female, and I’ll be alone? I’m all for girl power and all that jazz, but it’s dangerous out there, dude.”
He smiled. “Yeah, it is.”
“So come on along. You don’t know where you’re going anyway. This way, you don’t have to think too hard about it.”
“You have a point.”
“Yup. Thinking’s hard.”
“Thinking’s very hard.”
Smith sat back in his seat. He looked out the wet windshield, watching Mist City start to fill up again in the aftermath of the torrential downpour. Just about anything could come out of all that universe of swirling gray clouds…
“You’re right; it is dangerous out there,” Smith said. He wasn’t sure if that was meant for Donna or himself.
“Yup,” Donna said quietly. Then, looking over at him, “What’s your real name, anyway?”
“Does it matter?”
She seemed to think about it for a second or two before shaking her head. “I guess it doesn’t. What’s a name, anyway?”
“A name’s a name, is a name.”
“In that case, I think I’ll change mine to Margo.”
Smith reached over to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you, Margo.”
“Yeah, nice to meet you, too, John Smith.”
“So,” Smith said, sitting back, “you find anyplace interesting on that map? Preferably someplace that isn’t covered in mist?”