Galway Girl

Meanwhile, back in Galway,

How Jericho really got her name.

At the Burning Man festival, where Emerald and Jericho met and hooked up, they spent most of the time on peyote and a guy had a large screen showing the gruesome, violent movie Criminal.

It starred Ryan Reynolds as an agent who is shot in the head and his memories are transferred to a vicious killer played by Kevin Costner.

Yeah, family fun.

Emerald had a serious hotness for Costner and, in a moment of drug euphoria, exclaimed,

“If I die, my mind will be transferred to you.”

Hard-core peyote, so little wonder Jericho bought into the craziness, and when Emerald baptized her with the best tequila, chanting,

“From henceforth, thou art Jericho,”

It became so.

Jericho liked to fuck with people and tell them her name came from U2 or whatever weird shite came into her head.

She had watched Criminal while doing lines of coke and wondered,

“Where the hell was Alice?”

Her mobile was dead.

Jericho paced, needed action, and, of course, her primary present target was Jack Taylor. Time to go fuck with his place.

Jericho approached the door of Taylor’s apartment with extreme caution.

She knew he knew she broke into his place regularly,

So would he have the brains to set a booby trap?

He wasn’t in there; no one had seen him for a week.

Was he dead?

“Fuck no,”

She muttered.

She wanted/needed the joy of killing him her own self.

She set her tools on the lock.

Click.

Okay.

She opened the door slowly, her heart in ribbons. She’d seen an episode of Fargo, the shotgun rigged to the door, cursed,

“Where the hell is Alice?”

Girl had gone on a tear, no sign of the cow for days.

She stood in the middle of the room. On the coffee table was an envelope with

“Jericho”

In bold red marker, leaning against the skull she’d left on one of her forays.

Nervous, she picked it up, opened it oh, so carefully,

Read,

She turned, looked at the small fridge. It seemed harmless but her stomach was in knots. Would he have rigged it to explode on being opened?

She slapped herself, said,

“Get with the program. He isn’t that smart.”

All the same, she hesitated.

Then, steeling herself, opened the small door, realized she’d shut her eyes, cried,

“Fuck, girl, focus.”

The fridge was empty save for a small red envelope propped against a bottle of Galway Hooker beer. She sneered,

“Cute, Taylor.”

Took the envelope out, shook it, heard a faint rustling, then slit the flap with her long nail and out onto the coffee table fell...

A gold chain

With the initials GG, blood still encrusted on the letters.

The sound she made would have made a banshee shudder, a primeval howl of utter agony.