Mind-Altering Murder

Chapter Two

“Why didn’t I what?” Gus said. “Murder an old man who was trying to help me?”

“Is that what you call it?” Shawn said.

“Murder is what the law calls it,” Gus said. “It’s what the Bible calls it. It’s what everyone in the world calls it.”

“I could be wrong about this, but I seem to recall hearing that in different countries they have different words for things,” Shawn said as he stepped over to the shelves of snack foods and gave an exploratory squeeze to a package of Twinkies with a pull date from before the turn of the millennium.

Gus couldn’t pull his eyes away from the dead man lying on the floor in a pool of blood and whiskey. “Why did you kill him?”

Shawn put down the Twinkies and turned his attention to the freezer chest loaded with ice-cream bars. Or, as he discovered when he tried to take one out, loaded with a single ice-cream bar, as all the smaller units had melted and refrozen into a cube six feet on each side.

“Because it was him or you.” Shawn took two running steps, then leaped over the counter, landing in a crouch next to the body, his duster sending waves through the puddle spreading across the floor.

“What was he going to do?” Gus said. “Throw the bottle at me?”

“Worse. He was going to give it to you.” Shawn pulled the bottle of Glen Graggenlogan from the shopkeeper’s cold, dead hands and looked it over carefully. Then he pulled out the cork and turned it upside down. There was a rattle of metal on glass, and a small olive-colored device fell into Shawn’s hand.

“What is that?” Gus said.

“Doesn’t matter what it is now. What matters is what it would be if you walked out the door with it,” Shawn said.

“And what is that?”

“The ultimate theft-protection device,” Shawn said. He jumped back over the counter, opened the door, and tossed the device out onto the street. The thing bounced twice on the asphalt and then exploded into a fireball that took out two cars and the area’s last remaining pay phone.

It took a few seconds for Gus’ ears to stop ringing. He spent the time staring at the crater in the center of the road and trying to figure out how far his body parts might be separated by now if Shawn hadn’t stopped him from taking the bottle.

“I thought that was the thing I was supposed to bring Morton,” Gus said finally.

“Apparently you were supposed to think that.”

Gus looked around the liquor store in despair. “So what is the object?” he said. “What is it we’re supposed to collect here? Because I haven’t seen it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Shawn said. “You were staring at it all along.”

“I wasn’t staring at anything all along,” Gus said, then realized he wasn’t completely right. “Except…”

Shawn nodded. “Except.” He jumped back over the counter and fished around under it in the area the old man had kept his hand, then came up with a machete.

“Morton’s people would never allow us into his lobby carrying a weapon like that, let alone into his penthouse,” Gus said.

“The machete isn’t going anywhere,” Shawn said. “Except through a couple of vertebrae.”

It took Gus a moment to realize what he was hearing. By that time Shawn had already raised the machete high over his head and was beginning to bring it down toward the old man’s body.

“Stop!” Gus shouted.

Shawn froze, the machete poised in midair. “You want to do this?”

“Of course not,” Gus said.

“Then what’s the problem?” Shawn said. “You can kill a couple of cops when we leave here. Then we’ll be even.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Gus said.

“You’re no fun,” Shawn said.

“I am fun,” Gus said. “I am huge amounts of fun. Entire barrels of monkeys spend their lives yearning to be as fun as I am. What isn’t fun is shooting unarmed people and cutting off their heads.”

Gus reached up and grabbed his own ears. He gave them a hard tug, as if he was trying to pull his head off his shoulders.

“He had a grenade in one hand and a machete under the counter, which strongly suggests he wasn’t entirely unarmed,” Shawn said.

Despite his best efforts Gus’ ears remained stubbornly in place. “What about the little old lady you gunned down in the park?”

“She had that dog,” Shawn said.

“A bichon frise,” Gus said. “A Muppet would have been more of a threat. That didn’t stop you from putting three bullets in her.”

“I admit I got a little overeager there,” Shawn said. “But I paid the price for that. The cops came down pretty hard on me.”

“Until you ran them all over with your Hummer,” Gus said.

“Which dented the fender and put the car out of commission,” Shawn said. “Why do you think you were able to get here first?”

Gus gave his ears another yank, then grabbed his nose with one fist and twisted fiercely. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish we had never started this in the first place.”

“But we did,” Shawn said. “And now we have to finish.”

“I am finished,” Gus said. He squeezed his temples between his hands, then twisted his head furiously. The last thing he heard was the crack of his neck snapping.