The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

West of Nowhere by Harry Hunsicker

FROM Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

DANNY THE DUMB-ASS fires once into the ceiling of the bar.

Plaster and slivers from a ruined fan shower the room, a slurry of dust and wood fragments.

I cringe, grip my pistol tighter, face hidden by a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask.

Rule One: The guns are for show only; don't shoot unless absolutely necessary.

"N-n-n-nobody move." Danny's voice, muffled by his own rubber mask, sounds shrill, scared. "Ha-ha-hands where I can see them."

Rule Two: Let me do the talking. Especially if you're a stutterer.

In the middle of the room, a half-dozen men in overalls and work clothes sit around a felt-covered gaming surface. The table is between a bar on one wall and a shuffleboard game on the other. Nobody else in the place except for a scared-looking bartender by the beer taps.

In the middle of the table: a pile of chips and cash, and a spray of playing cards, trapped by a circular fence of longneck bottles and ashtrays.

Danny the Dumb-ass moves to one side of the front door and unplugs the jukebox.

Toby Keith and Willie Nelson stop singing in midverse. "Whiskey for my men-"

Silence. The bartender is shaking. A mug in one hand, beer slops over onto his fingers. Danny looks at me and nods, apparently now remembering to be quiet.

I resist the urge to slap him. Instead, I flip the deadbolt on the door, stride to the table.

Outside, it's early afternoon and the sign on the bank around the corner reads ninety-three degrees. Inside it's balmy, the narrow room thick with air conditioning and smoke, lit only by a handful of neon beer signs.

"Put the cash in here." I drop a canvas bag in the middle of the card pile. "All of it."

The guy at the head of the table is about seventy. He has work-gnarled hands and a leathery face, evidence of a lifetime in the sun, most likely working the rocky soil of Central Texas.

"Boy, you are making a big mistake." He exhales a plume of smoke from his nostrils.

"Less talk, more money." I fire a round into a framed picture of John Wayne. The photo hangs next to a deer's head with a dusty bra dangling from the antlers.

What the heck; the don't-shoot rule has already been broken and my other wingman is a no-show. Time to crank this cash-and-dash up to eleven and get out.

Five of the six people at the table flinch and duck. The old man with the gnarled hands doesn't move, not even a blink. He smiles instead.

Danny hobbles to the table, dragging his foot in the special shoe, the one he told me would allow him to walk normally but clearly doesn't. He grabs a wad of currency and a manila envelope that sits in front of the old man. He stuffs both into the sack.

The old guy tenses, the tiniest movement in an otherwise still room. Losing that much cash hurts. Danny doesn't notice. I do, and the old man knows it.

"The rest of it," I say. "Get a move on."

The other players shove money toward Danny.

"You know whose game this is?" the old man says.

"W-w-w-wouldja just shut the hell up." Danny's voice is louder than necessary. He jams the muzzle against the man's temple. "It's our ga-ga-game now."

"You nervous or something?" The old guy raises one eyebrow. "People stutter when they get nervous."

Danny's gloved hands shake. He doesn't handle stress well, not the best attribute for the sidecar on an armed robbery, even one as easy as this. Sometimes, however, you've got to run with whoever's on the playground, even if he comes to school on the short bus and has one leg longer than the other.

The old man shrugs. He stares at me. His eyes seem to pierce my mask.

Danny scoops up the rest of the money with his free hand, shoves it in the bag.

Lots of high-denomination bills, a big game. The stopwatch in my head says we've been inside for about fifteen seconds. Another fifteen to wrap things up, and we'll be in the stolen pickup just outside the front entrance.

Danny limps toward the door, sack in hand.

"Don't anybody be stupid." I back away, weapon pointing at the men. "It's just money."

Danny is at the entrance when the back door we'd locked earlier opens.

A woman in her mid-thirties wearing a denim miniskirt and a halter top bounces in, cigarette dangling between her lips.

Everybody turns her way.

She stares at me and screams, a keening sound like the gates of hell just opened up for an instant or maybe American Idol has been canceled. The cigarette falls to the floor.

Danny startles. Fires his pistol again for no apparent reason. The bullet hits the floor.

Several of the men at the table jump up. The bartender reaches under the bar.

The old guy moves faster than everybody. A gun appears in his hand. An orange spit of flame. BOOM. The bullet hits the wall about a foot from my head.

In the same movement, I fire twice and turn to the door. I'm not really aiming, only pointing in the general direction of the table, hoping not to hit anybody, especially the girl, just trying to make the old man quit shooting.

Another round hits the wall near my face. Shouts from behind me. A grunt of pain too, maybe.

I grab Danny, push him outside. Slam the door behind us.

The joint is on a side street in a little town in the Texas hill country, between an antique shop that's always closed for lunch and an abandoned feed store. No traffic or people visible. Yet.

I rip off the mask and blink at the sun. From the cardboard box we've left sitting by the front of the bar, I grab a battery-powered nail gun.

Thwack-thwack-thwack. Three nails in the door and frame, almost as good as a deadbolt.

Danny takes off his mask too. Sweat drips down his nose. "S-s-sorry about that."

"Get in the truck." I walk as fast as possible to the driver's side of the Chevy parked by the curb.

Inside, we buckle up, all legal. I head to Main Street, driving well under the speed limit.

"Don't forget Chris." Danny's tone has returned to default, a whine somewhere between petulant and pathetic. "We g-g-gotta go to the rendezvous to get Chris."

The urge to rip out a clump of Danny the Dumb-ass's red hair rises in my gorge like week-old anchovy pizza eaten too quickly. I reach over. Danny backs away. I mutter, lean back, keep driving.

We're in the clear so far. There looks to be enough money in the canvas bag to pay off a few debts with some left over to send to the kid and hopefully make the she-beast that is my ex-wife go away.

A sheriff's car idles by in the other direction. The driver's window is down and a uniformed guy who looks like Jabba the Hutt but bigger sits behind the wheel. He pays us no mind.

I don't look at him either. I keep my hands at ten and two on the wheel. At the next stop sign, I turn toward the rendezvous point, the parking lot of the Baptist church. A few moments later, we stop by a Dumpster behind the sanctuary, windows down. The air stinks of grease from the trash and a charcoal fire nearby.

Thirty nervous seconds stretch to a panic-filled minute before Chris appears, running around the corner of the church.

She's wearing a denim skirt and a halter top, the girl from the bar, our lookout who was supposed to be inside before we got there, sending a text or three on the situation.

"Sorry I was late." She hops in, scoots Danny between us. "But I dropped the key to the back door and then my parole officer called. Figured I'd scream to distract everybody."

"That's okay, Chrissie." Danny smiles, a goofy look on his face. "It's all good."

Danny would give another inch from his bad leg if she'd acknowledge him as something more than a lopsided stump with eyes. He'd give his entire leg if she'd sleep with him. Chrissie, who's made a career out of going to bed with authority figures and dope-addled musicians, would rather French-kiss an armadillo than let Danny touch her.

I pull away from the Dumpster, marveling at the stupidity of my cohorts.

"The old guy's hurt." Chrissie lights a cigarette. "One of your shots hit him in the gut."

"All good" just morphed into something less, more like "all screwed."

"W-w-w-what are we gonna do?" Danny looks at me. "That guy said the operation was connected."

"Somebody owned that game?" Chrissie leans forward, stares at me. "I thought this was an indie?"

I don't reply, trying to process it all. Only so many people who could control a poker table like that, none of them folks you want to mess with. One in particular is especially vigilant when it comes to keeping a watch on his investments: Sinclair, a psychopathic Pole whose problem-solving techniques start with a blowtorch and then get nasty.

"Jesus H." Chrissie flicks her cigarette out the window. "I thought that guy was familiar. I've seen him before. In Waco."

I keep driving, vision tunneling at the news. We pass the city-limit sign on a narrow two-lane farm-to-market road that heads west.

"Waco?" Danny starts to shake.

Waco is Sinclair's base. Which means the game we just robbed was his.

And so was the guy I had shot.

Houston belongs to what's left of the Italian mob, mostly the aging wise guys based in Louisiana. Dallas has gone from an independent region controlled by local mom-and-pop thugs to being run by the Russians advancing across the country from the East Coast. The border region, everything from the Rio Grande to San Antonio, is controlled by the cartels.

That leaves Central Texas, the swath of foothills and blackland prairie between Dallas and the Alamo.

The heartland of the Lone Star State belongs to the Bohunk Mafia, the descendants of the Central European immigrants who arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Krauts and Slovaks, Czechs and Poles. In addition to a taste for beer and sausage, they brought the vices of the motherland: whores and gambling, numbers rackets that appealed to their Teutonic sense of order. And a wicked style of loan sharking picked up over the years from the Jews as they herded them into the ghettos.

The three of us are Czechs from the same town, a little place near the Brazos River famed for its oompah band, sausage house, and second-generation meth labs, the latter of which are run by Chrissie's family. We grew up together and-if we'd stayed in school-would have graduated in the same class, coming up on twenty years ago.

We used to work for the Nemeceks, a local crew recently dispersed by prison and a nasty strain of syphilis too long untreated. I was muscle and transport, moving the weekly take to a friendly bank in Austin. Chrissie ran a strip club and hotsheet joint by the interstate. Danny, dumb as cut hair, worked as the point guy at a Nemecek dope operation, essentially directing customers to the right aisle of the store, sort of like a greeter at Wal-Mart.

But that was then. Now we are scared and a long way from home, cruising down a farm-to-market road in the western fringes of Central Texas, open territory, or so we thought. The terrain itself is sparse, rocky outcroppings topped with cedars, craggy hills that jut from barren pastures. Wood and stone farmhouses bleached by the elements.

Chrissie pounds the dash with both palms. She is angry.

"Sinclair," she says. "What the fricassee do we do now?"

My cell rings. The caller ID shows the number of an attorney in Dallas, a rabid weasel hired by my ex to get even on the child support. I turn the ringer off.

"We don't know it was his game for sure." I turn onto a gravel road that leads to a grove of wind-stunted live oaks. "Let's keep a positive thought."

The truck shimmies over rain-carved ruts in the caliche surface.

"Don't worry, Chrissie. I-I-I-I'll take care of you." Danny bounces, presses against her shoulder, then chest. He doesn't bounce back.

"Are you copping a feel, you little pervert?" She elbows him in the ribs.

Danny yelps, jumps away.

On the other side of the live oak trees is a clearing at the base of a small hill. A double-wide trailer with a rotting wooden deck sits in the middle of the open area. The sides are faded metal, once white, half of the windows either broken or weathered plywood.

"Nice place." I park by a rusted-out barrel smoker.

"You wanted somewhere to lie low." Chrissie flings open the passenger door. "Next time I'll get us a suite at the Motel Six."

We navigate the crumbling steps to the front of the trailer. Step inside.

The interior has orange shag carpet that smells like cat piss. A purple leather sectional sofa. Avocado green tile in the kitchen area. Through the back window I can see a shed and a narrow path leading around the hill.

I sit on the sofa, dump the contents of the canvas bag onto the wagon-wheel coffee table.

A pile of currency dotted with the occasional chip and scrap of paper. And the envelope.

Danny offers to count.

"No offense, Dumbo." Chrissie rolls her eyes. "But two plus two does not equal 'a bunch more than two.'"

Danny looks like she just kicked him in the nuts.

"Go outside." I point to the door. "Keep watch."

"I can do 'rithmetic, you know." He puffs up his chest. "I'm not s-s-s-stupid."

"Add up how long you'd last with Sinclair making s'mores out of your fingers." I throw a handful of chips at him. "Now get outside."

He grumbles, limps out.

I sort and then count. Twenties and fifties and the occasional ten-spot. And lots of hundreds. I open the manila envelope that had been sitting in front of the old guy and dump out another gi-normous pile of c-notes. Chrissie licks her lips, smokes.

"Holy crap." I gulp at the final tally. "There's over sixty grand here."

"And this." Chrissie holds up a key that looks like the kind used to lock a storage locker at a bus station.

The key had been in the envelope.

"What do you think it goes to?" Chrissie purses her lips.

"Beats me." I'd been expecting a take somewhere around five thousand.

Chrissie drops the key on the pile of money. She takes the envelope and discarded scraps of paper and chips into the kitchen, drops them in the trash. When she comes back, she carries two bottles of Bud Light.

"We can't stay here." I accept a beer. "That's too much cash. They're gonna come looking."

"This place belongs to my cousin." Chrissie takes a drink. "No way Sinclair can find us here."

"Let's go west." I check the magazine in my pistol, sorry not to have brought more bullets.

"You ever been west?" she says.

I don't reply. Neither Chrissie nor Danny has ever left Texas. I've been the farthest. I've seen the ocean at Galveston twice, New Orleans once.

"We're west of nowhere already," she says. "And look what's happened to us."

We could head toward California, but where? And then what do we do?

"They won't find us," I say, more to myself than to her.

Chrissie shakes her head, drinks beer. "I'm gonna call my parole officer, see if he can get me in one of those witness protection programs."

I head to the back. In the narrow confines of the bathroom, my cell vibrates, a text message from a number in the Waco area code.

Give me envelope & ur partners. u can keep cash. Sinclair.

That didn't take long. Who knew it would be so easy to track down a stuttering gimp of a stickup guy and his partners?

I flush, walk to the living area.

Chrissie is still sitting on the couch. She holds her cell phone like it's hot, looking at the front door, an expression of shock on her face.

Danny stands in the entryway, his cell in one hand, pistol in the other.

"S-s-sit by her." He aims at me.

"Easy, partner." I raise my hands. "Let's be cool."

"The mo-mo-money's mine." He wags the phone at me. "And Sinclair gets you two."

When I was about twelve-right before he left to get some Skoal and never came back-my old man told me to look out for Danny the Dumb-ass.

"Anybody that stupid's gonna need all the help he can get." Pop cuffed me on the head and walked out.

I suppose, looking back, I was a little unclear on the concept, because later that week some buddies and I knocked over a Porta-Potty while Danny was inside taking a dump. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Danny no longer looks stupid and befuddled. He looks angry. Hope he's forgotten about the Porta-Potty.

"Go in the kitchen." He waves the pistol. "Both of you."

"You just told me to sit down." I point to the sofa.

Chrissie nods in agreement. Her face is white.

Danny-saddled with the unfortunate nickname since grade school-frowns.

Chrissie and I don't move. Sweat beads on my forehead.

Danny's frown morphs into something else, a dark spot on the far side of his soul, the cold and brittle crevice where thirty years of insults and playground beatings have been brewing.

His mouth twitches, eyes darken. He grips the pistol tighter, knuckles turning white, muzzle shaking.

"I got the same message from Sinclair." I hold up my phone. "He's on to us."

Danny's eyes narrow, finger tightens on the trigger.

"Ah jeez, c'mon, Danny. Don't shoot us." Chrissie holds up her hands, voice panicky. "We're your friends."

"F-f-friends?" He limps inside. "You treat me like d-d-dirt."

Neither of us responds.

"How much?" He points to the money.

"A lot." I ease a step closer. "Enough to get us gone from this part of the world."

Danny stops by the table. "Where's the envelope?"

"In the trash." Chrissie points to the kitchen, obviously ignoring the key that sits next to her pack of Capris, a few inches from the pile of cash.

Danny turns that way but hesitates. Indecision etches itself across his face.

"Put your piece on the table." He waves his gun at my waistband. "And get the envelope."

"He's not gonna let any of us go," I say. "He's just playing us against each other."

"Nuh-uh." Danny shakes his head. "He's gonna give me a job, a full-time gig at one of his cathouses."

Sinclair is not stupid. He's offered the two things most important to Danny: steady employment and women who have no choice but to pay attention to him.

My phone is still in my hand. It buzzes again.

The same Waco number: Too late, sucker.

"He's lying to you." Chrissie stands.

"Shut up." Danny's face is red, mottled like a moldy tomato. "SHUTTHEHELLUP."

His phone buzzes, a text message. He looks at the screen and his face turns gray.

I lunge across the small living area, grab for his gun.

He lets me take it, offers no resistance.

Chrissie runs to the door, slams it shut. Her phone rings, a call coming in. She looks at the screen. "It's my cousin."

Danny stares at me, a blank look on his face. He seems to get smaller, shoulders falling in on themselves.

"Why are you calling?" Chrissie answers and peers out the remaining window, moving aside a gingham curtain. "I told you we'd be gone in a couple of days."

The room gets very quiet, nothing but the low rumble of the asthmatic air conditioner.

"You told him WHAT?" Chrissie lets the curtain drop, looks at me. "'Course I know what a blowtorch can do." She rubs her eyes. "How long do we have?"

I throw money in the bag. Grab the key to the storage locker.

She hangs up. "Sinclair knows where we are."

Danny begins to hyperventilate.

"What do we do now?" Chrissie lights a cigarette, takes one puff, and stubs it out.

"He doesn't care about the money. That's what the messages said." I look at her. "He wants the envelope."

"The key." She nods, points to the item in my hand. "It was in the envelope."

A car door slams outside.

"We give him the key, then." I peer out the window.

Sinclair Wachowski stands by the front of a late-model Chevy dual-axle pickup, beefy arms crossed. He's wearing a faded pair of overalls and a wife-beater T-shirt. A large man, if by large you mean obscenely overweight, Sinclair would field-dress three hundred pounds if you were to gut him like a deer.

"Stay here." I hand Danny's gun to Chrissie, leave the money on the table. "Cover us."

To one side of the truck stands a younger, fitter man about the same girth but taller. He's holding a gun. His skin is ruddy and hairless, and he looks like a side of beef straining the thin material of his sleeveless T-shirt.

"W-w-w-what do I do?" Danny says.

"You're going with me." I push him toward the door. "Safety in numbers."

Outside, I blink at the glare. The key is in my pocket, gun in one hand.

Sinclair watches us descend the rickety stairs, eyes like slits. He doesn't move except to work his jaws around a wad of chewing tobacco in one cheek.

A blowtorch sits on the hood of the truck.

"I didn't know it was your game." I stop a few feet away.

Danny is behind me, out of direct view, whimpering.

"Uppity Czech trash, that's what you are." Sinclair spits a stream of brown tobacco juice into the dust. "Your old man thought he was sumpin' special too."

His accent is pure Brazos bottom drawl, as country as smoked brisket.

"I wouldn't have hit one of your games." I keep the gun pointed down, next to my thigh.

"Give it to me." He holds out a fat hand. "And the money too." He smiles. "You didn't think I was really gonna let you keep all that cash, didya?"

I toss him the key, try to squelch my anger. I think about the Dallas lawyer, my bitchy ex-wife. The son I'm not gonna get to see anymore.

"What the hell is this?" He holds up the key.

I don't reply. My skin gets cold despite the heat.

"Hey, Danny the Dumb-ass." Sinclair peers around my shoulder. "What is this bull crap you're pulling, huh?"

Danny moans but doesn't reply. He leans against me like he's gonna faint.

"That's what you wanted," I say. "The key."

"You're as dumb as Danny." Sinclair shakes his head. "I don't want some dang old key."

I blink, running through options, the adrenaline in my system making my brain mushy.

Danny figures it out, once in a row.

"You want the envelope," he says. "That's what your text said." He pauses. "It's inside."

"You better hope so." Sinclair picks up the blowtorch, points to the trailer. "Let's go."

The envelope is not inside.

Neither is Chrissie or the money.

The door on the shed out back that was closed is open now, the storage space empty.

Sinclair takes my gun and watches us while his bodyguard, the slab of meat who'd been standing by the truck, searches the double-wide. After a few minutes, Slab-O-Meat returns to the living room and shakes his massive head.

"Start talking." Sinclair turns on the blowtorch, and a blue tongue of heat emerges.

"Chrissie." I lick my lips. "She was in on it. She took the cash and the envelope."

"That's funny." He turns up the flame. "Who do you think put me on to you two?"

"Chrissie?" Danny looks at me. "She s-s-screwed us?"

I nod, the fear a physical presence in the pit of my stomach, a lead brick that sits there.

She screwed us and good. She came in late and screamed so there would be no way she could be tied to the robbery. She arranged the hideout and apparently the getaway car hidden in the shed. She told me the key was important, not the envelope itself.

"Where is she?" Sinclair approaches, my gun in one hand, the blowtorch in the other.

"I don't know." I shake my head. "Honestly, have no idea."

"That's too bad." He waves the blowtorch. "Because I really need that envelope."

I don't say anything. All I can do is stare at the blue flame. The fire consumes my consciousness to a point that I almost don't react when he tosses me my handgun.

I catch the weapon, look at Sinclair and his guard.

The Slab-O-Meat holds a pistol by his side but is not aiming it at me.

"You're gonna get that envelope back," Sinclair says.

I nod slowly.

"If you don't"-he holds up the torch-"then I'm gonna start on your toes and work my way up."

I look at my gun, afraid it's a trick. The magazine is still there, a round in the chamber.

Then I get it. Sinclair knows I won't do anything. I'm just poor dumb Czech trash that's been given a lifeline, a slim chance for redemption. His power and reach in my world is all-consuming.

I start to shake and sweat uncontrollably.

He smiles at me like I'm a three-legged dog, his face reflecting the utter self-confidence one gets when dealing with lesser life forms, a look of supreme control.

I grip the gun, think about bringing it up.

"That ain't the way this plays." Sinclair shakes his head. "You coulda taken me out a dozen times over the years, but you didn't. You're not gonna grow a set now."

I lower the gun.

"Just in case you don't get the gist of what I'm talking about," he says, "I'll give you a little demonstration on Danny the Dumb-ass."

Danny gasps, runs for the door.

Slab-O-Meat grabs him with one hand, holds out a skinny arm. His other hand brings up the pistol my way. Danny yells, struggles.

"Not like anybody's gonna miss him anyway." Sinclair walks toward my friend, blowtorch at the ready. He pauses, looks my way. "You ain't got a problem with this, do you?"

I hesitate, breath caught in my throat. Then I shake my head and wait for hell to commence.

Two Weeks Later

The darkness is all-consuming, even in the bright light of day. The permanent night that is in the center of my mind never rests. I have a tiredness about me that no sleep will ever cure, not even death.

But I do have a goal, and that's important, according to the guidance counselor at juvie lockup way back when and a self-help book I read one time. The counselor had said, "A goal is a good way to break free from lowered expectations that people place on you."

My goal is Chrissie, and I am as close as fleas on a pound dog to reaching her.

I stand outside the end unit of a motel a block from the beach in Port Aransas, at the north end of Padre Island. Peeling paint, rusty window frames, a couple of old cars and sand in the parking lot. A flickering neon display that reads "Vacancy."

Early November, and there's only one occupied room and barely anybody in town, most places closed since the season ended months ago.

I grip the shotgun and kick in the door.

Sunlight spills into a darkened room that smells like cigarettes, burned metal, and sweat.

Chrissie screams, pulls the sheet up to her neck.

A man in his forties with a week-old beard sits in an easy chair by the desk. He's comatose, mouth slack, eyes rolled back in his head. A bent and blackened spoon is on the desk next to a lighter and a syringe.

"Where's my money?" I cross the room and slam the barrel down on her legs underneath the sheet, aiming for a knee.

She screams and babbles, words unintelligible.

I let her cry.

The guy in the chair doesn't move, doesn't appear to breathe. He is thin, cheeks hollowed. His skinny, needle-scarred arms look like twigs sticking out of a San Antonio Spurs T-shirt.

"Please-don't-hurt-me-please-please." Chrissie shivers even though the room is warm.

"The money," I say. "And the envelope."

She cries harder, shakes her head.

I raise the barrel of the gun.

She holds up a hand. "D-d-don't. Please."

I stop.

She rolls off the bed, naked. Wraps herself in the dirty sheet, pads across the room to a dresser, limping from my blow.

"Don't try anything." I shoulder the gun, aim at her torso.

She shakes her head. Tears stream down her face. From a duffel bag on the dresser, she pulls out the envelope. She crosses the room and hands it to me. It's empty.

"Where's the money?"

"What money?" She wipes her eyes, sniffs. "Look around, willya."

A wallet sits by the bent spoon and the syringe on the desk. I open it. No cash. The ID reads "Joel MacIntosh, Parole Officer."

"He promised me we'd leave Texas," she says. "We were gonna start over in California."

"Where did it all go?" I mentally slap myself as soon as the words leave my mouth.

"Where do you think?" She points to the spoon. "Up his arm. At the dog track. Hell, it just blew away like the damn wind."

I read the outside of the envelope, the name of a bank in Atlanta, a phone number, some other cryptic marks. The information so important to Sinclair.

"Please don't hurt me," she says. "I just want to go home."

I point the muzzle at her stomach, and an anger blacker than the darkness in my mind oozes from my pores.

"Jesus please no." She shakes. The sheet drops, and she makes no move to cover her nakedness.

"We've known each other since we were kids." I tighten my finger around the trigger. "And this is what you do to me?"

"I just wanted out." She crosses her arms, covering her breasts now. "I wanted to go somewhere new."

"You finally got to see the ocean at least." I close one eye, aim at her face.

"I could buy my way back home with the envelope, couldn't I?" she says. "It's all I've got. Please tell me I could."

And then, like a light extinguished, the anger is gone.

"I'm sorry about Danny," she says. "But Sinclair told me he needed to make an example out of somebody, you know, to keep people in line."

"You're not fit to say his name." I sling the shotgun over my shoulder by its strap and pick up the lighter.

"You and me," she says. "We could ransom the envelope to Sinclair. Use the money to start over."

I smile, the decision made. I flick the lighter, hold the flame under the envelope.

"NOOOO." She lunges toward the fire.

I kick her away, hold the envelope up high until the flames singe my fingers and the precious slip of paper is consumed.

"See you around, Chrissie." I let the ashes flutter to the dirty carpet.

Two blocks down is the car I've left parked by the seawall. I leave and walk there, the permanent darkness in my mind lessening just a fraction.

The ocean is cold and gray, a line of storms visible on the southern horizon. The beach is empty except for a couple of people surf-fishing and an old guy with a metal detector. The air smells like seawater. Gulls trill overhead.

Danny the Dumb-ass sits on the hood of the car, watching a tanker steam by in the distance. I sit next to him.

"Did you find her?" he says.

I nod.

"What do we do now?"

"I don't know." I sigh. "Maybe we should go to California."

They say every dog has its day, so I guess every uppity piece of Czech trash has a chance to break free from the burden of lowered expectations.

Sinclair, of course, is dead. Every night in my dreams I picture the surprise on his face as I shot both him and the guard right before they went to work on Danny with the blowtorch.

"Yeah, that's a good idea." Danny smiles. He slides off the hood and gets in the car.

I look at the Texas coast one last time and do the same.

An hour later, we're on the highway by the cutoff.

I ignore the road west and point the car toward our place in this world, the little corner of Central Texas where we'd both been born and would die.

Danny doesn't say anything. Neither do I.