Читать книгу Lone Star Lawless: 14 Texas Tales of Crime - Kaye George - Страница 7

WILD HORSES, by Alexandra Burt

El Paso, Texas, November 1995

Three days had passed since his departure from the Fachada Ranch where Brady had spent his days feeding, watering, herding, branding, and loading horses into trailers. Until one day there was a fight.

His temper had flared. He recalled that frozen second between his anger igniting and throwing the first punch—there was always that split second when he could still go either way—when that fire inside of him made his hands tremble and his stomach quiver. There was a sensation of his limbs elongating and his muscles gaining strength. Shaking to the core, he felt as if he grew in height and weight, exponentially, expanding his slight frame to match the power of his wrath, like a jockey turning into a defensive tackle. There were broken bones, blood, stitches.

Getting into the Ford Bronco and taking off south had been an impulse on his part. Once Brady reached the interstate—speakers thumping and the night with all those stars sparkling above him—he gunned the car and headed farther south. Occasionally, he glanced into the side mirror, fascinated by the wind aimlessly throwing his hair around. But mostly he was anxious and his nerves were frayed to the quick.

On the first day, he was unable to keep down the food he bought at random gas stations. He pulled over by the side of the road, fell to his knees, and allowed the vomit to dribble off his lips. He thought about what he’d done, really thought about it: all he had in his name were a couple of hundred dollars and an ancient Bronco in need of new tires, with a bad transmission, and the brakes, moaning and screeching, were barely a layer away from hitting metal.

On the second day, he dozed off in the backseat of the Bronco in a Cobb’s parking lot—Lubbock, if his memory served him correctly, but he could be mistaken. In that lot he slept off years of backbreaking work cleaning stalls, branding horses, and mending hundreds of miles of fence. In his sleep he heard horses slurping water from troughs, followed by the animals’ snorting sounds. In his dreams he felt the breeze of their tails on his skin. In the sharp draft of the late fall he awoke, his back tight, and drunk with sleep. He cracked his knuckles where his fingers had been broken—his left index finger remained crooked and the pinky on his right hand was unyielding, he could hardly bend it at all.

He kept on driving and on the third day he felt himself coming off that sharp edge and on the fourth day, driving south on I-27, he reached Sweetwater. On I-20 West he pondered turning around for the better part of an hour, but when he hit I-10 West toward El Paso, he vowed to look ahead, the only direction there was.

As the dawn teased the sky into daylight—a sign above the highway announcing El Paso 15 miles—somewhere on the outskirts of the city, the flashing orange fuel light reminded him of reality at hand.

He pulled into a Choice Mart located on a large lot with cracked concrete among donut drive-thrus, pawn shops, and liquor stores. He killed the engine and the Bronco shuddered and shook, then quivered with a sigh of relief as if done roaming this earth. A good night’s sleep and he’d get on with it, call some landscaping companies, maybe moving and construction firms. He was bound to find a job if only he looked hard enough. He was a workhorse, after all, he did the work of three men, never complained, kept his head down. Unless his temper flared.

Scanning the parking lot, he made out newspaper boxes, a bench, a trashcan, a soda machine, a rusty dumpster, a mailbox, and more parking than this gas station would ever need. Harsh rhythmic music and a husky voice, chanting and rhyming words Brady couldn’t make out, drifted toward him from the left.

Three spots down from him sat a Ford Mustang—red and bold and shiny like a sunset—with two teenage kids staring at him. The driver rolled down the window and allowed his arm to dangle in the morning breeze. A cigarette without a filter stuck between his fingers, the orange glow dangerously close to his skin.

Brady checked his phone—the preloaded minutes down to zero—exited the car and approached the payphone. His stiff body felt like a frail puppet being held in place by invisible strings. He walked hunched over until his spine stretched, allowing him to stand straight. The receiver dangled on a metal cable twisted beyond recognition. There wasn’t a phonebook anywhere in sight.

A glowing cigarette butt landed only inches away from his feet. He kicked it with the tip of his boot, embers spilling into the parking lot, coming to rest in front of the red Mustang.

The kids inside the car laughed, slapping their knees. Brady told himself he didn’t need any trouble, he wasn’t going to start a fight. He knew what amused them though: his long and shaggy hair, his tanned skin with hardly any stubble on his face—not because he had shaved but because it had never grown. His stature was short at best, he had started growing early but then around fourteen his body thought otherwise and stunted at under five-four. It didn’t help that his features were soft and feminine and everything about him was what people referred to as petite.

Brady entered the gas station. Cold air hit him and the overhead fluorescent lights covered the world in a blue tinge, making him feel like warm flesh within an icy box. Behind him a magazine aisle took up the entire front of the building, the coolers on the back wall held soda, fruit juices, milk, and water bottles behind glass doors. Some panels were still foggy from customers long departed. He crossed his arms to keep warm. In need of a phone book, Brady approached the register.

Just as he parted his lips, he froze. The man behind the counter looked familiar. Brady rifled through his memory but came up empty. He realized it wasn’t the man who was familiar, but his kind; his pronounced brow ridge, the pocked skin, the greasy hair dyed two shades too dark slicked back into a ducktail.

Brady had done a four-year stint in prison a few years back and this man reminded him of one of his Russian cellmates. During those years he’d picked up a fair amount of Russian, remembered most of it, but everything else that had happened in that cell he had learned to forget. He could have been out when his time was up if it hadn’t been for the fights he always got into. There’d been quite a few—fists, never any weapons—and the memory of an aching stomach pounded by relentless fists, his arms losing tension, his legs beginning to weaken sent a sudden gush of pain through his body.

Forcing himself to push the feelings aside, he beheld the Russian: a white starched dress shirt, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. Snakelike, the tattooed image of a bluish chain disappeared underneath the cuff of his shirt. His hands were freakishly large—even for a man his size—and the teal tinge of the tattoos and the sloppy outlines yelled prison makeshift ink. Brady had seen dozens if not hundreds of tattoos during those years, crude ink made by burning the heel of a shoe and mixing the soot with urine; once a concentration camp number, numerous tears on cheekbones, various baby footprints, mermaids, you name it, he’d seen it. The cross around the Russian’s neck identified him as a Prince of Thieves, a highly honorable tattoo. Brady imagined the man’s back adorned by cathedrals and towers, two, maybe three steeples with spires on top, representing the number of prison terms served.

Instead of You have a phone book? Brady lowered his eyes out of respect: “May I borrow the phone book, shishka?” Shishka was an informal word for a person of great importance.

The Russian’s eyes showed no emotions, his body didn’t move, not even shift in place. He reached under the counter and dropped a phone book on the counter with a thud.

“I want it back.” Robot-like, he finished one word before he began the next one. His accent was deep and weaved itself through each syllable and every word. He placed his hands on top of the phone book and slid it slowly and deliberately across the counter. “Do not leave it outside. People steal around here.”

Outside, Brady sat on the bench. He looked up landscaping and moving companies and wrote their phone numbers on the back of a business card he’d grabbed from the counter. He emptied his pockets: just enough money for a week in a seedy motel and a couple of meals.

Calling one of the numbers, business hours Monday through Friday, he realized it was Saturday morning and he’d have to wait until Monday.

He pondered his next move but not much came of it. He got stuck on the past: the bad checks he’d written—his lust for gambling was another thing all together—the stint in prison, the bone breaking job as a ranch hand, and maybe, just maybe, he should have stayed put. Should have apologized, should have found a way, maybe should have just taken the bantering of the men twice his age at the ranch with a grain of salt, the way they called him names, should have made peace with the fact that he did the work of three while they stood around flapping their gums and smoking, kicking dirt off their boots while he worked his fingers to the bone.

And then there were the women. He couldn’t remember the last time he had touched one, hadn’t had a remotely romantic moment since he’d been out of prison, didn’t want to do the math on that one. Years it had been, years. There was that one girl at the ranch—she did the weekly payroll, handing out envelopes thick with bills—but he had never pursued her. He loved the way her hair touched her shoulders, how she tossed it back right before she handed him his money. Brady felt mostly awkward around her but he still thought fondly of her. Everybody seemed to have a story about her and maybe it was true what the men had said about her even though she didn’t look like one of those women.

He felt the old rage rise up inside of him—he had always called it the old rage because it seemed to come from some sort of ancient place that reached so far back he hardly remembered its origin. That familiar temper had gotten him in so much trouble over the years, it churned inside of him as if a bucket was filling up—without any outward sign of fury—but once the liquid reached the top, all bets were off. He saw his father’s face in those moments, smelled cheap whiskey, felt some sort of way about him. He had been at odds with his father since he could remember, and in return his father used the belt. He used it often and hard. It wasn’t the welts on his skin, wasn’t his swollen shut eyelids, wasn’t the pain that seared itself into his brain, it was the tears that he swallowed that made his life unbearable. He attempted to wipe those images aside like condensation on a mirror. It didn’t always work.

By the time he dropped out of school—he was fifteen then—rage overtook him frequently. He loved to fight, taunt other guys, most of them taller, heavier, much older. He didn’t care. The pain they inflicted on him felt real, unlike his life. Unlike the—

No. His whole childhood was a can of worms he didn’t want to open. He wanted to keep a lid on it, maintain a poker face—swoosh, he imagined a hand air-swiping from his forehead to his chest, done! Nothing to see here. He thought of the horses, how they showed signs of edginess, squirming and prancing, and there, there, he’d say, calm now, calm, and he’d blow air on their nostrils. Within seconds they stood serene, waiting for his command. He didn’t have that same power when it came to his temper.

He sat on the bench by the pay phone for the better part of an hour, staring at the cracks in the concrete and an occasional weed fighting its way toward the light. Reality intruded, snapped him out of this state of contemplation: a man checking tire pressure and a woman bent over a screaming infant in the backseat, changing a diaper.

He froze when he spotted the dent in the door of the Bronco. It was the size of a boot, as if someone had kicked the door just for the fun of it.

He studied his likeness in the window of the Bronco: unkempt, worn out, a man in the body of a twelve-year-old boy. Those kids had done that, he knew it. They had no respect for a man’s property. That car was all he had, old as it may be, he had always tended to it, kept it clean and maintained, and it had another ten years in it, if not more.

Anger rose to the top but the red Mustang was long gone. Brady counted—remembered a trick he had heard of in prison: first, anchor yourself, look around, find something you can see, something you can touch, something you can hear, something you can smell, and something you can taste—to slow the scorching heat behind his eyes. A sign in the door—one of the things he forced himself to see—made itself known: Help Wanted, it read.

* * * *

Three hours later the Russian knew his life story: his love for horses and his hate for ranch work, his gambling habit, the stint in prison, the dent in the Bronco.

His name was Igor, he said, just Igor.

“Listen,” Igor said, “I need someone to stock shelves. Scan merchandise, that sort of thing. You can sleep and shower in the back. There’s a cot in the back room. Good enough, you are young. Not so good for an old man.” He smiled and exposed his upper teeth encased in gold.

Brady wanted to somehow indicate his level of trustworthiness but came up empty—had just told him about the bad checks and the gambling habit—but Brady knew to steal from him, to take anything without asking, would result in dire consequences. Even Texas wasn’t going to be big enough to hide from a man like Igor.

“I know you understand. Your time here will be what you make of it.” Igor’s eyes focused on some invisible target in the distance and his thoughts seemed to trail off to memories not meant for the faint of heart. “We need to talk about what I expect from you working here, living here, money and customers. Following orders.” He spoke without contractions, his English grammatically flawless yet it was the accent he couldn’t shake, substituting the ‘w’ for the ‘v’-sound.

“One more thing,” Igor added and pointed at the curtain below the counter. With a swift swipe of his hand he parted the fabric and exposed the wooden barrel of a shotgun. “Under this counter, there is a gun. Never touch my gun. Never. Do not speak of it, do not handle it, do not even look at it. Just know it is there and leave the rest to me.”

“You’re the boss, shishka.” Brady shrugged and lifted his hands, palms facing out.

Three rooms in the back of the gas station: Igor’s office—a desk and a chair, a few shelves stuffed with papers, boxes piled up on the floor, and a pin-up calendar—and a square room with a cot and a shelf. The third room was next to Igor’s office, rectangular and tiled from top to bottom. It contained two showers without partitions or shower curtains. Igor referred to it as the freezer room because it contained two sub-zeroes with large stainless steel doors reaching from floor to ceiling. The two doors had separate locks and Igor handed Brady the key to the door on the left, which contained frozen foods and ice cream products. Igor never so much as mentioned the right door and he didn’t ask.

The next morning, Brady stocked soda and beer, and scanned low inventory in a handheld scanner. The work was easy enough yet Brady felt himself drift off into a strange place of discontent. He missed the creaking of the barn door on its worn-out hinges as he lugged it open, the stuffy musk of animal fur and old, dried-out dung and droppings, and the sharp smell of sweaty horses. The way his eyes struggled to get used to the darkness of the barn, how he had to allow his sight to compensate for the lack of light. He missed the squeals and the nickers of the horses, the scent of hay, the dirt underneath his boots. Even the banter and teasing of the men didn’t seem so harsh now that he was trapped in the unforgiving fluorescent light of a concrete building day in and day out.

He never rested. At night, any sound would do. A car alarm, loud music, voices, and on his cot in the otherwise bleak room he awoke with his heart racing and his brow covered in sweat. He felt the starkness of the flickering lights and the smell of bleach seemed to seep into his pores. The gasoline scent from the pumps and exhaust from the cars was much harsher than the scent of oily metal and iron farm machinery. Sometimes he longed for some sort of release, crying maybe, even sensed something resembling tears well up in the back of his throat but they never collected.

A week passed with those strange feelings Brady couldn’t quite place until one night a commotion awoke him. There was a thump just after four in the morning. He recognized the sounds as the delivery door slamming against the crates stacked in the back of the building. Then the sound of boxes toppling to the ground. Something continued to bang against the walls of the narrow hallway leading toward his room. Brady pulled a sweater over his shirt and slipped into his jeans and boots. He opened the door and poked his head into the hallway.

A light bulb swung back and forth, its blinding light making it difficult to see what was coming toward him: a shadow of a man with keys jingling on his hip carrying a heavy load over his back.

Brady blinked, hoping for the vision to disappear. The shadow on the walls grew and there was a scent he couldn’t quite place.

Brady wasn’t a religious man, could hardly be bothered to lower his head before picking up a fork, yet he couldn’t shake the image of someone hauling a large cross on their back. He’d seen men carry deer and other large animals over their shoulders after hunting—he himself had hauled foals over his shoulder just the same, had seen sheep carried that way—yet someone carrying a deer on his back into a building with underground tanks and freezers stuffed to the gills with ice cream just didn’t make any sense.

The lightbulb swung just right and he recognized a face: Igor. His chest, drenched in crimson, glossy in the light of the bulb swaying like a ghostly pendulum. His face was distorted, he struggled under the weight of the load, and every step seemed to take more strength than the one before.

As Igor toppled toward him, the smell of metal and salt struck Brady like a hoof, making his stomach churn and his knees started to give.

Brady recognized the mass on Igor’s back: it was the body of a man draped over his shoulder. Judging by the trail of blood leading down the hallway, the man must have bled out between the back door and this very moment. Below the crimson and the ashen skin Brady recognized a neck tattoo, or rather parts of it: a blade had severed the man’s throat, cutting straight through the writing. Like a Halloween prop, the man’s head swung back and forth, barely attached, hanging on by tendons and spinal cord. The dead man was at least the size and weight of Igor himself.

Brady saw the dead man’s muddy boots and his heart sank. They were nothing like the ones Brady wore—there were no double welts and detailed stitching—but simple working boots of a plain working man and Brady felt some sort of kinship with him.

Igor stepped to the right and tipped his head downward.

“Get the key off the ring, the silver one …” His breathing was labored, he all but choked on his words, the weight of the load over his shoulder overwhelming him.

Brady didn’t want to touch the man’s blood, wanted this moment to never have happened. He should have stayed in his room, on the narrow cot that made his back ache and his neck stiff. Should have stayed at that ranch, should have … what? Just another regret, another moment of remorse, so many, weighing him down.

Everything inside of him said no, loud and clear, assertive. But could he decline, he wondered, could he refuse to participate? Brady wanted time to think before he made a decision, wanted to weigh the pros and cons. He also knew he was fooling himself, he wasn’t used to weighing his options, had always operated shooting swiftly from the hip.

“The key,” Igor insisted, staring at Brady, his eyes without emotion.

Think, Brady told himself, think it through. He had a moment of clarity, a moment of reality forcing itself on him: hopeless it was—like gambling, you could tell yourself you call the odds, yet you get the hand you’re dealt and no other, you can’t refuse it. Too late. It was always too late, this was no different.

Brady pulled the key off the ring and unlocked the freezer room. Inside, Igor dropped the body on the floor, stood up straight and stretched his back. The body, slick and shiny like a newborn foal, reeked of blood. Igor hit the wall switch and after a few hesitant sputters the overhead light kicked in to full capacity; the body lay flat on the tiled floor on his stomach yet his face pointed toward the ceiling.

Igor unlocked the freezer door, then pulled the body to the back wall. He turned on the shower and stood underneath the stream of cold water as if it could wash him clean of all his sins. With his eyes closed, the brackish water ran off him, over the dead body below him and down the drain. He pulled the body toward the freezer and opened the door, his hands hooking the body by the armpits. A visible cloud of cold escaped the freezer and migrated into the room. Igor shoved the body into the freezer and the loud hum resumed as soon as he closed the freezer door.

Igor walked away, down the hall and toward the back door. “Clean up,” he called out and Brady heard a door slam and a car take off.

Brady gathered a bucket, mop, bleach, and mopped the hallway three times to get all the blood up. As he wiped, he felt the old temper grow inside of him. He kept wiping but that only made it worse, all that rage gathered and consumed him. The men at the ranch, Igor, the dent in the Bronco. He was surprised by the way he made no attempt to calm himself, how he saw no need for his feelings to be reduced. Trapped is what he was, trapped in this gas station, would be at Igor’s mercy, had incriminated himself, gotten himself into trouble yet again. But this time his temper wasn’t to blame, he was guilty of no crime, yet he wasn’t any better off. He was an accomplice, subject to the same punishments, as if he had killed the man himself—he knew the law, had studied it in prison and then he recalled a Russian word—toska—but being an accomplice in a murder is nothing like writing bad checks for those gambling debts that ended him up in prison. Toska, a suffering one feels deep within, a lingering pain he couldn’t put a finger on. A dull ache of the soul, a longing. Yet he didn’t know what he was longing for, a pining, nebulous at best, of opportunities lost, roads not taken. It dawned on him that every single time he tried to do better, be better, he kept digging this hole deeper and wider and one day it would swallow him up.

* * * *

Every night Brady was aware of the body in the room next to him. He imagined it covered in a layer of ice, waxen and frozen in time. Less than five feet from where he slept, there was the body of a man just like him, a man who wore boots to work. He never dared ask Igor what the fallout had been, not knowing was best, was always best. The vibration travelling through the wall into his brain made his hands tremble and his heart pound.

He seldom slept longer than three hours, his brain in a loop, an endless recap of that night. He’d lie awake in the dark, aware of his hands, calloused and rough from ranch work, joints aching and stiff from the air-conditioned room he slept in night after night. His life made itself available to be interpreted, no longer a matter of short foresight, no, but a matter of involvement. It wasn’t his temper that got him in trouble, no, his hands were the guilty part of him, not his mind. They got involved when they shouldn’t, had written the bad checks that ended him up in prison, had punched and pounded and left bodies like bruised fruit in its wake.

His thoughts kept him awake for the better part of those nights and when morning came, he knew he had to think really hard. Make a plan. Time to move on.

* * * *

His first paycheck was more than he’d expected—Igor was generous—and he bought minutes for his phone, boots, a new pair of jeans and t-shirts. He had some money left over, a nice chunk even, but he had gone out to the race tracks and played some Texas-hold’em down at the Sunland Park, and he shouldn’t have done that, knew it the moment he got in the car. And at the end of the day he was back to zero, right where he had started.

Brady was about to lock up for the night when the glass door swooshed open and the kid from the Mustang walked in. A memory the shape of a dent in his Bronco flashed. Brady pretended to straighten the cigarette lighter display on the counter. The kid disappeared between towers of beer and display cases and aisle shelves just to return with a six-pack of Budweiser and a bag of chips.

“Hey, shorty, what’s up?”

The kid’s voice was soft, not unlike his own. Brady stared at him, mumbling something, then began ringing up the beer and chips.

“Where’s the big guy? The owner, your boss, whatever … I need to talk to him.”

Outside, the parking lot was deserted but for the kid’s Mustang.

“What about?” Brady asked. “Maybe I can help?”

“I don’t need to talk to you. Where is he?”

The old rage, there it was. What Brady wanted—if he could have it his way—what he wanted was the kid to make a wrong move, say the wrong word. He wanted to pound his face, feel bones crack …. He caught himself, remembered to keep calm, hoped the kid wouldn’t insist on talking to Igor, would just leave with his kid beer and his kid bag of chips.

“Why don’t you tell me, maybe I can help you?” The radio was scratchy, stuck between two stations, aggravating him.

“Last week, you were out of my favorite beer,” the kid said in that snarky way, his lip pulled up on one side. “The bathroom always looks like shit and your donuts are stale. And if that isn’t bad enough, there’s no phonebook outside. I need to make a call and I can’t. Is that how you treat your customers? You don’t give a shit about your customers, do you?”

He gave a shit all right. But all the shits given didn’t change the fact that everything in life gets stolen, pissed on, torn up. The best intentions will end you up in deeper shit than you even thought possible. Nothing was ever enough. If every shelf was stocked and the bathroom was clean, the kid would have found another fault, another something to complain about. His hands twitched, calling on him to do what he did best: fight. Draw blood. He felt his fingers squeeze his thumb within the fist that had formed. He remembered his first fight, how he’d punched and almost broke his thumb and realized it needed to be on the outside curled between his first and second knuckles, kept tight, but also fluid. Powerful.

Time froze. There was the day he had asked a man in prison for a tattoo, he even remembered his name—they called him The Painter—and when he asked what kind of tattoo Brady wanted, he told him the face of a demon. The Painter paused with the needle suspended in midair, inches above his chest. “You’ll have to draw that for me. I don’t know what a demon looks like,” he had said and lowered his hand.

Brady had never been able to draw that demon. It wasn’t something that had a likeness in this world, maybe it was just the thing that bubbled inside of him, ready to strike. Brady looked down at his hands, warped, sunburnt, broken. His fist relaxed, opened up like the blossoms of a flower. He smiled; he had fought for composure and he had won.

“I’ll get the owner for you,” Brady said, forcing his voice to remain calm even though he felt the words tremble in his throat. He cocked his head to the right, pulling up the left side of his lips. The curtain beneath the counter hung in dusty and uneven folds.

“Hurry up. I ain’t got all day.”

“He doesn’t speak any English. He’s Russian,” Brady lied.

“Wait, wait. How do I tell him about my complaints? He speaks Spanish?”

“No.” Brady shook his head.

“How do you say that in Russian? How do you say ‘clean up the fucking bathroom?’” the kid asked.

“YA znayu ob etom cheloveke v morozilʹnuyu kameru,” Brady said.

“What? Yazanoo otretom chellovecce moro seal juno caeroo?” The kid tried, but got it all wrong.

“YA znayu ob etom cheloveke v morozilʹnuyu kameru,” Brady repeated.

They went back and forth another three or four times but finally the kid got it right. “YA znayu ob etom cheloveke v morozilʹnuyu kameru.”

Russian for I know about the man in the freezer.

“Igor?” Brady’s voice carried far into the back. “Igor?” Even louder.

Igor, reeking of cigar smoke, stepped behind the counter through the swinging door. He looked at Brady, then at the kid, puzzled.

“YA znayu ob etom cheloveke v morozilʹnuyu kameru.” The kid spoke slow and clear, remembering every syllable.

Igor stared at him in disbelief.

Brady nodded encouragingly at the kid, then took a couple of steps back.

“YA znayu ob etom cheloveke v morozilʹnuyu kameru,” the kid repeated, even slower this time.

Igor’s right hand parted the curtain below the counter. He reached blindly, never taking his eyes of the kid. He stood erect, balanced with his weight slightly forward, and pulled the trigger. Twice. The explosions occurred so quickly, they could have been one shot. The kid dropped without saying another word, a red shiny circle formed in the very middle of his chest. Two shots looked like one, that’s how accurate a shot Igor was. It wasn’t a through-and-through, there would be no clean up. The images that remained; the hue of the blood, the kid’s eyes staring off into nothing, the lighter display on the counter, the humming of the freezers, Igor’s breath coming in short spurts.

Igor hooked his large hands into the pits of the kid and pulled the body down the hallway. Brady reached for the kid’s car keys on the counter.

Out in the dark parking lot, the kid’s fiery Mustang patiently waited. Compared to the old Bronco it was a definite improvement. The engine started with a moan, grumbled, then settled down, like a horse’s quivering haunches as they rock forward. A sleek flaming beauty it was, with muscles hidden underneath the shiny coat draped majestically over its frame.

Brady rolled down the window to better hear the engine. He had a vision of thundering hooves splitting the silence of the night and he imagined himself galloping through the bleak concrete landscape. He stepped on the gas and rolled through the parking lot, recognizing the Mustang’s natural canter and gait. In his peripheral vision Brady watched Igor hit the master light switch. The gas station was closed.

One determined tap with the foot and the Mustang propelled forward, powering across the lot. He pulled into traffic without thinking of where to go and what to do next, but he knew he wasn’t going to stop for anything.

When Brady hit the highway, he felt free. His knuckles, white like river rocks, stretched through his skin. He relaxed his hands. A new beginning, maybe up north; he’d never been beyond Arkansas. He felt sad thinking about the kid on the ground, dead, by now next to the other man in the freezer. He tried not to think of his clouded eyes.

He tapped the gas and the Mustang roared. It did what horses do once allowed to roam free; it joyously neighed into the night.