Fifty Grand

“Rifleman’s reloading,” Crawford says. “We got ten clicks.”

And now Briggs does stand up. All six foot five of him and still somehow wearing his fucking cowboy hat. He flinches, bracing himself for a bullet in the brain.

I rummage through the stuff in the backpack: pepper spray, ski mask, rope, duct tape, finally the loaded 9mm Stechkin APS pistol that hadn’t been cleaned or fired in years.

Briggs walks toward me, striding over the ice fissures, holding his.45 in both hands. Six meters away. Impossible to miss. He beads me, lifts the gun. “No more chances now, whore,” he says. His eyes narrow, focused, concentrating, his grin wide.

“None necessary,” I reply, sliding up my father’s pistol and shooting him in the neck.

Briggs falls to his knees, drops his weapon.

Hands at his throat, blood seeping between his fingers.

Ssssfff! The rifleman in the trees has evidently reloaded. Crawford hits the deck.

“Did you get her?” Crawford says.

The ice cracks beneath me as I walk to Briggs’s.45 and kick it into the water.

“Damn it, man, did you get her?” Crawford says, firing the last of his clip at the marksman in the woods.

The sun breaks over the tree line. New-born photons bisecting the lake into a world of shadow and a world of light. Water seeps into my shoes, I lose my balance, put my arms out, regain it, step over a widening fracture, and come up behind Crawford.

He turns.

“Cocksucker,” he says and slams home a fresh clip but can’t get off a round before I put one in his groin, one in his thorax above his body armor, and one in his mouth.

I wave at the man in the parking lot.

He stands up, waves back.

It’s too skinny to be Esteban. It has to be Paco.

I wave my hands over my head. “Stop! Stop! That’s enough! They’re dead.”

Silence and then a distant voice. “Are you ok?”

“Sí.”

“I’m coming.”

I walk to Jack and kneel beside him.

He’s terrified. He smells bad. He’s defecated himself.

I smile in a kindly way.

“W-who are you?” he asks, his voice quivering.

“I’m María.”

“Why have you done this?”

Well, it ain’t because you’re a lousy tipper.

A groan behind me. Briggs, living yet. That type needs a stake through the heart at a midnight crossroad.

“Wait here,” I say to Jack. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Dodging cracks and fissures, I walk back to Briggs. The ice is cracking all around him. Blood and water, water and blood.

I kneel beside him.

Our eyes meet.

Are you close now? Do you have any answers?

I don’t. Hector says the meaning of life is to be found in the quest for the meaning of life. But that’s Hector.

Briggs looks at me. A croak. “Help me,” he says.

I look at the wound. I suppose if we rushed him to a hospital there’d be an outside chance.

I shake my head.

“Why?” he asks.

Why indeed?

I can’t tell you about the tarot or the Book of Changes or that I am sent by our lady of the moon. But I must tell you something. I must tell you because, before the minute hand on your watch makes another revolution, I will be the instrument of your transfiguration.

For you, I suppose, it was the fifty thousand.

“The fifty grand. The price of a dead Mex.”

He thinks about it, doesn’t get it.

“That my father’s life could be bought so cheap,” I explain.

He nods.

His breath has taken on the sweetness of death. His face is white, his eyes crimson. There are splinters of ice in his hair.

“Is there a deity with whom you confer?” I ask.

“No, no, wait…”he gurgles.

“Make thy peace.”

He grabs my arm with a bloody hand.

I release his grip, step back, raise my father’s gun. This is not retribution. I have no authority for that. Nevertheless, I deliver you from this world of tears.

“No, wait, we can make a-”

Lead crosses the space between us, rips his skin, passes through muscle and bone, punches a hole in his skull the size of a baby’s fist, and exits through his spinal cord.

He looks at all the blood and lies backward on the ice, dead.

Jack’s hands are above his head.

He’s crying. “Don’t shoot me. Please. I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Whatever I did, I’m so sorry.” Tears, an anguished look. More tears. “Oh God, please don’t, please.”

“This is your best performance,” I say.

“It’s not a performance, I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For whatever it is that you’re so angry about,” he says. Lips quivering. A cackle at the back of his throat. Snot, spittle.

The scent of death all around me, in me, makes me want to throw up. On the edge of the ice lake I see Paco in a black coat and carrying Esteban’s rifle. He waves. I wave back.

He yells something but I can’t hear what it is.

“I can’t hear you!”

“I said, I saved your Cuban ass.”

Gingerly he begins walking across the ice. He’s almost comically slow. I imagine they don’t have many frozen lakes in Nicaragua.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re going to kill me, I’m going to die,” Jack says.

He bends over and throws up what’s left of the hors d’oeuvres from Tom Cruise’s house.

“I’m not going to kill you.”