Chapter 1

I’ve never killed a man who didn’t deserve it. Working for a casino out in Nevada you tend to encounter a lot of cheaters, and when the casino finds one of the cheaters, I make him regret being born, and if the cheater is bad enough of a problem I take him outside of town and plant a 45 in his skull. I’ve been doing this for the last some thirty years, back when I was around twenty or so. I’ve broke so many fingers, cut off so many thumbs, and shot so many idiots in the head that it all blends together, save for that one incident…

That’s beside the point. What I am trying to say is that killing and maiming idiots who think they can cheat the system has been a regular thing for me for a while now, which is why each detail leading up to my current predicament has unnerved me so badly, and why I’m certain that what I am hearing in the back of my trunk is no hallucination.

The boss had signaled me off the busy casino floor to the back with a simple wave of his hand. I had seen the same gesture many times over the years and knew it meant I was getting my hands dirty. I followed him where no one could hear us.

"Eugene, I got a guy in the trunk of the car parked out back,” the boss said quietly.

“Am I killing him or breaking some bones?” I said, straight to business.

“Shoot him through the head and drive him down to Mexico to bury him.”

Not my first job like this, but it always piqued a level of curiosity that I couldn’t pursue while keeping up with the profession. The sorry sap was probably just important enough that the body had to vanish. Usually, I’d bring the body to some smugglers down near the border though. This was far from normal. I wasn’t paid to ask questions though.

I drove out to a hill in the middle of nowhere, my favorite spot, with a lovely view of the Mohave wilderness. Not a bad place to die. More mercy than most of these fools deserved, but usually not something they appreciate. They always went out crying, sniffling, and begging. It made me sick. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise that those who live without dignity die without dignity.

That’s why, when I opened the trunk, alarm bells in my head started ringing. He wasn’t even tied up. I jumped back as he crawled out of the trunk of the black sports car. He was an older fellow, Latino, and had this huge shit-eating grin. “This the spot?” he asked. “Real pretty. You professionals sure know how to pick em’.”

“I… wha—”

“Hey, boss. Let’s do this.” He knelt down right in the spot I would have placed him. “Don’t got all day. We do this now, or we’ll be in deep shit.”

There was a cloud forming in the distance, probably a dust storm. It looked bad. They call them haboobs, a wall of dust and sand so big that it’ll swallow everything in its path. There was a loud echoing sound in it, probably thunder.

I turned back the man who knelt there smiling. He wouldn’t blink. It was unsettling, and I don’t ever feel unsettled. Annoyed, pissed, incensed, but not unsettled.

I unholstered my 1911. Better to just get it over with. He leaned into the barrel as I pointed it at his forehead. He wouldn’t stop staring at me, wouldn’t stop smiling, and when I blew his brains into the small rocks and sand of the hill, I could have sworn that those eyes stayed trained on me. He didn’t stop smiling either. He kept that same shit-eating grin even as I shoved the whole body in a trash bag, and I couldn’t help but imaging him staring through the plastic at me with that same smile as I shut the trunk.

The storm was coming from the north, and the road lead clear south. It was still a while off. I must have been really losing it, because the winds of the storm almost sounded like voices, screaming and screeching in contempt.

About a mile in, I heard something from the back trunk. Dead bodies do weird things. Muscles spasm. There’re the death rattles. The bodies will defecate. It was easy to blow it off as any of these things, but there was an off feeling about it all. I heard a gurgling.

Could he be alive? Not likely. 45ACP through the frontal lobe bisecting the brain isn’t really something you walk off. I looked in my rearview. The dust cloud was coming closer. It was huge, like it stretched all the way to the sky, a giant pillar that swallowed every droplet of light.

“They’re coming,” came the voice of the man from the trunk. I jerked so hard that the car damn near flipped off the road. I started slowing down to stop. “Don’t do that ikniutli,” the voice said.

“You talk a lot for someone without brains,” I said, trying to ignore the insanity of the situation.

“Been due to die a long time, got a lotta chatter left in me I suppose.”

I felt that I was going insane. It was the only reasonable explanation. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw the cloud of dust was keeping pace with the car. The noises that came from it were more succinct. It was a wall of noise, voices wailing in anguish.

“I don’t think all those are for me,” the man in the back of my trunk chimed in. My palms started to sweat. I hadn’t felt the sensation since I put my first man in the ground.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That storm behind us, it’s a wall of souls I have wronged since I made a deal many years ago. I remember every voice, so I can say with certainty that they aren’t all here for me. You’ve wronged a lot of people for one lifetime ikniutli.”

“Bullshit,” I replied coarsely as I depressed the gas pedal and sped us a good hundred miles per hour down the empty interstate. It looked different than I was accustomed to. There were no other cars or buildings, and I had gone far enough that I should have at least passed a gas station.

“As many people as you’ve killed, you can’t pretend your hands are clean.”

“They are. I never wronged any of them, they wronged my boss and I took care of them.”

The voices mixed in a cascade of anguish. Their ages, sexes, and tones varied greatly.

“I hear a lot of women and children in the mix. I’ve done a lot of things, but I don’t recognize any of them,” the man at the back of the car said. I could sense that same shit-eating grin. I wanted to pull over, drag him out, and beat his face with a shovel until he didn’t have a mouth left to make the gesture.

“I don’t kill women and children.”

“Who said anything about killing them?”

I saw a figure up ahead, a small silhouette dotting the horizon. It was approaching rapidly, and I feared that I would run the poor sap over. As I came closer, I could see that the figure was small, only a child. Her long hair concealed her face. She was turned away from me. She looked up, hair falling away as I swerved past her. I looked into her cold dead eyes and saw pain and hatred that a child so young should not be familiar with. I recognized her face from the papers.

“Shit,” I said under my breath.

“Believe me now,” snorted the dead man.

“I believe I’m going crazy. It wasn’t my fault that he was a lousy father. That’s what I believe. I don’t regret killing her daddy. I don’t regret it a damn bit.”

“That’s why she’s angry at you, I imagine. I’ve lived for almost five hundred years, and you’ve equaled the number of angered souls as me in a tenth the time.”

I kept my eyes forward and prepared myself for what I assumed would be a none-too-pleasant drive. I’m a few miles in now. The gas hasn’t gone down a notch. There isn’t a building in sight.