White Hot Pistol. Eric Beetner
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powered on over the slow rises in the two lane highway, one headlight tinted slightly pink with the animal’s blood.
Jacy curled her back and tried to settle into a comfortable position on the seat. Any way she sat, her hands were awkwardly pinned against her back.
The gunman punched the roof three times, punctuating each one with a, “Fuck.”
Jacy tried a different tactic. She needed to calm him down.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” His plans extended only as far as the lights could reach on the blacktop in front of him.
“You let me go, and you can have your money back.”
His foot came off the gas. “What?” He tried to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Your money. It’s in my car back there. You bring me back, and you can have it all.”
Jacy slid off the hard seat and slammed into the metal backing of the front seat as he smashed the brakes to the floor. She hit the backseat carpet, smelling faintly of vomit and piss from years of abuse by drunk drivers in custody and couldn’t be sure if the dizziness she felt was due to the whack of her forehead on the seat back or the fishtailing of the police car.
• • •
Nash felt his own warm blood mix with the blood already on the knife. He’d remembered the murder weapon as he aimlessly searched for a way out of the cuffs binding his wrists. Bending down to retrieve it from the pool of gore surrounding the dead man, he fought paranoid thoughts of blood borne diseases that the murdered man may have been carrying and tried to concentrate on the sawing motions as he cut away the flex cuffs.
The cuffs released their grip, and he brought his hand around in front of him and examined his self-inflicted wounds. Knicks and scrapes, nothing suicidal. He stood and sprinted to his Honda. He picked up Jacy’s purse from the ground and tossed it inside, then tore away in the direction he saw the police cruiser go.
He forgot what it was like to feel drowsy behind the wheel as he sped down the desolate highway, twin curtains of black on either side. He nervously chewed his lip and tried to scan the road far ahead when he could, searching for signs of the car. He wondered if the call had gotten to Brian yet.
He rounded a bend and on the horizon, saw dancing colors alternating blue and red. He drove for the light and found a one car roadblock. The cruiser angled across both lanes of road, doors open and no one inside.
Nash braked hard and got out, his feet touching down on the double yellow line. He listened. Nothing but a slow wind moving through to better places. A fine methane tang of cow in the air, some live and some fertilizer.
Jacy came out from behind the cruiser, pinned closely to the chest of the gunman who had the state trooper’s gun pressed to her temple. Nash saw a thin line of blood already running down from her scalp. His hands went up again like a reflex.
“I want the money,” the gunman said, his voice full of uncertain threats and desperate wishing.
“I haven’t got it,” Nash said.
“You do too,” Jacy said. “I put it in the car when you ran off.”
Nash defensively wanted to explain his strategy for ditching the maniac in the darkness, and that it had worked, but now was not the time.
“Get it, and she might live,” said the skeletal man.
Nash turned to the Honda and peered in the back seat. The crumpled canvas bag sat there.
“I got it. I got it,” he said. Please don’t shoot was implied. But Nash knew once the crazy man had the money – money he’d already killed for – there would be nothing stopping him from shooting Jacy and Nash. He thought of trying his same method twice – taking the bag of cash and sprinting off into the unplowed fields on the side of the road. Then he spotted Jacy’s purse.
Nash ducked into the car, put one hand on the handle of the canvas bag and plunged the other into Jacy’s purse again, mirroring his earlier hunt for a smoke. His hand searched for her defense-against-Brian gun but found nothing. He risked a quick glance down and saw the gun, dropped outside her purse by the cop when he got shot. Nash scooped up the gun and pulled back out of the car with the bag clearly visible and the gun held behind him.
Nash had shot before, but he was no marksman. The way Jacy was being employed as a human shield at the moment, any shot he got off would have a lottery ticket chance of hitting the gunman and a coin flip chance of hitting her. He walked forward and watched for his opening.
“Here you go. It’s all yours,” Nash said.
“Toss it over,” the gunman said.
“Let her go.”
“After I get the money.”
“No.”
The man pulled tighter on Jacy, pushed the gun harder into the bone of her skull.
“Jesus Christ, Nash,” she said.
“Put the fucking money–”
Nash cut him off. When he bounced at bars, he learned that you never let the drunk dictate the terms. The same went for a wiry dirt bag off his daily bump. Soft serve didn’t work with guys like him. They needed the hard stuff.
“Here’s how it’s gonna go. You let her go and send her over. We get in our car and I drop the bag out the window as I get the fuck away from here and never see you again.”
The man’s pinprick pupils shuddered back and forth in his wide open eyes.
“How about I shoot you both and take what’s mine?”
“If it was yours, I don’t think you’d have had to cut anyone’s throat to get it,” Nash said. Then, ignoring the lucky shots he’d landed in the trooper, he tried to sap some of the man’s confidence. “And we’ve already proven you can’t hit the acre of land you’re standing on with a gun. So let’s do it my way and we all walk away from this alive and well. And you a hell of a lot richer than us.”
“No, no, no, no. Fuck that,” he said. “Fuck you.”
Jacy’s tears glistened in the cruiser’s light show. “Nash, just give him the bag.”
An engine sound reached Nash’s ears before the headlights showed over the nearest rise. A truck, moving north.
“Time to make up your mind,” Nash said. Fuck if he was going to make it out of this place once only to get planted on the side of the road on his way out of town a second time. The ground of this whole damn state sat under an inch thick layer of last year’s cow shit and damned if that would be his final resting place.
“Toss the bag over here.”
“Let her go.”
“Throw me the fucking bag!”
Nash felt a slow drip of his own blood trickle down his wrist and onto the gun hidden behind his hip. “You want your money or not?”
The headlights crested the hill, lighting them for the main event. The semi trailer’s brakes hissed as he saw the police car blocking lanes and the standoff.
The gunman turned to the sound of the straining engine and hydraulic blast of brakes. Jacy pulled with her shoulder and tore away from him. She fell to the ground.
Nash dropped the bag with his left hand, raised Jacy’s pistol with his right, and fired. If the man hadn’t been so perfectly lit up by the semi truck’s headlights, he doubted he would have hit him. But both shots he squeezed off in a tight pair landed in the man’s chest. A spray of blood was backlit in the tractor trailer’s lights as the man fell.
Jacy ran to Nash, stumbling into his arms as the truck finally ground to a halt only feet from the stopped cop car. She started crying, and Nash thought he might too. The weird