Everywhere, Nowhere
By: Edd Jennings
Tags: Short Story, Fiction, Guns, Action, Adventure

Every so often, someone from my family checked on me. To make sure I hadn’t been dead for days or lying sick and unable to help myself. The way I lived struck them as on the edge of dementia. When it appeared I had disappeared and hadn’t been home for days and my red truck went missing, they’d give the license number and description to the sheriff’s department, and I was enough of a figure in the state that the media would pick up the story. These people looking for Tora would see this, and they’d find me at home — at their leisure.

If we ran, I’d lose my truck. The county tax assessors put it as worth a thousand. I’d doubted I could get more’n eight hundred for it. In comparison, a couple of .45 Colt cartridges would cost, let’s see, a little less than four cents apiece for the primers, about two and a half cents apiece for the powder, the cases I’d save, and the lead cost me nothing, old wheel weights melted down. Looked at in that light, I did right not to run.

The way they maintained their distance from each other showed the pair had some kind of training in small unit tactics, if it didn’t offset their inability to move silently. In this dense vegetation, with the small brook running down the center of the hollow, to move in silence would be slow. The old boy with the SMG took the lead.

They worked their way up the incline with the AR-15 old boy, hanging, by this time, fifty yards behind. With only our noses and gun barrels showing over the roots, we didn’t give them much to see. My hat bill protected me; Tora’s hair did the same for her, a light sink in the shadows.

With the SMG wielder was almost on top of us, I still wanted AR-15 dead first. I’d almost wait until the close one spotted us. I didn’t bother tracking him with my front sight. Tora, from the other side of the oak bole, would take care of that. Firing strokes with the Ingram were slow. If he spotted us before I shot AR-15, I could still shoot him first at close range. By the time he reached fifteen yards out, he loomed huge.

Until damn, the Sig cracked. She just couldn’t stand it. He hopped around screaming, “My leg, Tony, my leg. I’m hit.”

At the distance of AR-15, I needed a deep breath before I could shoot. He dropped to the ground hard, fading from sight in the low vegetation.

SMG disappeared under the roll of the hill, still screaming. “Help me, Tony. Help me.”

Not a word, not a sign from Tony.

“You son of a bitch. You can’t leave me like this, Tony. Man, c’mon, man. We’re buds.”

A constant stream. Grating. Next he’d want his mamma. Human nature being human nature, Tony wouldn’t run to the sound of the guns. I caught sight of him belly crawling away, almost to the road, almost a hundred yards. It was all I was going to get. Professional pride, all that, meant less with his partner screaming. It wasn’t fun anymore. Old Tony was lighting out, not good for us.

In this kind of light, a man such as myself with poor eyesight, is likely not to bury a crude sight deep enough into the notch, which compensates and then some for the rainbow trajectory of my Keith .45 Colt cast handloads. I held just below the shoulder blades. Because of my arthritic fingers and the numbing of the cold, I’d left the trigger with a bit of take up, when I fit it to the hammer notch, before it broke at three pounds. The Colt bucked in my hand.

A body squirms one way sliding to a quick, frenzied escape in search of cover, another way with the spasms of a spine hit. This was spine hit spasm. I’d seen it too many times to mistake it.

I dropped a quick sixth round back into the Colt, making sure to pocket the empty. I was cheap. I doubted anybody would search the scene enough to find the empty cartridge case, but it paid to be careful.

SMG screamed again. “Tony, say something. Are you Okay?”

Tora laughed, delightful and fluid. “Tony’s done. We haven’t met. What’s your name?”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

“If you can’t be polite, we’re leaving.”

“No, it ain’t right. Can’t you understand? I’m bleeding, bitch.”

“Not my problem.”

“All right. All right. Anything. Just help me.”

Son of a bitch sounded like he was about to cry. I wasn’t moved. Neither was Tora.

“First, throw your SMG over the hill where I can see it.”

“I can’t reach it.”

“As you wish.”

“You’re going to help me, ain’t you?”

“No.”

All the while I kept my eyes on the last movement of Tony. Every indication was spine hit, which stopped, but didn’t always lead to an immediate death, although without treatment death was certain.

“All right. All right.” The SMG went over the bank where we could see it, landing with a thud.

“The pistol next,” Tora said.

“Bitch,” he screamed, but it too went over the bank.

“Now hands. Show your hands where I can see them.”

He did.

By this time I had Tony’s outline clearly in sight. He had stopped moving and lay, facing in the other direction, sprawled unnaturally in death. It was safe to move.

“I’m approaching.” Off to my left and a little behind me, I heard Tora add, “Move those hands and die.”

We crept over the bank. As I stepped down the hill to check on Tony, I heard Alphonso, amid profuse whining, give his name. She had an affinity it seemed for knowing a man’s name.

Tony had a perfectly good knife, a Benchmade Infidel, a through-the-front opening automatic, I’d always admired. I collected the knife, along with two-thousand dollars from his wallet. I’d seen those wing-tips in a story in GQ in a doctor’s office, eighteen hundred bucks. Inside a minute, I had them unlaced. Those, the Zippo lighter, the AR-15, and extra magazines, which I stuffed down in his over-the-shoulder shooting bag, and I stepped back up the hill toward Tora. I just couldn’t leave this stuff — the waste wouldn’t be right — but the sheriff would see these things missing and if he couldn’t know, he would still recognize it as a signature. Whether Sandy could or would do anything about it was another matter.

I rolled Alphonso over, him spewing obscenities, and pulled a nice Italian leather wallet with another twelve hundred in it. His belt, a beautiful custom affair, slipped out of his trouser loops next.

He asked, “Do you think I need a tourniquet?”

“Hell if I know. I just wanted to see if the belt would fit.” It didn’t. I tossed it in the low laurels. He did seep blood hard, not arterial, but hard from where the 9mm shattered the bone in his right thigh. The ugly hole going out the backside would have probably caused him to go into instant shock had he been able to see it.

To my back Tora asked, “Do you really have to do this?”

I didn’t answer just turned to her, my fist loaded with the thirty-two hundred dollars and asked. “Do you need it?”

She bristled. “I don’t want it.”

“Not what I asked.”

I shoved the wad down the inside pocket of her unzipped leather jacket. She didn’t refuse the familiarity.

“Let’s go,” I told her. We started to walk off.

Alphonso asked, “What about me?” He tried to crawl a little toward us without making a foot of progress, weakening fast.

I said, “Live, die, none of my business.”

On the way out, I thought about puncturing the tires of what I now knew as a GMC Yukon with the new Infidel but couldn’t see risking the blade on what for all I knew could be steel reinforced rubber. Instead, I lifted the hood and took the battery. Be my luck, it wouldn’t fit anything I had. Aside from the battery, which I had to take, the only thing worth getting were a pair of insulated mugs. A forty dollar mug is a forty dollar mug.