Maker's Mark

An ominous black crow, devoid of humanity and grace, assembles on a concrete birdbath doing what birds do when they want to be obvious, teetering on the lip, wings flapping off dirty mosquito rain water. I will kick that mosquito breeder over before I leave and hopefully he will still be there when I do. The crow's body is like a fat soaked oil rag and in his enormity, he doesn’t seem to belong this close to the earth. 

I have never seen a crow at night, I realize. My senses are sharpened, adrenaline rushes through my veins, and the red brick chips beneath my feet sound like riotous mobs smashing storefront windows with bricks. My cigarette tastes rich and with the aftertaste of whiskey in my mouth, there is an orgy of flavor. Not at all frightened by me, that crow doesn’t leave as I approached. He remained, defiantly. Fuck you, he said. The backyard smelled like fat red roses, the color making their scent distinct. I knew it before I opened the iron privacy gate closing it behind me softly, not latching it. The roses were hiding behind the khaki-painted cinderblock wall. An old dog barked lethargically but stopped when I petted her. Her tags jingled off a worn red leather collar. Her eyes were cloudy but her nose was working over my pant leg reverently. She rolled over on her back on the walkway and begged me to rub her belly which I did with the sole of my shoe that was burnt from snuffing cigarette butts. It was dark but I knew that those roses were red because I attended enough funerals to know that much, to differentiate them from lilies, or mums, or carnations, or dreadful orchids, or roses of some other color, and distinctly from the perfume of fat women. 

I go to the funerals of everyone I off. Off is the best way to describe what it is that I do, what I am again about to do. The house was stucco Southwestern modern, two stories, lit up like a paper lantern. The backyard was mostly brick chips, an idle swimming pool in the back corner with a lagoon feel to it, lizards scurrying, a filter that hummed softly, dead patio furniture, lounge chairs, a shrouded grill, and a basketball hoop with a jump rope hanging off the rim making it look a little like the gallows. I stood there like a cactus with their Judas dog at my side, looking in through their double-paned window with the ADT sticker that should make me shiver. There was no motion light. I knew that yesterday. They could not see me in the backyard. I was someone who never existed to them. Someone that will never exist. He was in the kitchen smiling, laughing, helping a child with the dishes as though he had never done anything wrong in his life. I have always hated actors. 

            I pulled my Ruger 9mm, the same sleek color as that goddamn crow, from the waistband of my black Calvin Klein’s and held it up to that perfect window above the sink. The old dog was sitting obediently to my side looking up at me indifferent to the instrument in my hand, ignorant maybe, or simply too old to give a damn. He was such an easy mark but I would have preferred to have done him more personally, with my knife, the slow torture of a thousand cuts, or to have burned the house to the ground. I steadied the pistol and got the slob in the crosshairs, his billboard forehead down a perfect straight invisible line from my barrel and I held it there. It was foreplay to me. He moved only slightly and the gun barrel followed him, and with the gun barrel, the sight, and with the sight, my keen left eye that never blinked. Wide open. Steady. My right eye tightly shut, my head tilted slightly right. I could hear the old dog pant steadily, louder and louder. I could hear the crow in the birdbath, crickets chattering, a moth bouncing off a neighbor’s porch light, the pool filter hummmmmm. I could smell the fat red roses. 

I wouldn’t miss. Not from this distance assuredly, but I could even take a few steps back and stand at the gate and be confident that I would deliver an equally perfect shot. The knife that would have slit the dog’s throat, had the dog not been so cordial, dangled from my black belt. I waited for just the right moment, perhaps for him to look up, look for the pooch, something, but he was reticent. I waited patiently. I was in no hurry. I tried not to think about him personally—how he had affected my life. My hand was steady; my arm was outright, locked, moving with his forehead like a swinging gate in a feeble wind. I heard the crow again repeating the same ridiculous ceremony as it had when I entered. Then I had him. He looked up and out into nothing. A perfect last look as though he was clipped up with metal clothespins on a target at the range and I adjusted the toggle to my fancy. I pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The dog sensed my agitation and barked twice. Normally, I don’t make such a mistake but I was frazzled. I knew this was it for me. The safety was locked so the trigger only depressed slightly with no satisfaction on my end. A reprieve? Amnesty? It was a perfect opportunity blown or gained. Some say that things happen for a reason. Fate, or whatever bullshit theoretical concept, steps in and takes over interfering like a meddlesome mother, mother night, perhaps. Or maybe it was God himself. The Big Cheese. God’s invisible hand swooped down from the purple clouds and disabled my gun so I couldn’t shoot, so the bullet couldn’t penetrate the glass effortlessly, so the slob wouldn’t fall with soapy hands in the kitchen and bleed out the back all over the ceramic-tiled floor in front of his wife and kids with a perfect hole in his head. So that an ambulance wouldn’t have to come and a funeral wouldn’t have to be arranged and fat women wouldn’t perfume themselves and flowers wouldn’t be snipped and put into corny baskets and sold for way too much for the ceremonial fraud. I would have shot his wife, too, had I been asked to do so, or even if I was given some manner of indifference to her death. She was involved and as guilty as him but K didn’t want her to die. I don’t even think she wanted him to die. The slobs had three children who would then have to be raised in a foster home or by grandparents in Florida who are too old to understand. Slobs beget slobs, I told K over the phone. She was silent. Why the fuck did she care about them?

But fate didn’t remain in his favor. My thumb clicked off the safety and the sound spooked the crow which flew off squawking as it ascended to wherever birds go at night which caused the slob inside with the receding hairline and that billboard forehead, perfect as a paper target to look up, yet again. Perhaps he saw a glimmer of the gun, my burning cigarette, or my faint outline in the moonlight. He froze. I like to think he knew it was coming. I pulled the trigger, it consummated its purpose, and God didn’t save him. 

....

I met K at an Applebee’s a week before. Wasn’t my choice. I left it up to her and that was a place she felt sure I would see off 24 in Paducah. The sign reached up from the side of the highway battling a contingent of other chain and box store signs lit in all sorts of vibrant trademarked colors. I wondered if they paid by elevation. It was the same sign that I had seen in a million different cities. I would wager that if I scaled the pole with a tape measure it would be the same size as the sign in Cleveland, or Altoona. I pulled my rental car in a safe discreet spot, perfect on time, 9:30 on the nose by my Timex and the car radio. I waited there for a few moments smoking a cigarette, fast hard drags. It lit my face in the warm dark night. Yews in the mulched flowerbed stood by silently. Her car wasn’t in the lot, unless she lied about the make and model which is always a possibility. But she wasn’t in the restaurant I could see through the window. The chubby high school girl at the door who by design was dressed in all black, smiled, greeted me bubbly with the rehashed company line and asked “how many” in such a manner that asking “how many” would not sound in anyway like an inconvenience, even if I dropped a “32” on her. I smiled, didn’t say anything to her as I walked to the bar. She was paid to be kind and I hadn’t the time or a desire for such phoniness. It was already bad enough being in Applebee’s.

            “Maker’s Mark. Straight,” I said to the bartender before I sat down.

            He smiles, fills a short glass and sits it perfectly on a napkin before me. He is younger, goofy-looking, with bleached orange hair and grins too much about nothing for me to like. I was two drinks in and the Beach Boys were singing when I heard her. The door opened and she entered, which is the simple way to put it. She found me at the bar. I was the man in all black who doesn’t work here with the red rose pinned to the lapel of his suit-coat. It would have been safer had I instructed her to dress a certain way so to avoid a possible set-up, but perhaps it was the John Dillinger in me that preferred me to be identifiable. And by the time of the meeting, after dozens of discreet talks, I was more than comfortable with whom I was to meet, feeling assured that it wasn’t a trap. We sat at a table by a cheap framed picture of Marilyn Monroe and blue wall-mounted snow skis that had surely never touched snow; she was too young for the bar. A thin buggy waitress gave us large plastic menus and buzzed about the table like a vexatious mosquito. I told her to go away, my eyes with a citronella glare. She and the hostess were probably mocking me in their symposium near the front door. They looked my way several times and I smiled at them cementing my asshole status in the annals of Applebee’s history.

K was young and pretty with an elevation of five feet, paid for by the inch, perfect Snow White lips, and crystal blue eyes, the color of the gas tank of a carousel motorcycle that I remember from a carnival when I was very young, spinning around looking for my father who was the fat blur in a black suit. Pictures simply do not represent the whole of a person. It is why Playboys never did it for me and why Marilyn Monroe has always been just another bleach-blonde. K has big teen breasts that ache for freedom like Libya before ousting the bra that was Colonel Gadhafi this summer. We must be a curious spectacle. Father-daughter, perhaps? I, an old lost murderer living on a gross inheritance, graying in all the wrong places, haggard-looking, crooked nose, a jagged scar on my left cheek, clean shaven, pale skin, tired watery eyes, teeth like broken glass, tucked up in a black suit like someone who never left a funeral, doused in expensive cologne as though that would redeem me—my daily Sax Fifth Avenue baptismal.

            “Are we free to talk?” she asked.

            “It is why we are here.” I took another drink. She looked enviously at my glass. “You want one?”

            “No,” she laughed awkwardly. “I’m not old enough.”

            “I won’t tell if you don’t tell. It is the nature of our business.”

            “No, Mr. Black. I don’t drink much anyway. Drinking is why I am here, you might say.”

            “No, no, nooooo!” I replied quickly. “You are here because there are monsters in the world that prey upon beautiful things. Don’t blame my Maker’s Mark or its family.”

            “I’m sorry,” she said feebly. It looked as though she was going to cry.

            “Don’t. Please...” The waitress brought the food, smiling like an idiot, like she wanted us to kiss her feet for it. I refused. K ate light—a salad, some wings both that she pecked at like a small bird. I had the salmon. I knew it was frozen when I walked through the door but what do you expect from Applebee’s, or chains that pride themselves on uniformity? They have formulas for profit at the expense of quality.

            “I’m sorry,” she repeated meekly. She held back a storm.

            “I just told you not to apologize.”

            “I thought you meant not to cry.”

            “No. I don’t mind you crying. It is perfectly understandable in your condition. But apologizing is a sign of weakness unless you did something to warrant an apology. And before you say you did, silly rabbit, I mean some physical thing like stepping on someone’s foot, or rear-ending them in traffic. Or something egregious.”

            She looked at my plate of pink fish and steamed Caribbean rice that was as Caribbean as I am. I held up the glass so the buzzing waitress could see that I was in need of a refill. She had brought me a glass of water with a lemon wedge that sat uselessly on the table. I didn’t ask for water. The waitress abhorred me. I am okay with that. I didn’t want to fuck or marry her. “You eat a lot of fish?” K asked.

            “Yes. I’m a vegetarian.”

            She looked surprised. “But fish...”

            “Jesus ate fish. So I eat fish. I don’t want to debate that tonight.”

            “Sorry. Oops. Um, well, are you religious?” she asked excitably. “I’m a Mormon.”

            “Not particularly. Just fond of Jesus...and fish. And that’s nice. It is good to have faith, even if you are wrong.” I hate waiting for a drink from the bar. I sat the empty glass down angrily, more than once and it made a significant thud like a gavel. The goofy bastard bartender was chatting with some twerps about Kentucky basketball. He looked like an orange-headed abstract John Cusack. They are loud and obnoxious. “Fill my drink,” I growled angrily under my breath. He couldn’t possibly hear me. My messages were purely telepathic. Then I looked back to K who was looking at me like I was a Picasso hanging in a gallery, trying to make sense of me. “Look this isn’t about me. But if it helps you to know a little I’ll give you a brief overview. Ask me anything. You have,” I said looking at my Timex, “ninety-seven seconds. Go.” I had never given anyone the opportunity. Perhaps, it was a new more personal approach to my business.

            She smiled. “What don’t you like?”

            “I don’t like cell phones. I think people are fucking idiots texting and talking on them every goddamn place they go. Adults playing idiot bird and castle games. Fucking ridiculous.”

            “But you own one?”

            “Necessity. I don’t abuse it. No games or texts.”

“What do you like?”

            “Maker’s Mark.”

            “That it?”

            “Speak of the Devil...” My drink arrived. I took a quick drink. My eyes met the bartender’s exonerating him for his lassitude. “Pretty much.”

            “I wish I was more like you.”

            "No you don't."

            “You have a family?”

            “Sure.”

            “Kids?”

            “What do you think?”

            “You’re scary.”

            “That’s not so bad.”

            “No,” she smiled. “It’s a good kind of scary. Like a rhinoceros at the zoo. Why don’t you eat meat?”

            “Jesus,” I reminded her.

            “Oh, that’s right. Well, what makes you eat fish?”

            “I don’t understand them.”

            “You understand cows and pigs? Chickens?”

            I looked at my Timex. “Yes. Perfectly.”

            “Is your real name, Mr. Black?”

            “Nowhere close.”

            “Are you really twenty-eight?”

            “And then some.”

            “Will I see you again after tonight?”

            “Not by design.”

            “By accident?”

            “Who’s to say?”

            She paused. I knew what was next before it came. It hovered in the air like a crow before it landed to peck the graying dead flesh of an old conversation. “How will you...”

            “I told you. No details, love.” I said laconically.

            “I’m sorry.” She instantly regretted another fruitless apology. I glared. She wanted to say sorry for saying sorry. “I’ve been apologizing my entire life...”

“Well, not anymore.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

            I smiled. “Time’s up.”

            She drank her water the way a child does through a straw, leaning into the glass with five pink fingernails on the plastic shaft. She was very childlike and innocent. She once said that it is what she hated most about the rape. Not the physical pain, or the torture, or the betrayal of trust, or the mental scarring, but losing her innocence. She had told me every detail of it and it burned in my mind as I sat across from her like a raging house fire with no survivors. Even the pets were charred. Sitting across from her I knew she hadn’t lost anything. Everything was stolen but no matter what I did I couldn’t give it back. I had done this a hundred times but I had never realized that what I thought I accomplished and what I accomplished might not be the same. She was more than a frayed nylon thread and I was less than a flame. She was a fractured little girl stumbling into womanhood and I was her glue. At least, I wanted to be her glue. Normally, it doesn’t go this way. Normally, I wouldn’t have bought dinner or even sat at a table. I wouldn’t have given this any thought. We would have shared a drink and she would have written the name and address down on a napkin, or what she knew, and I would have left quickly with it in my pocket. The more time I spent with her, the greater the chance I could be identified in the inevitable investigation which would happen for she had filed a police report that went nowhere. There wasn’t enough evidence and she waited four days to report it. The police report would be motive. But I didn’t want to stop drinking or eating the fish. I didn’t want the ninety-seven seconds to end but it did. I knew I had to stay on task. Think…

I fucking hate Applebee’s. I’ve been in a million of these dank closets, cluttered walls with fake memorabilia and hokey waitresses, hostesses and bartenders, all aspiring actors or writers—dreamers too good for factory work or a farm. Even the music seemed orchestrated and fake and I was sure it was full of subliminal messages saying "try an appetizer," or "have a dessert," or "have another drink," or "don't forget to tip your waiter or waitress." The menus are designed by some overpaid graphic design company and the check books are the same black plastic everywhere you go with the little clear slot for your credit card. The architecture is all the same, even the landscaping, those yews. At least they serve my Maker’s Mark.

            I pushed the napkin forward with a pen. “Name and address,” I said sternly. She looked down at the empty white square and swallowed. She swallowed a thousand doubts and spasms of morality. She stared at the simple white napkin and the pen. The waitress retrieved my empty plate and brought me another drink. K breathed a few deep breaths. Her breasts inflated like peach balloons. “Name and address,” I repeated. “I drove seven hours. You said you were sure.”

            “I know. But what am I if I write it down? That is the question I can’t stop asking myself. It’s doing pirouettes in my head.”

            “What are you if you do not? If you don’t do this, he will hurt others."

            She swallowed again. More doubts washed away, drowned, a flooding. She drank the water carefully through the straw as though it would help. Finally, she took the pen in hand and wrote it quickly before she had time to change her mind. I took the napkin and looked at it. She even gave me the zip-code. I left three twenties for the check, stood up and adjusted my coat. I unpinned the rose from my lapel and laid it on the table. “I will send you an email when it is over. It will give no details. It will say only, ‘I love the smell of red roses.’” She was crying when I left but I hadn’t the time or the ability to console her. I hadn't the heart. I rubbed her shoulder as I passed and I presume the mosquito waitress thought it was a harsh break-up, and feasting on K, I’m sure she said all sorts of dreadful things about me, plenty of fish, on and on. I watched through the window. That night at the hotel I fell asleep watching The Wizard of Oz, drifting away around the time of the Tin Man.

....

            I have to admit I thought Paducah was nothing more than 24 and the smattering of chains and box stores broken out on either side of it like a venereal disease along five exits. There was a proliferation of vibrant-colored signs of varying elevations, corporate inducements, Walmarts, truck stops, cheap souvenirs, fast food restaurants this way, that way, semi-trucks idling in large open gravel lots, and road signs promising so many miles to St. Louis, “Gateway to the West.” Everything is dreadfully repeated no matter where you go. K texted me the next morning and asked me to meet her downtown for lunch. I agreed though I knew I was risking my life in so doing. But I couldn’t say no. In the brief moment I was around her I felt some twitch that I never had before; I felt as though I belonged somewhere, as though I was back on that motorcycle carousel. My father died when I was six and I was raised by an aunt who placidly bragged that she was the first person ever officially diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder. I followed the directions K gave me, off the highway, down a street that looked less and less like a major route and more like home the further I went. My mind raced with a flurry of thoughts. Black crows gathered in my head picking me apart. There is sadly no difference in anything anymore along the highway. I remembered being on Route 66 on my way to off a slob in Tempe who had raped a co-ed. It was a sad road and all the old motels with once proud neon intricate signs boasting clever names were dilapidated rat holes and the rusted signs looked in danger of falling off the poles. The new highway did that, the Holiday Inn Expresses, Motel 6s, McDonalds’s, Walmarts and Burger Kings. Someday when people, safe in a space station, or exiled on another planet talk about the death of Earth they will say that it was because of the highway, the bypass, and man’s insatiable desire for profit, power and fossil fuels. It will not be attributed to madmen like me, murderers trimming the fat of humanity for its own good. I believe I could ask her to marry me. What a damn fool thought that was. Juxtaposed to her, my soul feels alive. I feel a heartbeat where I had none. At least a tick. I breathe, when I had spent a lifetime in slow suffocation.

            We met by the flood wall. There was an old train engine that had run out of track, stalled for tourists in front of the wall. It was Thursday morning and there was hardly anyone about which only added to the appeal of it for me. It felt like we were the only two people in Paducah, the real town. A few people walked by us looking at the mural along the back of the wall which depicted famous floods from the town’s past, evoking old ghosts and local events and people that have died but still live. There was a convention center near it, a modern-looking building with an impressive glass front and a giant quilt hanging in the rotunda. Quilting is a big thing in Paducah and I was not lost to the wonderful metaphor that it is done by hand and not able to be cheaply replicated or mass produced. Everything was preserved beautifully. We walked around the small town, down brick alleys, past an ice cream shop where a kid in a paper hat served out scoops of ice cream into waffle cones. He was the kind of kid I could see K with. I asked her if she wanted an ice cream but she regretfully said no. I wanted one but I wouldn’t admit it. There was a bed and breakfast, where I wished I would have stayed, and would have had I known of it. There were antique shops and museums, a few cafés, Whaler’s—a wonderful seafood restaurant with a large wooden outdoor patio that resembled a giant two-story dock. If the town ever flooded again, surely you could still sit there and eat as it did—the patio is high enough on the large wood pillars. We ducked into an art shop that sold homemade soaps, sculpture and various local art, some expensive, some cheap. I bought her a piece. It was a metal rhinoceros. “So you don’t forget me,” I smiled.

            “A rhinoceros?” she laughed.

            “Scary. But the good scary. Like at the zoo.” Its horn was sculpted from the tip of deer antler by the lady who owned the shop. She said her husband shot the deer and they used every part of it, saying nobly, it is what Native-Americans would do. The fur was on the back of a wooden Indian created not by God, a spirit in the sky, or evolution, but by a chainsaw. I shouldn’t have spoken to her; with every word she was consuming me. I was getting lax and I knew this could cost me but I couldn’t help it. If the investigation led back to here, a relationship would be established and I would be questioned. An older scary-looking, scar-faced man with a young pretty girl is a curious relationship, certainly suspect. I paid with cash but I had to withdraw money from an ATM for the $145 piece of art. K held her rhinoceros like a toy poodle. A few doors down she took my hand and pulled me into a chocolate shop. Two old women were gabbing, waiting for us behind the glass counter. They were talking about something that had happened in 1974 to someone they knew. Some fantastic murder. A doctor chopped up his wife and buried her remains in Caldwell County. This wasn’t good for me and to make matters worse, K knew one of the ladies who quickly asked how her mother was doing before looking at me distrustfully. The other lady removed the metal lids on the glass jars as we ordered piece by piece. As the wood-floor creaked beneath my feet I could hear her telling police exactly what I ordered, recalling the weight of the tiger-butter and white chocolate peanut clusters to the tenth of an ounce.

            After lunch we walked along the Ohio River. We had to walk down a large concrete embankment and she taught me how to walk down without falling. Zigzag. I couldn’t imagine the water ever rising so high to overcome the town as it had, according to the mural. It seemed like such an impossible feat. She asked me not to go to Utah, saying that she was fine and that she had forgiven the man and his wife for that night. “One night,” she says, “shouldn’t define anyone. For better or worse.” But I hadn’t forgiven them. A family pulling a small boat in a red truck pulled in near us as we walked the bottom of the concrete bank. They waved hospitably and I was insentiently envious. Water splashed up onto the shore not like a tide, but as though being displaced by an invisible fat man who had just sat down in it. I thought of my father who was very obese; it was a heart attack that took him. We walked on further, leaving the conversation of our business alone. She slid her hand in mine and I stopped before I stepped on a dead fish that had washed up on shore. Its silvery-body glimmered in the sunlight, as though it could recoup and swim away given a boost or a cardiac massage, but it had no eye in its head and the hollow socket looked at me, empty and eerily. I had seen a hundred dead bodies but never had anything struck me so effectually to make me stand there and stare, completely lost.

            “It’s a buffalo fish,” she said. “My dad taught me.”

            Silence.

            “Are you okay?”

            “I wonder how it died. Why it washed up. And what happened to its eye.”

            “A crow probably ate it,” she said. Behind us on top of the bank there was a row of locust trees where the crows were waiting. If I could throw stones with my eyes they would have been cast like machine-gun fire and those dreadful birds would have scattered. Instead, they mocked me. I reached into my suit coat pocket and grabbed my flask for a quick drink. I stood there staring at the fish. It was the saddest thing in the world to me. The water from the river rocked it back and forth pathetically like a mother might rock a dead baby, or a baby in the arms of a dead mother. I couldn’t understand.

            “You want a drink?” I asked dolefully.

            She considered it. “Maker’s Mark?”

            “What else is there?" I smiled.

            She smiled and took a swill. She drank it effortlessly and I was impressed. There was no harsh reflex, no bitter face or gagging. It was like she was drinking water. “I shouldn’t drink anymore,” she resolved. “Not in my condition...”

            “A snip never hurt anyone. In the old days they said a drink or two would make the baby smaller and labor easier...”

            “Will you stay?”

            “Stay?”

            “With me? Or let me go with you. I love you.”

            I was in the same condition as that poor buffalo fish. No better, no worse. Sometimes death comes when you are still living. You die before you go anywhere, and the rest of your life is a succession of strung-along days of existing that fail to live up to one single day that defines what happiness is, or would have been. To know that I was offered everything and that I would have to turn it down meant that no day would ever be better for me and, henceforth, I was effectually deceased, lost in the shadows. If there was a quilt of my life it would be all black fabric and consist of nothing but dead eyeless fish, black crows, handguns and whiskey bottles. I took another drink as though the Maker’s Mark would give me an answer. Help me to say yes. The flask was empty.

            “Or am I ruined to you? Like the fish.”

            “No. You aren’t. You’re perfect. This town is perfect. I am ruined. I am an old dead man who walks and breathes, displaced, just like that fish. Much older than I look.” I had nothing else left to say. I walked up the embankment and looked up the dress of the locust tree at the leafless branches where the crow perched that undoubtedly ate the eye of the fish. He waited for another to wash up. I promised never to be him in another life. In the next life I would be a fish. This would be the last job. She called and ran after me. I kept walking but she at last caught up before I reached the rental car and said she had my payment; she’d nearly forgotten. I had forgotten too that long ago over the phone we discussed it, jokingly. I never did this to be paid. It once filled some black hole in me, gave me purpose, but now perhaps that black hole was filled and no more would fit. I don’t even know why I did it. She reached into a red backpack and pushed aside the metal rhinoceros carefully and pulled out a folded olive-green bar towel delicately. It wasn’t a gift for the murder I was to commit, once on her behalf and now on my own. When the investigation came to the point where two meaty dipshit detectives with crew-cuts in a small warm room asked me if I was hired, I would say no, concretely. I would say that I loved her and wanted the sonofabitch to pay for what he did because toe-headed cocksucking policemen in Utah didn’t do a goddamn thing about it. She unwrapped it and saying nothing for how difficult it must have been for her to get, she handed me the contents saying the world in two words. “Thank you.”

Contents: a sole bottle of Maker’s Mark.