Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“You may never see your family again.”

“I never see them now.”

Walking to her apartment after dinner, he admitted, “I lied to you earlier. I do worry.” For some reason he felt sad. “Can we bathe together again tonight?”

Lee touched his face with both palms. “Of course, my love.”

Going into her building, neither of them suspected that they were being watched.

At ten the next morning, Morgan strode into the Dingo Club, two pistols and ammo in a belt around his waist, an Uzi 9mm machine gun and web belt of extra magazines slung over one shoulder, carrying the Mossberg shotgun in one hand.

The club, not yet open, was empty except for Donahue at his usual table. Halfway back to it, Morgan stopped cold. Donahue had a glass and bottle in front of him, telling Morgan that something was very wrong. No professional soldier drank before a fight; you didn’t want alcohol in your system if you might be wounded. Walking on up to the table, Morgan stood there, waiting for Donahue to speak.

“The operation’s off, lad,” the Irishman finally said.

“What’s happened, Donny?”

Donahue looked up at him forlornly, his expression desolate, eyes mournful.

“Your brother Virgil was put on trial at seven o’clock this morning. He was found guilty at eight. And he was hanged at nine.”

Morgan was thunderstruck. “Virgil—? He’s been — hanged ?”

“I just got the news a bit ago. I’m sorrier than I can say, lad.”

Shock overwhelming him, Morgan sat down heavily on one of the chairs, laying the Mossberg on the table, dropping the Uzi and web belt to the floor next to him. His lips parted wordlessly, incredulously.

“One of the guards I bribed got word to me,” Donahue said. “I’m truly, truly sorry, Morgan. I really wanted to have a go at this one. With you. Your brother. I was gonna make it my last big raid. I really wanted it—” Tears came to the big Irishman’s eyes. He poured a drink, but did not raise the glass. Instead he angrily propelled both glass and bottle off the table with the sweep of an arm. “Oh, damn them! God damn them to hell!”

The two men sat in silence, not looking at each other, for what seemed like a long time. Around them, club employees began to straggle in and begin making the club ready for its noon opening.

Hanged, Morgan thought, shaking his head dully. It was almost too heinous to imagine. Virgil, hanged.

Finally, Morgan rose from his chair. “We’re set to fly out with Benny Cone at four, if you want to come along.”

Donahue shook his head slightly. “Thanks anyway, lad.”

Leaving the Mossberg and Uzi and ammo, Morgan walked out of the club.

At Lee’s apartment, the door was ajar. Frowning, Morgan drew his Glock, thumbed the safety off, and eased inside. Lee’s father was sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead as if in a stupor.

“Where is she?” Morgan asked.

The father smiled slightly. “I watched you last night,” he said. “I saw you come in here with her and I waited all night until you came out this morning. I know that you have dishonored her and she has dishonored my family. Shame has been cast over me. Now that shame is erased.”

Morgan’s already ashen face blanched even more pallid and horror clouded his eyes. He went into the bedroom.

Lee lay on her back, still wearing the plain white cotton gown she had pulled on to say goodbye to him at her door. Her face was whiter even than Morgan’s, whiter than the white cotton gown, whiter than the pristine white satin sheets on the bed. Her throat had been cut and the blood in which she lay had dried almost black under her head.

Morgan sighed a great, hollow sigh and thought: This is my punishment for the life I’ve led. He felt deep remorse that Lee had been punished too.

Walking back to where her father sat, Morgan raised the Glock and put the muzzle between the man’s eyes.

“Shoot me,” Lee’s father said. “Kill me. I do not care. I did what was right. I face death without shame.”

Morgan thumbed the safety of the Glock back on. “No,” he said. “You live with it.”

He left the man sitting there.

Stretched out on the empty cargo deck of the Constellation about five minutes after it was airborne, Morgan heard Benny Cone call back to him from the cockpit.

“Hey, Tenny! We got off by the skin of our teeth! They just closed the airport!”

Morgan went forward to the cockpit. “What happened?”

“It just came over the air from the tower. There’s some kind of rebel army attacking Pul-e-Charki prison. The place is under siege. Prisoners are escaping like ants.”

Son of a bitch, Morgan thought. Donny’s doing it anyway. He’s getting his last big raid.

“The radio say anything about a big fire on the other side of the city? A lumberyard?” he asked Cone.

“Nope. Just the attack on the prison.”

Good for you, Michaleen, Morgan thought. Just you against the prison, with no diversionary tactic. One on one. Way to go.

Going back aft in the plane, Morgan stretched out again. For a brief moment, he felt guilty about not being there with Donahue. Then he thought of Lee and the guilt faded.

Lee would forever be with him.

And he would never kill again.

© 2007 by Ed Gorman

Booklist recently called Ed Gorman a “modern master,” and his latest Sam McCain novel, Fools Rush In (Pegasus), received a starred review in Library Journal . The following Gorman story will also appear soon in the limited-edition collection Midnight Premiere , edited by Tom Piccirilli (CD Publications). An advance review from Booklist raves: “There isn’t a single unrewarding entry [in the book]!”

Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Jason Fanning. Not that I probably need an introduction. Not to be immodest but I did, after all, win last year’s Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Same with my two friends: Bill Leigh, the Academy Award-winning actor, and Spence Spencer, who won the Academy Award two years ago for Best Director. People with our credentials don’t need any introductions, right?

Well...

That’s the kind of thing we talked about nights, after Video Vic’s closed down for the night and we sat around Bill’s grubby apartment drinking the cheapest beer we could find and watching schlock DVDs on his old clunker of a TV set. Someday we were going to win the Academy Award for our respective talents and everybody who laughed at us and called us geeks and joked that we were probably gay... well, when we were standing on the stage with Cameron Diaz hanging all over us...

We had special tastes in videos, the sort of action films and horror films that were the staples of a place like Video Vic’s.

If it’s straight-to-video, we probably saw it. And liked it. All three of us were on Internet blogs devoted to what the unknowledgeable (read: unhip) thought of as shitty movies. But we knew better. Didn’t Nicholson, Scorsese, De Niro, and so forth all get their start doing low-ball movies for Roger Corman?

That’s how we were going to win our Academy Awards when we finally got off our asses and piled into Spence’s eight-year-old Dodge Dart and headed for the land of gold and silicone. We knew it would be a little while before the money and the fame started rolling in. First we’d have to pay our dues doing direct-to-video. We were going to pitch ourselves as a team. My script, Bill’s acting, Spence’s name-above-the-title directing.

In the meantime, we had to put up with working minimum-wage jobs. Mine was at Video Vic’s, a grimy little store resting on the river’s edge of a grimy little Midwestern city that hadn’t been the same since the glory days of the steamboats Mark Twain wrote so much about.