Victor Gischler - The Pistol Poets

“Goddammit!” Stubbs’s face flushed. He spit when he yelled. “You think I’m kidding? You don’t think I’ll blow your fucking head off?”

The pier hadn’t been built for cars. The boards rattled, creaked. The Mercedes bounced violently. Morgan sideswiped a trash can, debris exploding upward, drifting down again on the Gulf breeze. Morgan hit the accelerator.

Stubbs reached over Morgan, tried to grab the wheel. Morgan pushed him away, steered one-handed. Stubbs went for the keys, and Morgan punched over his shoulder, tried to get Stubbs in the face. They picked up speed.

“Are you crazy?” Stubbs had gone back to waving the gun. He still leaned into the front seat, tried to threaten Morgan with the.45 and grab the wheel at the same time. “I swear to God I’m going to do it. I’ll blast a hole in your face. Hit the brakes.”

“You’re all talk.” Morgan swerved between the guardrails, clipped one on the left with a sharp crack, splintered wood. The left headlight winked out. The end of the pier sped toward them in near darkness. Stubbs was tossed around in the backseat, but righted himself quickly, shoved the gun against Morgan’s neck. He kept with the threats, shouted himself hoarse.

Morgan didn’t care. He half expected- half wanted -the bullet. Let it come. Bring on the hot flash of blood, fragmented skull. He could pitch forward into sweet, eternal nothingness.

The Mercedes exploded through the wooden railings at the end, slipped the surly bonds of earth, pier, and reality. They seemed to hover. Stubbs screamed something, the pistol gone from Morgan’s neck. Neither wore a seat belt. Morgan felt himself float up and away, weightless, breathless.

Then gravity.

The long, awkward plummet.

It wasn’t more than twelve feet down to the water, but the Mercedes in freefall took a lifetime to plunge the distance. It smacked the water, the impact throwing Morgan against the windshield. He bounced back into the seat. A blur of water and darkness and dashboard lights. The windshield looked down into the depths, the remaining headlight flailing against the black of the Gulf.

Chilling panic. Morgan saw himself going down with the car, pictured the salty water rising over his head, his lungs burning for air. A strangled cry of fear, desperate. It had come out of his own mouth.

He clawed at the automatic windows, lowered the one on the driver’s side. The Gulf poured in. But the water came slowly. The Mercedes floated near the level of the lapping waves. The hood of the car tilted down into the water, but the rear remained above the surface.

Morgan scrambled through the window.

“Morgan!” Anger, panic, rage mixed in Stubbs’s voice. “God-damn you. Come back here, Morgan. I’m stuck. Morgan!”

Morgan paid no attention. Stubbs continued to scream after him.

Morgan squirmed through the window, bobbed on the freezing water. Went under, swallowed water, kicked to the surface, and coughed. Gulped for air. The shore was a smear of fuzzy light. It seemed about two hundred miles away. Muffled screams still came out of the Mercedes.

Morgan kicked toward shore. He wasn’t a strong swimmer. Water smacked his face, stung his eyes. He sputtered, stroked. His arms ached with exertion and cold. He was going numb, shivering.

Morgan felt the bottom sooner than he’d expected, stood in the waist-deep water, and trudged to land. Waves pushed him in the right direction. He made it to the beach, collapsed into the sand, chest heaving with burning breaths.

He propped himself up on an elbow, looked back toward the end of the pier. For a second he thought the Mercedes had gone down, the black against the night made it hard to spot. But there it was, the back end still visible, taillights like the eyes of a demon.

Morgan watched. The Mercedes bobbed. It looked to Morgan like the front bumper was bouncing against the sandy bottom. It was pretty shallow, even that far out. Each time it bobbed, more water poured through the open front window, the tide inching it farther out and away from the pier. The car was sinking slowly, and he hadn’t seen Deke get out.

Morgan watched, still gasping breath, as the Gulf of Mexico slowly ate Dirk Jakes’s new Mercedes.

The son of a bitch had left him. Stubbs had threatened, begged, screamed his throat raw, but Morgan didn’t come back.

When Morgan had taken the Mercedes airborne, Stubbs had lost himself. He’d floated, turned, the night sky a tumbling blur. The whole car had shuddered with the impact of water. Stubbs had hit the floor, his hands flying out to protect him.

His left hand had slid under the car seat in front of him. He heard a crack. Something had come apart under the seat. His fingers had wedged between the metal tracks just as the seat had suddenly shifted backward. His four fingers had been crushed, trapped, pain lancing past his elbow, up to the shoulder.

He’d screamed for Morgan to come back.

Now he pulled hard on his hand. If he could, he’d yank the fingers out of their sockets. He couldn’t see the hand, but he knew it was ruined. The water was up to his neck. The pain was nothing compared to the water’s relentless rise. Stubbs did not want to drown helpless in the dark. He gritted his teeth, pulled, grunted. He felt the skin of his fingers rip and pull away along the bone.

And the cold water still came.

“Oh, God.” Stubbs thrashed, tried to work the fingers loose. “Oh, God, please.” His free hand groped, tried to find leverage, anything to help get free. His hand landed on the tools. A hammer, some chisels.

A saw.

The water was halfway over Stubbs’s Adam’s apple. He stretched, craned his neck, gulped air. “Please, God.” He grabbed the saw, held it tight. Tears stung his eyes. “Please.” He lifted his head for another lungful of air, the water level hovering at his bottom lip.

He put the saw against his arm just above the wrist. The back of the seat kept him from going lower. Stubbs was already halfway through the bone when it occurred to him it might have been easier if he had just put the.45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The dark waters closed over him, the Mercedes gently bouncing against the sandy bottom, tiptoeing out to sea.

Moses Duncan unlocked the door to his dark little farmhouse, Eddie right behind him. He was tired and pissed and cold and hungry. He felt for the light switch.

Then the hands.

They grabbed him from all directions; Eddie too. Moses tried to twist away and earned a fist on the side of the head.

A voice. “Be still, bitch.”

He was thrown to the floor, facedown. A kick in the ribs. Moses whuffed air, heard Eddie mumble fear noises. Somebody turned on the lights.

“Damn,” Moses shouted. “Take what you want.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Another kick, but halfhearted this time.

A black man in a purple suit knelt in front of Moses. He grinned, no humor touching his eyes. Moses felt hands and feet along his body, keeping him pinned down. He wouldn’t have tried to move anyway. He froze, kept his mouth shut, waited to be told what to do.

“They call me Red Zach. You heard of me?”

“No, sir,” Moses said. He chanced a look, swiveled his eyes around the room. A bunch of coons. Hell. Just his luck. Some kind of damn poetic justice maybe to die in the hands of a mob of coons. Maybe they were with that Ellis son of a bitch. Maybe they knew Moses had been looking to splatter some buckshot across Ellis’s face, and these coons were here to kill him.

No, that didn’t make sense. Ellis was hanging with those two white guys. The mob in his living room was strictly an all-coon outfit. Hell and shit.