Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Over the following months, their wounds healed—not perfectly, but then, wounds rarely do. Micah took to wearing a patch over his squandered eye. Ebenezer’s unrelaxed hair mushroomed into a massive Afro. Minerva kept her own hair razored tight to her skull. They slept in the hayloft above the horses. During the day, they walked the fields alone, testing their strength against some unknown eventuality. The scent of cut garlic leached out of the earth, perfuming their skin. They were happy. As happy as people like them could be. They had no family. Many of their old friends had been eaten by the war.

At night they slept fitfully, like wolves from separate packs forced to share a den. One night, Ebenezer awoke to find Minerva staring at him. Her eyes were a peculiar blue in the drowsy light of the barn.

“See anything you fancy?” he asked.

“Can’t sleep.”

“Try thinking pleasant thoughts.”

“That’s hard, looking at you.”

Ebenezer laughed softly. “Oh, you are truly an incorrigible flirt.”

Minerva would kill him eventually. She was as certain of that fact as she was that the sun would rise in the east—even more sure, in fact, because if the sun failed to rise one day she would still kill Ebenezer in the dark. Ebenezer believed her actions had been motivated by monetary concerns. He did not fear or suspect her. And Micah was right—it would taste all the sweeter for the wait. Minerva had read that people who had the ability to delay gratification were the most successful people on God’s green earth.

ONE DAY,the farm’s owner summoned Micah to his kitchen.

“There’s a job needs doing.”

Micah said, “I thought you were quit of all that.”

The man said, “It ain’t mine. Still needs doing. I figured your crew might be up for it.”

My crew? Micah thought. They are just a couple of strays.

“Payroll job,” the man said. “Hungarian gang operating out of Albuquerque.” He snorted. “How they ended up there, you got me. Good payday. But it’s not a one-man job.”

Micah nodded. “I owe you.”

“Don’t owe me much. Just reckoned it would get you back on your feet, is all.”

Micah floated the idea to the other two. He was surprised when they both readily agreed. Ebenezer was a mercenary at heart, happy to join any cohort so long as a payday was involved. Minerva was the real surprise—but she was sick of bounty hunting, and her old outfit was unlikely to take her back now anyway. They were all poor as church mice, too.

She said, “Even splits?”

“Even splits,” said Micah.

“Then I’ll do it.”

THEY TOOK A GREYHOUNDto Albuquerque. Micah bought a Dodge Dart at a used-car lot, signing the ownership papers under an assumed name and paying cash—the last three hundred dollars in his wallet.

Micah drove to the payroll swap site. A hardware store on Euclid Avenue. When the delivery van showed up, Micah strapped a hockey helmet on his head and gunned the Dart’s engine and charged out of a blind alleyway, slamming into the van, T-boning it, and rocking it up over the curb. His head slammed the dash, blood leaping out his nose. He gazed out the busted windshield and saw Ebenezer and Minerva—who had been sitting at a bus stop directly across the road—hauling open the van’s rear doors and dragging out a pair of stunned deliverymen.

Micah staggered out of the Dart. A Hungarian mama with a corrugated dust-bowl face ran out of the hardware store with a machete. Still woozy, helmet on, he leveled his pistol at her. She got the point and dropped the blade. Ebenezer retrieved the cash bag. They dashed down the blind alley and onto another street. Sirens, distant but closing in.

They walked into a pet store. Micah still had the hockey helmet. He took it off, left it on the stacked sacks of dog kibble. They breezed past caged puppies and lizards and twittering birds, exiting out the back door. They walked down another alley to a park where kids were playing baseball. Minerva bought a lemon Italian ice from the ice cream truck. They were sweating, but so was everyone else.

Ebenezer tried to hail a cab, but nobody stopped. One did for Micah, but only once Ebenezer had hidden behind a bus bench. When Eb hopped in, the driver made a face like he’d sniffed something rank, but he kept his lip zipped. He took them to a bar on the outskirts. The cash bag sat under their table. Ebenezer played the pinball machine. Minerva played “Sugar Shack” and “Blue Velvet” on the jukebox. Micah pretty much stared at the wall.

After a few hours, another cab dropped them at the bus station. They caught the 6:30 Greyhound to Angel Fire. Back at the farm, the farmer counted their take. There was also a pound of heroin in the bag. The farmer claimed it was “primo stuff.” Micah didn’t care. He’d had his fill of drugs.

The job had gone off without a snag. They worked well together. The farmer said there were other jobs. The three of them didn’t have much else better to do.

AND SO THEY FORMEDa loose association. They had no obligations, no taxes on their time. It was not a natural fellowship. Each of them preferred the sound of one hand clapping. Plus one of them nursed a blood grudge against another.

But something happened during their flight from Mogollon, their recovery at the farm, and the jobs they did under the farmer’s supervision. They came together in a manner none of them could credit.

They were professional and declarative in their actions. Judgment did not enter into their thinking. As they were good at their chosen endeavor, for many months they prospered. Between jobs, they would drift apart for a week or two, leaving the farm to pursue their own amusements. Then they would return like honeybees following an old pheromone trace.

This was the nature of their existence for months. Then a woman entered and changed everything, as women often will.

Afterward, Micah Shughrue would dwell on this idyll of good months and the two people he shared it with. He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins.

Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.

MICAH KNEW THE WOMANwas watching him. When a man spends a lot of his life with a target on his back, that man had better develop a sixth sense if he wants to keep drawing breath.

He had driven into Angel Fire in the farmer’s pickup to purchase sundries: flour, sugar, molasses, a new button for his duster. Also ammunition. He’d been practicing on the farm, pegging cans off the corral fence. His aim was screwy with only the one eye—even though he used to squeeze that eye shut when he fired. He had never been a crack shot, anyway. It was more that he never flinched in the cut.

He exited the gun shop with three boxes of 7.62 mm cartridges. He crossed the road to a small groceteria. It was cool inside, an old Westinghouse wall-mounted A/C pumping, the tinselly ribbons tied to its grate fluttering. He walked the aisles. A sack of sugar. A five-pound bag of Gold Medal flour. A box of Sugar Sparkled Rice Krinkles—all men had their vices. He passed a cooler and grabbed a six-pack of Blatz. He felt like blowing the foam off a few. He picked up a church key, too.

He had spotted her by then. First, when he came out of the gun shop. She was lingering across the road, pretending to be absorbed by the display window of the hardware store: a heap of men’s work gloves. Why would she be so interested in those? She wasn’t. She was watching him in the reflection of the glass.