Nick Cutter: Little Heaven

If I do this right , she thought, any donkey dick with a gopher gun should be able to irrigate me right between the eyes.

Minny had made other attempts to do herself in. The first time had been… Christ, when was that now? A pauper’s cemetery near the Mexican border. She’d killed a man, or maybe it was two or three. They died as they always did, with screwed-up looks on their faces that said they had witnessed a terrible reckoning just before the door slammed shut. Afterward, Minny had perched on a tombstone and socked the barrel of her Colt M1911 under her chin. She cocked the hammer, wanting it so badly but knowing—without even pulling the trigger—it wouldn’t work.

The deal didn’t work like that. It was a compact etched in blood—hers and the Englishman’s and Micah Shughrue’s, too. Their blood, and the blood of the black thing that had tendered the deal.

You can’t walk it back. You can’t welsh on a deal that fills your very veins.

She’d pulled the trigger anyway. What was the harm in trying? Hah! There had come a lifting sensation, her body a sail filling with wind… She came to sometime that night, though it could’ve been the next. The moon shone over the gravestones. Her hair was matted with blood and hardened curds that she instinctively identified as her own brains. But she was fine. Intact. Nothing but a small coin-shaped scar on the top of her head where she used to part her hair before she’d taken to shaving it.

She’d tried other ways, sure. Pills. Hanging. Slitting her wrists with a barber’s straight razor. One night she paid a man eighty dollars to stab her out back of a porno theater. The man had seemed the sort to stab a woman for eighty dollars, though he might have done it for free if she’d proposed it. There was little negotiation or discussion. He’d just smiled and begun to stab her with a bone-handled fillet knife, powerful thrusts to her belly and chest. The pain sizzled through her as the knife sliced sideways, sawing through velvety muscle. The man was a dab hand with a blade; he might have had some butchery training. They were both grunting: she from the pain and the air whoofing from her lungs with each knife thrust, he from plain old exertion. Minny had braced her hands on his shoulders to stay steady and aid him at his task. She’d stared into the man’s bright magpie eyes as her blood splashed the oily cement, until she slipped gratefully into the black…

When she came to, the man was dead, his neck slit so deep that Minny could see the gleam of his severed windpipe. She was fine, of course. A few shallow scratches on her stomach. She had then dragged the man’s body behind a dumpster, leaving him beside a box of sun-bleached porn magazines with titles like Old Farts and Fifty and Nifty .

But right now, tonight… yes, it would be different. She couldn’t kill herself, and she couldn’t induce someone else to do it. The deed had to be committed fairly. She had to lose. Well, she wasn’t a sore loser. Tonight she’d get herself good and properly killed.

“Boogie Oogie Oogie” segued into “I’m Your Boogie Man,” by KC and the Sunshine Band. Had she stumbled into some kind of half-assed theme night? Minerva dropped another shot of whiskey down her throat. A woman came out of the men’s bathroom. A jaundiced-looking businessman followed her out, hitching up his slacks.

The woman elbowed up beside Minny.

“How about it, pal—you want a ride?”

Minny turned to face her. The whore leaned back.

“Ah, shit,” she said, pronouncing it as sheeee-it . She was stoned out of her gourd. “I thought you was a dude.”

Her laugh was nasty. Her hands were covered in scabies, and her nose had been busted a few times. “Well, so what?” she said, more to herself than Minerva. “It wouldn’t be my first time with a chick.” She wiggled her hips. “What do you say?”

“Oh, I imagine not,” Minny said breezily. “I’d rather eat cat shit with a pair of chopsticks, to tell you the truth.”

“I will leave you to it, then,” the whore slurred, unfussed, and sidled down the bar toward the drunk smoking the cigar.

Minny heard the growl of a pickup truck. The light of headlamps washed over the bar’s dust-clad windows. She tossed another shot down her throat.

The door squealed open on its rusted hinges. The clopping of boots.

“You the one they sent?”

Minerva turned sluggishly. Dizzy, sick, drunk. Good.

“Yuh,” she said, and burped. “I’m all of it.”

The man looked like they always did. Leathery, rawboned, a face raked by the wind. A hard man made harder by the awfulness he had committed. A man untroubled by his past. She could not tell by looking if he felt any remorse for the things he had done—the things that had put his name on the breeze, put him in the wheelhouse of her employers, put her on a path to this very meeting. She did not rightly care. He probably saw himself as a fox set loose in a sheep pen—how could he be blamed for doing what came naturally to him? And who knows? Maybe he really was that fox. Sadly for him, she was a wolf.

“The lady shootist,” the man said. “I heard of you, but I thought you wasn’t real. Just a spook story.”

Minny said, “You will find that I’m real enough.”

The man’s gaze was cold, but then they always were right up until the end, when they turned fear-struck and childish.

He smiled. “I hear my head’s worth twenty grand.”

Minny shook her head. A heavy lead block had replaced her brain. “You’ll fetch five grand per ear, if I’m lucky.”

“That’s not too shabby,” the man said, proud at the price.

“I’ve done better.”

The man’s smile evaporated. “I’m sure you have. But what about taking me alive—you get any more for that?”

Minny said, “Never bothered to ask.”

The man’s jaw set. “What if I go without a fuss?”

“Do you have a mind to do so?”

The man shook his head.

“Then I saved myself the haggling,” Minny slurred.

The man said: “Look at you! You’re drunk as a tick!”

Minny laughed at the odd turn of phrase. Then she spoke so everyone else in the bar could hear. “You best all clear out. And none of you even think about calling the authorities. This will be done soon enough.”

The patrons obediently departed. Minny’s sight was failing, but she could see shapes behind the bar’s front windows. The parking lot lights glinted off shotgun barrels.

“You brought help.”

“I heard about you, was all,” the man said evenly. “Got the devil’s own luck.”

It isn’t luck when all you want to do is die, son.

“What do you say we part company in good faith?” the man said. “You go your way and we ours. There are other bounties, aren’t there? Other men.”

“The only time I ever shot a man in the back was when he was running away.” She opened her palms to him. “There are things a man can’t run away from, boy. And I am sorry to say that tonight you’ve run clean out of road.”

The man opened his leather bomber jacket. A pistol was tucked into his belt above his Confederate Eagle belt buckle.

“I ain’t your boy , bitch. I’ll kill you,” he said. “Dead as a beaver hat, that’s you.”

This fellow was a fount of old-timey sayings, wasn’t he? Instead of laughing, Minny swooned. Guts heaving, bowels thudding, eyes screwed tight like pissholes in the snow. Dead as a beaver hat? How quaint. I like your spirit, boy.

She made no move for her pistols. Her arms were crossed. The man’s hand twitched above the grips of his own gun.

Be a crack shot , she prayed. Put one slug through my pump house, another through my brain box. That would meet the terms of the pact. All fair, all final.