Andrew Shaw: $20 Lust

Most of the million has been going into stocks and bonds, a little at a time. When it’s all invested we’ll probably leave Belfast, head somewhere else, some other town in some other part of the country. Buy a bigger paper, a bigger house, come in with more money and spend it without looking suspicious at all.

Sometimes we remember that very short period of time when we were hunters and hunted, criminals, murderers. Sometimes I remember Cindy putting a knife into Reed’s back, killing him. She is pregnant now, and it is difficult to reconcile this lovely incipient mother with a murderess. Just as it is difficult to believe that I myself killed four men, one with a bullet in the throat, three more with a gun butt. I don’t feel like a killer, or a criminal, or anything other than what I am — a small-town editor and publisher, a husband, an up-and-coming father.

A strange life. But a good one.

It’s ironic, building a life of good from a life of sin and evil. It’s not only ironic, it’s impossible. Things like this just don’t happen. Except maybe in fiction. But what’s the old saw about truth sometimes being stranger than fiction?

Cindy and a hell of a lot of $20 bills kind of prove it.

I’m not complaining.