MINERVA FIGURED it was high time to try and hang herself again.
She couldn’t remember when or where the last time had been—the attempts all blended together after a while. Anyway, why not? She had no other plans for the afternoon.
Another town, another ratbag motel room. The Double Diamond Inn, this time. New Mexico was littered with shitholes just like it. The mattress was thirty years old and probably saturated with a thousand dreary cumshots milked from the nutsacks of basset-faced johns by one dead-eyed whore or another. And here Minny was, sitting on the mattress. Buoyed up on a cushion of grim, dried-up old sperm.
Minerva tended to get moody before a suicide attempt. It was tough to see the rosy side of life. But perhaps there had been happiness in this room, too. A young couple could have passed a night in this dump on their way to another city, a better life. Maybe their first child had been conceived in this very bed and had gone on to invent the floppy disk or star in an off-Broadway play or some shit. Who could say?
The noose was fashioned out of stout nautical rope. She had pulled a ceiling panel loose and knotted the rope around an exposed pipe. She sat on the bed, staring up at it.
She had a forty-ouncer of rye. Bathtub-grade shit, just slightly more pure than Sterno. She would drink as much as she could, then clamber up on the chair and stuff her head through the noose. Kick the chair away, la-di-da, carefree as a bird. Say good night, Gracie.
But there was a chance—a perfectly good one—that she’d come to a few minutes later, her pants heavy after her bowels had involuntarily loosened and the whites of her eyes gone red with hemorrhaging. If so, she’d cut herself down and get on with her day.
She had drunk the neck out of the bottle when someone knocked on the door.
Shit. Fucking hellfire.
It wasn’t the cops. It never was. She had killed three men in a bar, two days and five hundred miles ago. Afterward, she had driven away. Nobody had pursued her. Nobody ever did.
It wasn’t the fact that the men she had killed in that bar were themselves killers and, as such, didn’t exactly inspire the police to discover who had ended their lives. When a mad dog kills another mad dog, the dogcatcher still pursues the murderous hound under the suspicion that it might kill an innocent creature next. And it was not that Minerva had left no trace. She had shot the men with witnesses present.
No, the cops did not give chase because that was part of the deal. She had made one discrete wish, but with it came all manner of consequence, unknown to her at the time. It wasn’t just that she had to live with the killing she’d done—it was the lack of comeuppance for having done it.
She had killed… Jesus, how many? Twenty? Twenty men over the past fifteen years. Twenty souls gone to heaven or hell or just vaporized, blown to some other part of the continuum on the cosmic winds. The people she had killed were bad in a basic sense, pollutants whose dismissal off the food chain was mourned by a precious few, but still. Nobody ever came sniffing after her. She went wherever she wanted and left whenever she desired. Her life was free of consequence or reprisal. She had spent not a single day in jail. She had been called in for questioning on occasion, spent a few hours in the stir, but inevitably a detective would tell her that she was free to go.
“What if I did it?” she’d asked one of them once.
“You didn’t do it,” the detective had said, as if reciting some boring middle-school fact, his face blank as a test pattern.
The knock came again. Insistently. Minerva set the bottle down. Her pistols lay on the bed. She reached for one.
“Who calls?” she said in a falsetto.
“It is Micah Shughrue, Minerva.”
A profound coldness invaded her chest. Minny gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass.
“You standing in front of the door?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why? You think I’d try to shoot you through it?”
Silence.
She put the gun down and got up. She opened the door a crack. Then she sat back on the bed. The door opened a few more inches. Micah slid his head through the gap.
“Do come in,” Minerva said primly. “Splendiferous beauty awaits you.”
His gaze made a quick circuit of the room; then he twigged on the noose.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“How did you find me?” she said, ignoring the question.
“Caught your scent on the wind.”
Micah didn’t need to explain. Although she hadn’t exactly known he was coming, Minerva wasn’t surprised. She always had a sense of where he’d been these past years—and the black sonofabitch, too, who had to be nearby. She never knew their precise coordinates, but all she had to do was close her eyes and concentrate. Little by little, their presence would start to ping. Seems they now each had the same ability, thanks to what had happened. All any of them needed to do was track those pings to their source.
“Hey!” she said. “You out there?”
“I am,” Ebenezer called out.
“You scared of me?”
“A smidge.”
Minerva sighed inwardly. When she considered the damage she had done over the last fifteen years to her fellow human beings—to those who deserved it, and some who had not quite been deserving—well, it would be disingenuous to say she and Ebenezer were not now peas from the same pod.
“Get your ass in here.”
Eb’s head poked around the door frame. He limped inside.
“Minny,” he said.
“Shithead,” she said flatly.
Ebenezer said, “Charmed, I’m sure.”
He, too, scoped the noose. His eyebrow ticked up. Minny swallowed more rye whiskey. What the fuck did she care what they thought?
“You boys made it in time for the show. Which one of you wants to kick the chair out from under me?”
The men hung their heads, unwilling to meet her eyes. Were they actually embarrassed for her? Well, screw them both. And the horses they rode in on.
“Okay, then. Get the fuck out of here if you’re not going to be useful.”
Micah turned his cold eye on her. A point of light sparked in the center of his remaining pupil. “You think I showed up to watch you hang yourself?”
“I don’t know why you showed up,” Minerva said sullenly. “You followed the wrong Bat Signal, Boy Wonders.”
Micah went into the bathroom. She heard him unwrap a plastic cup from its wax paper cover. Next, running water. When Micah came back, his glass eye was missing. He crossed to the dresser. A crumpled Burger King bag sat beside the portable TV. A few salt packets were scattered beside the bag.
“You need these?” Micah asked.
Minerva shook her head. Micah ripped the packets open and spilled salt into the water. He gave it a stir with his finger to dissolve the crystals.
He leaned forward until the rim of the cup encircled his empty socket. He tipped his head back, holding the cup in place. He shook his head and hissed as the salt water cured the flesh inside his empty socket. Then he brought his head down and took the cup away. Water dripped out of his socket onto the grimy motel shag. He dabbed away the excess water with a napkin.
He then pulled the glass eye from his duster pocket and dropped it into the cup. It sat in the bottom like an olive in a martini. He swirled it around, then fished it out and put it back in.
“Good?” he asked Minerva.
“A little bit to the…”
Micah adjusted the glass eye with his finger.
Minerva said, “Yeah, that’ll do.”
Micah sat on the bed beside her. Ebenezer watched from the doorway.
“I need your help.”
Minerva was surprised. Micah Shughrue wasn’t one to ask for anything. He was the sort of man who would track down the doctor who’d delivered him just to repay the debt.