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High Desert Come to Jesus



Starring Harry Hargrove as a serial killer master builder



“Like something written by Michael Marshall Smith’s acid-popping doppelganger. Breaks new ground on the idea of serial killers and sociopaths”

–Midnight Mystery Magazine



A Quinn Martin Production





Harry Hargrove entered his home, flipped on the light and tossed his keys on the table. He went straight to the kitchen, grabbed two glasses, filled them with ice and vodka, then teased the drinks with enough orange juice to give them color.

“Why do you live so far out?” the blonde asked as she entered the room, swaying slightly as if it were the deck of a ship.

Harry handed her one of the glasses, which seemed to steady her.

“I like my privacy,” he said.

Harry’s home was sparsely furnished. No extravagances. Nothing expensive. There were only a few decorations and these were Mexican knick-knacks bought in tourist stalls just over the border in Agua Prieta. For all the space he had it might as well have been a hotel.

“What’s with all the phones?” she asked.

Her name was Meredith and she worked days at the local community college as a receptionist. Her blonde hair, blue eyes and red lips had gone well with his martinis earlier at Hangman’s House just north of Douglas along the Pan-American Highway.

She giggled and pointed to one of the phones, his oldest. “I had one like that when I was a teenager.”

It was a 1999 Samsung and was the Model A of his collection. He doubted she’d had one within a decade of her teenage years, but he allowed her the conceit, if only for the tilt-a-whirl that had been promised him. But what he couldn’t allow, even if it meant going to bed alone again, was for her to touch it.

“Refresh?” he asked, a little too loudly.

She jostled unsteadily, her hand poised just above the red and white plastic phone. She seemed about to touch it, then turned and sipped the last of the liquid from between the ice cubes. Her expression was pure tomcat.

“I once dated a man who collected garden gnomes.”

“The kind with little pointy hats?” Harry asked, slipping close and taking her into his arms.

“Just. He must have had a hundred of them.”

“What a strange thing for a man to collect.” Harry glanced over her shoulder at the bank of seven phones. Each was plugged into the wall with LEDs lit and ready for a call. None of them had been connected to a service for a long time, but that was how it was supposed to be.

“He wasn’t much of a man,” she whispered.

Harry cupped one of her breasts in the palm of his right hand and guided her to his bedroom, his lips reading her skin like it was War and Peace in Braille.

***

Sometime during the night, while he lay staring at the laconic circuit of the blades on the ceiling fan above him, a sound penetrated his descending slumber. Other than the soft snores of Meredith, who’d proved to be quite the athlete in both endurance and dedication, there was no other sound except the hum of the home’s electrical grid.

Then it came again.

The phone.

Harry leaped from the bed and tore into the kitchen. He picked up the old red and white Samsung, pressed the talk button, and waited.

Finally a man’s voice came on and spoke one word. “12,” he said.

“17,” Harry replied.

“21.”

“Red horse rising,” he said.

The wait on the other end was long enough to make him wonder if he’d gotten it wrong. It had been years since he’d practiced the codes. Years since he’d made the vow. Frankly, he’d never thought he’d have to use them after all this time.

Finally the voice said, “We have him.”

Harry licked his lips. “Where?”

Meredith entered the kitchen, came up behind him and put her arms around his midsection. Her left hand slid down his hairless stomach and tried to tease him back to life.

“Shakespeare’s Graveyard,” the voice answered.

Harry felt himself stir beneath her ministrations. He grinned. “How long?” he asked.

“Two hours,” the voice said, then the phone went dead.

When Harry turned around, he was at full throttle.

Meredith smiled. “Wanna get lucky?”

Harry kissed her on each nipple, then whispered in her ear. ”I just did.”

It took him ten minutes to toss on clothes and climb into his ’06 Cadillac CTS and head up Arizona 80. He had to pass Cazador and climb the hills near Chiricahua before he’d hit the New Mexico line. Shakespeare, New Mexico was a good ways away and would take him most of the two hours to get there. Even if he wasn’t stopped by the police, he was so close to Mexico that the border patrol would be on his vehicle like white on rice until they were convinced he wasn’t an illegal or worse yet, a coyote. That he was white and Anglo-Saxon meant nothing to them. After all, he could be one of the coyote smugglers or an exotic illegal, or O–T–M, what they referred to as Other Than Mexican, a small but interesting category of illegals that included many men of Middle Eastern descent.

Harry left his window down as he raced along the road. Arizona was three weeks into summer monsoon season and the frogs were calling to him from the darkness. Their plaintive barking sounded like geese flying overhead in the star strewn sky. Soon the monsoons would stop and the frogs would dig themselves a hole, where they’d sleep until the ground moistened once more.

Their life cycle was a lot like Harry’s. He hid away most of the time, waiting until one of the phones rang. His past deeds had provided him with a set future as long as he spent wisely. Living in the loneliest corner of Arizona, he couldn’t help but save money.

His lights lit a border patrol SUV waiting along the side of the road. Harry slowed and made it a point to look at the agent behind the wheel. Just enough cooperation and then he was gone. He checked his rearview mirror and was rewarded with a continuation of the darkness.

An hour of hard driving saw him pass into New Mexico. He had the choice to continue north on 80 to Interstate 10, or go East on Highway 9 to Animas, then head north along one of the dozen or so farm roads. 80 would be faster, but if there was someone laying for him, they’d expect him to go that way.

He checked the time.

The hell with it. He couldn’t afford to be late after all this time. He swung onto 80 and sped north.

Eight years ago was the last time he’d seen Ronnie Archie. Then five years ago he’d spent time in Florence lock-up where he’d met the Salvadoran, Enrique, the voice on the phone, and the people he represented. Harry had eventually made the vow and set the actions in motion. The Salvadoran was charged with tracking down Harry’s victims and keeping the process honest. Ronnie was the oldest, the first to turn twenty-one and therefore the first to be tracked down. Harry would never even have a chance of finding the boy. Harry corrected his thoughts. Man. Ronnie was a man now, no longer the thirteen-year-old kid he’d been when Harry entered his life.

Why they’d chosen Shakespeare, New Mexico was an interesting question. The place was a ghost town. Formerly known as Mexican Springs, it had been a stop for the Butterfield Overland Stagecoach Company in the 1800s. Legend had it that Johnny Ringo, The Clantons and Billy the Kid called it home when on the run from the law, for it was a dead run south to Mexico and freedom if any tinhorns interloped on their hiding place. Then there was the Shakespeare connection, named after an old silver mining company, not the old bard.

Harry sliced across Interstate 10 for a few moments, then took the Lordsburg exit and headed south into the desert. It wasn’t but a matter of minutes before he saw a cockeyed wooden sign, pointing down an even lonelier trail, strewn with river rock and tumbleweeds. He took it slowly, the rocks banging against his under carriage like a door knocker slamming against a held-fast door.

The graveyard was on the near edge of town. He pulled into it and saw a tall thin man standing behind one of the tombstones. Harry turned off the car lights, got out of the car and closed the door. He stepped forward into the light.

“You,” came the voice of the man. The word came again, as if released from an old balloon kept alive through care and concealment. “You!”

Harry shone his flashlight towards the man. The light first flashed on the gravestone which told of the demise of old miner and his wife during a typhoid outbreak in 1870. Then Harry drew the light upwards as if it were a brush of radiance, creating from darkness the visage of boy-turned-man, only hints of the terrified child he once was in the countenance of the man who stood outraged before him.

“You,” came the voice once more.

“It’s me, Ronnie” Harry said.

Harry lowered the light from the Ronnie’s eyes to his midsection. He was thin hipped and thin shouldered. The light reflected from his glasses, turning them into pale silver opaque squares.

“What do you want with me?” Ronnie asked after a few moments.

“The question is what do you want with me, Ronnie?”

“What?”

“I asked you, what do you want to do?”

“Me?” Ronnie licked his lips like a boy waiting on carnival food. “I don’t want to do anything?”

“Oh, come on, Ronnie.” Harry smiled to himself. He’d imagined a thousand versions of this conversation over the years and this was version six hundred. He knew it well. “What I did to you, what was done to you...show me your hand.” He stabbed the light to the boy’s left hand shoved deep into a pocket.

“No.”

“Come on, Ronnie. It’s just me and you out here.”

“Why do you want to see?”

“Hmm. Good question. Think of it as a calling card, or better yet, a fingerprint, excuse the pun. With that I’ll know it’s really you.”

Ronnie seemed about to argue, but instead pulled his hand free of his jeans. A silver watch adorned his left wrist. His wedding finger was bare. All else was normal, except of course the missing pinkie.

“Ah. So it is you.”

“Of course it is you bastard!”

“Bastard,” Harry mouthed, tasting the word. He said it a few more times as he rolled it around his mouth. Finally, “is that the best you can do?”

“What?”

“You called me a bastard. Is that what eight years of hatred created? Is that all you feel?”

Ronnie shoved his hand back in his pants and balled it into a fist, the jeans pushing outwards and taught. He frowned, the corners of his mouth jerking his entire face south towards some hellish remembrance. His lip quivered like a bowstring ready to fire.

“Bastard.” Harry sighed. “That’s pretty pathetic, really.”

“What the f*ck do you want from me?” Ronnie cried.

Harry grinned as he said, “I want you to get me back.”

“Get you back?”

“Sure. What I did to you was heinous, there is no doubt. I’m a changed man, now. I’m a new me.” Harry held out his hands and spun, the light briefly leaving Ronnie then returning as Harry completed his rotation. “Out with the old and in with the new.”

“Get you back? Get you back?”

“You’re sounding like a broken record, Ronnie. Ease up on the anger. Mold it. Savor it. Use it as the engine for your revenge.”

“You’re a new man?”

Harry tsked and stepped forward. “Get it together, Ronnie. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Think of all those nights you dreamed of getting me back. That moment has arrived.”

“But why now?”

“Finally a good question. You’re listening. That’s a good start. You ask why now? Why not now? The truth is that I had to let time pass. I wanted to wait until you’d turned twenty-one before we met again. I wanted you to finish becoming who you were to become, who I helped mold.”

Ronnie opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it. “Why did you change?” Ronnie finally asked.

“There are a hundred reasons. We all have a come to Jesus meeting at least once in our lives. Let’s just say that I had mine with some educated men several years ago and made a promise to them that I could make up for what I’d done.”

“Some things can’t be made up for.”

“Oh, Ronnie, you’d be surprised what can be made up for. The human mind is a crazy animal. Left to its own devices, it would create a universe within which to live. It’s only through the glory of the five senses that you have any control at all over the synapses that are firing. Be glad for that.”

“You’re afraid you’ll get caught.”

“By the police? Never.”

“Then by whom?”

Harry stared at Ronnie for a long time.

“Me? You’re afraid of me?” Ronnie laughed.

“Don’t laugh too hard. If I were you, I’d reach that point in my life when I’d had enough and seek out the man who ruined my life.”

“You didn’t ruin my life.”

“The hell I didn’t. When’s the last time you had a girlfriend?”

No answer.

“Do you sleep with the light on?”

No answer.

“Do you ever go out in the rain anymore?”

Still no answer.

Now, just tears.

“You’ve got to trust me, Ronnie. This shit builds inside of you and when it becomes too much. You have to act on it. I want to make sure you act on it before you blow.”

“I’d never do something like—“

“Few people wake up in the morning knowing that they’re going to commit a mortal sin sometime during the day. The opportunity just sneaks up on them mostly. And with opportunity comes knocks.”

“Knocks?”

“You ever see the movie Paris Trout?” Harry asked. “It starred Dennis Hopper in the title role. He played a mean-ass Southern cracker who was so scared of someone sneaking into his room while he was gone that he covered his entire floor in glass to capture the sweat stains of bare feet. Can you imagine covering an entire bedroom floor with glass?”

Ronnie shook his head.

“Me neither. But the more I thought of that movie, the better I thought the idea, and between you and me that idea is crazy!”

“But how can you be scared of me? Look at me,” Ronnie said, glancing along his thin angular frame. “I’m nothing. I’m nobody.”

“Jeffrey Dahmer felt the same way until he ate his way to confidence.”

“I’m no cannibal.”

“Good thing. Now let’s get back to it, Ronnie. What is it you want to do?”

“To you? For revenge?”

“Yes.”

“I never really thought about it.”

“Oh, Ronnie.”

“No really!”

“Who are you kidding, Ronnie? I know you better than most people. Remember those sixteen days I kept you in the box while your dad scrambled for the ransom? There were four holes in the box. Do you remember what each was for?”

Ronnie nodded.

“One was for food in,” Harry said. “One was for talking. One was for a drinking straw. Do you remember what the last was for, Ronnie?”

“It was for my...“

“That’s right. It was for your piss and shit and hate. And do you remember what we did with the holes every morning?”

“We rotated them.”

“That’s right, Ronnie. Good. You do remember.” Harry grinned like a proud parent on report card day. “So tell me again that you never thought about getting back at me.”

Ronnie began to breathe deeply as if he were about to hyperventilate. Finally he said, “I wanted to kill you.”

“There you go. Kill me. I certainly deserve it. But killing is a little too permanent. Let’s just say that you aren’t the only one I’m going to make this offer to and if you go and kill me straight off, then what will all the others do to me?”

“Others?”

“Do I detect a note of jealousy, Ronnie?”

“No, I just didn’t think there were any others.”

“You never do. Neither will they. You all think you’re alone in this world.” Harry shook his head in mock sadness. “So what’ll it be? What do you have in mind for old Harry here?”

“You’re f*cking nuts.”

“Do you know what I think, Ronnie? I think that you’re still too much of a nice guy. I think you can’t really think of something terrible to do. Here I am giving you the opportunity to do absolutely anything to me that you want, and you can’t come up with anything.”

Ronnie glared back, the truth once again in the set of his jaw.

“Then let me help you. Let me tell you all the things you might do. First there’s the simple.” Harry wedged the flashlight into his armpit so that he could count off the ways on his fingers. “You could burn me. You could break a bone. You could run me over with a car. You could bury me in one of these graves. You could even give me biblical revenge and cut off the pinkie of my left hand.”

“You’d let me do these things?”

“Do them? I’m looking forward to them. Look, Ronnie. You might just be finally getting it, but here I am, large as life and metaphorically gift wrapped for your revenging pleasure.”

Ronnie looked around. “Where’s that Mexican? This is a trick isn’t it? You’re going to kidnap me again, aren’t you?”

“Ease up on the paranoia, Ronnie. You’re making Woody Allen look sane. No one is here to kidnap you. We’re past that. And the Mexican is actually a Salvadoran, who doesn’t take kindly to being called such names. Anyway, he is not my friend. He actually hates me and would love for me to break my vow so that he could do to me what you can’t figure out to do.”

“So he’s out there?”

“With a high powered rifle pointed at me as we speak.”

“Do you swear?”

“Yep.”

“How do I know you aren’t lying?”

“Enrique? Donde está usted?”

“Mira,” came a voice from the dark.

Harry turned and shined his light on a short dusky man, a rifle in the pocket of his shoulder, an eye glaring through an immense scope with red-tinted lenses.

“It’s an infrared scope. He can see me in the dark like he was Jesus.”

“Jesus never had a rifle, Maricone,” Enrique said.

“If he’d had one, Judas would never have got the drop on him now would he?” Harry glared happily from Enrique to Ronnie and back.

“Watch your blasphemy.”

“You’re f*cking crazy,” Ronnie said.

“Not as crazy as Enrique. His cousins are all MS 13 gangbangers and even they’re scared of him. You ain’t seen crazy until you seen Enrique mad.”

“And he’s on my side?”

“Enrique?”

“You do what you gotta do, puto and I’ll keep Harry from stopping you.”

Ronnie looked from the rifle-toting Salvadoran to Harry, his long lost kidnapper, and for the first time braved a smile. It was a small one, but it carved the fear from his features as surely as a knife.

“So where were we? Ah yes, the many ways to come to Jesus.” Harry dropped his voice to a whisper. “Isn’t it ironic that whenever we say there’s going to be a ‘Come to Jesus’ that it’s something bad? You’d think that people would look forward to the savior of the universe not be in fear of him.” He tapped his forehead. “Just something to think about.”

“I hear that,” Enrique said.

“So where was I?” Harry asked. He glanced down at his fingers and realized he’d lost count.

“You were talking about me cutting off your finger,” Ronnie said.

“That’s right. I was. Is that what you want? Is that what will do it for you?”

Ronnie seemed to think for a moment, then mumbled something unintelligible.

“What was that?” Harry asked.

“Not enough. I said that’s not enough.”

For the first time concern flashed through Harry’s eyes. But he recovered quickly. “So you want to go past the easy things. I understand. I put you through a lot of shit.”

Ronnie just stared at him. The opaque squares now seemed menacing.

“You could always stake me to the ground near an anthill. I hear the Indians used to rub honey over the bodies of their enemies and watch as they were eaten alive.”

Ronnie tilted his head as if contemplating the idea.

“But that would be too much, I think,” Harry said holding up a warning finger. “You can hurt me. You can do whatever you want to me, but you aren’t allowed to kill me.”

“So what then?”

“Tell him about Pancho Villa,” Enrique commanded from the dark.

The boy craned his head. “What about him?”

Harry shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Nothing really,” he said. Then in a stage whisper, “Want to keep that shit to yourself, puto?”

“What about Pancho Villa?” Ronnie asked.

Harry sighed. He pulled the light from under his armpit and walked back to the car. He opened the door, briefly flooding the night with light. A dinging sound brought an electronic surreality to the newly illuminated graveyard. Harry snapped on the headlights bathing the Cooper family grave plot and those next to it in Cadillac radiance.

“There. That’s better,” Harry said, slamming home the door. He returned to where he’d been standing and addressed Ronnie who stood just outside the farthest beam. “So you want to know about Pancho Villa. Truth be told, I think it all started with Zapata. You know all of them rode around here. Pancho Villa probably stood on this very point of land. This part of the world was famous with Pancho Villa, Black Jack Pershing, Emiliano Zapata and their kind, all stirring up a history that still hasn’t died down.

“But I think Villa is the most famous of them. The Mexicans loved him like we love Robin Hood, although I doubt the green spandex-suited archer and his merry men would ever have conceived of a torture that included urging a plant to grow up someone’s ass.

“So it starts with a Maguey plant, although I haven’t seen any around here.”

“There’s a few back in the pauper’s section,” Enrique offered.

“Thanks,” Harry said. “That detail helps a lot.” He glared at the ground for a long moment, before he resumed. “The story says that Villa would torture those who came and did harm to his people with this plant. Now the Maguey is a perfect plant. You can build homes from it. You can make clothes from it. You can eat it. Even tequila comes from it. Maguey is a type of agave, you see. It grows wild and can reach monstrous proportions. Well, what Villa and his crew used to do is strip some poor soul down to their Birthday suit and strap them to a wooden contraption over the plant. They’d pile stones on the body and poor water on the parched plant. These plants can grow six to ten inches a night and the combination of the weight of the stones and the stimulus of the plant with the water, made it so that man would intersect plant sometime around midnight after everyone was drunk. And if they’d aimed the victim right, the Maguey would grow right up his ass.”

Ronnie’s mouth had fallen open sometime during the telling. It seemed to take a while for it to close, but when it did, there was a new cast to the young man’s jaw. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple diving in and back out.

“Does that sound like something you’d like?” Harry asked.

Ronnie shook his head.

Although Harry looked perceptibly pleased at the answer, he was becoming frustrated with the boy’s lack of commitment. “What then? Really, Ronnie, I don’t have all day.”

“The ear.”

“What’s that?” Harry asked.

“I said the ear,” Ronnie repeated.

“What about it?” Harry asked.

“I remember somewhere that it only takes seven or eight pounds of pressure for someone to rip off an ear.”

Harry felt the Sahara enter his mouth. He licked his lips, wondering from what dark and dreary corner of the boy’s mind this idea had sprung. Still, he’d made the vow. “I heard something like that, too,” Harry heard himself saying.

“If I was to take off an ear, you could always put it back on,” Ronnie mused.

Harry blinked. “I’m sure they could at a hospital...as long as I had the ear,” he added.

“I wouldn’t do anything with it. I’d just take it off.” The young man smiled grimly. “If that’s what I decided to do.”

Harry tried to see through the reflecting squares of Ronnie’s lenses, but he might as well have been trying to peer through a mirror with the success he had.

“Now wait a minute. You have got to stick with something, Ronnie. Name it and commit to it. We could be here all night going through the catalogue of things that could be done.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you found a good one. It’s painful as hell, it’s totally disfiguring if I can’t sew it back on, and it’s something you can live with.”

Ronnie seemed to agree with the argument. He leaned against a gravestone and began to untie one of his shoes. After a minute, he rose with a black Converse high-top in his hand. He began to murmur as he pulled the lace free.

“What are you doing? What are you saying?” Harry asked. Then he glanced to the dark. “What is he saying, Enrique?”

“Math,” the Salvadoran replied.

“What?”

“He’s saying math.”

“How do you say math?” Harry shifted from one foot to the other. “What’s Enrique talking about, Ronnie? You mumbling math?”

“Physics actually,” Ronnie said. He dropped the shoe and slid his foot into it, fighting for balance. Then he held the string out in front of him with both hands. “Hooke’s general law of mechanics states that that stress is directly proportional to strain. Although Hooke’s paradigm referred to coiled springs, using the zero-length spring and a two-dimensional stress state instead of a three-dimensional stress state, I can figure the force necessary to remove your ear with a non-elastic linear object.”

“The string?”

“Exactly.”

“And Hook’s Law tells you how to do this?”

“If applied correctly.” Ronnie gestured towards a tombstone with a flattened top edge. “Lay across this,” he said.

Harry looked at it and felt his knees weaken. That Hooke was one nasty f*cking physicist. He took a step forward and felt his resolve weaken. Was this how it felt? Was this what all of his victims felt when the inevitable was presented to them? It was as if karma were dancing spider fingers along his spine. He gulped and walked over to where Ronnie indicated.

“Now lay your chest over here and balance it. Yep. Face down just like that.”

Harry lay across the top of the tombstone, the rock cutting into his chest. He faced the ground but couldn’t see it. Ronnie began to tie wrap the shoe string around Harry’s left ear, then tie it off with a granny knot.

“That should do it,” Ronnie said.

Harry wanted to say something, but a fist of bile clogged his throat. His eyes watered as he fought to stay balanced. He struggled against the urge to run, not because he knew Enrique would bring him back, but because of the vow and what it meant to Harry.

“So I guess we count to three,” Ronnie said. He held each end of the string in each hand. His arms were out stretched and his knees were flexed. “One... two... three!”

Ronnie swung his arms down and threw his weight to the ground.

Harry screamed and flew ass over head, landing with his back on the ground. His ear burned as white stupendous pain shot through his neck and head. He reached up and felt for it and was surprised to find it still attached. The pain had begun to die down and he felt himself breathe.

“Damn. I don’t know what happened,” Ronnie said.

“What?”

“I guess I better try it again?”

“Try it again?”

“Of course. I didn’t do it right the first time.”

“But—“

“You told me to be committed, Harry and now I’m committed. Get up and bend over the grave. I promise I’ll get it right this time.”

Harry crawled to his knees and found his feet. He stood shakily and made his way back to the tombstone. He wished it was over with. Having to do it again was worse than the first time. Now he knew how badly it was going to hurt, and worse if he did it right.

But he bent over the grave in the same position and allowed the boy to count one more time. Harry thought he’d puke when the boy got to three, and then he was flying through the air again. The pain was once again cataclysmic, Armageddon rainbows of pain firing through his head. But in the end, his ear was still attached.

He rolled over and clawed his way to his knees.

“What the f*ck, Ronnie?”

Ronnie leaned against the tombstone and tapped his front tooth with his forefinger. “I don’t get it. My equation is just right. What could it be?”

It was then that Harry noticed the playful lilt to the boy’s rhetorical question. What could it be my ass, thought Harry. The boy knew. This was all part of his game. At that point, Harry almost smiled.

And they tried it again with the same result.

And this time Harry did puke...from pain and fear and giddiness.

“Aha!” Ronnie said finally. “It’s my fulcrum!”

“Your what?”

“Fulcrum. Your chest is all wrong.”

Harry felt himself being helped to his feet and led back to the tombstone.

“Here, let me have your jacket,” Ronnie said.

Harry struggled out of his lightweight denim jacket and passed it to Ronnie. The young man took it and folded it several times until it presented a square.

“Here, hold this against your head,” Ronnie said.

Then he led Harry down so that his forehead was resting on the square of denim which was balanced on the top of the tombstone. Had he not the fabric as a pillow, his head would be roughly scraped by the stone. Harry couldn’t help but appreciate the thoughtfulness of the gesture.

“There. Now I have it right,” Ronnie said. “Hold still. This might hurt a bit, champ,” Ronnie whispered.

Harry remembered hearing those words somewhere before. Then he remembered. He’d said them to the boy just as he’d snipped off the pinkie.

Then Ronnie fell before him.

Harry felt a great tug from the side of his head followed by so much pain as to fill the vacuum of space and time and the entirety of history. Harry screamed something that came from his toes, bile and spittle shooting free as he gasped and sobbed and created a new agony-based language.

Then he felt a cold icy warmth as the blood began to gush.

Ronnie stood, holding Harry’s ear on the end of the string. He swung it several times like a pocket watch then let it fall to the ground.

“Better stop the bleeding, Champ, or it’s going to be worse than it has to be.”

Harry swooned as he remembered that he’d said those very same words to the kid as well. Ronnie had a good memory. Even better, he had the killer instinct. Harry had made the boy into his image and he wasn’t so far off.

Harry somehow managed to get to his feet. He used his jacket to sop the blood as he pressed it against the hole in the side of his head. He picked up the ear and pushed it into his mouth. He gagged for a moment but he’d heard this done once before. He had to keep the ear moist. If it dried out, it would be no good. His body heat and saliva would help in the short term.

“So long, Champ,” the boy said from the dark.

Harry waved blindly and got into his car. It took him a moment to figure out how to work it through the pain, then he shoved it into reverse, took out a couple of stones with the rear bumper, and then shifted into drive. Soon he was roaring like hell’s fury straight to Lordsburg Hospital which was no more than ten miles away.

As the lights of the city came into view, with the frogs wailing in the night, Harry allowed himself the reminder that there were six more phones to be answered, which meant six more come to Jesus meetings. He wondered what he’d look like when it was all said and done. He wondered if he was even making a difference.

***

Story Notes: The geography of this story is where I live now in Arizona. After writing a lot of stories about L.A. and the South, I wanted to begin writing some located here. After I read The Straw Men and The Intruders by Michael Marshall I was intrigued by the idea that there can be something going on in a story like that akin to Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show. Almost as if the crime thriller had become an epic crime thriller. I decided to take that idea on a small scale and create a person whose job it was to create sociopaths and serial killers. Then I wondered how is it that someone would go about doing such a thing? This unabashedly violent piece of crime fiction is my answer to that.