End of the Road Read Online Free

course.” He steps back into the dim light
showing his muscle. “Haven’t you wondered why I chose tonight to
visit you?”
    “ That had crossed my
mind.”
    “ You see, our good friend
the detective met the fishes tonight and I have my money back. In a
fitting tribute I tucked a single dollar into his pocket before he
had his swim. I stashed the rest in my car and I’ll be leaving the
city in a few minutes.”
    “ Then why off me, pally?
You’ve got what you always wanted.”
    “ Just to end things on a
proper note, Mr. Hale. I do like things tidy, you know.”
    The colt rises before me in the dim light of
a cold moonlit night. I stare down the barrel, shaking like never
before as a peculiar thought crosses my mind. I have always been
told you never hear the one that sends you to your maker. A click
and a muffled pop echoes as the door explodes filling my lap with
shards of frosted glass. My eyes wide with fright, my vision locked
on, nothing.
    I blink, wondering if this is what heaven
feels like. I feel a heightened chill across my skin when the pale
light of the hallway filters into the blue, smoke-filled room as a
small puddle grows between my legs. I see my heaven-sent angel
through the haze standing before me, her hands wrapped around my
.38. Her soft red hair leans into the office through the missing
glass in the door staring at the bloody lump on the floor in front
of my desk.
    “My, my, Bobby. Such nasty friends you
have.” She saunters in and lowers her hands onto the glass-filled
desk. “I’ll be leaving now, with the fifty-gees.” She lays the .38
on the desk and turns, “You coming?”
    The End
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    Chapter 3
    Clay
    By Russell Blake
    Curtis spit onto the red dirt as he watched
the horizon for tell-tale dust clouds, allowing his eyes to wander
to where he’d left his mark with saliva, the moisture already being
sucked into the thirsty ground, hungry and demanding as it had
always been, for as long as he’d been alive on it. It was a dirt
that coated everything, became a part of a man, stained his
fingernails and gritted between his teeth until at some point a
body didn’t know where the dirt stopped and the person began. Dirt
that was unforgiving, as were the denizens of this arid
badland.
    His father had raised him to understand that
he was of the dirt, and would return to it, and that his time
walking on it was temporary, stolen from a cosmos that would allow
him just enough to learn the harsh lessons it taught before it
reclaimed him, just as it had taken everyone before him, and would
take all who came after.
    A scorching wind blew across the plain as he
squinted at the point where the sky became the earth, wavy and
distorted from the never-ending heat that was his constant
companion. They were coming. He knew it as surely as he knew the
sound of his own breathing. It wasn’t a matter of if.
    Footsteps shuffled behind him, and a
tentative voice, small in the vast expanse, tugged at his
sanity.
    “ You need to
eat.”
    “ Been eating all my life.
Missing a few bites won’t hurt me much.”
    “ I brought you some
water.”
    “ Thanks. I told you to get
going, and take the boy with you. What are you still doing
here?”
    “ I…I don’t want to
go.”
    “ Plenty of folks don’t want
to do what they have to.” Curtis sighed, watched the wet patch
drying like a magic trick, right before his eyes. “It wasn’t a
suggestion, Meg. You need to leave. Now. Pack up, and head south,
to your sister’s place. It’ll be safe there. Go out the back way,
by the well.”
    “ Curtis–”
    “ Time for talking’s
done.”
    “ You don’t have to do this.
Come with us.”
    “ Never been much good at
turning tail, Meg,” he said, running a calloused hand over the two
day growth that darkened his chin. “Go on. While there’s still
time.”
    He felt fingers on his shoulders, as light
as a butterfly flitting across his sun-bleached shirt,