Niceville

bluffs that overlooked the town. This was
his
town and he had built himself a good life here and these pukes who took his fucking
item
were going to sincerely wish they hadn’t.

Friday Night

Merle Zane Meets the Woman in the Forest
    After giving up on all that transcendental horseshit, Merle came up with the much simpler alternative plan of passing out from the pain. This had its risks, such as shock and death, but Merle decided that being dead, while inconvenient in many ways, had the advantage of being painless.
    He closed his eyes and rolled his head back and started to slip his cables, as the sailors like to say, when they mean to drift quietly out of the harbor without troubling to raise their anchors.
    “You all right?” said a voice in his head, but not the nasty grating voice that was always criticizing and accusing him, a voice that, he had realized a long while back, belonged to his maternal grandmother, Murielle, who had always disapproved of him, and not entirely without reason.
    Merle opened his eyes.
    The dark was almost complete and the last of the golden temple light was leaving the forest. But he could see well enough to make out a shape standing in front of him, looking down at him.
    Caught
, he said to himself, almost with relief.
Now I’ll get some medical attention. Anyway, technically, if you died during the getaway then you weren’t really getting away, were you?
    Finding this argument persuasive, Merle forced himself to sit up, blinking at the silhouetted figure. As he moved, the pain sheeted through him with terrible intensity and he flinched a bit. The figure, slender, too slender for a cop, stepped quickly back and leveled what looked like a small-caliber rifle at him.
    “What’s
wrong
with you?” said the voice, a woman’s voice, in a soft Virginian accent, wary but not actively hostile.
    “I’ve been shot,” said Merle, trying to get his legs to work, trying to get the world to stop tilting crazily to the left. “In the back.”
    “Who shot you?” asked the woman. “Federals?”
    “No,” said Merle, realizing from the suspicious way she said
“Federals”
that whoever this woman was, she probably wasn’t with the cops.
    “Not the Feds. A business partner.”
    “Shot you in the back?”
    “Yes.”
    “Sounds like a bad partner.”
    Merle tried for a smile.
    “I’m leaning that way.”
    She might have smiled back. It was too dark to tell, but there was a flash of white in her face.
    “I heard you thrashing around in the valley. I thought you might be a hurt deer. Can you get up?” she asked in a flat, careful tone. She stepped back, holding the rifle steady, not aiming it right at him, but close enough.
    “I think so.”
    “You do it, then.”
    Merle got a palm on the ground, which helped to stop the earth from turning over underneath him, turned to his right, got a knee braced, and managed to get to all fours.
    He put a hand on the tree trunk, readied himself, and pushed himself upright, feeling the world spin and then slow. His jeans were soaked with blood and his boots squelched as he turned to face the woman with the rifle.
    In the dying light he could see that she was shapely, with shoulder-length hair, some dark color, possibly black, wearing jeans and heavy boots, a plaid shirt. Her skin seemed to glow in the last of the twilight.
    “Let me see the wound.”
    Merle twisted, lifted his bloody shirt. She leaned down to peer at the black hole in his body, straightened up.
    “Ugly. Don’t see an exit wound. If the slug’s in there, I guess it’ll have to come out. You got any cash money?”
    Merle considered the irony of having committed a wild-ass daylightbank robbery at gunpoint, escaping a statewide dragnet after being accessory to the assassination of four cops, in the process taking a bullet in the back from one of his own guys, only to end up being mugged like a patsy by a gypsy-looking girl-woman with what looked like a cap-and-ball squirrel gun about a hundred and fifty years old.
Life is an ever-unfolding panoply of marvels
, he was thinking.
    “I have maybe two hundred dollars in my wallet. All I have. I doubt there’s an ATM around here.”
    “Give it up,” she said, a hard note, but not threatening. Merle extracted his blood-soaked wallet, handed it over to her. She kept the muzzle centered on his belly as she snatched the wallet away. Merle, swaying, watched her think things over.
    “You got a gun on you there. I see it sticking out.