The Pillbox

by Chris Barsanti

Maplewood

You put three skinheads in a room, they’ll form seven factions. It’s incredible. You would think that in St. Louis, where there’s at most a few dozen of us, we would stick together. But that’s not how we are.

The rest of the world couldn’t tell an Aryan Nation thug from a retro rude boy or straightedge. But among skinheads it’s all purges and internecine strife. It didn’t surprise me that there would eventually be a murder. I just wouldn’t have thought there would be more than one. Or that I would be pulling the trigger.

Me, I’ve never been a joiner. I just liked the uniform and the music. It can be easier to strap on a premade identity in the morning than to figure out one for yourself. As idiotic as it sounds, I first shaved my head after I saw a picture of a band in Maximum Rock’n’Roll. Even on that black-and-white zine’s smudgy pages, the skinhead singer looked like some aerodynamically designed vehicle for aggression. That was it. I was eighteen, already into punk rock, and breaking out of that hair metal and classic rock straitjacket happily worn by every guy I grew up with in the half-rural, half-suburban, nearly all white deadlands of St. Charles just across the Missouri River from St. Louis County.

I had anger. It had been building all my life and needed to explode somehow. So I showed up for class at St. Charles High one Monday with a bald head just as shiny bright as the new, black, twelve-eyelet Dr. Martens on my feet. I wanted to give a middle finger to everybody. It worked.

The first week my nose was broken by two black guys I used to be friendly with. The one throwing the most kicks said I was a fucking Nazi. I tried telling him that I had just been to a meeting of SHARP the night before. You know, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice? But he couldn’t hear me through the blood. Clips of that episode where the racist skinhead busted Geraldo’s nose had been rebroadcast for months. My timing wasn’t the best.

The second week my ex-friends started calling me “punk faggot.” They painted Randall eats dick on my locker and looked for things to throw. Once a teacher’s back turned, the erasers, food, books, and spit started flying. Anything to leave a stain or dent on my shiny head. I lasted almost a month.

It was April of senior year, so the school let me finish up with home study. They mailed my diploma and hinted that I had more exciting activities to enjoy than graduation or prom.

My mother had a less-friendly suggestion: “Get out.”

My father had already split for Oklahoma with his praying mantis of a dietician girlfriend. But he left me his old gray Cutlass as a graduation present. So I threw everything I could into the trunk, popped my alarm clock on the dash, and sped down I-70 into the city, determined never to see St. Charles again.

I hit the places I thought punks would gather: Delmar, the Central West End. My newly acquired tribe was nowhere to be seen. So I squirreled myself away in dark corners of parking lots and alleys all over South City where a homeless eighteen-year-old could sleep without getting rousted or killed.

Having lost a lifetime’s worth of friends and family, I wasn’t discerning about the company I kept. I hung around Vintage Vinyl, checked out the flyers, saw every band I could at Bernard’s Pub and Cicero’s basement, and tried to make conversation.

I made the acquaintance of a skinhead named Gene at a ska show in some rich kid’s Great Gatsby mansion in University City. He was a lanky, genial, and none-too-bright military brat who had happily bailed on high school at sixteen, was booted out by his Air Force parents not long after, and now had more words to say than thoughts to back them up. Gene was twenty and at loose ends. He didn’t just need a buddy. He wanted an accomplice.

I was happy to make any friend, especially once he invited me to move into his place. The Cutlass was getting rank after all those weeks of doubling as my apartment. Gene lived in a punk house on a shabby block of faded one- and two-story houses in Maplewood. It was one of those tree-shaded neighborhoods clustered where the city blurred into the county that looked idyllic enough for now but was forever on the knife’s edge of white-flight collapse. The house was on one of the cheaper, rangier blocks close to I-44; plenty of space, and neighbors who didn’t ask questions.

The guy whose name was actually on the lease called it the Pillbox because of the thick brick walls and the little crow’s nest of a balcony above the front door. That was Anderson, the older art punk in the attic whose edge had blurred into a more general dissipation. Like most people on the verge of imploding, he had lost the desire to judge anything or anybody. He put up with Gene’s monomania, and the peculiarities of all the other lost kids who floated in and out of the house.

Anderson slept beneath a sepulchral poster of William S. Burroughs and kept a Webley .38 under his pillow. Like Burroughs, Anderson received a monthly check from the family fortune and had a thing for guns. Earlier in the decade, before giving up on the local music scene, Anderson had imagined the house as an art collective. There were happenings in the garage and experimental movies projected onto a bedsheet in the backyard. He soundproofed the basement to record music. That dream died as the bands broke up and people got married or left for bigger, broader-minded cities where they wouldn’t always perform to the same fifty people.

Now the basement was a shooting range. Anderson’s arsenal was locked up down there in a towering gray metal gun safe. He liked to hang out at gun shows and certain kinds of sporting goods stores where records got lost and serial numbers were filed down to nothing. On shooting nights, we would blast the Necros and the Effigies while Anderson judged quick-draw pistol contests. I went with the Luger, while Gene favored the heavier .45 M1911. My favorite, though, was the long matte-black Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge shotgun. With the Mossberg kicking against my shoulder and its solid slugs ripping apart the old Rock Against Reagan flyers pinned to the piles of castoff wood we’d snaked from a nearby lumberyard, I didn’t care how lost I was.

Anderson kept the utilities on and made sure there was always coffee. All the rest of us had to do was throw in a couple hundred a month for the rent and phone and take turns making sure the kitchen wasn’t bare.

I had a mattress, a door with a lock, lights, and access to a shower. I got along with everybody, more or less. Even Wendy and Shana, the lesbian-separatist poets in the second-floor room next to mine.

In a month, the Pillbox felt more like home than anywhere I had ever known.

Gene and I would sit up all night in his upstairs room listening to records. 2 Tone ska bands, mostly. Tight rhythms, staccato and yet steady. Like his voice. I listened to him talk about the old days that he hadn’t experienced and a once-proud British working-class subculture’s fall from grace. The ideals of racial solidarity perverted by racist pricks, and all that.

Gene took me down to a copy shop on South Grand where Reggie, the night manager, was an old friend of Anderson’s. He let all the zine kids and musicians print their flyers for half-off or even free sometimes. Reggie also made crisp and hard-to-spot fake IDs for bored kids like us.

We went to every hardcore and ska show there was—Crucifucks, the Meatmen, Ultraman, Drunks with Guns—but stayed out of the other skins’ way. You never knew which lines you were going to cross.

Gene had a lot of beliefs. But they didn’t include having a steady job. He was making five bucks an hour at the lumberyard a few blocks from the Pillbox. I got on there too. But our hours were thin and scattered. I was broke enough to start boosting boxes of cereal and pasta from the generic aisle at the ALDI supermarket.

We counted our pennies and donated plasma for twenty bucks a pop.

So when Tom and Drexel came up to us during an earthquake-loud set by the Urge in some yuppie bar down on Laclede’s Landing and started talking about work, we listened. It was a cold December night outside. I’d spent my last five dollars at the door and I didn’t know if I had enough gas to get us back home.

Tom was a lean, looming skin with a quick mouth but dead eyes that reminded me of Frankenstein. A onetime football star at Chaminade, he was another of those former jocks who had detoured into punk as an excuse for beating the shit out of people in the pit and claiming he was just slamming like everybody else.

Drexel was Tom’s shadow, a paunchy, shit-kicking hoosier from some one-moonshine-distillery Ozark flyspeck who had joined the scene with a religious fervor that bored anybody who knew him for longer than five minutes.

I tried to keep my eyes on the Urge. It was more of that ska-funk thing the local bands were putting on that had purists like Gene steaming. But Tom kept talking. He talked about skinhead solidarity. He talked about how hard it was for a workingman to make it in modern America. He mentioned his friends from Chicago and the operation they had.

First Tuesday of the month there was a drop-off and a pickup at Ugly Debbie’s, a well-past-rotten biker bar in the badlands of Sauget just over the river and south of East St. Louis. Pills were left behind and cash taken back to Chicago. Tom and Drexel had a circuit of 7-Elevens and fast-food joints they worked all around the county. Even with Chicago’s cut, each of them were netting hundreds a week.

“The thing is,” Tom said with a low urgency, “we need help. Trustworthy people. Chicago wants to expand. There’s a lot of untapped territory.”

Drexel, a foot shorter and wider than Tom, nodded enthusiastically at it all.

“You’re one of us!” Drexel shouted over the thundering amps, as we shook on it. I briefly wanted to ask about the 4/20 tattoos on their knuckles. But I figured it was just more skinhead arcana and a question would paint me as ignorant. I went money-blind fast.

Much later, Gene admitted that he knew Tom and Drexel were in with the Hammerskins. And that they were probably in the group that pounced the black skater kid on Delmar the year before and put him in a coma. That night, though, he didn’t want to confuse the issue by bringing all that up. By the time I found out, it was too late.

That was eight months ago. Every first Tuesday, I drove over the river and through those eerie blank streets where nature fought a winning battle against what was left of East St. Louis. I’d flash my still-new ID at the doorman and stalk through the smell of spilled beer and peanut dust to the back office. I left one padded envelope and walked out with another.

It wasn’t a cartel-worthy operation.

“Son of a bitch,” the potbellied owner would say to me each time, spitting tobacco juice into his KSHE 95 mug as he eyeballed Chicago’s cut of the month’s cash. “You fellas do this a little bit longer and I can afford to shut this shithole down. Those East St. Louis niggers are driving off my business anyway. I’m thinking you skinboys have got them right.”

I grinned in a friendly manner and said nothing. Like cowards do.

The selling was simpler. Whenever we plugged in the Christmas lights strung around the Pillbox’s front porch’s splintered white railing, the store was open. Customers (Gene insisted on calling them that) entered through a creaking gate in the chain-link fence cordoning off the backyard. We sat on the two avocado-green couches that took up most of the back porch. I played cashier. Gene was the dispenser, giving out the little round orange pills from the Ralston-Purina giveaway fanny pack he strapped on just for the occasion. He loved handling the merchandise, saying they reminded him of the go pills his dad used to talk about the Air Force giving pilots.

Anderson stood in between the couches, his hand on the butt of the Luger sticking out of his jeans. He loved guard duty so much that he magically kept that let-me-tell-you-something mouth of his shut during business hours. I assumed he was trying to perfect his gunslinger glare.

We sold to the chatty punks who heard about us through that narrow, gossipy St. Louis grapevine. We sold to the darting-eyed preps who needed all the college-prep help that SLUH or Priory wasn’t giving them. We sold to the occasional strung-out adults, those stringy-haired and pop-eyed wraiths who said they just needed something to get through the week. We sold to a hundred people who could have been undercovers and put us all away for decades

We should have been picked up in a month and would have been eventually. But we were white people selling to white people, and that will always give you an edge in St. Louis.

Within a week the house’s name had a new meaning. Everybody was buzzing. Our teeth rattled in our heads. Sleep was just a memory. The lights never turned off.

I had enough money to start buying groceries, and from the brand-name aisles. The Cutlass wasn’t always running on fumes.

I even had a girlfriend, of sorts.

Paul, for Pauline, was a vinegary spitfire still in her junior year but easily five years older than me intellectually. She had no patience for Gene’s skinhead politics or our business.

“Hey, Curly 2,” Paul would snap at Gene when walking into the Pillbox like she lived there. “Where’s Curly 1?”

She called all skinheads Curly. I was number 1, so that was something.

Paul worked nights behind the counter at an old storefront diner up on Manchester. It had been forgotten by everybody in the world except for me, Gene, and the four crypt-ready old men who spent all day arguing about the Cardinals and how the city was going to hell. We liked the endless refills and cheap doughnuts. She read worn-out paperbacks I didn’t recognize by Proust and Borges and did her best to ignore everyone else. I considered it a triumph when she said more than three words to me.

She was a careless beauty with keen blue eyes and angled birdlike features underneath her spiky ruff of hair which changed hues on a three-week rotation. I fell for her at a party in the Central West End thrown by some slumming art-collector friends of Anderson’s who liked rough trade. In the middle of my desperate conversation-making ventures, she caught sight of a mohawk poseur shoving his girl to the floor. Paul stalked over and uncorked an uppercut at the guy like she had taken sparring lessons. We found his tooth in a fishbowl on the other side of the room. The applause rattled the glassware.

I loved that underneath the crust she was a diligent West County girl who went to St. Joseph’s Academy and was going to get a full academic ride—somewhere with ivy-covered walls—without breaking a sweat. Once my pestering wore her down, I couldn’t get enough.

She was angry like me. But at least she had reason. Paul told me one night about what happened to her friend, the one they found last year dumped in the River des Peres, that glorified concrete drainage ditch not far from the Pillbox. It had been a huge story, a St. Joe girl getting murdered like that. Nobody could remember such a thing happening. But the case eventually went cold and the news moved on to other horrors.

Paul told me about what she would do to her friend’s killer. I didn’t think it was just hyperbole. I knew that I would want her avenging me.

At least once a week we exploded in some argument or another. I’d suggest she go fuck herself. But then I’d tell her she was right and she’d cock an eyebrow at me: “Of course I’m fucking right, Curly. Are we going to keep listing obvious things all night?” After those fights, we’d end up in my bedroom at the Pillbox. But she never stayed long.

Paul had one year of school left; she was blowing town the second she was done. It was clear as the pain on her face. As was the fact that I wouldn’t be going with her when she left. But that summer, we flew high and ran fast. I was nineteen and suddenly indestructible. It was 1989 and anything was possible.

Then it all changed.

* * *

The August pickup started as just another night in Sauget. Since my life in the criminal underground had begun, I had barely exchanged words with Tom. Just a nod and a back clap if we crossed paths at a show. I was fine with this arrangement; he always put me on edge. It was as though he was quietly expecting something from me that he never articulated. The packages came in and the money went out. That was all it needed to be.

But that night I arrived earlier than normal and saw Tom getting out of his red Ford pickup. Because of the heat, he’d taken his T-shirt off. I parked one row away in the mostly empty lot. I was fixing on my fakest grin and adjusting the thick packet of cash bulging out the front pocket of my gray Dickies when I got a look at Tom’s bare chest. If I hadn’t remembered the insignia from history class, I would know it from all the illustrated books Anderson left around the Pillbox.

The tattoo was over a foot wide, covering Tom’s gym-inflated pectorals. The eagle’s wings were unfurled in a stiff art deco flourish, its head perched to one side, with a swastika inside a circle at its feet. A Wehrmacht eagle.

Tom saw me looking at it and slid his T-shirt back over his head slowly, as though performing some horrific reverse striptease.

I kept my stupid grin on and walked up, meaning to keep on going toward the bar. He turned to stride beside me.

“Business is good?” he asked.

I kept my voice even: “I don’t have much to compare it to, but yeah. Seems to be.”

“Good. Chicago says they’re happy. It’s a good business. Nice and clean. No messing around, you know?”

“Absolutely.”

“Randall . . .” He paused, and I felt a question coming that I would not want to answer. “Let me ask you this.”

“What’s that?”

“You know that the business is good. But it can’t be just about business for us. I need to know something. Do you have Pride?”

He said it just like that. As though I should hear the capitalization in his voice.

I said, “Of course.” As though I knew what he were talking about.

“Good,” he said.

We showed IDs to the doorman, who couldn’t have cared less. Tom put his arm around me as we walked inside; it felt heavy with muscle. His mouth was right at my ear.

“The white man needs all the help he can get these days.”

I didn’t say anything. We did our business in the back, the owner said what he always said, and Tom and I returned to our vehicles.

“Say hi to Gene for me,” Tom said.

I nodded.

Tom’s face tensed, as though he had just thought of something important. I steeled myself, not wanting to hear it. Instead, he flicked a Sieg Heil into the air. He waited, his arm stiff and his eyes wide in the dim, buzzing glow from the moth-shrouded lights mounted on the roof of Ugly Debby’s.

I yanked open the Cutlass’s long, heavy door and threw myself inside. The engine roared to life and I peeled away. Looking back in the rearview, I saw Tom still standing there watching me, his salute slowly dropping.

* * *

Gene put on a disturbed look when I told him what happened. But he didn’t think we needed to do anything rash. I told him I was done and that he needed to be too.

Paul was the most furious I had ever seen her. She hadn’t been above prevailing on us to slide a few oranges her way, especially those nights when we stayed up until dawn and she had to work a morning shift. But then she told me she wouldn’t have taken a fucking one of them if she knew where they came from. I countered that she hadn’t seemed too curious about the source at the time. She batted that line aside like it was a mosquito.

We were on the porch, trying to decide what to do. The house was empty for once and the Christmas lights were off for good.

Paul tore into me first for not thinking about who I was getting involved with. As a skinhead, how could I not have known that 4/20 stood for Hitler’s birthday?

Then she turned on Gene: “You know that Tom tells everybody he knows Metzger, right? Don’t you think they’re in with some people who don’t need an excuse to have a boot party?” She pointed at me. “This idiot is so green he doesn’t even know what color laces to wear in his Docs. He doesn’t know those guys. You do. What the fuck were you thinking?” She folded her arms and waited. No good answer was forthcoming and she knew it.

I said I would take care of it. We would sell our month’s supply in bulk back to Tom and Drexel, take whatever kind of loss we needed to. Just to get rid of it.

Then it would be back to the lumberyard.

“No,” Gene sighed, “I’ll handle it. I hope you like working for a living.”

* * *

Two nights later, Paul and I were sitting in the kitchen by the Pillbox’s one operational phone. Gene was supposed to call after the hand-off. “Easy payday for them,” he had assured us. “They’ll find somebody else to do this in five minutes.”

Paul fiddled with the black laces on the still-gleaming oxblood Docs I had bought her with last month’s take. They were the most expensive present I had ever bought anybody. Now I was worried she was going to see them as tainted by blood money.

The wall-mounted phone rang. I jumped up and snatched the receiver. It wasn’t Gene.

“Is that Randy?” Tom asked.

“It is,” I answered. Paul watched me, her hands still. We both vibrated in the kitchen’s dead air.

“Are you one of the mud people?” Tom asked.

There was a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t comprehend why I was talking to him and not Gene.

“What?”

“I want to know, Randall, who your people are. Where do you come from?”

My mother was German-Irish. My father too, though he always claimed to have some Apache blood. In his mind, that excused his “wild” behavior. “Why do you care?” I asked.

“Because I’m convinced that only somebody with mud in their veins would stoop to such betrayal. Like your mongrel friend. He admitted that he couldn’t prove pure Aryan heritage. I think that was the last thing he said. Except for, Please don’t, of course.” He chuckled.

I gripped the receiver. Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I had just two friends to speak of in the world.

And now one of them was gone.

I was given instructions and directions, then the line went dead.

Paul stood and put her arms around me. She never did that. For a moment I imagined the two of us just leaving. Isn’t that how stories about teenagers in love should end? With the lovesick couple escaping to the west and leaving all their troubles behind? One problem was that I hadn’t said that I loved her yet. The other problem was that I had been told what would happen if I didn’t follow instructions. To me. To her.

They told me to meet them at a parking lot downtown, just north of Washington Avenue. I looked around at Manchester as I passed through, taking my time at all the lights and scanning for police. I pulled in just after midnight. It was a perfectly dead place, just another blank concrete slab that had probably once been a row of tenements housing the Irish back in the nineteenth century and then the blacks who came up from the South early in the twentieth.

Tom’s truck and Drexel’s white police surplus Chevy Caprice were parked at a right angle to each other, their hoods almost touching.

I stepped out into the stifling, Mississippi-sodden August night air. Not far away in one of the warehouse clubs on Washington, some band was making a painful-sounding noise. I couldn’t see or hear a single car. There were no pedestrians, of course. Urban renewal at its finest.

No words were spoken. Tom was standing by the back of his truck, with Drexel to his side. Both looked casual and all too pleased with themselves. They were both dressed the part, with polished Docs, cuffed jeans, white T-shirts, and braces up. I walked over quickly to get it done with and looked at what lay underneath the tarpaulin in Tom’s truck.

Even in the dim light cast by the city’s few-and-far-between streetlights, I could see that Drexel and Tom’s boots had done their work and then some. Gene’s favorite T-shirt, the Specials, was covered in blood and gravel and tar after he had been kicked from one set of steel toes to the next. His face was stippled with bloody smears, swollen and dark like it had been injected with some purple liquid. I was only thankful his eyes were closed.

My fists clenched so viciously tight I thought my knuckles would snap.

“What do you think, Mud?” Tom said, flipping the heavy tarp back over Gene’s stupid, trusting face.

I worked on keeping my face blank. I remembered Paul. “I think Gene panicked and did something stupid,” I told him.

“You got that right,” Drexel said, leaning back against the hood of his car with a grin.

“Yes, indeed,” Tom said, leaning in close to me. His voice softened, as he shifted from intimidation mode to soothing. “There’s no reason that business can’t go on like before, is there?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Good. And I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you from here on out.”

“I don’t see why not.” My molars were grinding together so hard now I was sure that both of them could hear the sound.

Tom smiled, his teeth like falling-over tombstones. “Well, get on with it, then. Just liked we talked about.”

I nodded, walked back to the Cutlass, and popped the trunk. I put the keys back in my pocket and leaned down. I clocked the time.

What happened next was all Paul’s idea.

After the call came from Tom, we had stood in the kitchen, unable to move. Our nerves were screaming. Disengaging her hug, Paul placed her hands on my shoulders and looked up at me. She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she told me what to do. I didn’t make a sound until she was done. Then I repeated it back to her, twice.

Tom had told me I was responsible for disposing of Gene’s body. To help make up for all this inconvenience.

So when I straightened up from the trunk, Tom and Drexel were expecting to see me with a blanket. They didn’t look surprised by the heavy yellow work gloves I wore at the lumberyard. It was going to be a messy job, after all.

The Mossberg in my hands was more of a shock.

Drexel was farther away and so a bigger risk for escape; he went first. I fired from the hip, not trusting myself to get the shotgun up to my shoulder in time. The slug caught him in the chest. It tore a glistening fist-sized hole in his T-shirt and knocked him back over the hood of his car. The sound echoed back at me from the dark hulking buildings scattered one and two blocks away.

I had been shooting the thing for so long in the Pillbox basement, in the proper stance with ear guards on, that I wasn’t prepared for the flat boom and savage recoil. I almost dropped the shotgun in surprise.

Tom was just as stunned as I was. That gave me time to shift the shotgun to one hand and pull the Luger out of the trunk.

I looked at Tom, remembering how he had just thrown the tarp back over Gene like he was covering up something disgusting, and wanted to pull the trigger right then. But I remembered what Paul made me repeat to her. I walked toward Drexel’s Caprice, keeping the shotgun held high and pointed at Tom’s face.

“Take it easy,” I said to Tom, as I reached Drexel. “You don’t need to panic.”

I had never actually seen the blood drain from somebody’s face.

“First time you’ve had a gun on you, right?” I asked him, standing at a slight angle between him and Drexel so he couldn’t see what my left hand was doing.

He tilted his head in what I assumed was agreement.

I shrugged. “Well, I can’t say I know how it feels. But I’m sure it’s not pleasant.”

The adrenaline surging through me was making every hair stand on end. There was a roaring sound in my ears. Time was tight. But still, I needed to say something.

“I didn’t even like Gene that much, you know. We spent a lot of time together, but it wasn’t necessarily by choice. In a different life, we wouldn’t even have been friends.”

“So, why?” Tom finally asked me, his heavy brow wrinkled in confusion.

“I should say that it was because he took me in, kept me from turning homeless, that I grew to appreciate him the more time we spent together. But that’s not what this is about. I don’t have a lot of friends to spare, you see. And you just murdered one of them. Beat him to death.”

I had reams of words ready to go, more than I had ever said at one time. Then I realized it was enough; I had already said it all.

I pivoted to the side, bringing Drexel’s right hand up with my left. My gloved finger barely fit over his underneath the trigger guard. But when I squeezed, the Luger cracked off a round all the same.

I didn’t wait to see if the first one hit. Given the awkward angle and me using my bad hand, I couldn’t take chances. I pulled three or four more times; to this day I couldn’t tell you exactly how it all went. At least two hit.

One blew a hole into Tom’s upper chest, just above his tattoo, that was probably nonfatal on its own. But another round sailed right through Tom’s throat, spraying a scarlet mist behind him that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as his body crumpled.

I don’t remember much of the rest, except for fitting the Mossberg into Tom’s hand, racking another shell, aiming at the air over Drexel, and pulling the trigger one last time.

More echoes. My time limit was already past.

I tossed Tom’s truck, finding the padded envelope of pills in a pile of flattened Budweiser cans and White Pride leaflets.

I didn’t look at Gene again. I had three dead faces I would now be seeing for the rest of my life. I didn’t want those memories to be any fresher.

When I pulled away, Drexel was still sprawled over the hood of his car like a piece of road kill. One of his boots dangling off the side kept twitching.

As I slid past, it stopped. I looked at my watch: it was just two minutes after I had popped the trunk. If I was lucky, nobody would have called in a report about hearing shots fired yet.

I drove west, as planned, keeping off the highways. Nice and steady, just below the speed limit. I flushed the pills down the toilet in a Denny’s near Crestwood Mall and dropped the gloves and padded envelope in the dumpster of a strip-mall Chinese restaurant in Sunset Hills. I pulled over three times, first to vomit and then twice more to dry heave.

I knew our plan had more holes in it than plan. I didn’t know if Tom and Drexel were right- or left-handed; how thorough the police would be with ballistics; or whether they would wonder why Gene had been beaten to death and the other two shot. I didn’t even know if the two of them were actually dead; it’s not as though I knew how to check for a pulse. I didn’t read mysteries. But the police would be coming around the Pillbox soon, asking questions. Anderson had been briefed on what to say. After giving up the weaponry, he had professed total allegiance. Nobody else knew anything.

I was aware of all the ways it could go wrong, but prayed that it wouldn’t. I had at best another ten months with Paul before she skipped town after graduation. Another ten months to love her, to thank her for giving me the vengeance she never had, to hope that I would stay free for all of it.

I had scanned the vicinity for witnesses once more before driving away. There were none to be seen, just mute buildings and weed-sprouted sidewalks. That didn’t mean, of course, that nobody had seen three skinheads driving into the parking lot and one leaving.

But then, maybe it wouldn’t matter even if they had.

People never can tell one skinhead from another.