After dropping Lisa off at her house Arthur decided to swing by his own house and pick up a change of clothes. When he entered the kitchen his eyes were drawn straight to the wall that Hank’s brains had been splattered all over. He shivered. With everything that had happened he hadn’t really had time to reflect on the fact that he had killed two people. Killed them to save his friend, but still. Arthur had never once imagined that he might end another person’s life, especially not violently. It was terribly bizarre.
Arthur wrenched his eyes away from the kitchen wall. It was clean now, nothing but bleach stains marking where the bloody mess had been. He went back to his bedroom and threw a few days worth of clothes into a duffle bag so he wouldn’t have to come back here until he needed to mint more dimes, but he could afford a few days of down time.
His landlord Lester greeted Arthur testily as he was leaving the house. “Hey! Where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking all over town for you!”
Arthur exhaled slowly. He was in no mood to deal with Lester’s blustering nonsense. “Well I’m here now so what do you want?”
“I need my dimes. Today! My God-damn wife is siphoning every cent I have and I need some cashflow pronto!” Lester gestured animatedly with his arms as he shouted.
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Arthur told him. “Because you aren’t due for another shipment until the end of the month. Just like every month.”
Lester was taken aback that Arthur seemed to be disobeying him. “How dare you? I give you a place to live for free and you dare speak to me that way!”
Arthur had had enough. “How dare I? How about I’m the only person in town who will give you anything in exchange for living in this shack? How about I save your ass when your ex-wife ups the alimony demands every other month?”
“I-” Lester tried to but in, but Arthur wouldn’t let him.
“You know what? I’m done with you. Our arrangement is getting reset to the original amount of dimes I gave you when I first moved in. Yes, before you raised it three times. And if you don’t like that then I’m moving out. It’s not like I have a lease holding me here. Good day, Lester.” Arthur brushed past Lester, hitting him with his shoulder as he stormed away.
Lester stood there seething on the front step for a moment before turning around and shouting after him, “I’m going to Varner with this!”
“Then God help you for disturbing him right now with something so petty,” Arthur muttered under his breath.
+
Lester stood at the back entrance to Thomas Varner’s grocery store. He took a deep breath. He shook his hands vigorously then reached for the door handle. He took a step back and ran his hand through the thin fringe of hair he had left on his head.
Word on the street was that Varner was pissed. Lester did not want to approach him if he was angry. Thomas Varner scared the bejeezus out of Lester. More importantly, Lester didn’t want to look weak in front of Varner. How the hell was he supposed to explain that Arthur Knob was refusing to do what he said? Lester was going to look like an ass-hat. No one would ever take him seriously in this town again!
But he needed those dimes!
+
“You have got to be shitting me,” Lisa Nichols groaned. “Just hurry up and open the God-damn door!”
Lisa was halfway up a tree in the woods behind Varner’s store with a pair of binoculars that allowed her to watch this bald jackass play footsie with Varner’s back door. All she needed was for him to open the door so she could fire her makeshift bazooka straight into Varner’s office, or at least near enough to know she would kill him.
It had been surprisingly easy to build a grenade out of a few everyday items at the hardware store. Figuring out how to launch the grenade using Avery’s enormous old potato gun had been the tricky part. In the end she had sliced a potato in half, strapped the grenade to it, stuck the potato in just like normal. It was the perfect plan!
+
Lester made up his mind. He reached out quickly and yanked open the door before he could chicken out again.
A loud bang came from the woods behind the grocery store and Lester turned around to see what the hell was making that racket. A large oblong projectile clanged against the metal door and bounced off, landing at his feet.
Puzzled, Lester bent down to inspect what looked like a potato. He died wondering why anyone would be stupid enough to shoot a potato gun at Thomas Varner’s grocery store.
+
The explosion was spectacular, but that was the only good thing Lisa could say about it. She had missed! The grenade had bounced off the door instead of going through the doorway. Whoever that poor bastard who had been agonizing over going to see Varner was surely blown to smithereens, but there was no way anyone else was taken out in the blast, certainly not Varner tucked away in his office like he was.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Lisa muttered as she shimmied down the tree as quickly as possible.
This was bad. Really, really bad. She had been so sure she could take Varner out in one foul swoop that she hadn’t come up with a contingency plan. All she could think of now was to run like hell.
+
Thomas Varner was normally a calm, rational, polite man. Sometimes he had to get his hands dirty and that was regrettable, but business was business. This...this was something else entirely. This was Thomas Varner out of control and the worst part was: he knew it. He knew it and he just didn’t give a damn. Years of amassing power, that horrible decade of pretending with his ex-wife, his vile children leaving him, all that had culminated with finding happiness when he had all but given up the notion that such an outcome was possible. Then even that had been taken away from him.
Thomas knew his underlings were terrified. They had seem him coldly, cruelly punish people who crossed him, but they had never seen him enjoy it before. They would stay obedient, out of fear. Now more than ever, they feared him.
Withdrawing the brand from her back, Varner smiled at his captive. “Feel like talking yet, Mrs. Nichols?”
“Go to hell! You killed my husband, you bastard!” She screeched back at him.
“Yes I did. And I confess, I did not have a good reason for it. He wasn’t worth my time and I killed him anyway. How does that make you feel?” He reapplied the brand before she could answer. “Yes, that hurts. Almost as much as losing the love of your life. Grief can make us to strange things. Insane things. Terrible things.”
Mrs. Nichols gasped and screamed the scream that had been caught in her throat while her skin sizzled.
“This can all end if you tell me who gave you that cockamamie device. No need to explain why you wanted me dead, I have that part figured out. I just need to know if anyone was helping you with your foolhardy quest for vengeance,” Thomas explained to her. He raised the brand to her face and held it an inch in front of her eyes.
Mrs. Nichols burst out laughing. She cackled like a madwoman.
“Something funny?” Thomas asked her, displeased that he might have unhinged Mrs. Nichols much quicker than he had intended to.
“If I’d known you just wanted me to point the finger at someone I could have saved us both a lot of trouble,” she said between gales of laughter.
“I don’t just want you to point the finger, I want the truth. Who are you working with?” Thomas demanded.
+
Lisa smiled up at Varner and lied to his murderer face. “You already know who or you wouldn’t be torturing me to be sure. That psychotic bitch Priscilla told me how I could kill you and gave me the potato gun.”
Varner nodded thoughtfully. After all, this must have been what he had expected to hear. Having failed to kill him herself, Lisa had had a glorious epiphany cut through her pain. She had failed, but that didn’t mean everyone else would! All she had to do was ensure Varner went to war with the most dangerous, violent person in town. Someone who was almost certain to finish what Lisa had tried to do today. Priscilla was finally going to make herself useful after stealing Mason from her all those years ago.
Lisa heard the hammer click back on Varner’s gun and she closed her eyes. The gunshot was the last thing she heard.
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