Free Parishioner by Walter Mosley

That six weeks felt as if it were an entire lifetime.
    Shirley and Robair began to have differences when they invaded an upscale cabin in the Tennessee woods where a wealthy Houston family took their summer vacations. She didn’t mind when they shot the father or even when Robair forced the mother and teenage daughter to do a striptease before killing them. It was when Robair got into the family liquor cabinet and decided to take the four-year-old son in the backyard to use for target practice that Shirley spoke up.
    “Don’t do that, Robert,” she’d said. Even then she realized, when calling him Robert, that the love affair had foundered.
    They were standing on the back porch of the summer home. Arabella Marquette and her daughter, Fawn, lay naked and dead in the kitchen just behind them. The acned, twenty-one-year-old Robair gave Shirley a petulant frown as he simultaneously shot the little boy at his side.
    Shirley raised her own pistol and shot her man in the center of his forehead. His lips formed a tight
O
. He didn’t lose his footing until he was already dead.
    The weight of that condensed six-week lifetime settled on Shirley and she found in her heart that she could not deny one thing that she had done or that had been done to her.
    “I sit in my home,” she said in an Expressions session that Xavier had attended, “and think about going back to Montreal and killing my stepfather. He’s old now and living in a retirement home. I’ve bought six tickets over the years. But every time I think about going I remember that look on Robair’s face when I shot him. He’d only talked big before he met me. He wanted to be evil but I was the one who allowed him to, who empowered him. And when I killed him there was no relief—not in me and not in the world we scarred.”

    “Hey, Shirley,” Xavier said. “How you doin’, honey? Gettin’ any sleep?”
    “I have a new barmaid,” Shirley said. “She’s not gay and neither am I.”
    “Yeah? You don’t say.”
    “But I told her about my sleep problems and she offered to lie in the bed with me, next to me. She’s a runaway and many times she goes out with her boyfriends. But on those nights she lies there by me I sleep like I did when I was child before my mother remarried.”
    Xavier heard the words and the echoes they set off in the spree killer’s heart. He knew not to comment on her therapy and so said, “Thanks for lettin’ my friend in.”
    “He looks scared.”
    “He should.”

    When Xavier pulled out the green straight-backed chair at Winter’s table the young man leaped to his feet.
    “Just me,” Xavier said.
    The words did not seem to have a calming effect on the youth, but he did sit down again.
    “What we gonna do, Ecks?”
    Xavier was a practiced killer but he rarely planned his crimes. He killed when he had to or when the opportunity arose and it seemed like the proper move.
    At one time he would have probably killed Winter. It just made sense to tie up loose ends.
    “That’s up to you, Win,” he said.
    “Me?”
    “Those men had guns, son. They would have killed us both and then burned the house down around our bodies. The way I see it, it was self-defense plain and simple. But the law could have different ideas. And I got a history, so they might not bring me down on this, but there are other warrants, in other places.”
    “What about that man with the tire iron in his chest?”
    “I used his phone to call the cops. They might get there in time to save him.”
    Winter clasped his hands and then ripped them apart.
    “What should I do?” he pleaded.
    “If the guilt is too much for you, you can call the cops. Tell ’em that I made you come with me and that you waited to tell them because you were afraid I’d kill you. Give me a heads-up and I’ll be gone before they get to my door.”
    “I can’t just turn you in like that, Ecks.”
    “Maybe not, but if somebody saw your license plate or something, and the cops come up