Free Holy Death by Anthony Neil Smith

stopwatch. Someone would notice. He didn’t have long. The room was lit only by a nightlight, and the shades kept out most of the sun. Lafitte searched quickly, found the camera, and did his damnedest to keep out of its sight. He pulled out the bottle of spray paint he’d picked up at a store along the interstate, hopped up in front of the plastic square high on the wall, and sprayed once. Another hop, sprayed twice. Enough to block out the camera.
    Only then did he dare turn around.
    Ginny was sitting in her chair, a slightly pouting sort of look. Her frizzy dark hair was much shorter, peppered with too much gray. Her face was lined and pale and tired. She was sad, sunken, and, in his eyes, beautiful. “Billy Lafitte, you’re very, very late.”
    “Sorry.”
    “I’ve been waiting, you know.”
    He started towards her, some of her letters crumpled in his hand. He fell to his knees and buried his head in her lap, shaking violently to hold back tears. She took off his cap and stroked his hair.
    “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

CHAPTER NINE
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    T he tiny bar was in a tiny restaurant in Beaver Bay, Minnesota. It was a two-story prefab building, a vinyl-sided block with three shops. The restaurant had a small sign above the door announcing “Lemon Wolf Café”, flanked with two carved wood sculptures—one bear, one wolf. Across the highway was Lake Superior, right behind a couple of “antique” (junk) shops and the town post office. He liked it here because it was quiet, only three chairs at the bar, no one bothering him, and instead of a bartender, one of the waitresses would stop and refill his shot glass with bourbon, hand him a new bottle of beer, one of those small-craft IPAs that tasted so bad it was hard to get drunk on them.
    But Franklin Rome drank it anyway, each bottle tasting better than the last. He’d usually eat the restaurant’s catch of the day—Lake Trout, most of the time—after downing eight, nine, shots, and five, six beers. He got quiet when he was drunk. Not melancholy. No, melancholy was every day. “Quiet” meant “barely functional”.
    Most of the time, he was the only black person around for at least a good square mile, he thought. Sometimes the only person of color, period, including Indians. He’d been up here on the North Shore since after the jailbreak, after Colleen had fucked up so bad at the prison. She had been good to her word, though, and left him out of it. Some agents had come to talk with him in Minneapolis, and he had lied his ass off about the price on Lafitte’s head, Colleen’s part in all this, and the eighteen grand up for bounty. As soon as he’d heard about the jailbreak, he got online and scattered the money all over, ten times over. Stock trades and PayPal and offshore internet gambling accounts and more. Shit, the original account wasn’t even in his name. He’d found it going through his wife’s papers, a small savings account in her maiden name she must’ve opened as a child or teenager, but which had been forgotten along the way. Happened all the time. Grandparents put a hundred bucks into it and then ten years later, everyone has moved on. Out of sight, out of mind.
    So he scattered the money, lied to the Feds, and quietly retired—although he’d pretty much been out of service for three years already, acting as a “paid consultant”. In the end, he had to leave Colleen twisting in the wind. He’d told her if it all went bad, he would do what he could for her. But in the end, it came down to nothing. He had no pull, no weight, and honestly, he didn’t give enough of a shit about what happened to her to even try.
    Eight years in prison. She had a chance at parole in a few. If she got it, Rome would be ready for her. Plenty of guns in his cabin. Maybe the HIV she’d caught from the gangsta would kill her first.
    The white ladies who ran Lemon Wolf were polite enough to Rome. He’d been coming here for about four