Free New Title 1 by Patrick Lestewka Page B

shoot you in the face.”
    Deacon leans forward until his face is inches from Dade’s. “Go… fuck .”
    And now I know, now I am absolutely certain, call me Kreskin because I am fucking positive this is going to end badly.
    Everything happens with the rapidity of fireworks going off. Dade reaches inside his jacket for the .38 we all know is there. Deacon claws at his waistband to free a Webley but it’s jammed, the cylinder won’t clear, and now Dade’s got the drop.
    These are the decisions you’ve got to make as a leader. Who stays and who goes. I don’t relish them. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But it is, and all I can do is make the decision, who lives and who dies, and live with it.
    These are the choices that made me old when I was young.
    I pull my .45 Chief’s Special from a Bianchi shoulder holster and extend to Dade the same mercy I’d offer a rabid dog.
    BOOM.
    The middle of Dade’s face explodes inward, the bullet blowing Dade’s teeth out the back of his skull, molars and canines pinging off sheet metal and there’s just this hole, this stark emptiness where Dade’s face used to be and the blowback throws his body against the rear doors which buckle outwards like a bomb-bay and then Dade’s body is tumbling across the highway, a dead dusky tumbleweed.
    “Jesus!” Malik screams, cupping a hand over his ear. “Oddy, what the hell—?”
    “Just drive, son,” I say. “Get us to that parking lot.”
    Nobody says much as we pull into a Pay-n-Park lot and transfer the cash to a VW Minibus we’ve stashed there for days. Deacon sets an incendiary charge that’ll gut the Chevy van, torching any evidence. We drive in silence to a motel on DC’s outskirts.
    The total haul, tills and vault, is $310,580. Nearly eighty grand a head, split four ways. Tiny’s got a wife and kid in Sioux Falls; Malik promises to get Tiny’s cut to his widow.
    “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end,” Malik says as I hand him his split.
    “No, it wasn’t. But we don’t have script approval, son. Sometimes things just end the way they end.”
    Malik opens the door. We shake hands, clap one another on the back, and fall into a half-embrace that is the closest thing to tenderness men like us can achieve. He stares towards the shrouded DC skyline, then at the unbroken stretch of blacktop leading in the opposite direction. He knows, as I know, there is nothing for us in either direction.
    “I’d go over the top with you anytime, Oddy,” he says. “My life in your hands.”
    He leaves. Deacon is sitting on the bed.
    “I shouldn’t have said those things to Dade,” he says. “Called him Section-8. Shouldn’t have done that.”
    “Not really your fault,” I say. “A man turns that way, well, there’s not much any of us can do to save him.”
    “What happened?” Deacon asked. “How did he end up like that?”
    I shrug. “As to Dade’s particular story, I really don’t know. All I know is that in Vietnam, soldiers were told to take all their pity, their mercy, their compassion and lock it away until it was no longer part of them. They were taught to fill that void with the emotions they needed to make it out alive: cruelty and hatred and rage. A soldier who did enough Tours became emotionless, you know? Became a creature of drives: eat, sleep, kill. Just a cog in The Big Green Machine. I’ve seen men like that, Deacon. They existed, and they weren’t exactly human.”
    An early twilight hung suspended over the undeveloped land across the road, patches of dull orange burning between the trees. “I once read about something called an Act of Erasure. It’s common in soldiers; they lose touch with reality, stop caring about living or dying. So a guy starts acting crazy, taking stupid risks, putting himself in harm’s way when there’s no need, even hurting the people he cares for. Trying to kill himself, in a roundabout way. That’s what happened to Dade, I think. Same thing happened