Free Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) by Jedidiah Ayres Page A

of the car. As they drop him into the trunk, you recognize the corpse as Conrad, one of the other gringos living here. His front is blackened with blood. His own, judging by the color of his face and the gash in his throat.
        “Fuck me,” you whisper.
        “Dude,” agrees Metcalf.
        “Where’s Dick?” you repeat.
        Metcalf is rooted there; breathing through his open mouth, glad to have another civilized white man to stand next to. He doesn’t answer. You start to pull your pants on. The sight of your dead friend, scumbag that he was, seems to require a gesture of dignity, even one as feeble as this. The two men had disappeared back inside the cantina and reappear now dragging another body, this one female and local. It’s a Maria, one of the prostitutes. All the women here were prostitutes the gringos call Maria, but this is Dick’s Maria, plain as day.
        Dick is the third body hauled out. Though beaten and bloody, he’s definitely breathing as they drop him on top of the other two and slam the trunk. The henchmen get in either side of the Cadillac’s front seat.
        Ramon, the barkeep, catches your eye as the car backs up and drives away. The crowd turns to watch it go, but you study Ramon grinning after the hearse. It’s always bad news when Ramon is happy. He wipes his face with his right hand and you notice his knuckles. Broken. Swollen. Bloody.
        No wonder he’s smiling.
    *
    You get good and drunk. Pass out late in the afternoon. In the meantime, you gather a loose narrative from Metcalf: Dick and Maria had a spat about the new Maria he’d been spending time with. She’d taken Conrad back to her place to piss Dick off.
        Got his attention.
        Got them all killed.
        Ramon is replacing the lock on his door, which looks kicked in. The safe he keeps behind the bar is compromised. There’s no reason for more security. The only times anyone steals or kills here; there are immediate and permanent repercussions. You guess that after slicing their throats, Dick’s idea was to grab the money and run over the mountains. A hasty, ill-conceived plan fueled by jealousy, tequila and boredom. Simple in concept, the killing and theft was no big thing. He’d murdered them as they slept, and Ramon’s safe could be violated with a can opener, but escape?
        Escape is a bitch. A man alone and on foot would have to be crazy to try.
        Apparently, he was.
    *
    You wake up an hour or so past dusk. In a heap. In the gutter. Smelling like piss. You just hope it’s your own. Ramon’s little ghetto blaster is on eleven, in the back of your consciousness, broadcasting some station that plays mariachi music. All those greaser tunes sound the same, so it’s hard to know how long you lay there drifting in and out. But you wake up long after midnight, naked once again, while Maria washes you with a sponge.
        You are in her hut, but you have no idea how you got there or why she’s taken you in again. Just her nature, you suppose.
        She stares at you with those spooky, mongoloid eyes of hers. She is stripped to the waist, cradling your head between her breasts, which brush against your cheeks as she wrings water out, wiping away your guilty stains.
        She speaks softly to you. All is forgiven, it seems. You feel an unfamiliar sensation in your gut. Shame. Shame about the way you’d treated her that morning. She’d lost a friend too - not the first - to this place.
        You fall into your usual pattern, carrying on two mutually exclusive conversations. Each language a bastion of solitude and anonymity. You have no idea how her conversation went, but yours tend to go like this:
        You: What was he thinking, killing Conrad like that? And over what? Some passed around piece of beaner trim.
        Her: It makes perfect sense. Stupid. But flawless logic.
        You: How’d you get that scar on your thigh? Looks like someone used a knife.