Page 6 of Trigger Happy

After a few minutes, a car engine fades in the distance. There’s silence.

Just our two hearts beating.

I give it a minute, then two, then my shoulders finally relax.

“Guess I haven’t pissed off fate as much as I thought.” Lawton snorts. “See, Chastain? This is why you don’t have to make a spreadsheet of every possible thing that could go wrong.”

“She could have just as easily reported the crime, and then we’d be burying two bodies tonight,” I huff.

“But she didn’t. It all worked out. No bulleted lists needed.”

Easy for him to say. Lawton’s always had the luxury of backup. His brother used to be his partner, and now he can always speed-dial his mom. My parents rarely have service, so it goes straight to voicemail. And besides them, I don’t trust anyone enough to be my partner. The one time I trusted the wrong person, I almost—

No.

I shove that thought down, down, down, refusing to even think about that night.

Lawton squeezes my waist with one big hand. I suppress a shiver from his calloused touch and shoulder him away, stepping out of the pool house.

“As much as I’ve enjoyed this tête-à-tête,” I say, letting the door slam into him behind me, “feel free to leave. I don’t trust you to handle cleanup duty. You’ll probably forget to bleach the grout lines.”

He saunters out after me. “I always forget how obsessive you are about cleanup. I guess that’s what having an on-call house cleaner does to a person. I didn’t have a trust fund, so I had to learn to live with a little mess and buy secondhand. Try not to gasp.”

I almost laugh. On-call house cleaner. That’s what he thinks? We never lived in a place long enough to make a mess.

“I still buy secondhand designer because it’s vintage, and you know, good for the environment, so you can bypass purgatory and go straight to hell,” I say.

I won’t apologize for liking pretty things when we live in an ugly world.

“You sure you want to go there? Look at this view.” He nods to the rays sparkling over the Pacific and whistles. “How ’bout we skip the road trip to Satan and hit that big-ass hot tub? It’s got ten different jet settings, I checked.”

I snap on my latex gloves. “You’ll have to drown me before I get in that jacuzzi with you.”

“Necrophilia isn’t my style. I like it when you bite back.” He snaps his teeth, and then he takes his pistol, points it to the sky, and pulls the trigger, alerting every cop car within a five-mile radius of my location. Seagulls caw and scatter across the purple-pink ribbons.

He dips that godforsaken cowboy hat. “Have fun with that, Chastain.”

I wish my smile could kill. “Au revoir, Montoya. Here’s to hoping you’re in a coffin before we meet again.”

4Lawton

If you ask me, serial killers have it easier than us freelancers.

Those psychos can off someone, leave their victims for the coppers to find, and high-five themselves. They don’t have to walk around their parents’ barn with cotton balls soaked in tea tree oil jammed up their nostrils, chainsawing a dead criminal into pig feed. That’s the kind of disgusting shit no one warns you about until you’re elbow-deep in body parts.

I swear it’s karma’s payback for leaving Chastain to deal with Jaxon-with-an-x last week, or whatever his name was. Don’t care. With the way he was clenching her wrist like he wanted to rip her arm off, his name doesn’t deserve to be remembered.

“Hey now, Carnitas!” I say to my pig. It’s only us in the barn. “It’s not dinnertime yet, you chunky shitweasel.” I yank the severed arm away from Carnitas while holding a bottle of limoncello in my other hand.

That bottle and I go everywhere together. Best mates, my younger brother, Walker, would say, because we had a job in Australia one time (killed a kangaroo poacher) and afterward he came back calling everyone “mate.” That was Walker, always ready with a joke and a lopsided grin that made you feel like the most important person in his life.

I take a swig of the limoncello. “Remember when we gave Buck the Bartender shit for not having Jack Daniel’s on hand, Walker? And he offered us limoncello on the house. Limoncello?”

I can almost hear his scratchy laughter in the barn.

By the end of the night we were saying, another shot of lemonello! I finish the last of the lemony liquid, but there’s a red, fleshy chunk of something stuck on the rim.

“Please don’t be intestines,” I say, sweeping my fingers through my matted hair to get a better view. I squint. That’s… blurry. “Yeah. Great. Those are intestines. I just drank intestine juice. Guess I can add cannibalism to my rap sheet now.”