Shut Your Trap

Martin felt the ghost before he saw it, moving up his back, shrouding the back of his head, half-formed wisps of arms reaching past his ears toward the woman standing in from of him, the woman pointing a hard-angled, black gun at his forehead. Mother Grace.

Grace was a contract killer, one of the best. Six foot two, thick ankles and wrists, half Navajo, nobody ever suspected the lady with the turquoise jewelry and salt/pepper braids of being what she was. And in all her years on the job, Martin had never seen her shaken, moved, or even emotionally side-lined on anything, anywhere, at any time. Practically the perfect psychopath, she removed obstacles from the paths of kingpins, big wigs, and sometimes, even presidents. She did it quickly and quietly, no flair or indulgences. This wasn’t a movie. She wasn’t a rock star. You were a bug. She squashed you under her boot heel, pivoted on top of you, then walked away—never looked back.

But today, she paused. In that millisecond, Martin continued to reflect.

Here’s how she worked. Leaving Denver, there were many roads on which to get lost. Too many. And Grace used this to her advantage, seldom going the same way twice, winding into the evergreen hills, then the mountains, sometimes driving for hours to get to the perfect spot for execution. Lost nooks and isolated spaces, her business done, she left the animals to take care of the rest.

“Come on, Martin,” she would say. “Let’s go snag another one.”

Martin, still young in his mind despite his early adulthood age, couldn’t help but look back, one last time. A snapshot, some goon with a hole in his brow, brains scattered in a wi-fi symbol on the hard ground, grass, pine needles, or sometimes, snow. Cool as hell.

So, when Mother Grace brought Martin to the ghost town, they both realized she had slightly strayed from her M. O., but this was different. This was Martin, her son.

She, most likely, wanted his body safe from the scavengers, hidden. She wanted to come back at times, for some reason, preserve the bones, just like keeping baby teeth in a small jar in a drawer or the back of a closet. To her, Martin was still Martin, alive or dead. But better dead. It was the only way she could keep his mouth shut. The only way to keep him from trying to put his dick in just about anything that wiggled (potentially passing the curse—gift?—on to some floozie in a trailer park that wouldn’t have a clue about what to do with it). Martin understood this thoroughly, in his mind. His hands, however, felt differently, and got him in more and more trouble every day.

Grace warned him, over and again, but ultimately, his trying to impress women by bragging about how he knew the locations of all the bodies led to the need for a slug between his eyes.

So, here was Martin, sobbing on his knees, hands tied, in a top floor brothel room above the rotting saloon. The wind picked up, cooing whistles across the broken panes in the broken windows of the broken building. Trees and long grass shushed between the sounds of flapping shutters. The town, dead and uncaring, was already a tomb for countless souls, snuffed while passing through on the way to find fortune in the craggy mountains beyond. Other souls, shackled by circumstances and the taught guy wires connecting them to the flames in the center of the Earth, sat hunched in corners, bellies empty and growling for blood feast.

The ghost’s wispy arms grew tense and tighter, dark half-solid forms now, gleaming tattoos and emblems up and down like sleeves. Slow motion, dexterous, cupping Mother Grace’s hands then moving the gun sights above Martin’s head. She fired three times at whatever it was that stood behind him. Martin felt the bullets tear open the wall, reverberating tingles in the floorboards under his knees. The shadow behind him unphased, it snugged to his back even tighter.

“You can’t kill me twice,” the ghost said, a gravel voice smothered in broth. “I’m his father and I have a say in this. You can’t send him where I’ve been.”

Grace now, “You’re not a father. You’re just a strange friend of a friend who turned up drunk and violent on random rainy nights at the bar where I bounced. After I let you rape me a few times, I strangled you out cold, put you into my trunk, and brought you here to bleed your final drops on the basement floor while snapped in a bear trap.” Eloquent, she could be.

She repositioned her feet, wider stance, straining to pull her hands from the hands of the father. Martin watched from beneath. I could run right now, he thought. But he didn’t.

The hands inched upward; mother’s elbows bent—under whose power it was hard to say. The gun barrel situated itself beneath her hard-chiseled chin. Then blam. Blood rain.

Martin continued bringing dates back to look at the body until he settled on one similarly bent soul, and they made a new family. The kid spoke of grandmother like she lived far away, in the hills, in a rotting room lit by candles. And grandfather too, though you couldn’t see him, no grinning skull face or rat-nipped bones to pass as memorial.

Martin told the boy to stop talking about it, especially at school. But he did it anyway.

©2021 J. Brian Reed