Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

then crumples the note and tosses it into the wind. “Fuck this shit!” He looks at Kornblum. “What the fuck took you so long?!”

Kornblum is convulsing with tremors, staring wide-eyed. “Wha... what?”

Oswald rises and starts pacing back and forth, waving the gun for punctuation. “Twelve fucking days I’ve waited for one of you shitheads to try to blow your brains out so I can start racking up the saves, but no, no, not a single one of you suicidal wussies has the balls to go for it! For almost two weeks I’m waiting, and I’m waiting, and meanwhile the moon is halfway to full—”

The Bluetooth in Oswald’s ear crackles, a high-pitched voice: “Hey, Tonto, you there?”

Oswald sighs. “One second, don’t move”. He reaches up and absently taps the Bluetooth while pointing the gun at Kornblum. “Gerbil?—What is it?—I’m the middle of the speech.”

“How far into it are you?”

Oswald shrugs. “Actually, I’ve gone off-script a little bit, I’m improvising a little. It’s going well. Why do you ask?”

“We got company.”

Trooper Wayne Ganz is going at a pretty good clip down the dirt access road, which runs along the boat docks and bait shops of Nauvoo’s downscale pier, when he sees the big guy with the gun on the bridge.

Ganz sees the guy out of his right front wing, the sun glinting harshly off the Crown Victoria’s right quarter panel. The glare plays havoc with the trooper’s line of vision, and the bridge is still a football field away, but the young trooper knows a handgun when he sees one—even from a hundred-yards-and-change away, rumbling over a herringbone of ruts, raising a storm head of dust.

Alarms go off in the trooper’s brain, adrenaline singing down his spinal column. He has yet to see any violence in his short career—a little over three years with the patrol and not much more than a few whiny motorists protesting yellow violation slips.

He reaches under his dash and flips on the chaser lights, then grips the wheel tighter and stomps on the accelerator. The Crown Victoria growls.

The access road runs along water level, past dilapidated shacks with tin roofs and boarded windows, past rotten docks and pilings long sunken into unforgiving marsh. Ganz blurs past them, keeping his gaze fixed on the concrete gateway three hundred feet away, baking in sun, engulfed in cattails.

The entrance to the Derleth doesn’t see much tourist or commuter traffic—most civilians use the Keokuk Causeway ten miles to the south—and this time of day, in the middle of the quarry’s first shift, the only vehicles using the bridge belong to either employees of Carbonate Amalgamated or local merchants and farmers.

As he draws up on the entrance, Trooper Ganz considers calling in for backup, but something stops him—a series of lightning-quick judgment calls crossing his mind with the speed of a synapse firing. Back at HQ, they make fun of his youth sometimes, and it eats at Ganz. What if this is nothing, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if the big guy is merely waving a stick?

Plus Ganz needs his hands. He’s got a hairpin turn coming up fast, and besides, he’s got his .357 Colt Desert Eagle on his hip and the 12-gauge on the rack, and nobody argues with a Mossman 12-gauge loaded with deer-shot. The radio will have to wait.

He bears down on the gateway, goosing the breaks and yanking the wheel.

Oswald is so distracted by the action unfolding at either end of the bridge that he loses track of the wimp for a fraction of a second—hardly more time than it takes Oswald to glance to the east and then to the west—but it’s enough time for Kornblum to run.

At first, Oswald is too busy to do anything about it, gaping at the battered old poultry truck coming toward him from the west, a stake job, loaded to the gills with crates full of chickens. He glances back over his shoulder at the opposite end of the bridge, where a state trooper is screeching around the corner of the bridge road, rumbling onto the precarious span in a swirl of dust and spinning lights.

And this is when Oswald catches a glimpse, in his peripheral vision, of the shithead scurrying away.

“HEY!”

Oswald instinctively calls out at the fleeing Kornblum, who is racing full bore along the boardwalk toward the oncoming poultry truck. The man is flailing along with a weird limp, his piss-damp Dockers flapping in the wind, his hot gaze searching the bridge cables for an opening. Oswald spits and curses and jacks a round into Bulldog.

The Bluetooth in his ear crackles again: “I don’t want to intrude, Tonto, but your guy’s getting away.”

Oswald starts racing after the asshole, grumbling into his earpiece: “No shit!”

“And in case you haven’t noticed, you got Barney Fife coming up fast on your left flank.”

From her vantage point on the Iowa side, near the quarry, perched at the very top of a derelict crane, Gerbil sounds like she’s actually enjoying this. Oswald doesn’t have time to yell at her.

“Tell me something I don’t know!” he bellows into the Bluetooth.

Fifty feet away, Kornblum finds another ragged opening in the cable-stringers. He stumbles to a stop and quickly latches one hand onto the cable, and then he pulls himself up and over the guardrail. Trembling convulsively, he blubbers while he climbs, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over!”

“KORNBLUTH, DON’T!” Oswald quickens his pace, breaking out in a full run, his finger on the trigger pad.

A mewling sound comes out of Kornblum as he climbs onto the ledge: “It’s Kornblum.”

“GODDAMNIT, DON’T!”

From the west, the poultry truck rattles toward them, an olive-skinned old man in a tattered straw hat and greasy glasses behind the wheel, oblivious to the little mini-apocalypse going on a hundred feet ahead of him.

“STOP RIGHT THERE!”

Oswald makes a mad dash for the pussy, only half aware of the prowler’s looming presence behind him, the Crown Victoria all lit up, pedal down to the metal, engine screaming. The trooper