by Brian Mosher
Three men were sitting in a booth just inside the door of a greasy-spoon diner on the Kansas state highway. I was sitting by myself in the next booth, facing them. One of the men looked like a cross between Quasimodo and Billy Joel, and he kept looking up at me with his one good eye. I ignored him. I’m good at that. I often get stared at by ugly men. I’m the sort of beautiful woman they think they might have a chance with. Not a glamorous super-model type, but more like the girl-next-door type—if you happen to live next door to an Irish killer for hire who looks like someone the Clancy Brothers or their ilk would have sung about: a lass with raven hair and ruby lips and eyes of emerald green / she’s an angel on the shores of our fair isle, the fairest fair colleen. Or something of that sort. Though I doubt anyone ever sang about me or thought of me as an angel. A fallen angel, more like.
The waitress, Trudy, delivered three bowls of soup to the men, then took my order. (T-bone steak, rare, with a baked potato.) We had a little chat about the dry weather and the universally acknowledged fact that there are no good men left in the world, then she headed back to the kitchen.
When Windy walked in, all three men reached for their weapons. They were all dead before their guns were drawn. The one who had been ogling me was now face down in his bowl of beef and barley soup, its broth spilling all over the blue Formica table. Before I could count to three, Windy blew back out the door, sauntered across the parking lot, climbed in her white Toyota pick-up, and drove away.
Obviously, I had to get out of there before the cops arrived. I couldn’t afford to get caught up in an inquiry into three mysterious deaths, what with my two or three outstanding warrants. But I couldn’t just leave, either. Cute little blonde Trudy would make a great witness against me. She’d seen me, we had talked, she had taken my order. She would remember me, for sure. Good looking women always notice each other.
I figured I could eliminate Trudy and cover my trail at the same time if I made it look like she was involved in the killing. The problem was, I didn’t really know how the men were killed. Well, I did . . . and I didn’t. (More on that later.) The point is, Windy had come in, the three men had died, Windy had left. All in about five heartbeats. No visible injuries, and no blood.
It was time to improvise.
Trudy was in the kitchen. She didn’t yet know there were three dead men in the booth by the door. I pulled out my Berretta M9 and pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen. As Trudy turned toward me, I shot her in the center of her smooth, suntanned forehead, just above her neatly plucked eyebrows. Then I fired a quick shot into the back of the head of the fat slob working the grill. Now he was being grilled right next to what would have been my steak.
I dragged Trudy’s body over to the dead men’s table and set her next to the guy who looked like Quasimodo. Then I draped her delicate arm around his misshapen shoulder, laid her pretty head on the table in the puddle of broth, and made my escape. It wasn’t perfect, but it eliminated the witnesses and hopefully muddied the waters.
Here’s what I knew about Windy’s history: the first VanderSlooths had come to America from Holland in the early part of the 19th century, settling mostly in western Pennsylvania, along the banks of the Allegheny River. Windy’s father was among the third generation in this family of immigrants, born in the early part of the 20th century. As a young man, he had served in the US Army during the Cold War years, intercepting and translating Russian radio transmissions. After his discharge, he bought a farm in Kansas, married a non-descript local girl, and led a perfectly normal life as a dairy farmer. That is, until his daughter proved to be quite abnormal.
The first time Mr. and Mrs. VanderSlooth noticed anything out of the ordinary about Windy was the night all the cows died while she and her boyfriend were making out behind the barn. You can imagine Windy’s parents’ horror when they saw all those animals lying there dead in the field, no injuries or signs of foul play—just lifeless. Things went quickly downhill from there for Windy. When you’re a sixteen-year-old girl in Kansas and farm animals start dropping dead in your wake, you don’t have a lot of prospects.
Eventually, Windy would learn to control her lethal ability. But in the beginning, it was dangerous to be around her, especially when she was feeling in the mood for love. Something about being sexually aroused triggered her power. I don’t know the science around it, and I don’t think Windy did, either. But there was no denying it. At first, it was always the least intelligent beings in the area who fell victim. First the cows, and then a couple of guys on the football team at the prom after-party. But even after she got a handle on how to trigger the power at will, and to direct it at a specific target, she found stupid people were always easier to kill than smart people.
It’s no wonder Windy developed a drug problem. Who wouldn’t look for a way to hide from such a reality?
Buying from drug dealers led her to know other criminal types. She began to work for some of them, moving from city to city until she found herself in Chicago, employed by the Nowicki family. From there, her abilities came to the attention of Mr. Owen O’Leary, an up-and-coming Northern Irish thug whose gang was about to become the largest organized crime syndicate in Western Europe.
I know all this because Owen was my dad. He used Windy’s addiction as leverage to control her, and she became a key part of his team.
When my father died just after my seventeenth birthday (heart attack while behind the wheel of his Cadillac, the coroner decided), I found myself orphaned. It seemed like both an omen and an opportunity to get out of Ireland and make a new start for myself. Having acquired some skills over the years, including how to handle a gun, I found employment with some of my father’s American associates.
Windy disappeared around that time. There were rumors about her. Stories would circulate about her being spotted in Eastern Europe or South America. But nobody was sure if she was working for someone, or freelancing, or just on her own, killing who she wanted to kill—or maybe not killing at all anymore.
And now, five years later, I’d seen her. I’d watched her kill. And she’d left me, a potential witness, behind. Why?
I slipped a Vicodin out of my jeans pocket, swallowed it dry. (Practice makes perfect.) As I climbed into my rusty, beat-up SUV, I heard sirens in the distance. I turned out of the parking lot onto the state highway, heading in the direction they were coming from, driving nice and slow, like nothing was wrong.
Later, as I nodded off in the front seat of the SUV, which I’d parked under a billboard advertising the local dairy’s line of cheeses, and remembering my dad once told me Windy hated cheese (she absolutely wouldn’t eat it in any form, which is strange for a girl who grew up on a dairy farm), I had an opiate fueled dream.
In the dream, a little girl was wandering in a desert, wearing a thin cotton dress with matchbooks on it. The matchbooks were advertising different roadside diners and truck stops. The little girl was making the sweetest sound by striking a cymbal against a washboard. At one point, she tripped and fell into a deep, deep hole. When she climbed out, she had a hole in her head, just above her left ear. She was almost dead from dehydration, exposure, sunstroke—and the hole in her head. Then a troop of flying monkeys swooped down behind her and carried her away, along with me and my rusty SUV. As we left the ground, she looked me in the eye and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
Collateral damage, you might call me.
It was both my current assignment and my life’s ambition to find Windy. When I stopped at the diner where I witnessed her kill those men, I had been on my way to her hometown to see if I could dig up any clues about where she might be. Now I knew I must be on the right track.
I pulled into the only convenience store in that one-stoplight town, and asked the counter guy for a pack of Lucky Strikes and some scratch tickets. He looked about Windy’s age. I asked him if he’d ever heard of her.
“Name doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “You might want to check with Charlie over at the post office. He knows everybody.”
I paid for my cigarettes and scratchies, and headed out to find the post office, which turned out to be located at the other end of the town’s only paved road. In a ramshackle building next to the post office was a bait and tackle shop called Something Fishy. There was a white Toyota pickup parked in front, like the one Windy had been driving. I checked my gun, made sure it was loaded, and tucked it where I could get it quickly. It wouldn’t be any use to me if Windy decided to take me out; still, it made me feel better.
From across the street, looking through the plate glass window, I could see a woman working behind the counter. From behind, she seemed to be the right size and had the right hair color. She didn’t look my way as I entered. She was busy helping a customer, an older woman. They were chatting about bait, which kinds are best for which types of fish. I wandered toward the back of the shop, making sure there were no other customers.
As I headed back toward the counter, I could hear the two women still talking, but the subject had changed. The old lady was giving grandmotherly advice now: “You should marry a man who loves you just a little bit more than you love him.” Then she opened the door and left with a bag full of hand-tied flies. Just right for catching spotted bass in the local stream, apparently.
The woman behind the counter turned to face me. It was the same face I had seen in the diner earlier. It was Windy.
“Hello Rose,” she said. “I’m surprised it took you so long to find me. I heard you were good at finding people.”
“You’re not the average person, Windy. Harder to find than most.”
She smiled, a little. “Well, now you’re here, what are we going to do?”
“How about a drink? Is there a bar in this town?”
“No, but I’ve got a well-stocked refrigerator in the back, and a bottle of Irish whiskey. Would be like a taste of home for you. Right?”
Windy locked the front door and turned the “Open/Closed” sign around. I followed her through a curtain hung in a doorway in the back and entered a small, sparsely furnished apartment. There was a couch, a table with a couple of chairs, a refrigerator, a sink, and a bathroom beyond.
Windy poured us each a generous portion of Jameson, swallowed hers in one gulp. Out of the refrigerator she took two beers: a Smithwick’s for me and a non-alcoholic O’Doul’s for herself. Icy cold.
We sat across from each other at the small table. Windy slugged her beer while I sipped my whiskey and forced my eyes to meet hers. “You know the Nowicki family want me to bring you to Chicago,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I know,” she said, returning my gaze. “They realize there’s no possible way you can make me go if I don’t want to, right?”
“It’s hard to know what they realize. Either way, they don’t care about what’s possible. They want what they want.”
“So, what’s your plan?”
I took a long swallow from my beer bottle. “I was hoping you’d just come along. If you don’t come with me, they’ll send someone else. And someone else after that. They don’t typically give up.”
Windy snickered. “It’s been a long time since I ‘just went along’ with anyone, anywhere.”
I tried to smile. “I know, but I figured maybe you’d make an exception in my case. My dad was awfully fond of you.”
“Your father was a pig. Like all men. Only worse, because he was powerful. Nothing worse than a powerful pig. Much like the people you’re working for now.”
“That’s a fair assessment,” I agreed. “Still, he always spoke kindly of you. Thought of you as a daughter, which would almost make us sisters.”
Windy leaned forward, her face in a grimace. I tensed, seeing the fire in her eyes. “He thought of me as a daughter? Is that why he tried to rape me? You know that’s why I killed him, right? As he drove away from me, shit-faced and frustrated and angry, I just snuffed him out. Like blowing out a candle.”
I had not known that. I knew my father hadn’t been the nicest man, had even been brutally cruel. And I knew he’d been a skirt chaser. But I’d never thought he was capable of rape. Or stupid enough to try to rape Windy. Either way, it was obvious she wasn’t going to just come along.
She sat back in her chair, appearing to relax, and poured us each another shot of whiskey. “I remember when you were born, Rose,” she went on. “Belfast, 1983. Your old man had just finished beating the crap out of some poor idiot who owed him money, when one of his flunkies told him your mother had called to say she was in labor and on the way to the hospital. Your dad told the flunky to take the poor sap he’d just worked over back home, then he sat down behind his desk and poured himself a shot of Jameson, just like we’re drinking now. I asked him if he was going to the hospital to be with his wife. I was twenty years old then, working as your father’s bodyguard. Seemed funny at first glance, since I was about half his size and didn’t carry any weapons. But you know what I can do.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to my question, but I asked it anyway, “What did he say when you asked him about going to the hospital?”
Windy almost smiled as she answered. “He laughed, a sad laugh. Then he said, ‘Why would I want to go there and watch that bitch give birth to some other bastard’s kid?’
She paused, almost as if to give me a chance to catch up and absorb this new information about my parentage. We each took another sip from our beer bottles. Then she went on, “He seemed human for a second. I could see the hurt in his eyes. He drank his whiskey slow, like you do. Just sipping it. Then he told me to get out. I know he was a decent father to you, even if he wasn’t your actual father. And I think he felt a little guilty about not being there when your mother died in the hospital giving birth to you that night. But I don’t think he ever forgave her.”
I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, but held them back and swallowed what was left in my whiskey glass. I could feel Windy looking at me, measuring how I was dealing with these revelations.
After a moment she continued, “So, here’s the thing, Rose. I like you. And maybe I owe your father some loyalty for helping me out when I was a kid. Or maybe I owe him some hatred for using me as a weapon. Maybe I should’ve felt pity for him, instead of bitterness and disgust, when he was so drunk and lonely he tried to force himself on me. But either way, I’m not going with you. I’m done working for other people, especially people like Owen O’Leary or the Nowicki family.”
We were silent for a few moments as Windy poured more whiskey in both our glasses. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my father’s face. But five years after his death, it had gotten harder and harder to do. Memories fade—the good ones and the bad. We’re left with impressions and vague ideas and memories of memories. To me, flying monkeys and monsters from my Vicodin dreams are as real as family and friends back home.
I opened my eyes to find Windy looking at me, waiting to see what I would do or say, but not really caring either way. She had gotten through, had become free. Who was I to destroy her peace? To drag her back into the life she’d escaped, a life she’d never wanted in the first place?
“Can I ask you something before I go?” I asked.
“Sure, kid.”
“Those three guys in the diner, who were they? Why’d you kill them?”
Windy shrugged, frowned thoughtfully. “Just erasing as much of my past as I can. They were some assholes I knew a long time ago, before I ever went to Ireland. I didn’t know you’d be there. I heard you were looking for me, but I didn’t know you were so close.”
I stood up and drained the last of the whiskey from my glass. “Thanks for the drinks, Windy. Sorry to have bothered you.”
She stood up as well. “What are you going to tell the Nowickis?”
“I don’t think I’m going back to Chicago. Been meaning to get back to Belfast for a while now.”
“Good luck, kid.” It almost seemed as though Windy was going to give me a hug, but then thought better of it. Instead, she turned and led me back to the store’s front door without another word.
I did start out heading in the direction of Belfast. But I made a stop on the way, and that turned into a whole other story.
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