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mountains, Detective. It just obscures the view.”
    I checked my gun. Three
bullets left. Thought things over.
    “I hadn’t heard you’d
died,” I said.
    “I was shivved in the yard. Nasty business. After I returned, I played doornail. The prison
didn’t want me, so the church dropped me off in Greytown .
As I suspected they would. It didn’t take long to find gentlemen willing to
fund my new church. Even less time to find clients.”
    “And Nex ?”
    “Short for necrophilia. My
own little joke.”
    I stared at Isabel. Looked
at her life. Wondered what she could have become.
    Thought about Marion.
About So and Jo.
    “What now, Detective?”
    I counted my bullets
again.
    “You won’t let me go
unpunished, will you?”
    I looked to the Bishop.
Its eyes were pleading.
    “I deserve punishment.”
    I looked back to Isabel.
    “You want to do it.”
    I caressed my scars.
    “End me.”
    One for So.
    “ End me! ”
    One for Jo.
    “I’m going to wait,” I
decided. “Until something happens.”
    I waited a long time.
    #
    I called Miss
Lopez, told her I quit, Isabel’s trail had gone cold. I hung up when she asked
for specifics.
    I pass the days now
shuffling through Greytown’s streets, gun by my side.
Most moots avoid eye contact, lurch to the other side of the street. They’ve
heard the stories; even if they haven’t, self-preservation demands the
response.
    I ignore them. If they are
cognizant enough to avoid me, they’re plainly capable of making up their own
deteriorating minds.
    Once in a great while one
will get it in its head to take me on. It’ll lumber up to the sidewalk beneath
my Greytown apartment window and groan a threat,
sometimes heave a brick ineffectually into the air.
    It’s usually the new
arrivals. They haven’t figured out yet what it means to be dead. They think me
a vigilante. A sheriff no one elected in a town no-one wants to live in. I give
them a chance to leave me alone. Then I let Marion speak for me.
    Sometimes, they’re older
moots, looking for a way out, knowing I’ll provide one. All they’d have to do
is ask. But they believe it better to go in a blaze of glory than a mewling
plea to end it all.
    To moots, I am the
avenging angel now. Or the nightmare of nightmares.
    Same result either way.
    Other days I can’t bring
myself to face the grey. I stay in my apartment, waiting out existence,
O’Shea’s brain set companionably beside me in its bowl. I fancy I can hear the
man within shrieking into the void.
    Neither of us deserve to escape our hells.
    I stare at the wall.
Feeling myself slowly rot away. Wishing it were quicker. Glad that it isn’t.
    On the wall in front of
me, two photos make up my world.
    Sophia and Josephine: the
two I couldn’t save.
    Isabel: the one I did.