False Start

The men drove across the landscape, gazing at the bareness stretching outwards to the horizon, as if they found such borders an affront to their very existence. They rode in a beat up Ford, and the dust of their passage reared behind them like a snake writhing to the sky. They rode and they smoked and they drank, all the while thinking of such things incomprehensible to all others. Their thoughts were ones of stone, of grand vistas and blood-canyons, of skies uncaring and of silent stretches. Violent thoughts, history’s disease.

They entered the town around noon.

***

Detective John Grayson entered J&J’s convenience store. He looked around – goddamn, he thought, some plain-ole ugliness went down here.

The cashier was sprawled out behind the counter, his last moment already contained and recorded with a chalk outline. His blood was thick, sticky.

Executed, he thought. A real fucking shame, no man should die under fluorescent lights.