City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance

until Chester first woke up, early this morning. So I haven’t been here long enough to qualify as being on a vigil.”
    He almost asked her who was looking after her kid, but didn’t. Instead, he said “Has he been awake since you’ve been here?”
    “Yes. He didn’t say much, though. Just ‘oh, hello’ when he saw me. He nodded when I told him Tommy was at home with the sitter. And he kinda chuckled when I told him you were in the other room.”
    “It’s good that we can laugh about it now.”
    She stood up and stretched cat-like, the slim muscles in her arms and legs taut and her smooth white stomach showing between jeans and sweater. She had a new tattoo there, just above her belly button, in red and black, but it was too small to be able to tell what it was—some sort of cross or something. He looked away from her.
    She said, “Lucky I was able to get the day off from work.”
    “Work?” Crowe said. “What, you have a job now?”
    “Yeah. Some people do work for a living, you know.”
    “Don’t give me that. You don’t have to work.”
    “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe some people want to work?”
    “No, not really.”
    She huffed. “Funny. Chester said the same thing. I got a job at the Mall of Memphis about four months ago. Working the evening shift at the shoe store.”
    Crowe said, “Well, you always were obsessed with shoes.”
    Chester snored peacefully. Crowe gently lowered his blankets a bit and saw the bandages around his torso. Dallas joined him next to the bed, standing entirely too close, and said, “What exactly happened out there?”
    “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
    She laughed softly. “Another daring adventure with Crowe and Paine comes to its inevitable conclusion. You two will be hard-pressed to top this one.”
    “I suppose so.”
    Her smell, again, that flowery scent that always went right to his head. He moved away and went to the windows. Another bleak winter morning out there, an expanse of dead brown grass trailing away from the house, into some sparse woods beyond an unpainted wood fence. In the distance, he could see a road, winding away toward what he could only imagine was civilization. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The Dr. Maggie Memorial Hospital for the Criminally Inclined.
    “Well?” she said after a minute. “Are you going to tell me what happened or what?  All I could get out of Marvis was that you two were on a job and everything went south.”
    “That about sums it up,” he said, staring out the window.
    He didn’t have to look at her to see the anger. “Oh, well thank you for clearing it all up, Crowe. I swear you drive me insane sometimes.”  She sighed and he heard her moving behind him, away from Chester’s bed. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
    And then Chester said, “Yeah. He’s still a jag-ass.”
    Crowe turned around and Chester was grinning at him weakly from his bed. Dallas went to him, touched his forehead with a gentle hand. “Chester,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
    “Right as rain,” he said. His voice was scratchy and dry. “Fucking starving, though.”
    “I’ll go get Marvis, have him bring some food.”
    “Yeah.”
    She kissed him lightly on the temple, and, with a wary glance at Crowe, left the room.
    Chester looked around with bleary eyes. He started to sit up, but winced in pain. Settling back down, he croaked, “You got a smoke?  Ah, never mind, I keep forgetting you don’t smoke.”
    “Bad for your health,” Crowe said. “Haven’t you heard?”
    “I think I remember hearing something about that. Thought it was an old wife’s tale. Shit, I could use one. What the hell day is this?”
    Crowe told him they’d been at the farmhouse for two days now, and what Dr. Maggie had said about his condition. Chester peeked under the blankets at the bandages around his torso, frowning philosophically. “Huh,” he said. “Y’know, I thought I felt something like