THUGLIT Issue Twelve by Leon Marks, Rob Hart, Justin Porter, Mike Miner, Edward Hagelstein, Kevin Garvey, T. Maxim Simmler, J.J. Sinisi

performing the proper Heimlich maneuver. Only tonight, Kansas was all out of Good Samaritans. The blood ran in rivers down his arms and he stared at me, the color draining from his face, until his white eyes went blank and he fell face down to the floor.
    I turned back to Connie. He shook hi s head at the kid on the floor.
    " It didn't have to be this way." I shrugged a semi-sincere apology to him.
    " Yea it did. These things always end up this way," he said to me with the exhaustion of a lifetime's worth of deals gone wrong.
    " I guess you're right."
    When I left the motel room, I placed the duffel bag on the doorstep before clicking the door closed and making sure it locked. Then I used a towel to wipe my prints from the doorknob. Inside the room, I had used the same towel to wipe down the gun before placing it in Connie 's cold hand and wrapping his finger around the handle and trigger. The placement of everything wouldn't hold up to a thorough investigation very long—and failing that, a cop would immediately realize they were both killed with the same gun. But I figured it would be confusing enough to give me a head start. Besides, there was no one left who could place a third person at the scene.
    " That's it, huh?"
    Startled, I spun on a heel. Instinctively my hand went to the small of my back, but there was no weapon there.
    "You scared me," I said. I slung the bag over my shoulder and brushed past her to the van. I could feel her eyes; her smile was gone, those beautiful teeth covered by a sad frown. "You been out here the entire time?" I asked a question I already knew the answer to.
    She stood as a weather vane; dug into the ground so firmly by disbelief her feet stayed pointing at the motel door even as her torso tw isted to watch me load the van.
    " What happened in there?" She responded with a question she too already knew the answer to. This amused me; the two of us parlaying via a verbal do-si-do.
    I slammed the sliding door shut on the van and stuck the key in the driver's side door.
    " Where you headed now?" She tried a different tack to get an answer out of me. It worked. I stopped and considered the question a few seconds longer than I should have. Those cops probably hadn't gotten very far. Regardless of how crooked they were, they'd be the first on the scene if someone had already called the police.
    " What's behind there?" I asked pointing to the fields abutting the back of the motel. "Beyond all this corn I mean."
    She looked at the cornfield, her feet still cemented in place . "It's just one farm here. He owns something like eighty acres. His farmhouse is somewhere that way. A road runs in front of his barn. You take that a few miles west and you'll hit Route 7."
    I mounted the driver 's seat of the van with considerably more ease than Connie had. He was dead now. The thought appeared alongside his ghost, floating there with the rest of them.
    " Thanks, Launderer." The irony of her name struck me when I glanced over my shoulder and saw the bag of cash sitting in the back. I could take her with me. Give her undisclosed sums of money to go out and buy the stuff of life. The money would cycle through the many and varied transactions of commerce and come back to me clean, untraced, and wonderfully ready to start a new life.
    " I heard gunshots."
    I wiped my mouth with my hand.
    "Where're you headed?"
    " I don't—" with great effort her feet pulled free from the earth and she turned to face me.
    " Come with me."
    " With you?"
    " Yeah. Come with me. The van's not as scary as it looks. Especially after you see what I have in this bag back here."
    " But my friends."
    " Screw 'em."
    " I don't think I could do that."
    I looked at the clock on the dash. I was wasting time. I put the van in reverse and wheeled it around. I stopped beside her, so close I could lean out the window and touch her forehead if I wished.
    "Remember that story you told me. About the murders?"
    She solemnly nodded.
    "There's nothing