Thirteen

Dan

It’s like my granddaddy used to say, “Nothing makes sense until it makes dollars.”

From the minute we skidded out of the driveway, I was trying to make sense of it all. Trying to crack this latest nut of Chad’s voice sounding so damned good all of a sudden. Trying to link his fading high note with everything else—Pam’s new obsession, the cop staring up at the sky talking nonsense with a bullet in his head, the day care worker sitting bolt upright in her bed and spitting a bullet into her hands. There was something that stringed all this together, but I just couldn’t keep my finger on it long enough to tie it into a bow.

There were other concerns too. The way we high-tailed it out of there to go off and live out of my truck, leaving behind two more shootings and one bitched up and confused wife and mother, there were three new big jobs on my plate. I needed to keep us hid from the cops, I needed to keep us moving, and I needed to find some way to put bread on the dashboard.

And that’s what it was really. Just like my granddaddy said it. It was that old fashioned need to turn some kind of a profit out of Billy’s abilities that finally shined the light in my eyes—finally showed me what Billy Shooter’s real talent was.