Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

But don’t go back to Gregor. Go home. Don’t force the truck through a pummeling rain that will drench the Hammersport streets into smeared impressions of themselves. Stoplights dripping crimson, street signs melting. Don’t drive so quickly that the moist road hisses underneath your tires. Stall; stop for gas. Don’t barrel across the farm roads stretching toward Gregor’s trailer.

Because what you’ll find when you return is Gregor prowling outside sopped and shirtless in the purple sheen of his bug zapper, wearing nothing but his khaki shorts, hair slicked over his cranium. He will be aiming his pistol with one hand toward the grass, stiff-armed. He’ll cup a cigarette dry with the other.

If you come this far, then just keep driving. Steer erratically if you must, but drive past. Abandon the truck down the road and race on foot across black and waterlogged fields until you collapse, almost drowned and heaving.

But don’t stop at Gregor’s trailer. Don’t wedge the truck headfirst into its gravel dock. Don’t douse the headlights as Gregor lurches toward you round-shouldered and puffing smoke like a dying campfire. With frantic forearm gestures he will lure you from the truck. “Come see what I have locked away. Hurry,” he’ll say.

The rain will patter your shoulders. You’ll forget the money pouch and the generator plug and everything if you follow Gregor’s trail. He’ll sidestep toward his trailer, never losing sight of you, urging you onward with flicks from his pistol. He will approach one of the three decommissioned coolers rusting in his yard. He’ll crush his cigarette against the cooler lid, where the rain will have gathered dust into rivulets of gray. When he opens the cooler, he’ll wrap his finger around the pistol trigger and stab the weapon inside.

You’ll see a boy just barely teenaged soaked in his jeans and a black T-shirt. A kid wearing fear on his face like the dead wrenching rubber on a Halloween mask. Blood in one nostril bubbling with each harried breath. Don’t allow yourself to see his eyes wet and blinking, his body folded inside the cooler with limbs bent useless.

“I caught the little insect, yes?” Gregor will say.

Don’t arrive at this moment. Don’t. Take another route. Because when the rain drives pain back into your wound and reminds you of your own shameful contortions, you will not be able to withhold. You’ll rush back to your truck and yank unopened boxes from the cooler. You’ll return to the boy and tear one box open like a split pinyata, dousing his body with ice cream sandwiches. You won’t dare glance toward Gregor, but you’ll see his gun always looming over the cooler lip, trained toward the boy’s wincing face.

You will tell the boy to eat. He wants ice cream? Eat the ice cream! Eat it all, you’ll demand, or Gregor will fire bullets and the bullets will black out his mind forever. You’ll scream at him, demand that he move faster as his fingers stumble across the packaging. You’ll hang so deeply into the cooler with your head and your curses that if Gregor fired, his bullets would catch you, too. Even as the boy chews down those cold slabs, you’ll dump a dozen more popsicles over his chest. Chocolate-darkened saliva will pool against his chin. Loose pellets of dry ice will begin to fog against his clothes and bare arms. He’ll flinch at the frozen burns and chew. He will close his eyes.

Right now you are furious, listening to these predictions. Right now you can’t imagine because you are gentle and you understand clearly that afterward there will be no hope of burying the shame of this moment from memory. But just wait and you’ll see. There is no need now for anyone to substantiate the awful thrill that you’ll soon feel slicing up your heart.

Heaven’s Gate by Judith Cutler

In July of 2003, the first of Judith Cutler’s novels to be published in the U.S., Power on Her Own, was released by St. Martin’s Press, followed this year by Staying Power. A Canterbury native, Ms. Cutler has, to date, penned six books in the series to which those novels belong, and she has another fifteen-book series in print through Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K., all garnering excellent reviews.

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“All this building work at the Big House that Mrs. Pearce mentioned the other day, extensions and that,” Tom Withers, the landlord of the Straight Furrow, began, swabbing an imaginary spot on the bar, polished to a deep glow by generation upon generation of loving hands.