Writing is toiling alone in the dark, digging up the weird soil of your mind, crawling into the claustrophobic places deep inside. So this is an incredible distinction and I’m very humbled to appear alongside so many incredible writers.

“Past Lives” originally appeared in Starlite Pulp Review #6, so I’m in debt to the amazing team there, who are putting out some of the best crime and genre expansive fiction out there today. The anthology, edited by Steph Cha and Megan Abbott, will come out in October, right in time for my birthday.

Other cool news: the fine folks at Feign interviewed me about my atomic murder mystery story “Boy Detective,” my writing process, and a bunch of other interesting topics. Check out the interview here.

“Writing for me is part craft, part heart of darkness. I don’t want to interrogate too deeply the unknown place the ideas emanate from. I just follow the energy where it takes me. Throw the resulting pages into the void. Hope someone finds them out in the dark."

Some cool things I’ve been reading/watching/listening to:

• Bugonia: squishy squeamish conspiratorial brainrot meets sci-fi nihilism; spoonfeed me Yorgos Lanthimos til my last breath

• Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby: razor-sharp muscular pedal-to-the-metal grit lit

• Tenebrae: quintessential Argento, black gloves glistening with blood by firelight

• The Beyond: more 80s goofy gross-out slasher than high giallo, but man, that final scene…

• Dizzy by Rachel: powerful chronicle of illness, health, and resilience

• “Going Shopping” by The Strokes: always happy to see some new Strokes, but this breezy one goes deceptively hard: “Stockbrokers flyin’ out the window /

  I kinda miss that sound”

Til next time.

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You go north on Ninety Five, leaving the neon behind, and within an hour there’s only rolling desert, horizon to horizon. A great vast nothing. Think of the eons that have worked across that land. The blood spilled. The secrets buried in the dirt.

I’ve recently published two short stories concerned with this history. The first is “Boy Detective” in Feign. This story is about a precocious kid named Mikey, who’s living with his fuck-up mom in a shit-hole motel in one of the seedier slums of Vegas. He befriends a retired homicide detective, who is haunted by the unsolved 1950s murder of a woman chained inside an abandoned house at ground zero of an Atomic bomb military test. As Mikey is pulled into the detective’s obsession, he tries to solve the decades-old case himself and escape his own troubled home life… but all is not as it seems.

Read “Boy Detective” now at the great Reno-based online magazine Feign.

Another story I published recently is “Romeo” in Starlite Pulp Review #7. This is a dark coming-of-age, true-crime-like tale inspired in part by the real-life serial killer Charles Schmid - known as the Pied Piper of Tuscon, who in the rock-n-roll scene of the 60s wore pancake make-up, prosthetics, and lifts to make himself appear younger and taller in his efforts to lure in and kill impressionable teenagers. The story of Schmid (which Joyce Carol Oates also riffed on in her amazing story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”) is more relevant now than ever before, in our age of dark influencers and bad-faith online pied pipers of disaffected young men.

In “Romeo,” an outcast high-schooler named Dante is befriended by a charismatic new student who calls himself Billy Romeo. As Dante is taken under the wing of the charming and increasingly ominous Romeo, he is lured into an ever-tightening labyrinth of dark paths, until he is faced with a single choice that will determine the course of his entire life.

Pick up a copy of Starlite Pulp Review #7 to read “Romeo” and more than a dozen more twisted tales of noir and pulp goodness.

‘Til next time, friendos!

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So begins my short story “Extinction Studies,” published recently in the amazing Cincinnati Review. It’s a story that took nearly my whole life to write, stretching back to thirteen-year-old me sitting in the dark in Las Vegas, face illuminated in the TV glow of late night sci-fi and monster movies.

“She handed him a boxless VHS tape with a yellowed label. She said she’d found it at a yard sale. A blood or cola stain obscured the title, but Albert was able to make it out in the light.

“Planet of the Apes.

“When they inserted it into the VCR, they were not surprised by Charlton Heston, whose blow-dried presence was familiar to them from Soylent Green and The Omega Man. But in this movie there was something electric about the crash landing onto an unknown planet, the humanlike apes and apelike humans, the blasted torso of the Statue of Liberty, the realization that this de-evolved world was their own future Earth.”

I didn’t live through the specific tragedy that befalls Albert, the teenage hero of “Extinction Studies,” but experienced enough death and abandonment and hopelessness in my own way. And like Albert, I found a way forward in the flickering dream machine in my living room, the midnight cathode ray fuzz of local TV, the one and only… Las Vegas’s own… Count Cool Rider.

Read about the Count in the full story online now at The Cincinnati Review.

New Book: THE BROKEN DETECTIVE by Joel Nedecky

I can’t wait to get my hands on the The Broken Detective, the debut novel by Canadian crime author Joel Nedecky. I’ve read the first thrilling pages already and can’t wait to have the book in my hands and dig in.

Check out Joel’s Substack, which includes links to other great stories featuring his haunted PI protagonist Jake Joelsen.

She stank of death. Days since she last showered, days holed up in this gutted house where the pipes only spurted out air and the wind howled through the rotted beams.

Peeking through the mangled blinds of the lone window that hadn’t been smashed out and boarded over, she saw the charred exteriors of the other houses on the block. A fire had once torn down this street.

No sign at all of her fuckhead brother. They were escaping tonight, whether he liked it or not. Leaving this warzone behind and lighting out for the ends of the world. Kevin gave off a lot of bluster and hot air, but she knew he was scared to death. Always had been. When they were kids, she urged him to hide it, warning him that people like their father would feed off his fear the way plants consumed light and warmth.

But the terror in the center of her brother’s heart was too great, even after Jane gutted their father with a kitchen knife mid-beating. Then Kev’s time in St. Mary’s took that fear in him and nurtured it, cultivated unspeakable impulses within him.

Finally. Kev’s ridiculous neon orange car pulled up to the curb. He killed the headlights. She crossed the living room to the front door, tucking the pistol in the rear waistband of her pants.

“About goddamn time,” she said when she opened the door. But Kevin wasn’t there. Instead, an old man stood on the porch, dressed in a black suit and wide-brimmed black hat like some Wild West mortician. With both hands, he held onto a large duffel bag, smiling at her through the door screen.

“Oh, I agree,” he said. “Finally. I’ve been dying to meet you.”

“The fuck are you?”

“Time is short, my sweet, and we won’t have the opportunity to talk long. When all is said and done, is that truly the question you wish to ask?”

The longer she looked at the man, the less she thought he was old after all. His face was ghost white, his flesh soft and sagging like a rotting pumpkin, but he wore a face that was more false than aged, as if he was covered with prosthetics that were slowly melting away.

“What are you doing with my brother’s car?”

“That’s a better question. Would you believe it if I said he gave it to me?”

“The fuck is he?”

“Yes, gave it to me. Willed it to me with his dying words, in fact.” He lifted up the duffel bag. “I have something for you.”

She snatched the gun out of her waistband and pointed it at the man’s head.

“Get your ass in here right now.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

She opened the screen door with one hand, keeping the gun trained on him as he stepped through the doorway, then let the screen hit his backside as he came into the house.

“I’ve been looking for you for some time, you know,” he said. “You must have felt it. I heard a lot about you. I’ve become quite an admirer of yours, in fact. I feel like I’ve known you for a long, long time, Jane.”

“Where is he?” she said, closing the door. “You tell me right now or I put a bullet in your head.”

“He talked a lot at the end. Told me everything I wanted to hear and then some. How everyone thought you were long gone, but you were staying right here under their noses. Smart girl. He told me how you double-crossed your benefactor, then triple-crossed her betrayer. He told me about this all-out war that you sparked, but that’s obvious to any observer. It’s there in the streets to see. Last of all, he told me about what you stole.”

Despite herself, Jane glanced at her bag in the corner, which contained the videotapes she stole from the sisters, the unspeakable things recorded on those tapes, how they would bring the whole house of cards down.

“I’ll say it one more time, then I end this. Where’s Kevin?”

“But he’s here, Jane. Do you want to see him?”

“Don’t move,” she said, but he dropped the bag on the floor with a thud and unzipped the length of it. Then he tipped the bag over, letting a half dozen human heads tumble one by one across the floor.

“Fuck,” she yelled as they rolled towards her, raising her feet like a swarm of rats were rushing under her feet.

In the moonlight, she recognized them. All of them. Rolling across the charred wooden floor, pinging off one another like oversized, horrible billiard balls. Miss Florsheim. The poor, stupid private eye, burned nearly beyond recognition. Others who had both aided and crossed her alike. Then, finally, Kevin—his swollen tongue hanging from one corner of his mouth, his eyes wide with a final moment of terror, etched into his face and too terrible to ever be witnessed again.

“You… you...” she whispered, her blood churning in her. It fizzed and seethed.

“Wait,” he said as she raised the gun and pulled back the hammer. “A final word.”

“You think you can talk your way out of this? You’re not going to add me to this pile. I won’t let you.”

“I’m disappointed, Jane. You, of all people, should know. I wish no harm to you.”

“Then…” she said through hot, choking tears, looking the man in the eye but feeling the heads rolling at her feet. “Why?”

“Like I said, we don’t have long. Me, especially. Cancer, you see. Quite advanced. Quite lethal. And like I also said, I’ve become an admirer of yours. Heard tales of your deeds. Seen your brutal handiwork up close. And as the conclusion to this story came into view, as it become apparent you would beat all odds and roll off into the sunset with your brother, I thought how boring, how sad is the happy ending. I feared the complacency your success would breed in you. This is much better. Something to haunt your mind. Something to remember me by. What are you looking at, dear girl? You know this is not my true face. Do you want to see what’s underneath?”

***

After some time, he opened his eyes. He could not recall when she struck him or what with. Nor did he think, with the amount of blood pooling at his feet, he would ever remember.

But when he came to, he was bound to a chair and the house was burning quite spectacularly. It had been burning for some time, it seemed, growing around him into a wild and uncontained thing. A vortex of flames and unbearable heat that spread across the bubbling walls, crawling now across the floorboards towards him. It was a thing to behold. The sheer shape and vehemence of it.

As black smoke spewed and blotted out the world, as the house crackled and began to fall around him, he said, “Oh, yes. How fitting, Jane. How lovely indeed.”

Read the full trilogy, and other flash crime shorts, in my story collection BLOOD SPATTER - free when you subscribe to NIGHTWAVES.

She was thirty minutes late. He raised his hand to her across the bar.

“It’s good to meet you,” he said when she came over.

She was so tall he had to crane his neck to look up at her. She muttered something he couldn’t make out, then took the shot of whiskey he held out and threw it back. He gestured to the bartender to pour two more.

They sat in a red velvet booth. Her sole profile photo on the app was a grainy picture of her against a gray sky with low-res clouds filled with dark rain, and he was surprised how she carried that dourness with her even here.

“Normally it’s me reaching out to girls on the app,” he said. He did not mention how he touched the screen when she messaged him, brushing two fingers across her cheek, marking her.

She downed her shot.

“You meet lots of girls?”

“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not just looking for the first wide-eyed wounded doe I come across. I spend a lot of time thinking about deep stuff.”

“Deep stuff.” She wiped her runny nose on her sleeve.

“What it all means. Where we come from and how we’re all the same but different. Your profile says you like the desert. What’s so great about the desert?”

“It’s hot. Nothing can survive in it.”

“But nothing’s there.”

“That’s what I like about it. The emptiness. It’s scorched clean. Like fire.”

“You’re from Vegas?”

“Just passing through.”

“A drifter, huh? They say this is a place you can start over. But that’s a lie. What kind of work are you in?”

“I’ve had all kinds of jobs.” The waitress brought another shot and she downed it, too. “Killed chickens at a farm. Carnival for a while.”

“That’s quite the resume,” he said. “Myself, I’m between opportunities at the moment. I’ve been thinking I’d like to find work in a prison. Keep watch over the bad guys as they serve their debt. My dad was killed when I was a kid, you know. They never caught the killer. Want to see a magic trick?”

He pulled a switchblade from his pocket and thumbed out the blade. Then he held up his thumb for her to see, before covering it with a cloth napkin. He twirled the knife between his fingers theatrically, then jabbed the blade into his covered thumb, wincing in pain.

“Ta-da,” he said, pulling away the napkin to reveal his intact thumb. He pocketed the knife and threw a punctured lime wedge on the table.

“I pocketed the lime when I handed you the shot earlier,” he said. “We call that misdirection.”

“Lets get out of here.”

In the parking lot, he dropped to a crouch in front of his car—neon orange and dented all over as if someone took a softball bat to it—and motioned to the license plate.

“Get it? Camaro Kev. Like on the app. My friends just call me Kev. Sometimes Killer Kev.”

He drove to where she pointed, barely saying a word, out to the edge of the city. What street lights worked out this way illuminated shuttered warehouses and ruined factories.

“Buses run out here?” he asked.

“I walk everywhere.”

“That must take you hours. This is no place for a lady to live. Haven’t you heard about the killer?”

“There are all kinds of killers.”

“Not like this one. He travels across the metro area, slashing the throats of women who live by themselves and nobody cares about. No offense.”

She didn’t say anything. Past the industrial zone, they arrived at a gloomy trailer park and the weather-beaten doublewide in which she lived.

“Turn off the lights,” she said.

When he did, she leaned over the dark interior and stuck her tongue in his ear. It was electric. She grabbed the bulge in his pants. The whiskey on her breath, the rubbery sound of her moving across the leather interior. She would not kiss him, and when he pushed his way into one, she bit his lip and got out of the car. He followed her up the steps.

The trailer was like a crime scene, an aftermath to some natural disaster. Holes punched in the walls, exposed insulation. A bare and darkly stained mattress on the floor.

“Nice place,” he said, walking inside. He kneeled in front of a large, stuffed duffel bag. “Living out of this?”

“Don’t touch that.”

“A bag full of money then.”

“It’s not mine. Some guy left it.”

She turned the deadbolt and pulled her shirt over her head. Her bra was flesh-colored and her skin bruised all over.

“That’s what I’m talking about. Just give me a minute, baby.”

He stepped inside the coffin-sized bathroom and rolled the door closed after him. The bulb flickered and buzzed above him and he stared at himself in the mirror. He wondered how he was going to do it. No two were ever the same.

He used to think it was improvisation, like free jazz, but now he knew that another force was acting through him. It usually ended with the knife, steel graceful and clean, but with the last one he met online he found himself taking her throat in his hands and crushing her windpipe until the veins in her neck stopped pumping blood to her brain. Eye to eye the whole time.

This one would have to be quicker—his sister was expecting him soon. But when he went for his knife, his jeans pocket was empty. Where had he dropped it? It would be one thing if it slipped out of his pocket in the car. But if it fell inside the trailer somehow…

The lights were off when he came out of the bathroom.

“Baby?”

But there was only a tall, thin man leaning against the front door.

“She’s gone,” the man said in a Southern accent. He had a quiet voice that lingered in the room. “Took her payment and left. It’s just the two of us.”

“Who are you?”

“Me? Nobody.” He stepped into a patch of moonlight on the trailer floor, his suit and wide-brimmed black hat, both black, glistening. “I’ve been looking for you, Kevin.”

“Looking for me?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been looking for you for quite some time.”

“Listen… did I meet some girl you knew?”

“Not yet. But I hope so very soon. You’ve been a very naughty boy, yet I’m not concerned with what you’ve done. I’m interested in what you have to give me. You do have something for me, you know.”

The man stepped closer. He smelled of latex and iron. Something else, too, biting his nose. Sulphur. His face looked like it had been shaped with lumps of wet clay. His face was wrong.

“What do I have for you?” Kevin whispered. He backed away as the man came closer, but his back hit the wall and there was nowhere else to go.

“Why, Kevin. Your last words.”

Originally published in Punk Noir Magazine

When he opened his eyes, a figure was sitting bedside, watching the IV bag drip through the tubes feeding into his veins.

“I’ve been waiting for some time,” the man said. A Southern accent. A quiet voice. “They told me you sleep most of the day, but I’m a patient man. And lo and behold. You’ve come to join me on this beautiful morning.”

Since the incident, his vision was like Vaseline smeared across a camera lens, but it looked like the speaker wore a suit and had long hair below a wide-brimmed black hat.

“Who are you?” he croaked from the hospice bed, his voice a far-away sound in his own head.

“Yes, it’s a beautiful morning, but quite too hot, wouldn’t you agree? Very hot and dry. Would you like some water? Oh, of course not. You can’t drink.”

“I said--”

“You don’t need to know my name, but I am a friend of a friend. Here in an official capacity. I am a detective of sorts, like you used to be. I have a few questions. First, I would be much obliged if you looked at this photograph.”

The Southern man held a photograph in front of his face, close enough for him to make out every gruesome detail of the crime scene.

“We cannot be precise with the cause of death. There are so many competing candidates. The likely theories are either the slash to the throat or the gunshot to the temple. The coroner has officially listed her as Jane Doe, but I understand that you and the victim are well-acquainted.”

With the state his body was in, every nerve ending screamed with pain as he sobbed, but he could not stop himself. He was racked with it. She was gone. It had all been for nothing.

“Please calm yourself, that looks terribly painful.”

“I suppose you're looking for a confession,” he managed to say. He felt bottomed out, eviscerated and drained of all blood. “But I would never harm her.”

“I’m not here seeking a confession, friend. I don't like the word anyway. Much too Catholic for my taste. My view is that there's no guilt in this world beyond the one you choose to carry. And I prefer to travel light.”

The Southern man removed his hat and stroked his head, which through his smudged vision looked bald despite the long hair that flowed to his shoulders.

“As I said, I understand you were acquainted with the victim. Were in fact the last known person to see her alive. Besides her murderer. So I come to you, poor invalid in bed, in hopes you will help me to piece together this intriguing puzzle. I know the rough shape of events. The dispute with her benefactors. The theft of a certain prized possession. Your aid in her flight from justice. The… accident that led you here. But how’s it all fit together? I need to know more.”

What could he say? From the moment she arrived in his life, he was besotted. He wanted to know her life from the inside outward, but she spoke a language of half-truths and outright lies. Despite everything he gave up for her, she was like a woman in a photo from a hundred years ago, anything familiar there supplied by your own desire.

“I promised I wouldn’t say a word.”

“It doesn't matter now does it?”

“But what is there to tell? It was love.”

“Love?” He let the question hang in the air, with the blips and beeps from the machines he was hooked up to. “If this is love, then you have been impaled upon its gates. You were shot in the back—literally. Your legs are missing from the thighs down. One arm has been amputated and the other useless. The remainder of your life can be counted in moments. You are a rotting man. All aftermath. And this… this is love?”

“What can I say? I’m a romantic.”

“Oh, I hear you were quite the dashing cowboy before all this happened. I need to know what happened. Don’t do it for her. You’ve done enough for that woman. Do it for yourself. You were police once. Serve the light again.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start. I wasn’t there at the beginning. I only got all the angles later.”

The Southern man leaned forward, the brim of his hat nearly touching him. “Let the spirit guide you.”

“What's wrong with your face?” There was something misshapen and molded about the features of the man leaning close to him, as if he wore prosthetics over his face.

“Nothing wrong with my face, friend.”

“Let me look at that picture again.”

“I don’t know what that would accomplish.”

“It’s not her, is it?”

“Of course it is. Death makes one look strange is all.”

“It’s not her. You’re a liar.”

The Southern man stood. Then yanked the pillow out from under his head.

“Well, I guess that’s that.”

“Where’s the nurse?”

“Don’t worry about that. You’re right, I haven't been entirely forthcoming. Where is she?”

“You’ll never find her.”

“That remains to be seen. It’s a big world, but I have a one-track mind. Like a dog in heat, ready to go to substantial lengths to stick some bitch.”

“She might find you first. You’d never see her coming.”

“Wouldn’t that be something. I can see this is at a dead end.”

He held the pillow before him as if admiring it.

“Did you used to have any hobbies? I like to collect last words. The way some might like to collect butterflies. Do you know what Marie Antoinette’s last words were? Forgive me, sir. In French, of course. She stepped on the foot of her executioner, you see.”

The Southern stepped even closer, hovering over him, an eclipse blotting out the world.

“Do you know what Houdini’s were? I’m tired of fighting.”

“Just get it over with.”

“Are those your last words?”

“Fuck off.”

“Oh, that’s more like it.”

Originally published in Bristol Noir

A new day. A new year. Times gone by and all the rest.

In one way, the turn of a new year is some arbitrary, imaginary line drawn in the temporal sands. Yet I’ll fight my Scroogish compulsions and take this opportunity to breathe, compartmentalize the swirl of inner time, create some narrative out of the great morass of days. I’m trying to avoid the dreaded word “reflect,” but as I look back on dead-and-gone ‘24, the one shining beacon for me personally, through all the upheaval and global anxiety, was the publication of my novel, Bondage.

I bled over this book over many years, dreamed about it’s hero Che for thousands of hours, so to see it out there in the world, garnering the positive reception it’s received, means the world to me. To those who’ve bought and read the book - thank you so much for the support, and I hope you enjoyed Che’s bloody journey through Las Vegas!

If you haven’t read it yet, you can order a physical or digital version of Bondage here, but if you’re interested in getting a signed paperback of the feminist crime thriller, then reach out to me (here or at shane.jimenez@gmail.com) and we’ll figure something out.

The Curious Man’s Podcast

I had a really awesome time chatting with Matt Crawford on The Curious Man’s Podcast. He’s a very well-read and interesting guy, and we had a wide-ranging conversation on everything from #MeToo to Las Vegas tragedies to the nature of evil to the badassery of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Give the show a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcaster of choice.

One fun item of conversation Matt and I talked about is my life-long fascination with extreme idealogies and states of mind. Fanatics, extremists, weirdos on the edge, madmen existing along the underbelly, outside the bounds of society. Radical movements. Revolutionary groups.

Or to be more precise, I’m fascinated by the tail end of extremist movements, like the Weather Underground, the radical student group that around ‘69 or ‘70 dedicated itself to the violent overthrow of the United States government. For a brief window of time amid the Vietnam War protests, the group occupied a place in the cultural consciousness. But what happens when the energy and idealism dissipates, when the wave breaks and the zeitgeist moves on? That’s the psychological place I find so captivating, the few hardcore believers hanging on, during all that long and bitter aftermath. To the cause. The movement. Just hanging on by their fingernails, despite a world that no longer cares. The heart of it all. The utter delusion.

In Bondage, I write about my hero, Che Guevara Horowitz, who, along with her sister, are raised by a Weather Underground-type revolutionary “as anti-imperialist fighters in what the biographers conjectured was an unidentified desert outpost, probably somewhere in rural Nevada. Two soldiers in a shadow war no one in the country even knew existed.”

What I’m Reading: Good Night, Sleep Tight and Barcelona Red Metallic

I haven’t been able to put down Good Night, Sleep Tight, the newest from the inimitable Brian Evenson. A haunting and heartfelt collection of horror and speculative short fiction that hooked me from page one, and might be my favorite book yet by Evenson. The title story, “The Solution,” and “The Night Archer” might be my favorites, but there are so many bangers in here. Pick this one up!

A masterful debut novel! As I wrote in my Goodreads review:

“Nail-biting suspense and characters I truly cared about. Cosack is a writer of many gifts: her beautifully written prose, her deft ability to believably depict the crushing devotion of motherhood, her talent at diving deep into the investigatory process of hit-and-runs, and the bottomless empathy she brings to each of her characters. But it's the unexpected twists and turns of this suspenseful book that truly left me reading late into the night, moved by this story of what a mother would do to protect those she loves and what a driven investigator will do to bring a murderer to justice.”

What I’m Watching: The Curse

I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this show since Twin Peaks: The Return (an equally bizarre and cerebral and, at times, inexplicable experience). I’m a huge fan of everything Nathan Fielder has touched, and love the scuzzy, gutpunch films of the Safdie brothers, so to see the team-up here raised my hopes pretty high. But despite my raised expectations, I don’t think I was expecting anything like this, with its car crash of cringe and dread and late-stage capitalism dissection. I honestly wasn’t sure what to think after the first couple episodes, but this bizarro show really crept up on me. I’ll have more thoughts when I finish up the series (through my fingers, of course, and with a clenched jaw).

Now Your Moment of Zen

The new day brings new hope. The lives we’ve led, the lives we’ve yet to lead. A new day. New ideas. A new you.

Here at the end of another momentous year (may you be born in interesting times, the curse goes) I’ve decided to embrace the weird and wacky coming fall of civilization. If this is truly it, the end of the world, let’s at least get all Mad Max with it. Saw off a shotgun and get beside me in a hypercharged V8 Interceptor and let’s head out into the wasteland, where anything goes.

In the meantime, the dreamtime, my scruffy mug has popped up in a couple online spots recently.

I had a nice short chat with Erik D’Souza on the Crime Writers of Canada podcast about being peripatetic, feminist crime writing, and my neon-noir novel Bondage.

Give it a listen!

If you’re in the mood for a longer conversation, I had a great time talking with Vincent Midgard of The Dark Mind Podcast about Bondage and its many themes and inspirations - from the Weather Underground (BRING THE WAR HOME) to Terminator 2 to the neon-lit, blood-slick streets of Las Vegas itself.

You can watch the video or listen to the audio here.

I’ll be back soon with some further thoughts on the craft and eternal, Sisyphean struggle of writing, as well as some exciting updates on a couple fun upcoming publications.

In the meantime, my crime thriller novel Bondage is available in paperback or digitally if you haven’t read it yet. I hope you give it a chance and enjoy the violent ride!

Until next time, wastelanders.

Now Your Moment of Zen

I remember a time of chaos... ruined dreams... this wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called… Max.

I’ll be back shortly with recent updates on the writing life, as well as some thoughts on the genesis and composition of “Victims.” Until then, enjoy the read and take her easy.

VICTIMS

Shane Joaquin Jimenez

After midnight, they pulled up to the house that matched the street number written with ballpoint pen on a cocktail napkin. The kid was still talking.

“I know you haven’t seen me in action, but I’m here to work. What I bring to the table is, I watch. I listen. And when the time comes…”  He drew his thumb across his throat. “Fuckers don’t even know what happened to them.”

The passenger slowly turned his head like some enormous owl, his bald scalp scraping against the roof of the ’88 Chrysler Fifth Avenue the kid borrowed for the evening. Hot date, he had told his uncle.

“Kid,” the passenger said. The veins in his neck were pulsing. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just trying to break the ice here. I’m–”

The man pulled an immense silver revolver from his jacket. It was the length of the kid’s forearm and the passenger held it between them for a moment, letting the gun reflect the moonlight. Then he said, “Keep the car running. I’ll be back momentarily.”

He opened the door and unfolded his great bulk out of the car. After the interior of the car went dark again, the kid saw the man crossing the lawn. The kid pointed his finger like a gun at him, taking aim through the windshield as the man disappeared through a side gate into the backyard. There was no call for him to talk like that. He needed the kid to drive him on account his license was taken away because of DUIs, and every other gun-for-hire was out of pocket because of the shitstorm in Salt Lake.

The passenger side door opened and a big silver-haired woman with the wildest eyes got in the car. Her shoulders were nearly as wide as the kid’s partner and she wore a white sleeping gown with jeans hastily pulled on under them. The assassin’s silver revolver was in her hand. Everything she touched in the car came away with blood.

“Hi,” the kid said, feeling dumb at hearing his own voice say it.

“Let’s go for a drive.”

It rained as they drove, casino neon bleary through the downpour. She directed him out to the highway, then onto a dark blacktop road. Leaving the city behind for the empty desert.

“Stop here,” she said. “Let’s take in the air. Find somewhere private.”

As he walked across desert, leaving the vapor headlights of the car behind, she followed with a flashlight. The cold rain falling on them in the dark. The lights of Las Vegas shimmering far off.

“Stop,” she told him. Then, “How much money were you going to be paid for murdering me?”

“Listen, they just told me to drive. I promise. I had no idea what that guy back there was going to do. They didn’t tell me anything. I had nothing to do with it. I swear it on my mother’s life.”

“How much?”

“I can just disappear. I’ll leave town tonight. I’ll be a ghost, no one will hear from me again, no one will know what happened. Deal?”

She raised the pistol at him. Clicked back the safety.

“How much?”

“I… a thousand dollars.”

“A thousand dollars,” she repeated, looking up at the night sky as if something was written in the stars.

“Split two ways,” he said. “If you let me go, I’ll tell you who hired me.”

“I know who hired you. The worst woman in the world. My sister.”

The kid had to pee. He began to talk. He told the woman everything. The direction his life had gone, why he had made the choices that led to this moment on this night. How, in many ways, he was just as much a victim as her. If only he could make her understand, open his chest and show her his beating heart, then maybe, just maybe…

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It’s like someone once pointed a gun at you and told you to never stop talking. Shut up. For just once in your life, will you shut the fuck up?”

Review for Bondage

If you’ve already read and enjoyed Bondage, then please consider leave a rating and review on Amazon or Goodreads. Every positive word helps. Here’s one very kind recent shout-out on Goodreads:

Interview Time!

If you want to learn more about the inception of Bondage and its many dark alleys and twisting blood-stained tunnels, then check out an interview I did here with Craig Douglas, editor-in-chief of my publisher Close to the Bone.

“If you’re lucky, you’ll ultimately find readers who care about your work. But until then you have to be your own biggest advocate. Your own number one fan.”

New Short Story Out ‘Dere

I am thrilled to have my time-crime short story “Crimes” in the newly released issue #13 of the stellar Infinite Worlds Magazine. In labyrinthine tunnels deep below the Las Vegas Strip, twin brothers Karl and Gustav come across Dan the Ice Cream Man, who claims he can show them the future… but what will they see and what will they do to each other upon witnessing it?

The story arose from me noodling on the narrative possibilities of the classic mind-bender “Would you kill Hitler in his crib if you could travel back in time?” But as can often wonderfully happen when you tip-tap away at a story, I was able to throw into the blender some other weird things that had been haunting my brain. Like memories of the strange dude who lived out of a broken-down ice-cream truck in an empty field down the way from us when I was a kid in Imperial Beach, California. Me and other neighborhood kids used to hang out in that claustrophobic sun-baked truck with him while he regaled us with lurid tales about women and living rough. I don’t remember if his name was Dan the Ice Cream Man like in the story, but that certainly dings the felt-truth bell.

It also gave me the opportunity to explore another area of fascination of mine - the hundreds of miles of subterranean flood tunnels snaking below Las Vegas, filled with the ever-nocturnal dispossessed who live down there, in the dark below the Strip and gleaming casino towers.

Here’s an amazing original illustration paired with “Crimes” in Infinite Worlds by the incredible Stone Drunk Wizard.

What I’m Reading

Flame and Sinew by Jacob Marsh

A bloody blender concoction of The X-Files and the X-Men, mixed up by a Creepshow-era Stephen King. The second in a series, the novel follows Owen and his collection of super-powered colleagues who investigate paranormal events plaguing the poor inhabitants of Birch Island.

The book flits between seemingly every conspiracy theory out there (on Birch Island, they’re all true!) while at the same time very organically world building and setting the stage for even crazier adventures ahead. Think NCIS meets Men in Black meets The Magnus Archives, all viewed through a dark and gory filter, and told with a voice and vision that is uniquely and satisfyingly Marsh’s own.

“Good Night, Sleep Tight” by Brian Evenson

I can say lots about this masterful story from Evenson’s latest collection, but you should really go into this one blind, like I did. So just read it now.

Now Your Moment of Zen

Oh those time-travelin’ blues…

“One bleeding foot after another, Che crossed the open desert.”

If you’ve already read and enjoyed Bondage, then please leave a rating and review on Amazon or Goodreads. Every positive word helps. Thank you for your support!

Early Buzz for Bondage

Thank you, Kirsten, for the generous review!

And thank you, Heather, for the kind words!

Autothriller

If you’re interested in getting a glimpse behind the scenes of the writing of Bondage, my recent essay, “Autothriller,” up at the excellent Shotgun Honey, goes into how my life and my Las Vegas converge in Bondage, as well as some guidance on how to leverage autobiography in your own fiction writing.

As I write of my early years, before moving to Vegas at age 13:

“Roaming the seedier parts of San Diego, crashing with my mom’s biker friends or in pay-by-the-week motels overlooking the freeway. We fled California under mysterious circumstances, moved into an old rusty trailer in the middle of nowhere Arizona. No electricity, dirt-floor outhouse. Thirty years later and I still shake out my shoes for scorpions every morning.”

“I came to realize that it was only natural to weave my own biography (which itself reads like some kind of crime-horror tale) with the propulsive story I wanted to tell of high-stakes survival, as well as other ideas that were occupying my brain space, like the aftermath of revolutionary movements and the nature of male violence towards women. This, ultimately, is what propelled me through the long years of writing, what gave me the stamina and faith to finish the book.

“Nothing is off limits. Lean into the pain. It’s all fair game.”

Recent Pick-ups

Kill Factor by Brian Bowyer - I’ve heard about the transgressive, grisly work of Bowyer for awhile now, and can’t wait to dig into this cool-looking book.

The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson - The dark, cryptic, puzzle box-like stories Evenson puts out into the world feel less like the result of traditional creative processes, and more more like strange visions recounted from half-remembered peyote dreams. I’m a few stories into The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and this amazing collection is no exception.

Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction - I picked up the first volume of this comic on a recommendation from my friend Adam and the great tagline for the book: “Suzie's a normal girl with an extraordinary ability: when she has sex, she stops time. One night she meets Jon... who has the same gift. And so they do what any other sex-having, time-stopping, couple would do: they rob banks.”

The Third Man - A perfect movie, with a beautiful film transfer on Blu Ray, that alongside a few other noir films from Orson Welles (Touch of Evil, The Lady from Shanghai) is a movie that I can watch over and over for the rest of my days.

“Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.”

“I don’t want another murder in this case. And you were born to be murdered.”

Victims

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter then you have free access to Blood Spatter, a collection of crime-horror short stories set within the Las Vegas of Bondage. If you haven’t subscribed yet, join up here at Night Waves to get a gratis digital copy of Blood Spatter.

One of the stories in the collection, “Victims,” appeared earlier this year in Shotgun Honey. Partially inspired by the real-life story of Susan Kuhnhausen, it’s about what happens when a woman marked for death turns the tables on her would-be hitman.

“The assassin’s silver revolver was in her hand. Everything she touched in the car came away with blood.

"‘Hi,’ the kid said, feeling dumb at hearing his own voice say it.

“‘Let’s go for a drive.’”

Now Your Moment of Zen

I am very excited to announce that my novel Bondage is out TODAY! Order a physical copy or digital version of the feminist neon-noir crime thriller here.

If you want to check out the first chapter of Bondage before purchasing it, you can read that here.

Advance Praise for Bondage

“Searing, heartfelt, and fresh, Bondage roars out of the gate at mach speed and never lets up. Che Horowitz is an unforgettable heroine. Shane Joaquin Jimenez has written a blistering debut.”

—Meg Gardiner, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Bondage by Shane Joaquin Jimenez is a vivid, atmospheric tour-de-force. Rich in intense moments, alive with sharp dialogue and, best of all, brimming with sentences that do their deadly work with ferocious clarity, Bondage stuns from its opening scene to its last.”

—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie and Neverhome

“Bondage is pure hard old school noir. Images that glitter and gouge. Words that fester. Phrases that linger and haunt. Lines that stay with you like bullet fragments under the skin. The sort of noir that gets up close to knife you in the belly then sticks around to keep you company while you bleed out. Read this book. Or else.”

—Will Christopher Baer, author of the Phineas Poe trilogy

“With believable tension of pursuit and escape, well-choreographed fight scenes and the copper of bloody violence tasted in the mouth, Jimenez’s Bondage is true to the heritage of grisly action pulp novels. A great debut novel.”

—Jesse Hilson, author of Blood Trip

Blood Spatter

Also, if you enjoy Bondage, don’t forget that you can receive Blood Spatter, a collection of crime-horror short stories set within the Las Vegas of Bondage, for FREE when you subscribe to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your support and hope you check out and enjoy Bondage.

Also, remember that you will receive Blood Spatter, a collection of crime-horror short stories set within the Las Vegas of Bondage, for FREE when you subscribe to this newsletter.

Bondage Review

Thank you, Nat Whiston, for the great review of Bondage!

Recent Stories: “Brains” and “Ultimate Warriors”

I’ve been very fortunate to have a couple short stories of mine recently featured in some cool places.

“Brains” was published in the always excellent Punk Noir Magazine. This paranoid piece is the result of several story strands and interest areas of mine that unexpectedly converged - a gritty crime short about an ex-con, the blighted underbelly of Las Vegas you find in the shadow of the Strip, nuclear dread and the 50s atomic origins of Vegas, and strange, obsessive states of mind (with a little lemon-wedge twist of an homage to the classic Nabokov story “Symbols and Signs”).

Also, my story “Ultimate Warriors” just appeared in Eclectica, which is the oldest online literary magazine (and has a delightfully 90s website, so retro it’s modern again). As a long-time boxing fan - and bumbling amateur practitioner - I spent years trying to write a story about the fight game. My previous attempts included a Rocky-eque parable about two brothers and an MMA heist thriller set in Japan in the days before the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but despite a lot of plotting and typing, nothing quite worked in the end.

I’ve found that often in my writing I’ll light upon a premise or core narrative idea that intrigues me, but I need something additional to allow me to enter into the dream space of the story - an interesting character or voice or perspective, some non-obvious angle through which to approach and tell the story.

In “Ultimate Warriors,” my entry point was the point of view of a non-verbal child witnessing the sad spectacle of his boxer father’s decline. I wanted to tell a story about the self-delusion required for someone to aspire to the pinnacle of the sport, how that in turn leads them to not accept when the time has come to hang up their gloves, and how love can lead one to dangerous measures. I also found a welcome opportunity to explore pro wrestling, a childhood obsession, and its bizarre, performative depictions of masculinity, such as the titular Ultimate Warrior. For 1990 me, there was no truer depiction of manliness than this hairsprayed bodybuilder in clown make-up and neon tassles.

What I’m Reading

The great up-and-coming Canadian crime writer Joel Nedecky.

Nedecky’s story “The Filthy Benjamins” was recently published at Bristol Noir and is a gritty noir caper about (among other things) the nature of punk, growing old, artistic integrity, drinking, and self-destruction. The hero of the story, tortured Winnipeg private eye Jake Joelsen, will feature in Nedecky’s forthcoming novel The Broken Detective (published in 2025 from Run Amok Crime), which I can’t wait to read.

Check out Nedecky’s other stories online here. He’s definitely one to watch for.

Now Your Moment of Zen

Bondage Reviews

One of the first reviews of Bondage has appeared online! The writer Joel Nedecky writes that the novel is “a sprawling revenge epic” that reminds him of Kill Bill, Terminator, and 8mm. ”Jimenez is a fresh voice on the crime writing scene, and Bondage is a great first novel. I look forward to reading more of his work.” Read Joel’s full review here.

You, too, can read an advance copy of Bondage, weeks before it officially drops on July 16^th. Advance copies are available via Booksprout and BookSirens, or via emailing me at shane.jimenez@gmail.com. I only ask that you rate and review the book on Amazon or Goodreads.

Blood Spatter

Speaking of free stuff, you can also download Blood Spatter, a collection of crime-horror short stories set within the Las Vegas of Bondage. Blood Spatter is a completely free book that you will receive when you subscribe to this newsletter.

These stories have appeared in publications like Bristol Noir and Punk Noir Magazine, and take place during and after the events of Bondage. You can read “Epitaph,” one of the stories in Blood Spatter, here.

Become a NIGHT WAVES subscriber today!

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What I’ve Been Watching

The Guilty, a 2021 psychological crime thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Based on a screenplay from Nic Pizzolatto, of True Detective fame, and adapted from a 2018 Danish movie, The Guilty is an interesting little diorama of a film I hadn’t previously heard much about. While LA burns with wildfires, an emergency dispatcher and former cop answers a call from a woman he believes has been kidnapped, setting off a desparate search to save her from her kidnapper.

The Guilty has a handful of credited actors, but is very much a Jake Gyllenhaal solo vehicle, as he occupies the screen nearly every minute of the running time, the whole movie playing out through his point of view as he makes increasingly frantic calls to rescue the kidnapped woman, while secrets from his own past come crashing into the open. The Guilty plays out out almost like a one-man play or an old-school radio drama, with some interesting twists and turns along the way. Definitely worth a watch with your state-mandated Netflix subscription.

Now Your Moment of Zen

Recent Writing

My horror short story, “Le Tigre,” was recently published in 96^th of October, a very cool transgressive online publication that puts out some interesting work that truly feels unique in our day and age. Think Henry Miller meets blood-spattery 50s EC Comics. Think Allen Ginsberg meets Vincent Price.

I hope you enjoy “Le Tigre,” a story I wrote about what it means to bleed for your art. While writing it, I thought of it in a way as my take on those great, campy, gory Tales from the Crypt episodes that scared the shit out of ten-year-old me watching in a dark room late at night in the early 90s.

I’ve Been Thinking About: Ephemerality (Digital and Otherwise)

Recently, while spit-shining my website and compiling a selection of my published writing over the years, I was struck by how many online-published works from a decade or longer ago are simply no more on the inter-webs.

Over the years, I turned from attemping to publish exclusively in physical literary journals to publishing in online mags. While there’s nothing like holding a perfect-bound magazine that contains some story you bled nightly over, one damn sentence after another, it also can feel like throwing your work into the void, to be glanced at by the last handful of adjunct English profs in the world who still read literary publications. But having your work appear online - however much it might not seem as “prestigious” - feels so much more accessible and democratic, like you might actually manage to get some elusive eyeballs on these pages you’ve suffered over.

But it’s all so goddamn temporary. As editors move on and domain names aren’t renewed, it all just fades away and vanishes. Although I guess I’ve picked up enough thirty-year-old, twenty-five cent literary journals from the bottom shelf of a dusty corner of some second-hand bookstore to know it’s all ephemera. We’re just renting space and time - whether it’s committed to actual pulp or just occupying 1s and 0s on some server.

Thank Zeus for the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, which has preserved old fiction experiments of mine in now-defunct corners of the internet like this and this (check out that Band-Aided forehead from busting my face on Higgins Ave in Missoula, Montana in 2008).

Who I’ve Been Reading Lately (And So Should You)

Jesse Hilson, the author of some really excellent recent crime novels - the cowboy noir The Tattletales and the great revenge thriller Blood Trip.

Jesse writes page-turner, well-crafted, often funny, often brutal fiction. Each new thing he puts out surprises me with some angle, some character, some ballsy place he’s willing to go - like his recent story “Murder Eyes” in Punk Noir Magazine. Buy his books if you haven’t already, and check out his razor-sharp Substack here.

Now Your Moment of Zen

Make sure you have the very latest Netscape and a fast connection before clicking here.

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One bleeding foot after another, Che crossed the open desert.

She had been walking for hours, through night and bitter cold, across earth with no end. Her throat dry as sandpaper with thirst. Her hands and arms stinging with lacerations. A crying wind cutting deeper—to the bone.

But the pain was a fire burning in the dark, driving her forward. And a voice spoke from the center of all that hurt.

Go, it said.

What she had run away from would soon come catching up to her.

Go. Go.

After a time, she arrived at a steep hill. She craned her neck to the house at the summit, floodlit by lunar light. A vision so strange after so many years locked inside.

Anything could be up there, waiting for her at the house. But as she looked back the way she had come, scouring her mind for any other path forward, she saw no other way.

They were out there in the dark, coming for her. And without a car or a gun, taking a gamble was the only edge she had. If she did not take a chance, if she was not willing to wager her very life, she would never save her sister’s.

* * *

When she came to the top, she took stock of the junkyard property. Porch light dead. Every window of the ramshackle house dark. Shards of glass snapping underfoot.

But there was an old Chevy pickup in the driveway, fresh tire tread and boot prints in the dirt. Signs of life. Of danger.

She approached the driver’s side of the truck and tried the door.

Locked.

She looked toward the house. There was no telling who or what she would find inside. She did not like her chances in putting up any kind of fight, given how weak she was beginning to feel, losing the strength even to stand.

Yet a voice spoke up inside her mind. A voice that she had heard first as her mother’s when she was a child, but which over the years had changed, become hers alone to hear.

Don’t be weak. Move forward.

* * *

The unlocked house door swung open.

The interior was graveyard dark. It took a tense second for her eyes to adjust. The dimmest of glows flickering at the end of the hallway. Television.

She considered prying her sneakers from her throbbing feet to dampen the sound of her footfalls, but if she had to run, she preferred to be ready with her shoes on.

Hoping the TV would be enough to cover her sound, she led herself by the wall down the dark hallway, stepping carefully on the creaking floorboards.

In the living room slept an old man in grease-stained coveralls, snoring through his open mouth on an old flower print couch in the glow of the television set.

You know what to do, the voice said. Do it. Now.

But Che shook her head. She knew what her sister Emma would do—what needed to be done, of course. The first and primary lesson their mother had taught them. But Che did not have the guts to kill an old man in his sleep. Not over nothing.

Your life is nothing?

Ignoring the question for now, she scanned the room. She was looking for the keys to the Chevy, but her eyes landed on an antique rifle hanging from a rack on the wall behind the old man. Bolt action and rusted steel. A stock of rich, dark wood. An antique that might not even work.

On the table next to the old man were two old hearing aids, connected by duct-taped wires to a dinged-up receiver box. He gave no indication of registering the sound from the black-and-white horror film that played on the television screen. A man with desperate eyes running through dark woods as he transformed frame by frame into a snarling werewolf. Che remembered faintly seeing this one once, a lifetime ago, on a fuzzy VHS in her mother’s desert trailer a hundred miles from anywhere.

She looked back at the snoring old man, lying there on the weather-beaten couch. An antique like everything else in the house. She convinced herself that she could lean over him and lay her hands on the rifle without waking the old man. Maybe she could.

But if he did wake, then she would need to follow the lesson her mother taught her. In her view, the ends always justified the means. It didn’t matter who you had to hurt if it meant protecting something you loved.

“Don’t you do it,” she whispered to herself.

She passed the living room and went into the kitchen. Leaving the light off, she turned on the tap and drank straight from the faucet, the best thing she had ever tasted in her life.

When she came up for air, she caught the ghost of her reflection in the window. Her jumpsuit shredded from the razor wire. A gash along her hairline and gore matted down one side of her face. Beneath her clothes, she knew she would be one bloody, smeared mess from her collarbone to her toes.

The pigs are coming, the voice spoke up again. Keep moving, stupid.

She found a can opener in the drawer and a can of baked beans in the cupboard. She downed it where she stood, barely chewing, letting the juice pour down her chin. There was nothing in the fridge but swill beer, condiments, a plastic sack of candy bars.

Something jingled up high when she shut the door. She reached up and patted the top of the fridge in the dark. Her hand came back with a key ring. A single key dangling between her fingers, a Chevy bowtie embossed in its center.

There was a rear door at the end of the kitchen. She could leave right then and there. But the longer she thought about it, the more certain she was that she could retrieve the rifle.

She did not yet know where Emma was or what she would need to save her sister. But whatever lay ahead, she needed to be armed.

As she turned into the living room, the old man was standing up, fitting a hearing aid in one ear while holding the rifle in his other hand.

“What are you doing in my house?” he said in a loud voice, his eyes bleary with sleep, his grease-stained fingers trembling as he pointed the rifle barrel at her.

She raised her hands and opened her mouth, but no words came. On the television, the werewolf lunged through the trees after a screaming teenage girl.

“I’m lost,” she stammered. “I was thirsty and needed help. I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“You got my Mars bars,” he said, looking at the sack of candy bars hanging from her raised hand. His eyes drifted to her other hand. The truck key dangling from her fingers.

Without taking his eyes or gun off her, he took a step towards an old rotary phone on a nearby table. “Now you stay right there, missy.”

This was it then. Her eyes searched the room for anything to use as a weapon, but she only saw the television. On the screen, the werewolf howled at the moon with red jaws, the screen washed in buckets of movie blood. Terrified teenagers being hunted and murdered in the woods. Superimposed over it, a tall and dark man dressed in Wild West mortician’s clothes beckoned to the camera with long fingers.

He reminded her of her father, killed weeks before she was born in a hail of government gunfire. Growing up, she had only the one photo of him. A thin, haunted-looking man from somewhere called Chiapas. In the picture he wore a long leather jacket and held a gloved fist above his head, a rifle proudly aloft in his other hand. He looked into the camera with the confident glare of a man who knew he would very soon be dead. She lost the photo years ago in a bloodstained Las Vegas motel room.

The old man’s hand was on the telephone. She scoured her brain for a compelling lie to tell him, but could not think of anything, so tried something completely different.

“I came here for your truck,” she told the truth. “I think my sister is in trouble and I have to get to her now. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Your sister, huh?” he said, as if not buying what she was selling. But he did not pick up the phone.

“She’s missing,” she kept on. “I didn’t hear from her in years. But then out of the blue I got something in the mail from her. It didn’t say anything, but… I know that it means she’s in trouble. So I’m out here looking for her. But there are people following me… dangerous people… and I got lost and came here.”

 “Well, hell,” he said, his eyes growing soft as he lowered the rifle. “I can drive you somewheres if that’s what this is all about. Where is it you need to go?”

The movie cut out. A loud musical fanfare played on the television as a breaking news graphic appeared on the screen.

Che’s face appeared on the TV. Her mugshot taken before she went into prison. Her eyes swollen and her face black and blue from how the cops had beat her head in.

A male newscaster read the text scrolling beneath the mugshot. Her full name. Che Guevara Horowitz. The murder they locked her up for. Her escape from prison. The manhunt underway.

“Che Horowitz is extremely dangerous,” the newscaster said. “Call the authorities if you see her. Do not approach.”

The old man’s eyeballs turned in his head from the TV back to her. There was no thinking about what came next. She threw the sack of candy bars at his face as he raised the rifle. He swatted at them and the rifle went sideways. She grabbed the barrel and they wrestled over the gun, dancing in a circle across the living room. She pushed him back into the television set, which crashed to the floor but kept playing on its side, as she wrenched the gun away.

She raised it at him. He threw his liver-spotted hands up and backed away, his legs hitting the couch and his ass falling back into it.

Kill him and be free, she heard. Kill him… kill him…

She pointed the rifle sight between his eyes. Put tension on the trigger and readied herself for the deafening sound.

But next to him, another man’s face flashed across the sideways TV screen. A smiling young man in cadet blues. The newscaster recounted the painful, familiar story of the dead young cop, just a few months on the job when he crossed paths with Che in a dirty Vegas motel room. The widow he left behind. The two young children. Girls.

If the old man had been spryer, he could have taken the gun from Che in that moment. But she could not look away as the news zeroed in on the young cop’s face. His bright blue eyes, which she had watched the light drain out of. They pierced right through her again.

She sighed. The old man winced. Through closed eyes, he said, “That gun’s ornamental, y’know. It ain’t worked in twenty years.”

She looked at the rifle in her hands. Then she pointed it at the rotary phone next to the old man and pulled the trigger. The butt kicked against her shoulder and the phone exploded in shards of plastic and red and blue wires.

She swung the rifle back towards the old man, who was hunched over on the couch clutching the ear that had the hearing aid.

“Do you have another phone?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“A cell?”

“A what?”

“Give me your wallet.”

He reached into the butt pocket of his jeans and held out a worn leather wallet. She snatched it from him, holding the rifle crooked in one arm as she pulled out about thirty dollars in loose bills. She threw the wallet to the floor, holding the gun on the man as she squatted and picked up the sack of candy bars.

The old man looked at her through bloodshot eyes, white-knuckling the armrest. She imagined the way she must have looked to him, half in the dark, the gun in her hands, what part of her that stood in the light stained blood red as if she had been baptized in it.

“I wouldn’t get up from that couch if I were you,” she said.

He nodded vigorously.

“I left you the beer. Troopers will be around the next day or two. But you should ration the beans just in case. Sometimes they’re slow in following the breadcrumbs.”

* * *

Rain beat against the windshield, mile after mile.

She drove through the night. Headed south across the barren Nevadan desert, her breath smoking in the dark cab, wind lashing the truck. Hunched over the wheel, chewing candy bars one by one and letting the wrappers fall to the floor.

Above the sound of the engine, somewhere out there in the darkness, she heard something like a werewolf howl, its heart wild with murder.

The terrain was empty and vast, as if she were the last person on Earth. But she knew what was lying in wait for her ahead. Roadblocks and checkpoints. State troopers. Federal marshals.

If she were still alive, her mother might be proud to see the fascists dispatching their pigs and thugs after her youngest daughter.

But deep down, Che knew what her mother would actually say. How she would rage at Che for letting the old man live so that she could live with herself. Che knew that she could not be that weak again.

She gunned the truck to 80, 90, 100 miles per hour, pushing for the horizon. She would be free or she would burn in bright flames.