... On A Two-Way Street ...

by Gary Cahill

About the Author: Gary Cahill is an active member of Mystery Writers of America New York, International Thriller Writers, and Irish American Writers and Artists. His first short story, "That Kind of Guy", was published as a Black Mask-style homage in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Other work has appeared in print, e-pub, and audio podcast versions with Shotgun Honey, The First Line Literary Journal, Pulp Empire, Short Story Me Genre Fiction, Big Pulp Magazine's anthology "The Kennedy Curse".

Excerpt

After our breakneck belly-flop bottoming-out farther back down the road, and doing God knows what damage to the shocks and struts and whatever else is under there, we took the car off the pavement once again, albeit with a bit more feel and care, about a half mile short of a Cape Cod motel where I hoped to ride out the coming storm—blue metal muzzle-hot lightning and lead-black rain from the finishers now roaming the night for whoever left two of theirs dead on the beach and then two more on the blacktop. She’s the maniac driver; I’m the blood-on-his-hands holding the very-loaded-big-boy-.44 carjacker. Quite an entry on the old résumé, that’ll be.

We left the car over a hump of grass in back of an evergreen stand, pretty good cover in the dark, and hoofed it to the “olde” something or other “inne” to await, as our characters in these dark stories always do, their date with inexorable fate, and for the final credits to roll. But in film fiction, or as well vérité, these tales often don’t tell themselves. Let’s add “narrator” to my job history—one bullet-point down the page after “carjacker”. Here goes.

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