Other Stories in this issue

Willard

by Bill Connor

About the Author: Bill Connor is a retired engineer living in Phoenix, Arizona.

Excerpt

Xonacotl Sanchez parked her minivan at The Dining Room of St. Benedict, the soup kitchen the locals called Benny’s. She was small and slim with a dark primitive face that looked like it had been carved from tropical wood with five quick strokes of an axe and left unfinished. A few customers sat along the curb looking worn, six-thirty in the morning and nowhere else to go.

Lemon hurried up to her. “Willard’s dead.”

For a moment time held still. The hard desert sunlight felt like a stranger’s palm touching her cheek.

“I went to his camp at sun-up. A killer got there first.” Lemon’s eyes shifted away, then met her gaze and shifted again, like a guilty child who’d been caught.

“Someone murdered him?”

Lemon nodded. “Cracked his head open.”

Xonacotl’s parents had abandoned her at the border fifteen years before. They sent her ahead in the darkness and then disappeared. Willard had filled the role in her life of counselor, advisor and grandfather. A boiling rage coursed through her veins. “Who?”

“You need to call the cops. Let them find out.” Lemon cleaned Benny’s for a place to sleep when he wasn’t in jail. No way would he call them.

“They won’t investigate. An old homeless man. They won’t. If they tried, no one would talk to them.”

“Then what you gonna do?”

Story Comments