Gus couldn’t look. He knew what was going to happen. The old man was going to nudge the bottle again and he was going to knock it off the shelf. The only thing he’d be able to bring Morton would be the broken neck, which was undoubtedly what Morton would give him in return.
A buzz sounded behind him. The door alarm. Gus started to turn. Before he could see who had come in, two shots blasted through the air.
The old man flew off the ladder, smashing into the wall of bottles, then crashed to the floor in a rain of broken glass and cheap scotch.
Gus stared over the counter at the shopkeeper’s bloody corpse. “Why did you do that?”
Shawn stepped up to him, thrusting the. 44 Magnum into the pocket of his leather duster.
“The question,” Shawn said, “is, why didn’t you?”
Chapter Two
“Why didn’t I what?” Gus said. “Murder an old man who was trying to help me?”
“Is that what you call it?” Shawn said.
“Murder is what the law calls it,” Gus said. “It’s what the Bible calls it. It’s what everyone in the world calls it.”
“I could be wrong about this, but I seem to recall hearing that in different countries they have different words for things,” Shawn said as he stepped over to the shelves of snack foods and gave an exploratory squeeze to a package of Twinkies with a pull date from before the turn of the millennium.
Gus couldn’t pull his eyes away from the dead man lying on the floor in a pool of blood and whiskey. “Why did you kill him?”
Shawn put down the Twinkies and turned his attention to the freezer chest loaded with ice-cream bars. Or, as he discovered when he tried to take one out, loaded with a single ice-cream bar, as all the smaller units had melted and refrozen into a cube six feet on each side.