A Dying Wish by Henry Roi

Author:Henry Roi [Roi, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Terminal Velocity - A Next Chapter Imprint
Published: 2019-11-25T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Loc was a sniper in the Marines,” Big Guns told me as we parked by the harbor. Ace, Shocker, and Blondie pulled in next to his Prelude. He killed the ignition. Bayou mud breezed our faces as we got out. Seagulls cawed over the fishing boats docked at the piers, scavenging for scraps of decaying fish, shrimp or crabs that could be sensed on the old wooden planks. Big Guns closed his door. We did the same, gathering around him so he could brief us on the mysterious Viet killer. “Loc is not, uh, right in the head.” He scratched his cheek.

“You mean he got messed up in the Iraq War?” Shocker asked, brushing a lock of hair out of her eye.

“He was messed up before he joined the military.”

“What happened to him?” Blondie said.

Big Guns looked uncomfortable talking about Loc. “About ten years ago his baby died. Then his fiancé left him.”

“Ouch,” Ace commented. The girls' eyes widened at the juicy gossip.

“Yeah,” Big Guns agreed. “Loc was a Buddhist with a Christian girlfriend- a recipe for trouble. The Two-Eleven go to church, so naturally they were enemies of the cliques that went to temple. They ran into Loc and his girl at church one day and jumped them. She was pregnant. They were beaten badly by five or six Two-Eleven, and she lost the baby at the hospital that same day. They were devastated. Loc wasn't a violent person back then, and couldn't bring himself to retaliate. It went against his beliefs. His fiancé was an Old Testament kind of girl and thought he was weak. She left him. So he joined the Marines to learn how to kill people.” He shrugged. “He became a sniper. Won some shooting competitions and some awards for valor. He conquered his cowardice, but his depression turned into something psychotic. He came back last year but won't speak to anybody. Not even his own father. He lives here, on that shrimp boat.”

He pointed to a fifty-foot wooden fishing vessel, dark red paint old and flaking off, wheelhouse small and crusty with tall antennas sticking up in front of the windshield. The out-rigging for the shrimp nets were drawn up like folded wings, steel tubing and pulleys well used, rust colored with a liberal coating of white 'gull droppings.

“Boss place,” Shocker said sincerely.

Blondie gave her a skeptical glance. I waved for Big Guns to lead the way. “I like psycho people. Let's see if he's home.”

Fifteen boat slots, all of them full of watercraft, jet skis to eighty-foot yachts, surprisingly held no people. The backwoods bayou was not known by the general public and would hold a measure of privacy a person of Loc's nature would appreciate. I realized the fugitive in the girl-beast must have noticed the same thing.

We stepped up on the dock's platform, tall marsh grass poking up between the boards, water sloshing its high tide under our feet. Fingers of wooden planks fanned out between the boats. Loc's

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