The lights and sirens are on, the motor is whining out, I am a small-town Sheriff crossing over a bridge while a train roars underneath, but I am so much more. I am vengeance. I am the voice of the dead. I am a bullet in pursuit of justice. I will not miss. Yeah, it's like that.

I weave in and out of the darkness, string the needle past a cargo van and a Peterbilt, a white Accord scurries to the shoulder. I roll through an intersection, the warn out struts bottoming out. I grind my stubby Swisher Sweet on my molars, a little juice hits the back of my throat. The Truck Inn looks like a crime scene, because it is. Some people see flashing blue lights and they get a bump of fear. I see a half dozen patrol cars encircling an entrance to a casino, where a hostage is being held and I feel comforted, because those are my people, my brothers and sisters, my team. They've got the bear tree'd. I've just got to harvest the pelt.

The dark overpass slides over me and I glide into the parking lot, shut down the motor, unlock the AR-15, put on my white drover cap as I step out of the worn-out cruiser. Sheila my trusted sergeant is standing beneath the facade of a phony western town. Walt Disney broke American architecture with his Frontiertown and all that other happy horseshit. After the rubes went back home, they felt empty, so every small-town architect in the country started remaking their own little jerk waters into rustic old timey places from neverland.

Some fairy tale inspired corporate hack designed this 800-truck parking lot off I-80 thirty miles east of Reno. It's a place to fill up and bunk down after crossing the giant kitty litter box of Northern Nevada. Also, since it's Nevada there's a peppy forty slot casino that you have to walk through before you can get to the bar or the restroom. Of course, the building has a theme. Silhouettes of some Clint Eastwood main street are outlined around the perimeter. Inside it's worse, replicated wagons, a water tower, a livery, a saloon, the set of a showdown without any show, until now.

I'm not here for the badge though. This is personal. My Martha caught a bullet. Went out to water her Blushing Knock Outs, a spinning speck of lead cracked into her cranium, punctured the cerebrum, passed through, lodged in six inches of loam, under the Kentucky blue grass that I helped lay down 23 years ago. Martha's meat computer lay in pieces, floating in pooled blood, mingling with the scattered petals.

Genie must have seen the water running down the gutter on her way home. You notice wasted water in the desert. Just on the skirts of her consciousness the violation would have circled while her main frame pinged on more important things, her semester finals, the alumite she just collected, the way Brian Anderson ran his eyes over her body when she walked through the quad. The lump of meat with its limbs stretched and twisted on the sidewalk probably didn't process at first. I'd like to say Genie didn't know what hit her when she got out of the car. That she just got her string pulled and slumped into nothing without registering. But it wasn't like that, she got one in the gut. The way desperadoes used to do way back when, a sick inhuman act, to punch a hole in the belly of another human, so their fecality washes around, acid stewing up their soft tissue. I've heard it hurts. Genie dragged herself over the hot sidewalk just to lie beside her mother. I don't like thinking that her last act was to seek comfort from a corpse. That's something I can't reconcile. A man will break if he thinks on that for long. I've been fumbling with that coin for some time, for more than I'd like to admit.

Sheila's been pacing, she does that when she's upset, a panther stuck in a cage, only this time the cage is her pledge. She wanted to go in, to handle Tom Streakle herself. I made her stand down. She shows me her phone, she's tied into the lenses inside, the all-knowing eyes that don't mind recording the mundane. Modern trucking isn't like you think, there are still redneck good old boys with confederate flags for mud flaps but there are also Sikhs that rig up their cabs to look like shrines, tough as nails black men and women who talk like Baptist ministers, Filipino's who don't bother to take off their headsets while they jabber to family in the middle of the pacific, while taking a piss. The all-seeing eye records most of it. The comings and goings, the weary and the outrageous. I flip through the displays searching for signs of the quarry. "Where the hell is he?"

"He's in there. Must have found a spot between camera angles lucky bastard." Sheila nods to Rogers. "Is there anyone else in there besides the cashier?"

"The place is empty; except he's got that girl. Name is Myra. Manager says it's Myra's first night on the job. Say's she is a student, hired on for the summer, wouldn't have hired her but she was willing to work nights. Didn't figure she'd last long."

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I grunt, slap Tom on the Shoulder. "Good work." I shift the AR to the left hand, put my right hand into Sheila's inside elbow, we are locked in place. I put my forehead on her brow. There is a frequency spike and I know she feels it too. "Make sure no one else comes inside." I look down at the phone. "Make sure no one sees any of this shit." I wish I'd said something to acknowledge the energy, the bond that could have easily fitted us together like a wheel on a track, but I didn't.

I'd like to say I opened the swinging doors and walked into the saloon like a real American gunslinger, but the truth is I had a hard time. I pushed when I should have pulled, played it off though like it was no big deal.

The entry tile is upswept. The wooden display case with the 45 brochures for touristy shit to do, the little stand with glossy real estate on the market in Reno, I stand beside it and try to peer into the shaded glass leading to the casino floor. No sign of movement, just empty slots, little time traps, waiting for a mark to fall into a cushy seat. I eek open this second set of doors, crouch, scan the perimeter, the wooden veranda that slopes down, cedar tiles that will never see a bit of rain, or sun. The bullshit profiles of fake rooftops could easily hide my prey, of course this is an obvious setup, I'm not necessarily the hunter here, but I've never let that stop me before.

I duck walk past six wooden caskets and hunker down by a buggy's varnished wooden wheel, try to listen for some signs of a struggle, for Myra's pleading, Tom's shallow commands.

Tom is the kind of criminal that they warn you about at the academy. A lot of crime is just weak people trying to find a way out of the press before they get stamped. We all get stamped, but I'm not sure about Tom. The son of a bitch got into the machine, his father was a county commissioner, so Tom had an inside track, took his pops place when the old man got broke off. Tom Streakle studied chemistry in college but instead of going back east and working for some pill plant, he came back here and decided to take his piece off the board, play monopoly in the underground. Did pretty well for himself until the cartels stepped in and took away his Walter White card. By then he had enough legitimate streams of income that it didn't matter. Only it never set right with me. Maybe it was my sense of justice, or maybe I got tired of cashing his checks every time I campaigned, seeing the way he smiled at me at fund raisers knowing I was his pet.

I dragged him into the light, but I paid one hell of a price. Now he's what Jenkins at the academy called a desperado. The term has lost all its impact, it's just a word sign. You've got to watch a dozen videos of unsuspecting traffic cops shot in the face before you recognize the terms significance. A desperado is a man whose game is over but doesn't want to hand in his piece.

I unbuckle my holster, slide the AR across the red carpet with its geometric diamond prints. The rifle clatters against the metal of a sliding seat.

"I just want to talk, Tom." I walk out into the open with the polymer Springfield Elite in my right hand.

I see movement in the corridor beside the cage. It's an area that is backstage, a place to store boxes of hand sanitizer, a hamper for dirty towels, a couple dusty black machines waiting for IGT to come around and take them back to the warehouse. Myra's freckled face is in a beam of light, she doesn't show her fear. She's the type that freezes up, goes passive betting the danger will move on as long as she doesn't give it offense. Most day's that wouldn't be a bad play.

Most of Tom's body is behind the decommissioned machine, its unlit panels etched with a stampeding buffalo.

This is a familiar scene. It's imprinted in my psyche by a hundred movies, a dozen video games, the alignment strikes me as preposterous, improbable. The way a person must feel when they hit a Megabucks, all of a sudden, they have ten million dollars, a few lifetimes of labor hits them like a thousand-pound buffalo.

This standoff usually goes one of three ways: I shoot him without harming the hostage, he shoots me, or I shoot him and the hostage. So, it takes me a moment to understand what Myra just said, "He's got a grenade."

A young girl like that talking about grenades. The thing her brother played with when she was a kid. Hell, maybe she played with them too. But you just don't expect that kind of shit, people talking about grenades in dark lit corridors the rest of the world lit up by artificial light like some stupid theme park.

A whip crack, a wall of fire, a baseball bat hitting a home run with my spine. I lay on the carpet its fibers charred and smelling like some long dead sheep. My first thought is my cigar, that maybe I swallowed it, but it's just that parts of me are missing, and the mechanics are hard to ascertain, pieces that I never gave much thought to have been violently rearranged. Tom Streakle stands over me, his blonde hair hanging down just above his solid blue eyes. He looks hurt. Somehow, I don't like to see that, but that doesn't stop me. I mouth words but can't make him hear them. He bends down on one knee so he can witness my last transmission. "I'll see you in Hell, Tom Streakle." He looks confused because neither one of us has much hearing left and he can only guess at what I've told him. Then I blast him in the face. And once again I say the words "I'll see you in Hell, Tom Streakle."

The thing is, I didn't really put much thought into those words. The trite cliché that spilled out of my mouth is regrettable, now that I have time to ponder it, but how could I know, that I would indeed see Tom Streakle in Hell.