The Mayor of Christ Mountain

Edmund stood with his back against a brick wall watching the intersection. Everything was tinted a little orange under Tallahassee’s streetlights. He was breathing heavily and sweating. The Taurus handgun he’d bought just last week weighed heavy in his hoodie pocket…far heavier than the physical two pounds would suggest. He’d bought it off a gangbanger,… Continue reading

Edmund looked in the mirror in the bathroom at his cheap motel. It felt nice to have his own face back. While he was elsewhere “on business,” he generally went disguised. It wasn’t anything elaborate, but he’d learned that a few tweaks in the right places can render a man almost unrecognizable. It took him… Continue reading

Edmund sat down on his front deck and leaned back, arms crossed behind his head. It was a good run that afternoon. Five miles, 42 minutes. He honestly would like to have gone longer, but it was time to get back to other matters. He pulled off his gloves, set them beside him and just… Continue reading

Edmund’s flight left at 10:30, so he needed to be at the airport at 8:30, but that left him time to stop for breakfast at Ruby’s. He’d stayed at the same cheap motel in Missoula the night before to save him the two and a half hour drive in the morning. He stepped through the… Continue reading

When Edmund had first started sketching out his plans, he quickly realized he would need to be someone else, possibly multiple someone elses. With very careful research, he realized that, for someone with his resources, creating a limited-purpose false identity was not that expensive. And so, on Thursday the 22nd, Edward Denniston flew out of… Continue reading

Judith and Saul Leibowitz of Greensboro, North Carolina were found dead in their bed by their adult son late that afternoon. The coroner found the cause of death to be carbon monoxide poisoning. This was attributed to some otherwise unnoticed flaw in their furnace, the common cause in such cases. If some savant of detection… Continue reading

Edmund was making one of his periodic trips into Missoula to pick up construction materials and a few other items that were harder to find close to home. After his two hour drive in, by the time he’d finished his various errands, it was almost 1:30 and he still hadn’t eaten lunch. Whatever intuition it… Continue reading

After finishing his burger and fries, Edmund shrugged into his jacket, paid his bill, and headed out. The air outside was chilly, but not unpleasantly so. While it wasn’t going to win any awards, the food here, he thought, might be worth the drive by itself, once or twice a month—not much more than that,… Continue reading

Edmund got to the park closer to 3:00. He drove up and down Carousel Drive beside the park, scanning the parking lots and road for anything out of the ordinary. He was not used to being on the defensive. It unsettled him. He honestly wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. A SWAT van… Continue reading

After a time neither of them bothered counting, Edmund looked up, sniffed to clear his nose, and said, “You hungry?” Molly rolled her eyes and thought, Boys. But she said, “Sure, what’d you have in mind?” “Barbecue?” She nodded, and they walked together over to The Notorious P.I.G. Edmund deliberately chose a slightly longer route… Continue reading