The Three Try to Steal All the Money, Ch. 3 Part 2

The next few months saw Jastio participating in most of the pivotal battles that drove the Insurrection of the Outer Territories to its conclusion.  After Crown’s Reach the Citizen’s Militia pushed through Pennsmouth and then Kathryn’s Bend. He saw action in both these places, ranging from street to street fighting to house clearing to protracted sniper engagements. Jastio fired his gun in every instance, and many times killed someone too. More than once he was one of only two to survive a battle. He received numerous commendations and received a pair of medals he almost never wore. At war’s end his unit was positioned behind the regular army to support their push against the final rebel stronghold in Crying Bluffs. He was far from the battlefield when the surrender was made and the brutal civil war ended. When the governor’s announcement of peace came over the radio his squad cheered. Jastio might have joined in, he might not. He didn’t really remember anymore.

The days after the war all ran together. There was brief participation in military rule of the outlying provinces before regular police forces could be re-established, and not long after returning to the city he was honorably discharged. At the end of his service, all he had to show for it was his rifle, his uniform, a pair of medals, and the inability to get a decent night’s sleep. He didn’t even have his own apartment, instead returning to live with his father just like before his conscription. His life briefly seemed as though it was geared to return to normal, the way it was before.

One day there was a knock at the door. Then there was a bang. Jastio sprang from the kitchen where he’d been having lunch to see his father lying slumped over in their doorway, the life already faded from his eyes. The people in his building and on the street saw nothing. The funeral was sparsely attended, most of Jastio’s family having either died or moved away during the war.

A week afterwards there was another knock, this time in the middle of the night. Jastio fumbled for his rifle, his mind still reeling from the liquor consumed in what was becoming part of his daily routine, and managed to slowly edge the door open. The inspector on the other side held up his hands then asked to come in. He called himself Laurence.

He said he was working on Jastio’s case when he came across an interesting tidbit. There was one person who did see a suspicious man leaving Jastio’s building the day of his father’s death. The man had been wearing a black leather coat, typical of the men who had staged the assassinations and terror attacks that had plagued Kingsholm in the months before the outbreak of war. He was walking very determinedly and far too fast for the middle of the day and seemed to be twitching involuntarily. The witness also saw him drop something into the sewer grate down the street but they weren’t able to get to it before the water swept it into the river. The bullet that lodged itself in his father’s heart did, however, belong to a revolver typically used by the rebels as sidearms.

The inspector had checked the descriptions and after canvassing suspects found there was only one without a reliable alibi. Caesar Mulligan hadn’t fought in the war, and it was unclear if he sympathized with the rebels at all, but his brother was a more clear-cut case. Kyle Mulligan had been a marksman with Bartlett’s Bandits, a crack Rebel unit in charge of harassing and disrupting the operations of Kingsholm forces. He had been tasked with driving out a patrol in Crown’s Reach in the waning days of the war, with the goal not of eliminating them but simply making it too costly for them to stay so the diminished Rebel forces could re-establish control of the district. Of course, that wasn’t what happened. The squad returned fire. Kyle Mulligan was wounded and his spotter killed. Stranded and injured he tried to appeal for help but none came. He bled out over the course of a day and a half, parched, starving, and alone. One of Jastio’s squadmates had left that detail in his answer to an interviewer’s question for a story in the papers. Caesar put two and two together and managed to track down the man who’d received a medal for killing his only brother.

“Just thought you should know.”

Inspector Laurence left. Jastio didn’t go back to bed. He sat and stared at the wall until morning.

The farmhouse was distant but not isolated. It sat on the very periphery of Kingsholm, almost as far out as Crying Bluffs. The sun was setting behind the fields, lending the cloud-filled sky an ashen color as Jastio walked up the dirt path to the doorstep and looked around. The house was a ramshackle affair, a one-story wooden construction with a dim light bleeding through one of the windows. A woodpile sat on one side of the home, and an outhouse on the other. In the distance a dog barked, and a distant windmill groaned softly as it generated energy for the rural town that glowed further down the road. A soft breeze flecked a few raindrops onto Jastio’s face.

For a long time Jastio stared at the front door, shifting occasionally to readjust the pack on his back. The man in the pub had told him this was the Mulligan’s plot of land.

“The younger brother, name of Kyle, he’d been the one to work the fields, planting and harvesting and what-not,” the bartender had said over Jastio’s pint. “Least that’s what he did until Bartlett opened his mouth. Young man like him scraping by with a whole farm to maintain and no way to find work in the city, he was hardly unique around these parts. Him and dozens like him signed up when they got the chance. I didn’t condone it – still don’t – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get why they’d want to fight.”

“You didn’t agree with Bartlett?” asked Jastio.

“Oh of course I agreed with the man,” said the bartender. “He was right about lots of things. We didn’t have opportunities, entire families were starving with no chance to better themselves. But where he was wrong was about having to fight. And the thing is, is you can only be wrong about that kind of thing once.”

Jastio stared at the door of the farmhouse he’d been directed to. The light in the window flickered. He took a deep breath.

“Caesar Mulligan!” The silence persisted, but Jastio briefly saw a woman’s face peek outside and then grow wide-eyed and retreat at the sight of the rifle in his hands. After a while of Jastio standing there as the clouds lightly drizzled him with rain, the door creaked open. A man with lightly buzzed hair and tanned skin in a plaid shirt, jeans, and workboots emerged, revolver in hand but not yet leveled at Jastio.

“What do you want mister?” Jastio’s eyes flicked between his adversary’s eyes to the revolver, then back again. He swallowed and stood his ground.

“Are you Caesar Mulligan?” The man picked his way carefully down the porch steps and onto the dirt path.

“I am.” Jastio couldn’t quite get a read on his expression. It wasn’t anger he saw there. Determination perhaps, but tinged with something else. Regret perhaps, but no, it was even more profound.  Sorrow?

“What does the name Richard Finnegan mean to you?” Caesar blinked. Jastio acted. The assault rifle in his hands was designed for engagements at hundreds of yards. The dozen meters separating the two men were nothing compared to that. The blast of the rifle completely drowned out the muffled thuds of bullets impacting flesh. When Jastio returned to himself he saw Caesar Mulligan sprawled in a heap on the steps. His head rested at an odd angle, propped up on one of the steps while his legs lay splayed out beneath him. His right arm had been flung to the side, the revolver clattering to rest on the steps. The woman in the house screamed, and Jastio heard her clambering out of the house and through a back door as he approached Caesar’s body. The only other noise was the chorus of barking dogs far in the distance.

The dead man’s eyes stared at the sky frozen in shock. They were a dark blue, almost hazel. Jastio reached over and picked up the revolver, finding the chamber fully loaded with six rounds. Later, while sitting at night by campfires or in dusty inn rooms he would examine and re-examine this decision. In the moment he had no idea why he did it. He wasn’t trying to separate the weapon from the man in case Caesar was only pretending to be dead, as he’d been trained to do. He also didn’t have a pressing need for a revolver either, though it undoubtedly came in handy throughout the rest of his career and life far from Kingsholm. But then and there, pragmatism never factored into it. The only semi-solid conclusion Jastio could draw about the act over the years, as he traveled and killed, was that he’d taken the gun because of the same impulse that had driven him to the farmhouse in the first place.