Terminus by Joshua Graham Page B

done.
    She reached inside the center console and grasped it:  cold, hard, deadly.  The feel of the gun sent a tingling chill from her fingertips straight to her scalp.
    But a stolen weapon was not enough to get her the justice she needed.  For that she’d decided to go to her cousin Joey Hernandez.  He could help. 
    She took the gun out, caressed the barrel, felt the tension in the trigger.  God should not mind one bit if she rid the planet of such a wicked man, even if he was her brother.  And would Papi turn in his grave?  Ha! Maybe he’d thank her.
    Carefully, she laid the gun on the passenger seat.  A white flash lit the pewter sky followed almost immediately by a thunderclap.  Then a heavy downpour of rain, so heavy she didn’t hear the CHP officer rapping on her window. 
    “Ma’am?”  
    She threw some papers over the gun, then opened the window. 
    “Is there a problem, officer?”
    “You’re parked.”
    Maria glanced over at the passenger seat.  The papers only half concealed the gun.
    “Parked?”
    “You’re holding up traffic, ma’am.”
    Glancing into her rearview, she noticed what had been there the last time she looked—an endless line of cars, their windshield wipers now whipping aside the rain. 
    Back to the officer:  “But we’ve been this way for—”
    “Ma’am, please?”  While he looked in front of her car, pointing, Maria grabbed a sweater from the back seat and threw it on top of the gun and papers.  Then she looked.
    “Oh.”
    A wide open lane was ahead of her. 
    Now she could hear the horns honking behind her, the drivers annoyed at her stopping for what had to have been a few minutes.
    “I’m sorry, I must have dozed off.”  She quickly shifted into drive. 
    “You going to be all right?” the officer asked.
    “Yes...I just received some bad news.   Wasn’t paying attention, that’s all.”  Her heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her ears.  But he couldn’t see the gun.
    “Be careful.  Freeway’s going to be slick.” He tipped his hat and started walking back to the checkpoint.
    As she drove off, she turned on Jonathan Hartwell again.
    “...and I say to you now...Your best days are just ahead, and closer than you think”

15
     
    IT MADE LITTLE SENSE NOW, but the first thing Yuri did after seeing Jonas’s corpse was to try and pull it back on board—until the sickening vibration of the dead skipper’s  neck bones deterred him.  He rushed back down to the hold, sloshed around in the water, and found a flashlight in a toolbox that floated by and banged into his shin.
    He swept the entire compartment from edge to edge.  The water, he found, was deeper on one end and shifted each time the boat shifted.  The flashlight beam disclosed several dead fish floating by his ankles, their eyes and mouths open wide in an expression that made him think of Jonas, still hanging on the side of the boat.  With a shudder, he shook the image from his mind and continued to search the hold.
    The crate which held his precious cargo must have broken open during last night’s storm.  The only thing in it was packing materials and splinters, one of which caught under his thumbnail.  Yuri cussed in Russian. 
    I’m sorry, Mommochka.
    She hated it when he used “vulgar” language because she believed, deep down, that he was good.  Not so his stepfather—Sascha had beaten him almost every day of his childhood.  You’re worthless, useless, you’ll never amount to anything.  Deep down, he’d always believed Sascha.
    He’d made ten-year-old Yuri steal liquor from the corner store, then forced him to watch dirty videos with him, taught him to drink, smoke, deal drugs, and worse.  By the time he was fourteen, he’d experienced more debauchery than most men would in a lifetime.
    And Mommochka knew.
    But she couldn’t do anything about it. Sascha blackmailed her with an ongoing threat to Yuri’s life should she ever tell anybody, try to stop him, or