The Deal
By Neil Shea


The worst part was knowing what the cops did to her. Kip was never sure how many were in on it—two at least. But a deal like that couldn’t spread far. People would catch on.

She got off as long as they got off. That’s how it worked. Jenna had been arrested for possession and hooking inside the Vegas limits a dozen times. But she was still pretty, and the cops noticed. About a year ago, after they’d picked her up yet again, they offered an alternative to jail. She took it. Now they demanded it whether she was in trouble or not.

Jenna was Kip’s half-sister. They shared a mother but had different last names. She was slim and very tall, with freckles concealing the years. Kip tried talking her out of the deal. It was just another trick, she said. He cajoled, warned, insisted, and one night Jenna broke. Never fucking mention it again, she said. They didn’t speak after that.

Kip felt badly that he’d pushed. It was less her fault, he thought. The shame came from others.

Ten years earlier, Kip broke the patterns that had trapped everyone he knew. He convinced an editor at the local daily to try him out. He started low and worked up to become cops reporter. Suddenly his sister, friends and cousins were the drunks, drug dealers and wife beaters he wrote about. His family joked about “making the news.”

The stories rolled in like wind off the desert, inevitable, dessicating, making Kip feel empty. The deal consumed his thoughts. Sometimes, when he picked up a report at the station, he’d see one of them, a heavy cop named Paul Keenan. Keenan would smirk. That he never spoke made it worse.

Kip considered shooting Keenan, decided against it. After a few weeks, he settled on a plan. The violence of it surpsrised him—for a moment. He wondered whether the idea was his, or if it was something he'd absorbed from a case he'd written about.

He waited outside Keenan’s home on a Wednesday. Keenan worked nights, and when he arrived, the neighborhood was dark. Keenan fiddled with something in the car and Kip approached, wearing a stocking mask, holding a crowbar. Keenan pushed open the door.

Hey, Kip said. Keenan turned. Kip swung hard. The blow knocked off his white wide-brimmed hat and he crumpled. Kip hit him twice more. Then he slipped out a filet knife.

Kip tore open the crotch of Keenan’s fatigues, cut through his underwear. Penis and testicles flopped into view. Kip tugged at the sack, slid the knife beneath.

At home, Kip drank a beer and went to bed. A few months back, he’d heard the cops made Jenna wear their cowboy hats while she performed, and he couldn’t stop the image that formed in his mind. It reappeared now. He rolled over and tried to block out her face. He tried to imagine tomorrow’s headlines.

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