Sins Of The Father

You’d think killing gets easier the more you do it. But it doesn’t.

Sal’s breath fogged in the cold night air as he tossed another shovelful of dirt into Frank’s grave. The truck’s high beams cut two hard white stripes across the open field, carving the darkness like blades. Everything else was black—the sky, the trees, the future.

He wiped his forearm across his brow. Sweat, dirt, regret—all of it stung his eyes.

“What a damn waste,” he muttered, the words drifting into the dark like a confession no priest would ever hear.

He dug the shovel in again. Gravel and frozen earth crunched under the blade. The sound echoed across the empty field, swallowed by distance. His fingers tightened around the handle—and cramped. A sharp ache shot up his palm and into his wrist. He flexed his hand once, then forced it back into place.

“Him with four kids at home,” Sal said, shaking his head. “And no wife to look after them.”

He lifted the next load of dirt, then paused.

Just a second too long.

His eyes flicked to Frank’s jacket in the grave, and something in his chest hitched. A breath slipped out of him that he hadn’t meant to take. Then he tipped the shovel.

The dirt landed with a hollow, final thud.

“What a damn fool that man was,” he added, voice low and rough. “Didn’t listen. Didn’t know to follow the rules.”

The engine idled behind him, headlights buzzing, warm exhaust drifting into the night. The field smelled like cold soil and gasoline—a place where things got buried and stayed buried.

Sal rested his hands on the shovel’s handle, shoulders rising and falling with a long, tired breath.

“You shouldn’t have been selling drugs, Frankie,” he said. “You dragged me into this. Dragged yourself into the ground.”

He planted the shovel again.

And the field stayed quiet, watching him work.

He stood there longer than he should’ve. Cops see headlights pointed into a field, they always come check. Usually, he wouldn’t risk it.

But this was swampy land, some new-age “protect the animals” group bought a few years back. Protected land, they called it.

If you were the fixer around here, it was the perfect place to bury the unwanted.

Sal walked to a patch of trillium, scooped out a few plants with his hands, and placed them gently on top of Frankie. It wasn’t a marker—nothing sentimental like that. But you don’t dig up those plants.

They’re protected.

Just like the land.

Protected, ignored, forgotten. Which made it the best hiding place in the county.

He scanned the dark tree line as he walked back toward the camper. A lot of ghosts lived out here—a lot of friends he’d had to put in the ground.

It was a kill-or-be-killed world, and Sal knew the rules by heart.

When the boss said kill, you did it. If you didn’t, somebody else would. And generally, that meant they were coming after you first.

Sal opened the truck door and dropped into the seat. He slipped Frank’s watch off his wrist and tossed it into the glove box. He wasn’t a serial killer or anything like that, but when you’d killed as many people as Sal had, the faces started to blur.

He didn’t want Frank to be one of them.

Sal snorted, shaking his head. “Like I could forget the faces,” he muttered. “I’d have better luck slipping into a bikini and shaking my ass all the way to a beauty-queen crown than forgetting the dead.”

He pulled a little .22 from his waistband and took a cloth from the console, wiping it down slowly. He’d heard cops could pull prints off a gun even after wintering at the bottom of a river. People always thought you needed a big gun to kill a man—flashy, loud things. But Sal knew better. Experience had taught him the truth. It just takes two small bullets in the back of the head to end a life. He taught too many friends the hard way. Way too many.

He paused. The pistol grew heavier in his hands, and his mind drifted back to a place colder than this field.

People talked tough about prison, as if it were some training ground for hard men. They didn’t know a damn thing.

Sal had been just eighteen when he got tossed into that Alabama hellhole—five years for driving the car during a robbery he hadn’t even planned. Five years in a place ruled by predators who smiled like they owned the world, men who decided in whispers who got hurt, who got used, who never saw another sunrise.

He learned quickly that size didn’t mean safety. Being big just meant being noticed. Being tested.

There was one night—his third month in—when three men cornered him in the laundry room after lights-out. No guards, just the hum of machines and the sharp sting of bleach in the air. One of the men, tall and soft-spoken like a preacher, told him they were “gonna teach the new boy how things worked.”

Sal didn’t remember the whole fight. Just the blur of motion, the shock of a punch he didn’t see coming, the taste of blood, and the moment something inside him snapped clean in half. When it was over, two of those men never walked the same again, and the preacher-voiced one never looked him in the eye.

It bought Sal space. Not safety—nobody gets safety in a place like that—but space. Breathing room. Enough to make it to the end of his sentence with his body and mind still his own.

He’d served the full five. Hard years. Years that clung to him like tar.

There’s no such thing as an easy time. Just lost time. Time you never get back.

Sal blinked, pushing the memory away. The present rushed back: the cold field, the dead friend, the quiet truck. He looked down at the pistol one last time, then set it aside.

By morning, it would be at the bottom of the St. Lawrence. Another ghost. Another thing buried where no one would ever find it.

He turned the key in the ignition, headlights sweeping past the fresh grave as he pulled away.

The field swallowed the light, and Sal drove into the darkness, the dead riding quietly with him.

He dropped the truck into gear and eased it down the rutted path. As the swampy field disappeared into the dark behind him, Sal felt the weight shift—not lighter, just different. Burying a man, even a friend, was hard. But the aftermath? That was the part that could gut you.

Frankie’s cheap bottle-blonde girlfriend was going to start asking questions she didn’t really want answered. And even if Sal wanted to tell her the truth—which he didn’t—life didn’t work that way. Life didn’t care about closure. It didn’t give out answers. It just stacked lies on top of damage and called it survival.

Then there were the four boys.

The oldest three were sharp enough to get it. They’d only understand part of what happened, but part was better than nothing. A warrant was about to go out on Frankie anyway, so it’d be believable enough that he ran. Lots of guys ran—some for a week, some for a lifetime.

But nobody outran the cops forever.

Well… almost nobody.

Mickey was the exception. Mickey had vanished five years ago without leaving so much as a cigarette butt behind, and the cops still didn’t have a clue where he’d landed.

Sal couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at his mouth. “Mickey,” he muttered under his breath. “Bastard lives in a little upstairs apartment right across from the cop shop in Cornwall.”

He chuckled, low and tired.

“He drinks his coffee on the balcony every morning, watching the same guys who are supposed to be hunting him down. Never seen someone hide so well in plain sight.”

The smile faded as the highway opened in front of him.

Frankie wasn’t going to get a lucky break like Mickey. Frankie was done.

And Sal, as always, was the one left driving through the dark, carrying the weight the dead couldn’t.

He turned onto the highway and aimed the truck toward town. Only one thing left to do tonight. It was time to confess his sins.

The boss might tell him who to kill and when to do it, but the boss wasn’t God. And Sal had been talking to God a lot lately—more than he had since he was a kid kneeling on a splintered church pew in Alabama. He didn’t know if any of those prayers actually got heard. He sure as hell didn’t know whether anything had been forgiven.

But a man had to hope for something.

He thought of the old verse he’d memorized once, back when he still believed things could get better, back before blood and orders and graves in protected swampland.

Matthew 7:7. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

Sal had been asking for a long, long time now.

But tonight, with the headlights cutting a thin tunnel through the dark highway, he wasn’t sure whether he was still knocking on Heaven’s door…

Or just pounding on a locked one.