West to the End of the World

Triggerfinger

 Present time...

"Alright, man, you ready?"

Steven "Psycho Steve" Troublefield — a thirty-one year old, fair-skinned, dark-haired con-artist with all the looks of a Calvin Klein model, sans tattoos — drummed his hands on the steering wheel of his late father's 1969 red Camaro. He let out a howl of excitement, his characteristically deep voice delving even further down in pitch, so much that he could imagine making Vincent Price flinch. There was a faint jitter in his bones, but he barely noticed it. He was too hopped up on meth to notice anything, really. Including the wide-eyed, borderline terrified expression of his partner-in-crime, — literally — Ricardo "Slick Ricky" Hernandez.

Steve reached over the passenger side and slapped the back of his hand against the thin, Hispanic man's chest. Steve had a wolfish grin, and his eyes were blazing. "Come on, Slick, get excited!"

"About what?" Ricky panted. He was shaking and sweating so hard that he thought, for a moment, he was about to have a seizure. "We're about to rob this place with nothin' but little fuckin' mouse guns and... and I swear to God there was something else in that meth, dude. I can't stop twitching!"

Psycho Steve laughed with a maniacal edge to his tone. He sounded menacing in his amusement, almost like what one would expect a serial killer to sound like. Steve had beaten the shit out of plenty of people, but at least, to his credit, he never killed any of them. Then again, it was never too late to start.

The last time Steve had gotten into a real knock-down, drag-out rumble was the night before his release from prison six months ago. His opponent was a larger-than-life black man who many of the inmates referred to simply as Bruiser. Bruiser never talked much, and no one really knew why he was given his life sentence, but there had been a plethora of variations in circulation to the rumor that he murdered an entire, armed street gang with his bare hands, and when the police arrived, Bruiser was covered in blood, sitting on the stack of bodies with a smile as wide as the pacific rim. Steve thought it was absolute, pure, unadulterated bullshit, and with an ego as big as Steve's, he wanted to prove how wrong everyone was. That day, on the shift of an older security guard that slept for most of the time, Steve lunged at the idle Bruiser with a metal meal tray. Steve busted Bruiser over the head, and from then on, it was a bloodbath. There was no clear winner by the time a few other inmates pulled them apart, but Steve walked away with a broken arm, several broken ribs, a cracked collar bone, and a punctured lung. As he was carried to the infirmary, he let out a bloodied laugh as hellish as a patient with psychosis. As far as he was concerned, he had proved his point; if Bruiser was really a cold-blooded killer, Steve would have been dead.

It was that kind of behavior that branded him with the nickname Psycho Steve in high school... and the fact that, in his sophomore year, he stole the principal's car and tried to run her over with it.

"Plus, I ain't trying to do prison time," Ricky wailed, his gaunt face slick with sweat. His whole life he had been known for his perspiration, of which he denoted to a 'glands condition.' That so-called condition marked him with the moniker Slick Ricky — he, however, preferred to believe that the name derived from his artful ability of evading the police. "After what we did to that girl, I've been nervous as hell. I can't even take a shit without looking over my shoulder. I'm hearing police sirens in the back of my head right now!"

That aforementioned "girl" had been a beautiful black woman that sported a designer pantsuit at the bank three days ago. Steve was trying to extract the last few dollars out of his account, arguing back and forth with the teller about something pertaining to insufficient funds, when he saw the woman sashay into the bank. Any other day he might have tried to get her number, but when he overheard her withdrawing a little over a thousand dollars from her account, the beginnings of a plot developed. As she left the bank, Steve flipped the bird to his teller, and followed behind the woman. She got into a nearly brand new VW Bug, and spend off down the street. It required a lot of bobbing and weaving through traffic, and running a few red lights, but he followed her all the way back to a fairly nice house. Steve jotted down the address for memory's sake, picked up a tweaking Ricky and a couple of ski masks, and they robbed the beautiful woman blind. It was a shame that they had to beat her up as horribly as they did, but she would not shut up. She had some fight in her. That was a trait that Steve normally liked in a woman, but considering the circumstances, he beat her until he damn near crushed her windpipe. She fell unconscious after that. Steve took off through the house like a tornado, raiding her purse for the money, snatching every valuable thing he could from the house, and destroying what had little to no value. All the while, Ricky stood over her with an expression of shock so bottomless and cold that it felt like a glacier. Despite his own participation in the beating, he hoped she would wake up on the mortal side of life.