No Looking Back
A bullet has no conscience.
It has no morals, no regrets, and no memory. Once it leaves the chamber, it’s a runaway train with no brakes and no questions. It doesn’t argue with its mission or wonder whether the job is righteous or rotten. It just does what it was born to do—go forward and ruin somebody’s day. With a bullet, there is no looking back. It doesn’t even know how.
This one was no different. Maybe it was worse.
It tore through the night air, a frozen slug with the weight of judgment behind it. It caught the red dot of the shooter’s laser and drove toward it, straight and hungry. No hesitation, no remorse, no turning around. Once you’re born from the dark mouth of a gun barrel, you don’t crawl back inside. You live fast, die fast, and take whoever’s in your way with you.
The slug hit the driver-side window first. Hit it hard.
The glass shattered inward and sprayed the Cadillac’s interior with icy splinters. Then the bullet found its purpose.
It kissed the left temple of the man behind the wheel—a quiet touch before the storm. Then it spoke loud.
The right side of his head burst in a wet fan of bone, blood, and brain that slapped the inside of the car in a single red stroke. Skulls don’t bargain with that kind of round.
The gore sprayed across the passenger—his son— coating the kid’s face with pieces of the man who raised him. The slug kept going.
It drove into the left side of the boy’s head with the same cold loyalty, and then blew the right side out, painting the passenger window with what used to be his thoughts.
The bullet punched through that glass too and vanished into the pasture beyond, swallowed by the dark and the wet grass.
One shot.
Two kills.
Efficient as a ledger entry.
The Cadillac rolled forward with the clumsy drift of something whose mind had gone missing. The engine still idled, unaware its passengers had clocked out. The car crept until it nudged the stone abutment of the narrow bridge— just a small tap, almost polite. Then it settled and stayed there, hissing exhaust into the frozen air.
That bridge came up after a ninety-degree curve that forced every driver to crawl. It was all the shooter needed. A slow bend. Predictable speed. A clean line. Time to breathe, steady hands, and lay in a shot that felt less like chance and more like fate.
Another job done.
Someone came along—maybe a farmer up too late, maybe a commuter grinding through the last miles of his night—and saw the wreck. The dispatcher told him what dispatchers always tell nervous voices: stay put, don’t touch anything, and wait for the uniforms. He agreed, but his voice trembled. He had seen something the night was not built to hold.
Two local units were nearby. One patrol officer on routine night rounds. One sergeant heading home from the gym, listening to the scanner because it was his second religion. They hit the bridge in under four minutes, expecting the usual Jugtown Mountain mess—a drunk who misjudged the angle and kissed the stone.
The moment they stepped out of their cruisers, the night changed shape.
Most of their work involved telling teenagers to go home or dragging dead deer off the road before somebody put a bumper through them. Murder wasn’t on the duty roster. Nobody in that patch of rural New Jersey had seen a killing in decades. People drove too fast, drank too much, wrapped pickup trucks around trees. But murder? No.
Until tonight.
Jugtown Mountain sat on a forested ridge of the Hunterdon Hills, a quiet bump on the way to the Delaware Water Gap. About three thousand souls lived there, most of them refugees from concrete and sirens, people who worked in New York or Newark and then drove an hour to hear their own breathing again. Country quiet, freshly painted houses, and the illusion that nothing truly bad ever crossed the township line.
But peace carries a tab, and growth drags shadows in behind it.
Old-timers watched the new faces move in—some good, some rotten. They didn’t complain much. Old-timers know that complaining never stopped anything. It certainly wasn’t going to stop what waited on that narrow road tonight.
Because tonight Jugtown Mountain learned something it had no interest in learning: Even paradise has a kill zone.
And someone out there knew how to use it.
When the officers rolled up, the man who’d dialed 911 was still in his sedan a few yards back from the bridge, windows tight, heater wide open. Outside, the wind took the wet and turned it sharp. The kind of cold that went through coats, into joints, and deeper.
The caller stepped out, hunching into himself, and slogged toward the uniforms. One officer angled his flashlight toward him, beam slicing the mist. The other drifted toward the Cadillac, drawn the way men are always drawn toward something awful and unavoidable.
“Good evening, sir,” the first one said, notebook already out. “I’m Sergeant McNalty. You the one who called this in?”
“Yes,” the man said. “I came upon them when I got to the bridge.”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Marc Livery. I live just up the road from these two guys.”
“You know them?” McNalty asked, pen scratching, world still normal for one more heartbeat.
“Yes, sir. They’re my neighbors. The Giovannis.”
He pointed toward the car still resting against the stone, exhaust coughing white fog into the dark. Then he hesitated and added, “Well… they were the Giovannis.”
The name hit McNalty hard, enough to pull his head around. Giovanni wasn’t just a name. Giovanni was baggage.
“Were?” he asked.
Livery’s mouth twitched. “You’d better go take a look, officer. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Before McNalty could move, the other deputy— Palance—bent into the wrecked car and let out a shout that sliced the night.
“Holy shit!”
McNalty rushed over, boots splashing, and crouched beside him at the driver’s window. Their flashlights probed the interior and dragged the scene out of the shadows in harsh white patches.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…” McNalty breathed. His voice suddenly thin. The light beams trembled over what remained of the two men’s heads. “What the hell happened to these two guys? Jesus.”
“Holy shit,” Palance kept muttering, stuck on the only words his brain could find.
“They are the Giovannis,” McNalty said. “Holy shit is right.”
“Yeah. It’s them,” Palance swallowed. “Hard to recognize with their heads nearly gone. But what’s left looks like them. And I know the car. You think it was a mob hit, Sergeant?”
“Quiet, deputy,” McNalty snapped, more fear than anger in the tone. “We keep this under wraps until I figure out what we’ve got. Damn it… This is going to be a long night.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
Because those corpses weren’t some drunk pair from the wrong bar. They were Giovannis—Salvatore Giovanni himself, the northern New Jersey underworld’s main bookkeeper of sin, and next to him, what was left of his son, Juno Giovanni. Heir to the operation. Future boss.
That bloodline ended right here, on a narrow country bridge in the rain.
The Giovannis were dead.
And someone out there knew how to make a killing look easy.
These weren’t barroom bruisers who shook down pool halls. They ran a syndicate with a sort of businesslike cruelty that turned cooperation into a survival plan. You crossed them, you vanished. No warnings. No last chances.
No bodies washing up on shore. No half-finished jobs.
They made people disappear so thoroughly you half expected the shadows to file missing persons reports.
Out here, most folks had never heard the name Salvatore Giovanni spoken aloud. But the cops had. They knew what it meant. They also knew they weren’t staring at just a crime scene. They were looking at the first page of a very long report.
They traded a glance. No jokes. No swagger. Just the quiet agreement that from this point on, everything had to be clean and tight. No shortcuts. No mistakes.
“Ah, hell. I touched the car door. God damn it,”
Deputy Dave Palance blurted.
His voice cracked up into a higher register. He already saw the write-up, the lecture, the note in his file.
Dave Palance was a walking tribute to bad timing and worse judgment. Thin, jittery, always on the edge of fumbling something. He’d once shot off his own finger on the range during recertification. Another time he’d slid into a bunch of bored teenagers outside the pizza shop, car sideways, gun in hand, shouting at them to “skedaddle”
before he arrested them for vagrancy. He claimed he was saving them from becoming hoodlums. Nobody believed him.
He’d also managed to set off a tear-gas grenade in court. Wore it clipped to his belt, snagged it on the witness chair. Pop. The place turned into a smokehouse. They evacuated everyone except the judge’s cursing, which lingered long after the gas cleared.
But the man had heart. Plenty of it. Loyal, earnest, trying hard in all the wrong ways. Hard to stay mad at a person like that.
Sergeant Hal Dean knew him. Even liked him.
“Don’t worry about it, Dave. Just write it up,” Hal said, voice steady. “Whatever we do, we go by the book on this one. Nobody’s going to say we buried anything. This is big. Real big.”
His eyes slid back to the car. Dave followed the look against his better judgment.
The scene inside the Cadillac was something nobody forgets. One bullet through the driver’s window. One entry wound in Salvatore’s head. The round had gone on through, into Juno’s skull, and out through the passenger-side glass.
It had then kept going into the cow pasture where the Giovanni outfit had sent more than a few of their own victims over the years. The men who’d made fertilizer were now part of the same cycle.
Their heads weren’t heads anymore. They were ruin.
Bone, meat, hair, and red smear. Salvatore leaned right, what remained of his skull resting on his son’s shoulder.
Juno slumped right as well, half poured out of the broken window, frozen in a posture that could have been sleep if sleep came without a face.
Dave turned away and grabbed the stone rail. His stomach surrendered the evening’s diner special to the creek below.
When he came back up, sweat beaded his forehead despite the cold.
Hal clapped his shoulder. “Don’t let it eat you, Dave.
If it weren’t for what I saw in Nam, I’d be over the rail with you. First time’s always rough.”
He straightened. “Now let’s get to work. Long night ahead.”
“Yes, sir,” Palance managed.
“I’ll call EMS and the detective. You lock down the scene. And for God’s sake, don’t touch anything else.”
Hal went back to Mr. Livery, who still stood stiff, eyes fixed on the car as if the sight had nailed him to the road.
“Stay available for questioning tomorrow,” Hal told him.
“No problem, Sergeant… but how am I supposed to get home tonight?” Livery asked, glancing past him at the dead men blocking the bridge.
“Sorry, Mr. Livery. You’ll have to go around. We can’t move a thing until the detective and forensics get here.”
Livery grimaced. The detour meant an extra hour on back roads. But an hour was a cheap price compared to where Salvatore and Juno were headed.
Hal thought it over, and then shook his head.
“Actually, I’m going to need you to stay until the detective arrives. He’ll want to talk to you himself. He won’t keep you long. I’m calling him now.”
The old man nodded, resigned. There were worse places to be than in a warm car within shouting distance of two dead devils and a pair of nervous cops. At least he was going home.
He retreated to his sedan and closed the door, letting the heater wrap itself around his bones while the flashing lights painted the windshield.
By the time Detective Barry Romaine pulled up, the scene was a picture out of a handbook: yellow tape stretched across the road, cruisers idling, their red and blue reflections sliding across wet asphalt, two uniforms doing their best impression of men in control.
Sergeant Steve McNalty was waiting at his door.
“You ready for this, Detective Romaine?” he asked.
“What’ve we got, Sergeant McNalty?”
The two of them knew each other from way back.
Same streets, same ball fields, same girls once or twice.
Barry had gone to college, taken a criminal justice degree, then gone to war and come back with a lieutenant’s bars and a few gray hairs he hadn’t earned honestly. Steve stayed home, bounced around factory jobs that smelled of oil and noise, and then settled into a police officer’s uniform.
They joined the force together twenty years ago, but promotions treated them differently. Steve had a knack for stepping on important toes. It kept stripes off his sleeve even when he earned them with sweat and hours. Still, on duty he called Barry “Detective Romaine,” the way it said on the badge. Romaine called him “Sergeant McNalty.” When they sat on stools at Mud Eyes later, nursing beers and trying to forget, they were just Steve and Barry again.
“A double murder, Detective,” McNalty said.
“What? Get the hell out of here.” Barry blinked.
“Yup. It’s the Giovannis.”
“Well, I’ll be go to hell.”
Barry’s mouth had a mind of its own. When the world jarred him, it filled the air with odd little phrases that didn’t belong to any one part of the country. He’d been born in No Trees, Texas—a town named after what it lacked.
Desert. Oil rigs. Dust and sun and not much else. He still carried the Texas drawl, wore a light tan cowboy hat over blond hair, and kept a mustache that twitched whenever trouble walked in.
Women noticed him. He noticed them back. It was one of his few hobbies.
New Jersey hadn’t been his idea. His father was transferred to the Corning Fiberglass plant and dragged the family north. Barry finished school here, picked up his degree, and then traded the classroom for Vietnam. After he came home, he climbed through the ranks until they hung a detective’s badge on his chest. He’d seen enough bodies to poison a stronger man. At thirty-five, he already felt older than the boots did on his feet.
“Really? A double murder, eh?” he said again, as if repeating it might force it to shrink.
“Yup. Wait till you see this.”
Steve led him to the Cadillac. Barry bent in, got one good look, and jerked back.
“Jesus Christ Almighty. What the hell happened to these two? They shoot ’em with a cannon? Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t know,” Deputy Palance cut in fast. “It wasn’t a shotgun—the windows are too clean. Caliber had to be big to do that.”
“Ah, man,” Barry groaned. “This is going to be a nightmare.”
He felt the headlines forming already. The bosses.
The county brass. The state troopers. Maybe the Feds.
Everybody would want a piece of this one.
He stepped away, hands on hips, eyes moving over the tape, the bridge, the wet road, trying to get ahead of the train before it rolled over him.
“Did you guys touch anything? Disturb the scene?”
he asked.
Palance went gray. He’d been waiting for it.
“I… I touched the car door. Thought it was just a pair of drunks,” he admitted.
Barry rounded on him, eyes hot under the brim of his hat.
“Damn it, Dave. You should know better. What’s the matter with you? Jesus Christmas.”
The words snapped in the cold air. That was about as far as Barry went with profanity. He still tried to keep his language church-ready, even when his job wasn’t.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. Very sorry. I had no—”
“Did you put it in your report?”
“Yes, sir. I did. It’s in there.”
“All right then.”
Romaine let his gaze sweep the scene again, slower this time. The bridge. The creek. The empty woods looming beyond. Emergency lights danced off the stone and water, but under that, the night had gone still and hard.
He drew a breath deep enough to hurt and let it leak out.
“Now buckle up, boys,” he said. “This one’s going to be a rough ride. These two jokers were mobbed-up six ways to Sunday. Don’t talk to anyone. Not your wives, not your dogs, not the person in the mirror. This is need-to- know. Keep the lid on tight. Last thing we want is a mob war spilling into Jugtown Mountain. And keep the press away from this mess, whatever it takes.”
He stepped in closer to Palance. “You got that, Dave?”
“Got it, sir. You can count on me.”
He hoped that was true.
That was when the EMS units rolled in, lights spinning, sirens wailing at the trees. The MICU followed them. The crews spilled out and moved toward the Cadillac, med bags bouncing against their legs, boots slapping through the puddles.
“Careful, boys,” the detective called. “Try not to touch anything we’re going to need later. Not that you can do much for them now. They checked out a long time ago.”
The medics took one look and understood. Two of them turned away and found their own patch of rail to puke over. The rest forced themselves closer, took the obligatory pulses, checked the pupils they could still find, and backed off again.
The MICU doc came over, wiping rain and sweat from his glasses.
“You were right, Detective,” he said. “They’re gone.
Hard to keep breathing with half a head. Take all the time you want. We’re just window dressing now.”
“Thanks, Doc. I’ll call forensics and the coroner.”
Romaine made the calls and got the wheels turning.
Then he went back to Livery, took his statement, gave him a card, and sent him off into the dark for that long swing around the detour.
The night was only getting started.