Grass by J.P. Gallagher

Marko brought the catcher around the side of the house to where the lawn bag stood under the open window. He shook out the clippings, covering up the duffel bag that had been dropped into the bottom. He bundled the top, felt its weight, and brought it around front by the garage. He rang the doorbell twice and waited. He hit it once more. He lingered on the front step a moment, then gathered up the bag and set it in the bed of the truck. He harnessed the mower and locked the trailer gate.

Marko scanned the neighborhood as he turned the ignition. The street was wide, and only eight houses in view, all on one-acre lots. Horses stood quietly in the yard of the corner house, glancing now and then towards the main road.

​There were no neighbors out. In fact, Marko couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone in the yards or the driveways. The turquoise ranch directly across the street might have been vacant or owned by shut-ins. A white Jeep always stood in the driveway of the neighboring farmhouse, but no one ever came out to drive it. A green Ford that he didn't recognize was parked at the far end of the street, but no one was in it. Nothing to attract any cop who didn’t get called there.

The only thing that felt out of place was Marko’s pickup truck and its trailer, half-filled with landscaping equipment. No one on the street would have been likely to hire out their lawnmowing, including the house he sat in front of, a white-and-blue ranch with cracked gutters and overgrown boxwoods blocking the front window. The neighbors might have thought that the old man’s nephew, who came by on occasion, had decided he had better keep the yard from becoming overgrown if he wanted to make any money selling it when the old man died. So Marko never did any more than he had to—no weeding, no trimming bushes, no edging. He worked haphazardly with the weedwhacker. The whole yard took seven or eight minutes. That’s all the old man needed to drop the duffel out the window into the lawn bag anyways.

Today the duffel was heavier. By a few pounds, at least. Duffy hadn’t said there was going to be more, but Marko had felt it when he lifted the bag. 

Normally Duffy would have said something. He would have given some sort of slick explanation, like college was back in session in Laramie and the kids needed supplies, or the stock market was down and the lawyers and doctors downtown were stressed out of their heads, asking for tons of product. Or there were fires and people couldn’t drive down to Fort Collins to get it. But the bag felt even heavier than it had those times.


His second phone vibrated on the seat beside him. He picked it up. It was Duffy.

“You’re done?”

“I just finished.”

“A cut only?”

“Yes. A lot of clippings. A lot to bring back.” 

“What do you mean a lot?”

“I mean it’s a heavy bag.”

“How heavy?”

“Two, three times as much.”

Duffy was silent.

“That’s not what you expected?”

“No. Herschel dropped it off a half an hour ago. Same size as usual.”

“Let me take a look,” Marko said.

Marko put down the phone, got out and walked to the back of the truck. He found the lawn bag and turned it on its side and started to sweep out the clippings with his arm. He pulled the duffel bag out of the bottom and unzipped it. It contained two old phonebooks. 

Marko returned to the truck’s cab, pulled his Glock 47 out of the glove compartment, and tucked the gun into his waistband before walking towards the house. Nothing moved in the windows. He didn’t ring the bell. He jammed open the door and stuck the nose of the gun into the dim living room.

He was struck by a stale smell. As his eyes adjusted he saw a body lying crumpled on the floor in the living room. Marko had not seen the old man more than a few times, but he recognized the man. He looked over the ragged, lifeless features: the bony nose, the recessed cheekbones, the hollow at the chin.

Before he could approach, a sharp squeak broke the silence of the house. He moved through the kitchen towards it. A lanky figure with something under his arm crashed through the storm door towards the old man’s Buick in the carport. Marko stretched for the window above the kitchen sink. He heard the stuttering burst of the engine just as the glass shattered and bullet holes appeared on the windshield.

The car was running but didn’t budge an inch. Marko slipped out the storm door, with the gun trained on the driver’s seat, but no one moved in the car. He opened the passenger side door and pulled out a brown paper shopping bag that sat in the seat next to the man, now dead. Marko didn’t look at him for long, just long enough to see the nose, the cheeks, the little hollow—an unmistakable family resemblance to the man laying in the living room.

Marko stepped back. No breeze disturbed the quiet of the street. He checked the brown paper bag and tucked it under his arm to try to cover the blood spatter. He walked down the driveway. The horses were still ambling about near the corner. The green Ford stood empty—perhaps ownerless—at the other end of the street. Before he got to the truck an elderly neighbor came out onto the porch of her ramshackle bungalow. She eyed Marko and made a gesture of disgusted confusion. He got in and again broke the silence with the roar of his truck's engine.  

© 2026 J.P. Gallagher

About the author:
J.P. Gallagher is a short-story writer living in the Denver area.  His work draws on the landscapes and traditions of the American West to tell contemporary, hard-boiled crime stories.