The Death of Roy Hogan

To some people, Roy looked angry all the time. He had a long face and a crooked nose. Roy’s beady eyes, always half-closed, made him look distant and uncaring. His thinning stringy hair dangled just long enough to touch his narrow shoulders.

He had a hard time staying employed, making friends and even keeping a woman. None of it was because he was angry, it was because Roy was a drunk.

Over his 43 years, Roy got himself arrested many times.

Disorderly Conduct, Harassment, Trespassing, Bar Fights, Drunk Driving, Petty Theft, and last night Roy spent the night in jail for ‘Enticement.’ He’d been trying to get a young woman walking home from work to get into his car on West Van Buren Street at 1:40 AM. After several refusals, the young woman ran to the payphone on Polk and dialed the police. The responding officer found Roy drinking a Schlitz in the front seat of his car twenty minutes later.

It was a cold February, the day after Valentine’s Day, and Roy had been drinking in The Hotel San Carlos since his release. The clock ticked 6:33 when two men sitting near one another at the far end of the bar began shouting.

At first, it was hard to tell what they were arguing about, and then Roy heard the words, “So you took it?” and shortly after hearing those words, the large man that yelled them stood up and shot the other man with a small handgun.

The San Carlos bar immediately smelled of burnt gunpowder and smoke. Roy noticed the bartender crouched behind the bar and so Roy slid off his stool and crouched out of view.

Roy listened as the shot man writhed on the floor in a growing pool of his own blood. He never screamed out or cried but he did grunt a number of times.

“I told you to leave it where it was. That’s all you had to do.” The large man with gun repeated, and that’s when Roy Hogan decided to run for the exit.

Roy counted to ten and stood just in time to see the man with the gun kick the other man as he tried to get to his knees and for a reason that Roy would never be able to articulate said his last words, “Hey, you already shot him, do you need to kick him too?”

The large man with the small gun looked at Roy’s angry-looking face and nearly closed eyes and thinning long hair and shot him dead.

— Jason Hallows is a writer, filmmaker, and post-production master. He writes fiction regularly and has just completed his third novel. His work has also appeared on Sesame Street, The National Geographic Channel.