Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [180]
“If I had been there, he never would have killed those two boys. I know I could have stopped him, I could have calmed his heart,” she said, and then buried her face in her hands, and all the tears they held.
BETWEEN HIS RELEASE AND THOSE FATEFUL NIGHTS IN JULY, Gary had held a job briefly at his Uncle Vernon’s shoe store, and had met and fallen in love with Nicole Barrett, a beautiful young woman with two children. But Gary also had a hard time refusing some old, less-promising appetites. Almost immediately after his release, he started drinking steadily, and he also began taking Fiorinal, a muscle and headache medication that, in sustained doses, can cause severe mood swings and sexual dysfunction. Gary apparently experienced both reactions. He also became violent. Sometimes he would get rough with Nicole over failed sex or what he saw as flirtations on her part. Other times, he would pick fights with the men around him, hitting them from behind, threatening to cave in their faces with a tire iron, which he twirled as handily as a baton. Within a short time, Gary had lost his job, had abused the support of his Utah relatives, and appeared embattled with nearly everyone around him. He drank more; he took more drugs. He took to walking into stores and walking out with whatever he wanted under his arm, glaring at the cashiers, as if they would be crazy to try to stop him. And he took to bringing guns home, where he sat on the back porch, firing them into the trees, the fences, the sunsets. “Hit the sun,” he told Nicole. “See if you can make it sink.”
When he had hit Nicole with his bare fist once too often, she decided that no man would ever hit her again. She packed up her belongings, grabbed her children, and moved out. Gary tried to get her to come back, but she would not. This went on for a while, until Nicole put herself at a greater distance from Gary. Then Gary told a friend that maybe he was going to kill Nicole.
On a heat-thick night in late July, Gary drove over to Nicole’s mother’s house and talked his ex-girlfriend’s little sister, April, into going for a ride with him in his white pickup truck. He wanted to drive around and talk and drink beer and look for Nicole, he told April. They drove for hours, listening to the radio, talking aimlessly, until Gary pulled up around the corner from a service station in the nearby small town of Orem. He told April to wait in the truck. He walked into the station, where twenty-six-year-old attendant Max Jensen was working alone. There were no other cars. There was only an empty Utah night. Gary pulled a .22 automatic from his jacket and told Jensen to empty the cash from his pockets. He took Jensen’s coin changer. Then he led the young attendant around back and forced him to lie down on the lavatory floor. He told Jensen to place his hands under his stomach and press his face to the ground. Jensen did these things, and tried to offer Gary a smile. Gary pointed the gun at the base of Jensen’s skull. “This one is for me,” Gary said, and pulled the trigger. And then: “This one is for Nicole,” and he pulled the trigger again.
Gary walked back to the pickup truck and got in. April had been sitting in the cab with the radio blaring, but she knew something was up. She was spooked.
After driving around for a while, they went to a drive-in to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the movie bothered April—who had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, following a bad LSD experience that had ended in gang rape—and she forced Gary to leave before it was over. They stopped by his cousin Brenda’s, but the visit didn’t go too well. Brenda could tell something was wrong. Finally they ended up at a Holiday Inn, where they smoked some dope, and Gary tried to take April’s clothes off. She was too freaked, though, and would not have sex with him.
The next night, Gary walked into the office of a motel just a few doors away