Manslaughter review issue 2

Manslaughter Review Issue 2: July 2017

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Table of Contents

Scott Klingbeil

3

Amber Bunnell

10

Tom W. Miller

17

Andrew Riconda

26

Alison Preston

36

Karl Koweski

44

Michael O’Keefe

54

Caitlin Ehlenz

57

Tom Barlow

59

Bios

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2

Moonshine Runner

by Scott Klingbeil The pretty girl in pink walked past me and into the soda shop, just as I awoke on the bench seat of the car out front. Convertible top down, bright blue sky above, her yellow hair floated past like an exploded sun, and I, continuing in my habit of being drawn to bad people and worse ideas, shook off the drive from the night before, rubbed the early morning Georgia heat out of my eyes, and decided to follow her in. The air was being cooked to a sizzle already, and the cicadas were humming like they were gonna explode. I stepped out of the car, dumbstruck, almost landing in a pile of horse shit in the gutter, vibrating with flies, and in my dreamlike state, I never saw the two dumb mugs in pinstripe suits eyeballing me from the hardware store across the street.

I’d spent all of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s hauling Sully's hooch to speakeasies across the state, but the soda shops were more my kind of place. Red booths and a slick counter lined the narrow store, with a checkered floor between them and fans overhead, spinning away the heat. Fella that ran the place even had a record player behind the counter, and there were banjos and fiddles flying out of it in a fine agreement with one another. At the far end, facing me as I stepped inside, the girl had taken a seat at the counter, an empty stool waiting next to her.

She noticed me as I was walking in, her eyes darting away quickly when I saw her, her cheeks reddening as I approached. I took the open stool and smiled. She reciprocated nervously; we laughed a little and looked away from each other; she seemed sweeter than the cherry pie behind the counter. That was my first memory of Jessie, so sweet you had to squirm to take it in. Back home a girl as pleasant as her might have known who I was, or been familiar with my associates, and would have run for the door by now, but she just sat there, smiling, giggling, and batting those curly eyelashes.

I was percolating some thoughts on how to start a proper conversation when there was a jingle from the bell above the door, and the two goons from the street entered the shop and paused, scanning the crowd. They were a couple of hulking brutes, thick chests and broad shoulders beneath bulbous heads, like someone set a jack-o-lantern atop a barrel and got it to walk around in a suit. They had to be brothers by the look of it, too extraordinary a pair to be finding each other through just the grace of God. Revolver grips peeked out from behind their lapels. The second of the two nodded at the shopkeep who shot an unwelcome glare back at them. The other customers dropped their conversations and became suddenly interested in the linoleum on the counter or the flakes in their cereal.

The first one through the door settled his eyes on me, big and dark, sharp and cutting. An icy frost came over me, and I fought the urge to slump over on my stool, staring at the ground myself. He tapped his brother on the chest, and the two of them lumbered over, taking their time moving down the 3

narrow aisle. Behind them, like the wake of a freighter, the rest of the crowd scurried out as they passed. The first guy kept those inkblot eyes on me the whole way, the second one followed closely behind, cracking his knuckles one at a time, the sharp snaps echoing in the sudden silence of the shop, until finally they were next to me, seemingly on top of me, the lead one with his arms crossed, waiting for me to turn and face them.

The first guy did all the talking. In fact, I don’t think I heard his brother speak the whole rotten time I was in Valdosta.

“Morning,” he said, greeting me with a low rumble.

I shot a quick glance back at the girl, but she had her head down now; they weren’t here for her. I should have known that nothing about this job was going to be easy, and I cursed Sully under my breath. I'd never done work this far south. No one back home had, and I hated when Sully asked me to crack open a new town. After the violence that chased me off the last job, he had to beg me to do it; said he had it on good word that there was no other game around and things would go differently this time. He knew what I felt I owed him and squeezed me with it when he had to. So I’d ended up fleeing Tybee Island the night before and arriving in Valdosta under a full moon, a couple hundred gallons of hooch rattling in the trunk of the Duesenberg.

I turned back to the welcoming committee. "Morning," I said.

"Couldn't help but notice the roadster out front. Beautiful car, you don't mind me saying. That your car, fella?" He spoke with a terseness meant to make me uneasy. The Duesy was a beaut, I had to give it to Sully, but a car that flashy, with that much speed? You didn’t have to brew the stuff yourself to know what I was carrying in it.

"That's the car I drive," I replied.

"That your car?"

"I s’pose it’s not my car."

A pause as he glanced at it in front of the shop. "Beautiful car," he repeated, turning his attention back to me. His brother stayed behind him, bald and dopey-eyed, checking out the candy on the shelf behind the counter.

The conversationalist waited for me to respond, but I only stared back. He had jet black hair, slicked back and coated with grease that was beading up around his temples from the heat. He stared back with furrowed brows, mouth flat as a board.

He leaned toward me so that his coat fell open a bit, and I could see the revolver clearly—but I didn’t blink. I just thought about Sully’s lying ass; if there was no game in town, then the folks here sure did have an odd way of greeting strangers. All I did was rub my forehead. I drove the car, I didn’t carry a gun, and I didn’t scrap. By holding onto these virtues amongst the operation back home, I felt I stayed a step outside the gin joint of immorality they operated in. But the truth is, to thugs like these, and even civilians like the girl, I was no different than the rest of them. Right now, I was a bootlegger on the wrong turf, nothing to admire. A virtuous criminal is a criminal nonetheless. I knew it and, lately, the point was really being driven home.

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"Listen, friend," he whispered to me, "We’ll do this nice once. We do it again and we make it easier to understand; and then, it’s not so nice. This town has plenty enough liquor to keep everyone happy, understood? That pretty car out front? I suggest you point it back to whatever shithole you drove it out of. How’s that sound?”

He had a clean smell to him, talcum powder and a hint of mint. I imagined his brother smelling like a block of rotten cheese.

“Sure, pal,” I said. “I was just driving through anyway. You two have a pleasant day.”

He nodded with a half grunt and they walked out.

“Allow me to apologize,” I said, turning back to the girl, who broke up laughing when I did.

“You got a real way of making friends, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I sure do.”

We talked, and she told me her name was Jessie. I was exactly twice as old as Jessie, who said that she had been in Valdosta for three months, stalling there when she ran out of cash, fleeing Florida for New York after her mother died. She told me that I resembled her father, who had abandoned the family ten years ago, after a life spent beating on the two women, leaving a cloud of alcohol following him out the door. I found it sad to hear, knowing that a man like that would have made an ideal customer of Sully’s. She told me her whole story over three pieces of cherry pie that she gobbled up like a vagrant, and in my head I imagined her picturing me as the cleaned up, idolized version of the man that had left her family and, despite reservations that were welling up inside of me, I was immediately drawn into this role.

I found myself envious of her. She was untethered and optimistic— qualities I had lost years ago. She had been shaken loose from her lot in life and when she flashed me what I believed at the time to be naïve smiles, I found there was a fierce sense of protection growing in me. When she was done telling me her story, I felt loopier than when I had walked in.

I reciprocated her openness. I found myself wanting her to know me like no one else did. I told her about being an orphan and meeting Sully, he a few years older but abandoned as well. Sully had been able to find work at sixteen and got us both out of the home, ending those dark days as wards of the state, leaving the abuse, and the day to day destruction of self until only survival mattered. I told her how Sully learned about bootlegging from the owner of the auto repair shop he worked at, and how when the owner died a few years later, he left the shop and the still to him. He had gotten me my first job working on transmissions and engines, showed me how to turn cars into rockets, and by the time he set up a casino in the house behind the garage, he had half the town working for him.

I shared with her in the same way she had, and when I would hesitate she would lightly place a hand on my knee, or stroke my shoulder. She never took her eyes off me, listening the whole way through. She wouldn’t judge, she couldn’t. She knew what going it alone meant.

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I told her about my reason for being in town, and she offered to take me to meet George McLean that night, the owner of the local speakeasy. Said he would probably talk to me, but also, that the men that had greeted me, the O’Shea brothers—there wasn’t a buck that changed hands in this town that they didn’t know about.

She did the chores and was allowed a free room in the home of an old spinster named Mrs. Irving, who was hard of hearing. Jessie believed she could sneak me inside, and that I could hide the car in the back. I’d try to sell McLean my inventory that night, what would happen after was left unspoken. *** When we swung by the dusty closet that was George McLean’s speakeasy the place was in full swing. Jessie rushed through a couple of drinks and danced for a bit while I stayed on the lookout for the O’Shea boys, though they’d be tough to miss in a cigar box like this.

George greeted Jessie as an old friend despite her being new to town. I could tell he trusted her and that put me at ease. He lacked the space to buy my entire inventory but he promised me he could move it all within a week. I asked about trouble with the O’Shea brothers and he told me they had a sister that ran the whole operation, and that she had been sweet on him since they were kids, so as long as I kept my head down, we should be ok.

We left on good terms. George struck me as an honorable man, and he slid me a stack of bills as payment for the first batch we were to drop off the next day. As we were wrapping up the O’Shea boys popped in and McLean snuck us out the back before they were any wiser.

The walk back was all shine with the light of a big, heavy moon glowing brightly. I thought about how Sully and I used to head down to the beach on Tybee under full moons like this, where we'd watch the waves roll in. We'd draw lines in the sand with our toes to see how far up the water would reach as the tide would wax and wane under the constant pull of giants. Years later, I'd started to feel this same tugging when I went on my runs. At night, under the watching moon, the roadster would take me far away from the whole enterprise back home—the illegal liquor, the casino, the whole dirty business of collecting from the welchers. For the most part, the guys that worked for Sully were deadbeats, anxious to make a quick buck, one short step ahead of the law. I started out as a grease monkey in his repair shop, but the bundle of cash I got for driving the car was a lot bigger than the one I got for fixing it, so I joined up with the racket, despite never quite feeling that I belonged. The trips would fling me in all directions, yet, no matter how far my business stretched me, I always slingshot back to them, through my allegiance to Sully. Like the water returning to the sea, crashing back into the chaos of the ocean; I’d go home until I was pushed out again, stretched thin over the journey, only to recede, leaving a temporary mark behind, soon to be erased completely.

As we walked, I put my arm around Jessie and pulled her closer to me.

That night, back at Mrs. Irving’s, I unlocked the empty valise I had brought on the trip with me.

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“Once the booze is gone, this will be full of money,” I told her. “McLean’s stack is the first $500, and by the time I’m done there should be a few grand, at least. What do you say me and you take that money and go on a little trip? Head west, maybe stay there forever?”

I knew I was being reckless and dumb, but I wasn’t even nervous asking. She nearly burst with joy when I did, swallowing me up in her arms. “I don’t have anywhere else I gotta be,” she said coolly. At last an escape had appeared, Sully would just have to live with it, I’d paid him back enough already. *** George had been right, it took us a full week to go through all the booze. I had managed to keep a low profile while Jessie made the deliveries and collected the money. When we got down to the final batch, I emerged from hiding to help her, eager to thank George and wish him well. The O’Shea boys hadn’t been spotted in a few days, but we still waited until the sun went down to transfer the bottles to Jessie’s car, and I lay down in my seat as we set out.

But it didn’t work. Tonight, they were parked on the street outside the house, and before we got out of the driveway they cut us off at the curb. James, the one capable of speech, opened my door and yanked me out something fierce as his brother came around from the other side. The beating they gave me was wordless, only the whooshes, cracks, and squishes of heavy punches, made any noise. When they were done, and I was on my ass, I leaned up against the car, and James crouched down to meet me at eye level, the dumb one behind him, heaving deep breaths, rubbing swollen knuckles. James unholstered his revolver and shoved the barrel under my chin.

“If we talk again,” he said, “you’ll be all out of chances.” Then he smacked my cheek and the two left. *** Jessie did a good job of cleaning me up, and we were fortunate Mrs. Irving was out and missed all the commotion.

Back in her room, I was nursing my swollen eyes and anxious to go.

“Let’s leave,” I said. “Right now. We can sell the rest someplace else.”

“You’re not thinking straight. I’ll go to George’s; we can load it in the roadster, and as soon as I’m back we can take off.”

“Jessie, they’re gonna know the minute that car hits the street. Just get the money and come back. I’ll be ready to leave once you do.”

She fidgeted a bit and grabbed the money bag.

“Hang on,” I said, stealing it back from her. “What’re you taking that for?”

Her voice rose a little, probably from the excitement of the beating. “I ain’t carrying all this money George is about to give me on my lap!”

“Here,” I said, and slipped a pillow out of its case and gave her the empty sack. “Use this. Best you don’t have all the cabbage in case those two catch up with you. You got a gun?” I hated asking it.

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"I'll be fine," she puffed, and swiped the pillowcase out of my hand and stormed out the door. "Just be ready," she hollered before she slammed it shut. *** It took her a lot longer than it should have to make the run, and I started to think of the O’Shea brothers and their sausage-thick fingers wrapped around her neck. I was already packed, ready to beat town in a flash. The room was dead quiet but for the sound of my pacing, clomping a path from the bed to the window. Outside, the full moon of the past few nights was gone, and the clipped version that was now in the sky sat behind thickening strings of gray clouds.

My nerves were crackling when I heard her key in the door, and she flew in, flushed, and out of breath. She stopped just inside the room, panting, and I noticed the ring of fur around the bottom of her coat. It was snow-hare-white but now there were fresh tendrils of tissue and blood, a dark and sticky red, caught in its fuzz.

"What happened?" I asked, but she only dug in her pocket and stuffed a blood-soaked wad of bills in my face.

“Jessie. What happened?” I asked again, but she just stood there with the money out, trying to slow her breathing.

“Whose blood is-“ “Baby,” she said, “put the money in the bag. We gotta split. Honest.”

She threw me a wink and a smirk. Feeling off center from the gore, I took the key out of my pocket and cracked the valise, already swollen with the rest of the cash. I shoved the bloody notes in with the others, but before I could close it, she fouled up all of it by pressing the cold metal of a revolver into my temple.

She did it with such force that I knew; she’d done it before.

You really gotta give her credit. She never showed her hand as that cash was stacking up all week. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see if she did. And for as electric as the murder and robbery of George McLean must have just made her, the girl had played it cool until the last second. Until all that dough was finally breathing the same air as her.

The gun had my head pinned toward the window. The clouds were gone now, the sky was clear, and the blood racing through me gave the moon a reddish tint. It seemed like it had doubled in size, and before I could say anything I felt her start to pull on the bag.

“You can leave it open,” she said, and I loosened my grip as my spirit flushed out of me completely. *** She had left me tied to the bed, secured by my hands and feet, but she was still young and for all her otherwise expert planning, she tied knots like a rookie. I managed to bust out pretty quickly and haul ass out of the house. The Duesy was still in the garage, the gears grinded when I shifted out of first, and it was obvious she had tried to steal that as well.

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I hit the edge of town and guessed she’d be heading north. No chance she’d crawl back to Florida (where I now suspected she had killed that father of hers), and I knew New York was the dream for a crook like her. Clear of the town, I started to jam on the accelerator when I saw the headlights of a car swing onto the road behind me. I knew it before I saw their big, dumb heads.

The O’Shea’s must have found McLean, and by the way they were driving, it seemed like they wanted to do more than just chase me out of town.

I’d juiced the roadster up exactly for situations like this, and with the brothers breathing down my neck, it didn’t take me long to catch up to her.

The dark, country roads were abandoned by everyone other than us criminals zooming along. I rolled the window down as I pulled up next to her, and the rotten egg smell of swamp gas-filled the car. I tried to call for her as we sped along, but she wouldn't even look my way.

The crash happened in an instant. The O’Shea’s made a move on me while I was next to Jessie. I saw it coming and cut her off as I sped ahead. She lost control, and at those speeds, there was never any chance after that. She made a hard left that she tried to correct with a heavy right which took her straight into the path of the brothers. The impact flipped her car a half dozen times and wrapped the two goons around a tree with a near comical explosion. I skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder. I sat there stunned until a truck came by after a while, and I sent him for the cops. When he left I searched for the cash and found it, wedged under the dash of Jessie’s car, her hand reaching for it until the life had slipped out of her. *** I stuck around until the cops came and took over the whole grisly scene. We were covered by a chandelier of oak branches and the night was so black that they threw down flares, whose red light made it all look like hell on earth. Twisted metal and chunks of flesh, all behind a cloud of smoke, the sharp smell of an electrical fire hung over everything. Jessie’s pale face had come to rest against her steering wheel. A trickle of blood had spilled from her nose, and her eyes were saucers; like she’d already seen her maker. There wasn’t enough left of the O’Shea boys to even speak of. The sheriff would be picking them out of trees for the rest of the summer.

The cops shook my hand when they were done with me; a couple of them patted me on the shoulder like you would a widow. No one looked me in the eyes, and the whole time I felt absent of myself like I'd been emptied out and forgotten. The air felt lighter, as though my whole body might just float up into the sky and be blown away.

I crawled into the roadster and thought about home, but as I drove I found myself drifting west instead, across the south, and into Texas. Through the desert and into California, until that pulling faded away and the whole operation back home was nothing but a bad memory. Clear across the country, until I hit the Pacific, where I walked along the beach on a cloudless night and marked the rising tide with my toe in the sand.

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Bloodroot, & Other Toxic Heirlooms

by Amber Bunnell Abigail often thought about poisoning the muffins. The blueberry almond ones were the most popular, so they’d kill the most people in one go. She could also poison the favorites of each regular customer over time, perhaps attracting less suspicion that way. At 3:30 a.m., as she gathered her long blonde hair into a ponytail and scrubbed her face, these were the thoughts that sustained her.

“Oh man,” said Wendy as soon as she arrived in the morning, ringing the little bell on the door as she entered the bakery. “Boy, I need some coffee. A good French roast. Yes. I wonder why it’s called ‘French roast.’ Abby, do you know? Why it’s called ‘French roast?’”

“Abigail,” said Abigail.

“So you don’t know, huh?” Wendy grabbed an apron off the hanger by the door. “That’s okay. I was just curious. Doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I’m gonna make some. French roast, that is.”

“I could put some in your French roast,” mumbled Abigail.

“Huh?” said Wendy.

Abigail knew all about poisons already, so it’s not like there’d be any sort of internet search trail linking her to a crime. She knew exactly what trees the poison mushrooms grew beneath in the woods behind the grotto. She knew that the tobacco in a carton of cigarettes was enough to kill an adult when injected into the bloodstream. And she knew how to heat a thousand apricots into a vial of cyanide. These recipes were her family heirlooms.

“Hey Abby,” said Wendy, “You put the scones in already? Oh man, you know I love doing the scones. I am like the scone girl. Oh wait, I got it – the sconer. I’m a sconer!”

Abigail didn’t say anything, she just gripped the wooden spoon she was holding tighter as she stirred, and looked out the window at the dark, empty street. There wasn’t a person in sight, only a pair of finches, chasing each other through the predawn air.

When she was thirteen years old, Abigail had a finch of her own, until she gave it a heart attack. It was a zebra finch, with black and white stripes on its cheeks, and a bright orange beak and tiny orange feet. Abigail used to kneel in front of its cage and reach her hand in and snatch it off its perch, holding it tight so that she could feel its heart racing against her palm. Each time, she squeezed it tighter and tighter, until the creature stopped squawking and turned silent, its eyes darting around, feet twitching. She’d hold it like this for a while and then release it back into its cage, until the day its little heart gave out as its body went limp in her palm.

“I started gardening,” said Wendy.

“Great,” said Abigail.

“Not vegetables,” she continued. “Flowers. I have petunias in the first row, and, you know, I tried to space them out in terms of color, and then I

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planted marigolds in the section where there’s shade, and then in the back I got lots of black-eyed Susans –” The idea came to Abigail when she drove home later. Alone in her car, her back slick with sweat and her shirt sticking to the back of her seat, she realized the obvious: poisoning Wendy was risky. Destroying the things she loved was not. *** Abigail’s mother was the type of woman who loved her children fiercely while keeping a cold distance from them. When Abigail brought home good grades in elementary school, her mother hung the papers on the refrigerator without a word. When Abigail was caught stealing from her fifth grade classroom, her mother sprinkled bloodroot on her dinner potatoes; Abigail spent the night crouched over the toilet, vomiting until 4:00 a.m.

Her father was a lawyer who traveled often and spoke little. Her younger brother Max followed suit and was in law school, out of town. Her older sister Charlotte lived in Maine and didn’t speak to any of them anymore.

Whenever Abigail made the drive out to the old farmhouse where her parents lived, accessible only by a narrow dirt road, she’d pass her childhood haunts and feel a faint nostalgia for her family’s home. But once she was inside the house, sitting in uncomfortable silence on a hard wooden chair and eating her mother’s food, she usually regretted making the trip. “Max is at the top of his class,” her father would say as he speared asparagus with his fork, never asking about Abigail, except once when she was promoted to manager at the bakery. Even the estranged Charlotte seemed to be held in higher esteem. “I heard that whore got a job at a university,” her mother said last time. “Best school in Maine. Looks like she found work with that useless degree after all.”

Abigail tried not to think about these conversations as she went about her daily life, and for the most part, she succeeded. In the mornings, she woke up in the dark and drove to the bakery. In the afternoons, she sold muffins and scones and homemade caramels. And at dinnertime, she drove home to the house she rented and ate alone on her couch, ran exactly two miles on her treadmill, and watched TV news until it was time to go to bed and start the whole process over. *** This routine, however, was punctuated by various projects when the opportunity arose. Destroying Wendy’s garden was one such project. After the idea occurred to Abigail on her short drive home that hot June day, she felt a new sense of purpose. Instead of falling asleep to the 9:00 forecast, Abigail waited until the sun had set and then jumped in her car.

She found Wendy’s house easy. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac off Acorn Street, a location Wendy was always raving about. The mailbox had hearts engraved into the metal.

Abigail parked a few houses down, and then walked over. The lights were off inside the home, and the garden was to the right of the house, barely visible in the dark. Abigail crept across the lawn, careful to avoid the light thrown from a nearby streetlamp, and pulled a scissors out of her pocket.

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First she trimmed the heads off the black-eyed Susans, stuffing the yellow-petaled flowers into her purse. Then she carefully uprooted the petunias, tossing the limp plants onto Wendy’s driveway.

“That’s enough for now,” she said to herself as she rubbed the dirt off her fingers. *** The next morning, Abigail waited for Wendy’s arrival with unprecedented excitement. She struggled to contain herself when she finally saw Wendy’s car pull up out of the corner of her eye.

As the little door bell rung, Wendy slung her purse and car keys onto the counter. “Great,” she sighed. “I think there’s a deer living in my neighborhood.”

Abigail looked up from the muffins, surprised. “What?”

“Something ate a bunch of my flowers last night,” said Wendy. “Just when things were starting to go well– ” “You are too stupid to realize that someone did something mean to you,” thought Abigail. “Oh no,” she said.

“Do you mind if I cut out early, to start replanting things?” Wendy tied her apron strings, slower than normal. “Can you cover that last part of my shift?”

Abigail’s blood began to boil as she imagined handling the busy afternoon alone. But then, a soothing thought: the harder Wendy worked, the more for Abigail to undo.

“For sure,” she said, and Wendy’s face lit up. “You go do what you need to do.” *** Abigail grew herbs in her kitchen window box, and often tried them out on herself to gauge their effects. The least toxic was the milk thistle, which produced a mild headache and diarrhea when ingested. The harshest was the bloodroot, which took over a corner of the box, strangling any other seedling she attempted to plant in its vicinity. She grew the same plants her mother and grandmother grew, except for one.

“You’re missing pennyroyal,” remarked her mother once, when Abigail first set up the garden.

“Oh, that’s right,” she had answered. “I’ll have to get some.” But Abigail knew she’d never plant it, and her mother raised her eyebrows, as if she knew it too.

The weeks passed quicker now that Abigail was working on the Wendy project. After Wendy replanted the petunias, Abigail snuck some bloodroot into the garden, and Wendy went crazy battling the strange weed destroying her flowers. When Wendy gave up on the garden, Abigail ran her key along each side of Wendy’s car and let the air out of the tires. She called the house in the middle of the night from payphones. She left a dead and bloody rabbit, ensnared in one of Abigail’s homemade traps, on her doorstep. June continued.

The bloodroot grew. *** Wendy, however, was proving to be a formidable foe.

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“You’re having terrible luck,” said Abigail one day after Wendy appeared thirty minutes late, dark bags under her eyes. “Doesn’t it ever get you down?”

“Well, you know how it is,” Wendy answered, forcing a smile. “When life gives you lemons…”

Abigail may have been obsessed with toxins in all their different forms, but she had never actually poisoned anyone before, having always drawn the line somewhere before the point of bodily harm. Perhaps her morbid fantasies were only that - fantasies. Perhaps the accidental death of her childhood zebra finch was enough of a cautionary tale. Or perhaps being intermittently poisoned by her mother had left her with a small shred of empathy. Whatever the reason, Abigail felt everything change as she stared at Wendy, arranging the morning’s scones in the glass display case, paler than weeks ago when Abigail first cut the heads off her flowers, but essentially the same ridiculous person. And as Abigail stood there, watching, she was hit by a flash of rage so strong she had to curl her hands into fists to stop them from trembling. It was becoming increasingly clear that Wendy needed to be poisoned. *** When they all lived at home, years ago, Abigail’s family used to spend Fridays after supper in the living room together. Her mother sat in the armchair by the fireplace, spine straight, knitting. Her father and brother occupied the sofa, each with a copy of the New York Times. Charlotte and Abigail sat on the floor in front of the television, volume turned down, watching true crime dramas.

This relative peace dissolved, however, on a muddy April evening when Charlotte made the announcement.

“Are you trying to ruin your life?” Abigail’s mother yelled from her armchair, still clutching her knitting needles. Her brother and father looked up. Abigail studied her sister from her perch on the fireplace, where just a moment before she’d been reaching for the remote control to the television.

Charlotte stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. “No,” said Charlotte. “No, no.”

“We can make an appointment in the morning,” said their mother, standing up. “We won’t let this ruin your life.”

“What?” said Charlotte. “No! No, I don’t want that.”

“Aren’t you overreacting?” said Max, folding his newspaper shut. “By this point it’s barely a fetus. A bunch of cells. That’s what you’re crying about, a bunch of cells.”

“You’re all horrible,” screamed Charlotte. “You’re supposed to be excited.”

“Excited?” said their mother. “Excited to watch you throw your life away?

What a wasteful, ungrateful child.”

“I’m an ADULT,” yelled Charlotte back. “You can’t tell me what to do, and I wouldn’t listen even if you could.”

Two days later, Abigail found her sister curled up trembling, crying, on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

“You should have left if you didn’t want this to happen,” Abigail told her sister, setting a towel down next to her. But it was as if Charlotte now existed 13

in another world, unable to hear a word Abigail said as she sobbed and wailed and shook and screamed, body pressed against the cold tile floor.

Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, Abigail tiptoed down the stairs and leaned out the kitchen window nearest the mismatched pots of herbs on the porch. They were each green and full and lush except for one: the pennyroyal, snipped down to its roots in the dirt. *** It was after midnight when Abigail set out to bake Wendy’s muffins. On her kitchen counter, she collected the flour, the sugar, the eggs, the almonds, the berries, the milk, and the bloodroot, ground into a fine paste in a small stone bowl. When the glorious concoction came out of the oven, golden brown and smelling of warm sugar and fruit, she felt prouder of it than anything she had baked her whole life.

“Look at you,” she held one of the muffins up in her hand, admiring it for a moment before tying it up in a shiny silver wrapper. The way Abigail figured, the plan was perfect: Wendy would be racked with a mysterious illness. Her body would shake for hours, her stomach desperately trying to empty its contents. Her skin would go pale, her hands would get clammy, her eyes would turn bloodshot and swollen, and, most importantly, her spirit would finally break.

The finishing touch was a homemade card Abigail signed with a flourish.

For you, Wendy, she wrote in purple gel pen. Hope things start looking up! Your friend, Abby. *** For two glorious days, Abigail worked at the bakery alone. No one interrupted her thoughts in the mornings as she spread the caramels out on wax paper, or at closing time as she swept the floor and carefully wrapped up each of the day-old scones. Wendy hadn’t even managed to call in sick, proof to Abigail that the bloodroot must have been working.

The peace and quiet spoiled her so much that, when Wendy actually did show up one afternoon, greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, face white with pale pink blotches on her cheeks, Abigail actually jumped.

“Wendy?” she paused to say from the cash register, in the middle of counting change for an elderly couple.

“What the FUCK,” said Wendy, and slapped her.

The coins tumbled out of Abigail’s hands, clanging as they rolled across the floor. A middle-aged woman in line gasped. When Abigail opened her eyes, she saw Wendy standing a couple feet away, hand still raised, eyes consumed by a look of terrible anger.

“I knew you were insane,” she said. “I’ve been so fucking nice to you and this is what you do, you psycho.”

Abigail touched her cheek, still stinging, and stammered, “I – what – what are you –” “You are a bad person,” said Wendy. “You are the worst person, in fact, that I have ever met and you can go fuck yourself as far as I’m concerned, because –” 14

Abigail didn’t hear any more, because she was walking out of the store, one hand still pressed to her cheek, ducking around the corner of the block to get out of sight of the bakery’s wide glass windows. My car, she thought, but all of a sudden she was running the entire two miles back to her house, sweating in the summer heat, a strange choking feeling in her throat. At home, she flung open the backdoor and didn’t bother to close it. As if in a trance, she was suddenly in the kitchen, staring at her countertop herb garden, green and full and casting sinister shadows on the ground from the angle of the afternoon light.

She picked up the milk thistle first, and smashed its orange ceramic pot on the kitchen floor, kicking the shards out of her way as she grabbed the next pot and ripped the belladonna out. She tore its matted roots apart and yanked its leaves off and then threw it down, trying not to scream. One by one, she grabbed each pot, each hanging basket. She grabbed the foxglove, the hemlock, the lily of the valley, the ivy, even the innocuous peppermint sitting in a large yellow pot nearest the window, and she shredded them with her fingers, the pile of soil and plant debris spilling over the kitchen tile, until only the bloodroot remained. Its wide leaves hung over its dark red pot as if it were watching her, waiting.

“You,” said Abigail, to no one in particular.

Then she slowly took a lighter out from the kitchen cabinet drawer, flicked it with her thumb, and watched the flame dance in the breeze coming in from the backdoor for a moment before touching it to one of the bloodroot`s leaves. The flames were slow at first, but soon the whole plant was burning, green leaves curling from the heat, the kitchen filling with smoke. Abigail stood still with her hand still curled around the lighter, watching the fire grow and then subside. She imagined it screaming.

When there was nothing left to burn, she opened all the windows in the house to air it out. Then she opened her bedroom closet, retrieved a small box from the top shelf, and pulled out a small slip of paper with a number written on it.

“Dr. Brown, American Studies Department,” said the woman who answered the phone.

The sound of her sister’s voice made Abigail feel as if she were going to burst. The hot telephone pressed against her cheek, she felt her chest tighten and she made a strange choking noise.

“Charlotte,” she managed to eventually sputter.

“Abigail?” said the incredulous voice on the other line.

Abigail wanted to tell her sister everything, about the bakery, about dinner at their parents’, about ripping up Wendy’s flowers and mixing bloodroot into muffins, but instead, she felt her chest go even tighter because all she could picture was her sister on the bathroom floor, years ago, in a pool of blood.

“I`m sorry,” she choked into the phone.

“What?” said Charlotte.

15

There was a long pause.

“I’m so, so sorry,” said Abigail again.

“I know,” said Charlotte, and the two were quiet again for a very long time, neither hanging up the phone.

16

Punchface

by Tom W. Miller In the six years I spent tracking David Addley, it never occurred to me that he didn’t exist. An extremely reputable site on the dark web had first posted the bounty. Orlo, the best computer guy an assassin could ask for, had obtained Addley’s social security number, his Georgia driver’s license with attached photo, property records, financial information, and a third-grade report card. Sure, he wasn't easy to find, but with a six million dollar price on his head, we didn’t expect that part of it to be easy.

Just when we’d begin thinking about putting Addley on the back burner and picking up some smaller jobs to pay the bills, the guy would surface. The passport of one of his suspected aliases would pass through airport security.

Orlo’s facial recognition software would find a match on some faraway surveillance camera. Like an expectant mother, I would grab my duffle with its change of clothes, toiletries, and a semi-automatic pistol, and hurry to Timbuktu only to find that I had just missed the slippery dude.

A few months ago, I decided to team up with Brick, a fellow killer who had also been pursuing Addley. Brick may have resembled Frankenstein’s monster, but I had always known him to be dependable and a man of his word.

We would have to split the six million, but at least we’d get something, and we could share expenses along the way.

It had seemed like a good plan until Orlo made his disappointing discovery.

The doorbell rang. I walked to the foyer and saw Brick, along with some ninety-seven-pound weakling, through the bulletproof glass of the locked storm door. I opened the door, ushered them inside and secured the entry way.

“Punchface, my man,” said Brick as he took my hand and pulled me in for a quick man hug. He looked around and admired my Art Deco decorating tastes. “Nice place you’ve got here. Very Ozzie and Harriet.”

I lived in a well-kept brick ranch in a middle-class neighborhood and employed a service to cut my grass and keep my flower beds weeded and mulched. “I keep telling you, Brick, that hiding in plain sight is the way to go.”

“I like my abandoned warehouse. It’s got a Batcave feel.” The shrimp beside Brick nodded in agreement.

“I understand your point,” I said, “but if the cops find you there, the whole scenario screams ‘contract killer.’” I turned my attention to Brick’s associate. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Edwin, my own computer guy. Since you said Orlo had something to tell us, I figured I’d bring him along.”

Edwin stuck out his hand for me to shake, but he had a hard time looking me in the eye. This was not an unusual occurrence since the bridge of my nose, broken countless times, made a grotesque right to left curve. When I was younger, people would say I had a face that begged to be punched, hence the name. Now I’m the one that metes out the punishment. I could have fixed 17

my face with surgery, but I found that my ugly mug had a certain terrorizing effect that was a boon in my profession.

“So what’s so important I had to drop everything and come over?” asked Brick.

“C’mon,” I said, signaling the two men to follow me into the living room.

“I’m gonna let Orlo explain it to you.”

My longtime partner sat at his workstation with its bank of six monitors.

Orlo had movie star good looks, six inches and a hundred pounds on the scrawny Edwin, and could be a great help to me in the field as well as online.

After the greetings and introductions, Orlo pulled up the video in which he had made his crucial discovery. “Here’s the latest sighting of Addley inside a convenience store in Meridian, Idaho.”

We watched as our longtime nemesis paid cash for a bottle of sports drink and a bag of nuts. “Did you see it?” Orlo asked.

I barely saw it and I knew what to look for.

“It’s our man in Idaho,” said Brick. “Why aren’t we up there now?”

“Did you see it?” Orlo asked again, directing the question at his computer colleague.

“I think I did,” said Edwin, who I could tell was oblivious to anything significant in the video. “Could you play it through one more time?”

Orlo did so, but as soon as Addley appeared, he froze the video. “Right when Addley entered the picture, there’s the slightest flicker.”

“Got it,” said Edwin.

“Very easy to miss if you’re not looking for it,” said Orlo. “Even if you did see it, you’re likely to dismiss it as just a slight imperfection in the feed. But I analyzed it, and it’s a fake.”

“What do you mean?” asked Brick.

“I mean Addley’s not really there,” said Orlo. “Somebody very good hacked this camera and edited in this whole sequence with Addley. I went back and checked the other sightings. They’re all the same.”

“So Addley’s got some computer whiz working for him who’s planting sightings to send us on a wild goose chase,” said Edwin.

“That’s one possibility,” said Orlo, “but I don’t think so. I mean, if you’re trying to stay out of sight, why do this at all? Whenever you hack, there’s a chance you’ll leave a trace behind that could be a vital clue for people like us.”

“Did the hacker leave a trace?” asked Edwin.

“No, but it’s always a risk.”

“If you don’t think it’s Addley’s people, then who is it?” asked Brick.

Orlo looked at me and I gave him a slight nod. It had taken him a while to convince me, but I was now a believer. “I think the most likely explanation,” said my computer expert, “is that David Addley is the figment of someone’s imagination.”

It took both Brick and Edwin a few seconds to process this theory. “If that’s true,” said Brick, “then who would do this? The cops?”

“Don’t think so. My best guess is that one of our fellow contract killers set this up to distract us. Think about it. For the last six years, we’ve invested 18

a lot of time and money in Addley. We’ve done the occasional small job, but we’ve passed on a lot of business to go for the big score.”

Brick liked the logic of the hypothesis. “So we need to look at the people who’ve landed the projects we let go.”

“The Deacon,” said Edwin.

“No,” said Brick. “Deke’s been working a lot, but he’s not smart enough to pull off something like this.”

“I think you’re right there,” I said. “A couple of months ago, the Deacon broke into the condo of a cheating husband. He’s about to induce a heart attack when a dog shows up and takes a chunk out of his ass. Deke takes out his gun, kills the dog and target but wakes up the neighborhood and leaves his DNA all over the place. Very sloppy and unprofessional.”

“Deke’s also computer illiterate,” said Orlo, “and he’s too cheap to hire somebody.”

“What about the Martz Brothers?” asked Edwin. “Ole Dooley Martz is pretty smooth around a keyboard.”

“Retired, and I think it’s legit,” I said. “They’re running a very popular deli in Queens.”

“So who is it?” asked Brick, who had never been a patient person.

“Orlo and I think that the most likely suspect is Cat.” As Brick and Edwin pondered the possibility, I reviewed the reasoning behind my conclusion. Cat had broken into the market just after the Addley bounty appeared. She started with small, simple jobs, snuffing elderly relatives and annoying coworkers, and built trust by delivering clean and dependable service. Now she had an established reputation and was landing some more prestigious work. I had never met her, but she had a reputation for being very smart and computer savvy.

“I heard she’s smokin’ hot,” said Edwin.

“Never seen her,” said Orlo, “but the word is that she’s very competent and uses all of her assets to advantage.”

"I'd like to use her asset to my advantage," said Edwin.

I was unable to keep my distaste for this pipsqueak off my face, but thanks to my disfigurement, it was almost impossible for anyone else to tell. I had lost a little respect for Brick because he hired this loser.

“I don’t care if she’s Helen of Troy,” said Brick. “If we confirm this and find her, she’ll die a very painful death.”

“How do we get her?” asked Edwin, excitement on his face.

“Already on it, I said. “Orlo’s put it out that we need a black widow for a job we’re doing. The money on offer is generous.”

“She’ll be at the park in an hour,” said Orlo.

“That seems very public,” said Brick.

“I guess she’s paranoid and doesn’t want to meet with killers in a dark, secluded alley,” I said. “Don’t worry, Brick. I have a plan. If Addley’s her play, I’ll find out.”

“Then it’ll be our turn to play,” said Edwin.

I wished the twit would just shut up, but alas, it was not to be.

19

“Yo Brick, who’s this Helen chick anyway?” *** If Cat wanted people around during our meeting, she had made a wise choice. The air was a little too humid for my taste but other than that it was a perfect summer day with temperatures in the mid-eighties and only a few high, wispy clouds in the sky. The bleachers were packed with parents watching a little league baseball game. Orlo and I had set up three lawn chairs to the left of the stands. Shrouded in a tan wide brim field hat and sunglasses, I sat in one of the end chairs and watched the game while Orlo stood in line at the concession stand for grape sno-cones.

“Mr. Willis?” said voice behind me. Hearing my alias being called, I turned around and almost aborted my plan because of the attention this woman was born to draw. Cat’s oversized sunglasses may have masked half her face, but the rest of her body was on prominent display. Her long, golden brown legs disappeared into a pair of skimpy jeans shorts. A tight white tee shirt accentuated the swells of her breasts and the curves of waist and hips.

On the field, bat and ball connected. Cheering and not a few hysterical shouts erupted from the crowd on the bleachers. I made a hand motion for Cat to sit down in the chair beside me, which she did. As the frenzy died down, we studied each other. Most people I met tried to look at anything other than my misshapen nose, but this woman seemed to be memorizing its every contour.

“My brother’s a rhinoplasty expert,” she said. “I could give you his number.”

I chuckled, having long learned to laugh at myself. “I like being able to scare the kids,” I said.

“And not a few adults, I’d wager.”

Orlo returned, handed me a sno-cone, and sat in the chair to the left of Cat. “Maybe a few,” I said. “Would you like a sno-cone?”

“No thanks,” said Cat. She looked straight ahead while she talked in order to keep Orlo in her peripheral vision.

“Do you have any associates here?” I asked.

“Just the twenty-five fathers in the stands that are looking at us and wondering why Beauty and the Beast are conversing.”

“Really, Cat. This is just a business meeting. There was really no reason to dress so provocatively.”

“A single girl’s got to be careful.”

“From what I’ve heard,” I said, “it’s the rest of us who’ve got to be careful.

In the last several years, you’ve acquired a stellar reputation as a reliable and efficient worker.”

“And from what I’ve heard, your nose is not your most distinctive feature.”

“Really? What is it then?”

“It’s the gray matter between your ears,” she said.

On the field, an absolute mammoth of a twelve to thirteen-year-old stepped out of the dugout and entered the on-deck circle. If Brick had a son 20

who played little league, it would be this young man. At just over six feet and at least two hundred pounds, he looked like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput. He put a donut on his bat and took massive cuts while waiting his turn to bat.

Orlo took a big bite out of his sno-cone. “How is it, Orlo?” I asked.

“Delicious,” he said. “Really takes me back. I haven’t had one of these in years.”

“Are you sure you don’t want one?” I asked Cat again, holding out the sno-cone. “I really had Orlo buy this for you. I’m not in the mood.”

“No thank you,” said Cat. “Sugar goes straight to my hips.”

“I think you could afford one sno-cone,” I said, keeping my gaze glued to her face. Though her sunglasses covered what must have been lovely eyes, they could not hide her exquisite cheekbones or her silky, honey-blonde hair.

“It’s a slippery slope. So I was wondering,” she said, getting down to business, “why you need my help on this particular job. I mean, I’m grateful for the work, but I’m curious, with your intellect, why you couldn’t figure out a way to handle it yourself.”

“Let’s just say that the, um….” I didn’t want to say “target” in public, and as I searched for another word, my eyes fell on one of the boys in the infield, pounding his glove and chattering at the batter. "The shortstop, I should say, is very good at defense. We've tried, but we just can't seem to get a ball past him. We have noticed, though, that if a girl comes up to the plate, he's got a tendency to drop his guard a bit."

As if to emphasize my point, the shortstop on the field dove and snared a grounder that seemed headed for center field then threw the base runner out from his knees.

Cat turned to me and smiled, also appreciating the uncanny timing of the outstanding play. “So you need a female to pinch hit,” she said.

Brick Jr. stepped up to the plate and began his pre-pitch routine. He dug his front foot into the dirt, twirled his bat a couple of time and pulled it back into position.

“Exactly,” I said. “The team will do all the rest of the work. We just need you to come in and get that key hit to win the game.”

“And who is this amazing shortstop?” she asked.

As Cat asked the question, the pitcher reared back and fired, hoping to be David to his opponent’s Goliath. When bat hit ball, it was as if John Henry had pounded a railroad spike with his great hammer. Necks craned to watch the ball as it soared through the air.

I saw Cat wince with pain as the tranquilizer dart hit her just above the shoulder blade. Her head whipped forward from the impact and the oversized sunglasses flew off her face. Brick, the best marksman I knew, had delivered the shot perfectly, and for once, Edwin had justified his existence by keeping an eye on the situation and helping his partner time the shot perfectly.

Parents stood as the ball sailed far over the fence and Brick Jr. began his home run trot. Before Cat could cry out in pain, Orlo put an arm around her and shoved his sno-cone into her mouth, muffling any potential scream. To 21

anybody who might be looking, they looked like a gorgeous couple sharing a frozen treat.

I leaned over, picked up Cat’s sunglasses, and saw confusion and anger in her large aquamarine eyes as the cheering continued. When the drug began to take effect, but before she lost consciousness, I answered her question. “The shortstop is David Addley.”

I saw a flash of fear just before she passed out. After I plucked the dart out of her back, Orlo eased her head onto his shoulder—just a man supporting his girlfriend who had become drowsy in the heat of the afternoon sun.

We remained in that position until the game’s next major commotion when the right fielder misjudged a fly ball. Orlo picked up Cat, cradled her head lovingly in his arms and kissed her on the cheek. A middle-aged woman, sitting on the end of the bleachers and somehow aloof from the frenzied action on the field, saw Orlo carrying his beautiful burden and smiled. "Aww, that's sweet. I wish my husband could carry me to the car when I was tired.”

I threw my melting sno-cone laced with Rohypnol—our plan A— into a trash can, and then I folded up the chairs and followed Orlo to our Toyota minivan. ***

We headed back to Brick’s abandoned warehouse which I had to agree really did look like the Batcave. I grabbed a chair from the large computer workstation in the center of the room. “Put her here and tie her up,” I said to Orlo.

Aren’t we going to strip her first?” asked Edwin.

“Why would we do that?” I asked.

“To demoralize her,” said the idiot. “Naked and afraid, she’ll tell us anything we want to know.”

As Edwin continued to leer hungrily at our prey, I gave Brick a look that questioned his sanity when he hired this jerk. My colleague just shrugged.

“Did you search her, Orlo?” I asked.

“She had a switchblade in her bra. Other than that, no weapons.”

“Then leave her clothes on. I’ve already got the information I need.” I had always prided myself on my discernment, and I had no doubt that Cat had been the one to concoct the fiction of David Addley Orlo proceeded to secure our prisoner's arms, legs, and torso with thin but strong rope. Edwin was pouting and looked about ready to lodge a protest citing inequitable groping opportunities when Cat began to stir.

She opened her eyes and focused on me. I had removed my floppy hat and sunglasses so that she could feel the full force of my ugly mug. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you were not behind the nonexistent David Addley.”

Behind Cat’s piercing eyes I could see calculations being made with the speed of a computer processor. Finally, she made a decision. “I just wanted a chance to break into the business. I was having trouble getting those first couple of jobs, so I hatched the Addley plan. And it worked perfectly. While 22

everybody else was off looking for the big score, I was taking the small jobs, building trust and reputation.”

“Who’s your computer person?” asked Orlo.

“Nobody,” said Cat. “I do everything myself. No need to split the profits.”

My partner nodded. “It was all very impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“Why become an assassin at all?” I asked. “You’re a very beautiful woman, and you obviously possess considerable intelligence and skill. Seems to me there are a lot of legal situations in which you could have a very comfortable life.”

Cat took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Ever since I hit puberty,” she began, “and even before, the men in my life have treated me like a piece of meat. When I grew up and acquired my present skill set, I decided to return the favor.”

Brick must have sensed my empathy for the woman in front of us. “She wasted six years of our lives, Punch.”

“Wasn’t my original plan,” said Cat. “As soon as I completed a couple jobs, I was going to pretend to take out Addley myself. But nobody seemed to suspect and I was enjoying the steady work. I just kept the fiction going.”

“Brick’s right,” I said. “It gets me riled up when I think about all the money we could have been making while we wasted time chasing a ghost.” I pulled a revolver from the back of my jeans and pointed it at Cat’s head. “We can’t let that go unpunished.” I cocked the pistol, giving Cat a chance to say her final words.

She remained surprisingly calm. “What if you weren’t wasting your time?”

“But we did,” I said, picturing the unsightly hole that was about to appear in Cat’s perfect face. “I’m not sure how many man hours the four of us put into Addley, both separate and together, but we’ve all had to eat into our savings just to make ends meet.”

“What if I gave you six million dollars?”

Brick looked at me with a dubious expression. He thought our prisoner was just stalling for time. I should just go ahead, pull the trigger and end this unfortunate chapter of our lives.

Part of me, though, admired Cat ingenuity and ability. “Do you really have that kind of money?” I asked. “There’s no way you’ve done that volume of work in the last six years.”

When I’m not working a job, I day trade,” she said. “I’m good at that too.”

I uncocked the gun. “Eight million,” I said. “The bounty was six million.

I want to cover our expenses too.”

With the gun still in her face, it didn’t take Cat long to consider my request. “Deal,” she said. “And I’ll put out the word that you bagged Addley.

That will enhance your resume.”

23

As I lowered my gun, Edwin stepped forward and ran a grimy index finger down one of Cat’s smooth cheek bones. “I’m gonna need one more thing,” he said.

Until now, I had reigned in my distaste for Edwin because of my respect for Brick, but this comment sent me over the edge. Not only was this putz undermining the bargain I had just made, but he was doing the very thing that had turned this intelligent woman into a killer.

With a quick backhand, I slammed my revolver into the bridge of Edwin’s nose, transforming it into a mass of blood and crumpled cartilage. As Edwin’s hands came up to his face, I transferred the revolver to my left hand and buried my right fist in Edwin’s soft belly. Instinctively, Edwin’s hands dropped to his midsection.

I bent my knees to get below the level of Edwin’s face. Pointing my right palm face up to the metallic rafters of the abandoned warehouse and thrusting upwards, as if I were launching a shot put into the stratosphere, I drove the heel of my hand into Edwin’s nostrils. I heard a tremendous crunch, like a calving glacier, and Edwin fell backward on the concrete floor. His arms made no attempt to break his fall and his head landed with a resounding thunk.

None of us spoke or moved for a few seconds. All of us, including myself, seemed stunned by the sudden, vicious violence and its outcome.

Edwin was not moving but his eyes were open, staring into space.

Orlo knelt and checked for a pulse. He shook his head. “He’s dead.”

I looked at Brick, but my colleague was still staring down at his former partner. “I’m sorry, Brick,” I said, aware of my serious breach of assassin etiquette. “That just kind of burst out of me.” Behind my back, I transferred the revolver back to my right hand in case Brick made a move.

“It’s okay, Punch,” said Brick. “I probably should have killed him myself a long time ago. “He’s always been a real jerk, and he’s not even that good with computers.”

Cat stared at Edwin’s lifeless body with awestruck wonder. “I thought that was a myth,” she said.

“What was?” I asked.

“Killing somebody with a punch to the face. Sending shards of cartilage into the brain.”

“Doesn’t always work,” I said, “but I’ve done it before.”

“That’s why we call him Punchface,” said Brick. “He’s the only guy I know who can kill with a punch to the face. He’s the man.”

The adulation was making me uncomfortable. “About that eight million?” I asked Cat. “If you untie my hands and get me a laptop, I’ll get it done right now.”

While Orlo supervised the transfer with Cat, Brick and I rolled up Deadwin in a plastic tarp and threw him in the trunk of my car for later disposal. While we were outside, Brick approved the new plan I had concocted.

When we went back inside, Cat was still sitting bound in the chair by her midsection and ankles. I looked at Orlo who nodded, confirming that we had the agreed upon amount in our account and credit for knocking off Addley.

24

“So would you please untie me now?” asked Cat. “I need to get home and start planning on how to recoup my losses.”

“You mean go back to stealing our clients,” I said.

Her beautiful face did not reveal any frustration or panic. “I thought you were an honorable guy, Punchface,” she said.

I pulled out my switchblade and pushed the button which made the eight inches of deadly steel spring out of the handle. “Even honorable guys have to make a living, Cat. I don’t appreciate the competition.” I walked over to the chair and held the knife two feet from her abdomen.

“That’s why I want you to join our team,” I said as I started slicing through her bindings.

“You and Orlo don’t need me.”

“But Orlo, Brick and I do. With four people, we could take on bigger jobs that require more manpower, or we could split up into teams of two to handle high volume. And you’d have more people to watch your back.”

“We’d be like the Fantastic Four,” said Brick.

Freed from the chair, Cat stood up and stretched. Her tee shirt rode up and revealed her navel in a brazen attempt to distract the three men in the room. It worked.

“And if I say no?” she asked.

“Then you’re free to go,” I said, though I was not sure that I meant it. I had not planned for a refusal, and I liked things to go according to plan. The extended switchblade was still in my hand.

Cat seemed to read my thoughts as she studied my face. “Okay, I’m in,” she said, though not with conviction.

I folded up my switchblade and put it back in my pocket. “Good,” I said.

“And with four people, maybe we could branch off into bank robberies.”

“Getting burnt out on killing?” asked Cat. I pointed to Edwin’s blood that had pooled on the concrete floor. “Still a killer,” I said, “but I thought it might be wise to expand our services. I’ve always wanted to plan the perfect robbery, just like in the movies.”

Cat’s neutral expression foiled even my extraordinary power of discernment. I hoped that I would not one day regret that I let her live instead of killing her when I had the chance. She may have been thinking the same thing.

Cat looked across the room and saw a metal table with four chairs around it. Giving us each a good look at the undulating curves of her hips and buttocks, she slowly walked toward it and sat down in one of the chairs. “Then let’s get to work,” she said.

25

DROWN WITH ME TONIGHT

by Andrew Riconda “C’mon already, Rehill, destiny’s calling.”

“I think I’m gonna let it go to voicemail, Frank.”

There was no point trying anything: his back wasn’t turned and I didn’t have a bat with nails in it.

All I had was a bacon-egg-cheese on a roll to absorb last night’s alcohol, sitting on my lap, ever so warm in its foil. What about its destiny? Instead of aiding it in its path to self-actualization, here I was about to become an accessory to bank robbery—as Frank Targille’s wheel man. I unfolded a corner of the foil, exposing melted American. I couldn’t allow this maiden fair to be caught up in this mess. Get out of the car, Frank, so I can wheel, man, the fuck away from you. The top was down to Brigitte’s LeBaron. Frank flicked his cigarette over the windshield. We both stunk of beer and cigarettes. I smelled a little like Frank’s sister, which probably didn’t strengthen our budding bromance none.

“Stop stalling.”

“Mother never told you,” I raised the sandwich up, “not to rob a bank on an empty stomach?”

“Maternal advice was not my mother’s fort.”

I had more pressing concerns than his linguistic prowess, so I let that go.

“Hey, Frank, when you showed up last night, I did mention that I’m a real estate agent and not a bank robber. That came up at some point, didn’t it?”

“Here,” he said, reached into the brown bag at his feet and handed me a coffee with milk and two sugars instead just half and half, no sugar. I put it in the beverage holder. “Real estate. Yeah, my sister said something like that. Sort of like being a thief.”

“Totally crooked,” I said. If he had let me in on his plans before he bought the coffee, I would’ve been gone already. And if he hadn’t also grabbed the key fob out of the cup holder when he went for the coffee. “Listen, you come by my office later, and I’ll subject you to some sweet, old-fashioned redlining.

How about that?”

“I don’t know what that is. And don’t talk about my sister.” I hadn’t mentioned her, but I kept my mouth shut. There wasn’t enough room in his sister’s LeBaron for me, him, and all the voices in his head. He threw his windbreaker on the backseat; I wondered if the key was in its pocket. He went on, “And the talking to about you and sis is upcoming. After I rob the bank.”

“Priorities.”

“Eat your fucking sandwich,” he said, watching me. So I raised it to my mouth as he went on, “Yeah, you do strike me as more of a lover than a desperado, Rehill. What you gonna do? You have to work with what God puts in your hands.” I was ready to take a bite when he grabbed my throat, squeezing so hard I squeezed the sandwich and cheese oozed out onto the steering wheel. “And God has now put your fucking neck in my hands, got it?”

26

I nodded, he released. I wiped the cheese off the wheel with my index finger, looked at him, and ate it. He snorted.

Now, if he got out of the car and the key was in his pocket, I would only get a block before the car went dead. But then I could just run away. A block lead and eight/nine ounces of scared shitlessness would make me fast on my feet.

That ass-sucking song, “The Art of Drowning,” was on the radio, that kind of crap pop tune that got stuck in your head like a nail from a nail gun. It had one good line about what maybe really flashes before your eyes as you die: your death. Maybe it wasn’t a good line at all, maybe it just made me think of Brigitte and how that first night we had showered together, how I thought if the roof had caved in then, I could die happy with that moment flashing, right then, and for the next few seconds of forever. I hit the radio off. Song sucked ass, really.

“Some shitty music playing these days,” Frank said.

“It ain’t ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,’ that’s for sure.”

“Eat your fucking sandwich, Sport.” He got out of the car, finafuckingly, and I smiled until he looked. Staring down on me from the curb with those fevered, russet-sickly eyes of his, anger growing effortlessly without any reason, his left paw’s digits thrummed on the meter’s display. It read in all caps, FAIL. He pointed to the cup holder of change. “Quarter,” he said. I tossed him one.

He dropped it into the slot. “There. Now we have to go through with it.”

“Hard to argue with logic like that.”

“Rehill.”

“What?”

“Destiny.”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

He looked at the meter. “You only get ten minutes a quarter now? Lousy Jew mayor.”

“Personally, I like his stance on charter schools.”

He narrow-eyed me again. I kept on changing the subject with idle chitchat.

That wasn’t all that was idling, though…

He started in again, “C’mon already, Rehill—” but I was pulling away, not even glancing back when I heard the thud of his coffee cup blasting brown swill on the car’s trunk. Frank had quite the arm under that Fuck Unto Others tat of his. *** An hour ago, I got out of his sister’s bed and bumped into Frank on the way to the can. He was standing in the hallway with a beer, looking vaguely towards the bedroom. He had shown up in the middle of the night to crash, fresh from a four month stint in Ossining and a week-long cocaine-Wild Turkey spiral down Bronx way. “So what do you think?” he said, beer-eyed red. “My kid sister good for sex?”

27

It sounded like the kind of question that really didn’t have a correct answer, so I went with, “Going on a coffee run, bagels. You want me to bring you back a jasmine tea with lemon?”

He straightened against the jamb, a contest for I don’t know what in his eyes. “Oh, I’m going with you.”

I shrugged, went into the bedroom for my shoes, closing the door.

Brigitte was still in bed. “I like you, but you should clear out.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that. How long is he going to stick around?’

“Until he doesn’t. Pity. It was going to be a nice weekend of us showering together.”

“He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

“Me? He might kill all the neighbors by brunch time, and stack their bodies up in an aesthetically pleasing pile—he used to make collages when we were kids—but me, he won’t lay a hand on.”

“He’s tagging along.”

“What do you mean?”

“To the diner. I’ll bring him there, get us all some breakfast, then I’ll hit the road.”

She sat up. She had picked me up three nights ago in hotel bar neither of us was staying at, and she was pretty cute, but she was alright, too. She was a waitress, not a waitress working her way through school, just a waitress.

She yawned. “You seem like a pretty nice guy. Not like the type who’d go home with just anyone you just met in a bar.”

“I like you, too. You don’t strike me as the type either.”

“I’m not.”

“But sometimes…”

“I know, sometimes,” she smiled. And then the smile went away. “Listen, do yourself a favor. Slip out the window right now.”

I slid into my left shoe, looked out the window into the ugly little backyard, a third cracked concrete, two-thirds zombie grass. I chuckled.

“You’re on the second floor.”

“Still…” she said. *** The LeBaron screeched up Wilkinson, and I stopped in front of the Tik Tok Lounge, where I had been invited never to come back by the owner after he had broken a pool cue over my head for what were pretty amorphous reasons.

“Misty watercolor memories.” I plucked the sandwich up from the floor mat.

I wished Frank was a distant memory. A smart crook, having just lost his “wheel man,” would walk. But I knew him for all of a night and already knew he wasn’t smart, was indeed stupid in a very dangerous way, in a way that probably proves more dangerous for those in his periphery—or those who use a word like periphery in his presence. But what I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around was his sense of whimsy, and stupid and whimsical isn’t a real winning combination. One minute, he’s ordering breakfast in a diner, the next he’s ready to go into the Citibank adjacent and order a free bag of cash.

28

I looked at my spilt coffee cup, feeling loss. A bottle of water was on the back seat, but it wasn’t right to have this sandwich sans coffee. But what God puts in your hands and all, so I shrugged and grabbed it. Baby, the Evian must fall. I bit into the sandwich. No ketchup. Son of a— The Tik Tok door swung open.

“Hey! We’re closed! And you’re not allowed in here ever!”

“I know you’re closed. It’s 10 AM. Go back to chalking your cues.”

“I’ll chalk your goddamn cue, alright. Just you come back in.”

“I thought I wasn’t allowed.”

“You’re not!”

“So why are we still talking?”

He shut up. His tone changed. “You selling that place on Laconia? What they asking?”

“350.”

“Get the fuck out of here, you, your sandwich, and your 350!”

The door to the Tik Tok Lounge slammed shut. I was thinking I needed a career change.

I rolled back out to Eastchester Road, parking in a bus stop in front of a bodega, just far enough to watch the bank entrance. Frank was nowhere in sight. He had gone in. He was going to rob the place and jog away. Maybe there was an off-duty cop cashing a check in the place. I really hoped Frank would be arrested momentarily. Or dead. Even better, dead. But hoping doesn’t make police just show up and kill somebody for you.

Ratting him out, however, might do the trick.

I grabbed his windbreaker, got the car key and his cell out of a pocket. I flipped the lid, pressed 9, and then 1, and then, well, you know.

“The Bronx. Yes, my name is Frank Targille and I’m about to rob the Citibank on Eastchester Road, near Horace Park Ave. By the way, I’m armed and people say I’m dangerous. But people say a lot of things.”

“You should stop what you are doing right now, sir. It sounds like you want our help.”

“With all due respect, lady, maybe you and the voices in my head shoulda told me that before I called you.” I was slipping out of character, so I filled my voice with more gutter, more gravel. “Hey, no offense or anything, but you’re black, right?”

She said police were en route to help me, and told me to be calm. I tossed his cell down, said, “Whimsy that, mother fucker.” I picked up the paper bag and held it upside down, hoping for an undiscovered ketchup package. It wasn’t meant to be, though. So I got over it, and got ready to take another dry, dry bite.

And then I saw Frank Targille walking not out of the bank, but out of the goddamn diner. *** About six hours ago, around 3 AM, he banged on Brigitte’s bedroom door and said for us to knock it off, he wanted to show us a video about the New 29

World Order. Brigitte looked at me, shrugged. “The racist stuff usually dissipates after he finds a prostitute at Hunts Point.”

“Yeah,” I said, “love has that kind of effect on men.”

“When he passes out, you’ll have to go,” she said, pulling on these silky pajamas that looked so good on her pulling them off was almost a crime.

“What if he doesn’t pass out?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were stupid.

An hour later, Frank was babbling: “Everybody just goes around breviating everything.” He scowled, “You’re all so goddamn FYI, and TMI. And LOL. No one breviates inside.”

“Inside where?”

“Inside the joint!” He slammed the plastic bourbon bottle down on the table, having foregone the middleman of a glass.

“Easy, Frank,” Brigitte said, blowing smoke up at the ceiling. “Fuck already.”

“Breviating bastards.”

“Rampant Abbreviation Syndrome,” I said. “I saw a special on RAS on PBS.” She kicked me under the table. “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”

She smiled.

Frank, even though utterly soused, saw we were having a moment. And I saw the crazy in his eyes right then over it. He leaned his face into hers and I slipped a butter knife into my lap. “Brigitte don’t thank any man for nothing, do you, honey? Brigitte No Gracias Targille.” His gaze switched to me and my fist tightened around the knife. “She ain’t ever going to thank you for nothing. I can guarantee that.”

“Shut up, Frank.” She got up, grabbed his plastic bourbon and put it on the TV. “Like I’ve had so much to ever thank any man for, especially you or Dad.” He chuckled, but moved on: “And you all got too many choices. There’s eight of everything. Makes you weak. A society of baby cunts. Pass me the chips.”

“Salt and Vinegar or Ranch Style?”

His eyes closed. “You see what… that’s just what…” and then he fell away from the table to the floor, smashing face against parquet.

“Should we cover him up? You know, with cinder blocks?”

Brigitte smacked me. “You had to go ask about his falling out with the white supremacists?”

I rubbed my arm. “I just wanted to know if they were too neo or too Nazi.”

She told me to go. I was busy thinking how we’d been out to dinner three times already and she never had thanked a server for water or the mustard or me for taking her out.

“Okay, I’m going.”

And then we went to get my other shoe out of her bedroom… *** And Frank was walking out of the diner, not the goddamn bank.

30

He sipped a new coffee, looked up my way, but didn’t spot me. He turned, headed away.

My phone rang. Brigitte. “So where’s my brother?”

“He just decided not to rob a bank.”

“That’s, ah, out of character. Did he give a reason?”

“I’m not sure if we’re on speaking terms right now. I cut him loose before he could go through with it. He’s probably heading back to your place, but he’s on his own big Sasquatch feet. Why don’t you pack a bag and I’ll LeBaron over there and pick you up and we’ll hit Atlantic City for a few days. I’ll bring the free lunch buffet tickets, you bring the pajamas.”

“Brian, um…”

“What?”

“He’s probably going to try to find you.”

“Yeah, pack a bag, I said.”

“Listen to me. He would consider it unprofessional if he didn’t beat you into a coma.”

“Professional? He’s been in jail half his life!”

“I didn’t say he’s good at what he does. But he is dedicated. To the job at hand, if nothing else. He’s going to hunt you down, Brian. He was real drunk, but you mentioned where you work—and, oh crap—that your mom still lives in the neighborhood.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, two things: how much do you care about the people you work with?”

I thought about it. Last week I had gotten an official reprimand on company letterhead for substandardism and, I paraphrase, conduct becoming a dick. “Meh. Not much.”

“And how much do you love your mom?”

“Much, Brigitte.”

“Brian, you need to weight some heavy options right goddamn now.”

“How’s he gonna remember anything from last night? He was skunkdrunk.”

“He remembers everything. The satellite beams down much slower to him, but everything.”

I hung up on her. I called my Mom’s landline and it went to the machine.

This guy is gonna ruin my whole week. Options Right Goddamn Now? I needed to get him back to the bank.

“Heavy,” I said, putting it in drive.

As he turned the corner, I was trailing about ten yards behind. He didn’t so much shoot me a glance or break his pace when he said, “You’re a dead man, Rehill.”

My phone rang, it was Ma, I pulled over, and took the call. Frank kept on walking.

I made the call brief.

Frank had stopped at the crosswalk up ahead, lit a cigarette, and for the first time looked my way. Our eyes met. Funny, he and his sister had the same 31

eyes. And all four ’em set my heart—albeit for entirely different reasons— pounding… I tapped the wheel. I remembered Mister Miyagi telling Daniel-san how to avoid a beating: Best way to block, no be there. Frank smiled down my way. Weekend ruining…

So, I headed his way, sighing. “Fuck my dick, Mister Miyagi.”

I stopped in front of him.

“Hey,” he said. “Dead Man Driving.”

“I chickened out, Frank. But I’m here now. Come on. It’s destiny. Get in.”

His eyes looked at me differently. “You do got a pair on you, Rehill. I mean for a baby cunt. Do you have any idea what is going to happen to you if I get in that car?”

“Pretty much.”

“Really?”

“We’re going to rob a bank, right?”

He laughed. Put the cigarette to asphalt, came over to the car, and hit me so hard in the mouth I would’ve landed on the passenger side if not for the seat belt. He came around and got in. He grabbed my shoulder and pushed me up to a sitting position. I felt a tooth on my tongue and I spit it out into my palm.

“Christ, I just had that filling put in.”

“Hand it here and I’ll put it back for you.”

“Focus, Frank: bank.” I put my foot on the brake. “I’m new to this. Is this where I say, ‘Let’s roll?’ ” He sighed. He looked very tired suddenly. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll roll. I’m not in the mood anymore. I need the mood to be just right for this sort of thing and you ruin-fucked it. Let’s get a couple of cases of beer and head back over to my sister’s.”

“Has to be today. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“Okay, we’ll get four cases of beer, and do it on Monday. Oh, yeah,” he said, and punched the other side of my face. “That’s for the jasmine tea with lemon crack,” he said. *** About an hour after Frank had passed out, Brigitte and I were trying to go back to sleep. She counseled, “You have to know how to play him, or else you’ll end up with broken bones—or worse.”

“I probably couldn’t take him in a fight.”

“No shit, Brian.”

“But I’m real good—adept even—at using a person’s weaknesses against them.”

She bit my cheek hard. “The real trick, sweetie, is using their strengths against them.” *** Frank grabbed me at the neck again and straightened me up without letting me go. “You okay to drive, baby?”

“I was a little dizzy, but that last one evened me out.”

I made a left at the corner.

“I said my sister’s.”

32

“The bank.”

His fuck-you grip tightened. “What did I tell you?”

I put it in park, and the hand drifted away, but lingered in the air in front of my face, ready to reattach. And then I chomped down viciously on it, boring my teeth into his paw. He screamed, shaking me loose.

I gasped, “You choke the chicken, you get the beak.”

He laughed and swung his left hand down into my crotch like a sledge hammer. I grabbed the wheel. I opened the door, unbelted, and vomited. His hand latched onto my jacket. “You don’t have the stomach for this, baby.”

He was right.

I wasn’t a violent thug. I was a lover, a man of non-ultraviolence, like Mr. Miyagi, like…

I looked at him.

“What?”

“It can’t wait until Monday. Monday’s Martin Luther King Day. Bank’s closed.”

“Martin Luther King Day,” he said.

“And, Frank, you’ve been away for a while…”

“Yeah, I need to get laid. Hunts Point. After a case of beer.”

“Frank, you’ve been away a while.”

He turned his head. “Either make your point, or I’ll put one through your head.” He spotted a blue, plastic funnel on the back seat, started to reach.

“Give me something pointy.”

“Frank, they call it MLK Day now.”

He turned his wooden gaze from me and looked out the windshield, trying to find some perfect place to be in this world of different hued people and their acronyms for all its different shit, maybe on some level understanding that whenever he himself got to that place it already started to be a lot less perfect, too.

He sighed, broken. “Jew bankers and dead darkies aside, I’m still not in the mood.”

I took that in. And said, in a tone like my old man would’ve, and probably his, “What the fuck does your mood got to do with it, boy?”

“What?”

“You don’t do the job you were meant to do because you’re not in the mood?”

He smiled. “You know, you are full of shit, Rehill, and yet you speak the truth.”

“Let’s roll?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

But we did. We rolled around the corner, and I pulled up in front of the bank, at the same spot, same exact meter, round and round, we had been at before.

33

He opened up the glove compartment and took out a .38. Shit, it was one thing him getting killed… “Frank, it’s like seven more years if you’re caught with a gun, no?”

He looked at me. “Around that. For fucking twice, you’re right.” He took my hand and put the gun in it. But he didn’t let go. What he did was, he moved my hand so the gun was pointed at his heart. “Did I tell you my theory on choice?” I had no response. He winked at me and slapped me almost tenderly across the face. “We’ll work on that baby cunt thing.”

I looked down at the gun, at its the muzzle. “Is that blood?”

“Lipstick,” Frank said wistfully. And then his eyes became liquid hate again. “Turn off the hazards, you fucking schmuck.” He got out of the car. He stopped, hesitated.

“What?”

“My phone’s a throwaway. Take a picture of the bank with yours.”

“Why?” “I’m gonna get a big piece of oat tag and paste all the photos of the places I’ve hit.”

It seemed easier to comply, so I did.

“Take two more.”

“Why?” “Because this is the third time I’m robbing this branch, what do you think, you idiot?”

And then he went into the bank, truly happy, I think.

I wished him well, I wished him death.

I put the gun down and backed up to the bus stop and that bodega. My hand fell to the sandwich and it was still a little warm when the two cars of cops pulled up. And about three minutes later—that meter should’ve been expiring right about then—they came out, dragging Frank in cuffs, one cop holding a tissues to a bloody nose.

I sighed. “You guys picked a helluva month to stop shooting unarmed perps.”

I watched until his new chauffeurs took Frank away. Then I went into the bodega, holding the sandwich, optimism growing.

“Ketchup packet, por favor?”

The guy behind the counter said, “You didn’t buy that here, maricón.” *** Brigitte had just hung up on Frank’s lawyer.

“I’m not pissed because you turned him in. Please. His own mother has the indoor track record on that.” She tapped an unlit cigarette against the kitchen counter. “First off, you all but made sure he knows it was you who turned him in with that pretending to be him turning himself in stunt. Did you want him to know? Is that it? Why?” I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“And then, after you ratted him out, you drove him to the goddamn bank.

Why?” I shrugged. “I dunno.”

34

“You are out of dunnos. Were you worried about your mother? That would fly with me. That would at least get us through the weekend before I boot your ass out.”

“I got through to my mother. She was in Phoenix. So, no, that wasn’t it.”

Something dawned on her. “You did it for me then? To save me from my big bad monster of a brother. So chivalrous. Is this where I get on my knees and thank you?”

“No.” “Just like a knight, not expecting a blow of thanks for gallant deeds—” “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t do it for you, either.”

“Then why?” And when she didn’t get a response, again: “Why?” “Well, I’m not quite done with you yet.”

She smiled. She walked over to the little stove, took off the big tee shirt, and put the meat on low. Then she turned and threw the tee over my head.

“Shower, anyone?”

“You gonna take it easy on me? I’m missing teeth.”

“No quarter.”

“BBMF,” I said.

Later, in our third shower of the evening, the water was too hot and I could hear that stupid ass-sucking song again coming from another apartment.

I blocked; it vanished. She turned her head the wrong way and got a mouthful of water and spit it on me. I reached up and redirected the shower head away from her, kissed her, and said, “Want to drown with me forever?”

Not buying it, she smiled and said, “No, just for now.”

I said, “Okay, I’m easy,” and re-redirected the water’s spray into her eyes.

She laughed, and cursed, and stopped laughing when I bit her neck. I went down, biting on down the line until my knees were on the prickly shower mat. I really wished she wanted to be more than a waitress. A few night classes. She said my name twice followed by a few colons, I think. I ignored that. I had to hunker down here, no room for substandardism—which is not even a fucking word—I looked up to the roof, hoping I wasn’t running out of time…

Rinse, repeat.

“Brian!” she blurted out as she viciously grabbed my hair and pushed back so hard I thought I heard my neck snap as the back of my head smashed into the subway tiles lining the bathroom walls. “Brian!”

“What? I’m trying to work here!”

Her hand went to the droplets on my cheeks, wiping them away, and she held my face with both hands, staring at me with those white pine eyes of hers, and she sighed, got control of herself—but only for the moment, I was going to make damn sure of that—and she said, catching her breath, “Thank you for not putting ketchup on my meatloaf.”

35

Family Planning

by Alison Preston Here in the basement of this church, we talk about God, though we have few real believers. We all have our spiels. I call Him a disgruntled bureaucrat made lazy by years of hearing requests He does not have the power to grant. He took this job for all the wrong reasons and now He sits in a petulant silence until He can’t bear it any longer and lashes out.

“Thus, us,” I say, throwing up my hands.

The whole crew laughs at my speech no matter how many times I give it—I deliver it like an old comedy routine, my father’s New York accent seeping into my voice.

Afterward, at the strike of nine, when we are a tired processional climbing up the stone steps, my friend Leslie catches up to me and tugs my sleeve, asks, “Hey Miss Cynic, drink at Dover’s?”

I always agree—it’s pre-planned at this point. We find a back booth, where no one can remember we’re there. Les is dark-dark-eyed and naturally bright blonde, some strikingly beautiful fluke of genetics. She hasn't cut her hair in two years, not since her sister's car accident. It’s her unhinged, meaningless attempt at control—we all have at least one, usually twenty. I ask her how she doesn’t have more split ends, broken strands, and she cackles and says, “Well, your hair keeps growing after you’re dead.”

After two beers, my eyes ooze tears, and I tell Les tonight’s version of how sad I am, and how I’m really just so mad. So mad I’ll say anything. And my mad reproduces like blood, I tell her. I say it quietly, under my breath, so that she has to lower her chin to hear me. Les is such a good friend—she just listens and nods. “If only we could donate it,” is all she says.

We pay our tab, wave to Brayden, the mid-twenty-something bartender. I always wonder what he thinks of us. We’re here so often, we look so sad. Don’t ask, kid, I channel to him as we walk out of the bar, just don’t find this out.

Les doesn’t drive or ride in cars anymore—it’s just like the hair—so we ride the bus together back to the church parking lot. She tells me, “Don’t forget your assignment for next week. Might help, you know?” I roll my eyes at her.

But I squeeze her fingertips with mine to say goodbye, and I get off and she stays on.

By then I’m sober, or drunk again on something else, which is to say, the same old thing. I drive home in the blackout darkness of northern Colorado at night. When I first moved here I’d whine about the lack of streetlights, the unbreathing blanket of dark that feels heavier and heavier as you drive away from I-25, deeper and deeper into Larimer and Weld counties and the lonely, haunted country roads. You know all the farmland is there, but there’s something black-hole-like in not being able to see it—like one wrong turn and you could get sucked into all that endless life.

I used to sit in the passenger seat of the pickup ranting to Mason as he drove, about how unsafe the blackout darkness was, how I couldn’t understand these wild-wild-west types and their desire for aesthetics over 36

safety. “This is not how we do it in the East,” I’d say. “We actually want people to live.”

“It’s just because it’s so perfect as-is, you can’t bring yourself to fuck it up with phony light,” he said back to me once, and I’ve always remembered it.

So now I drive home, hands gripping the wheel at ten and two, but trying to enjoy the darkness for him—one small token, my sweet darling, please say you know and take it, I whisper to him, to the cold petrified air of my car. I surprise myself—I can’t believe I’m still capable of this kind of lovey-dovey sweetness, even if I do only offer it to someone now one-year dead. I stop at a gas station in Milliken, where he took me once for Snickers bars and Cokes just a few days after I first met him. We ate them in the pickup for energy as we drove through a snowstorm to the canyon to make-out-and-more along the river, the truck parked for hours beneath the giant trees.

I stand by the car and pump the gas and look into the window of the attached convenience store, letting my eyes water with the cold. This is as close as I come nowadays to going somewhere I used to go with Mason. I peek in. I remember. I let the pain jump awake in my chest and then seep down my arms, back up again, burn into my throat and my head.

On the last stretch of road before home, I sneak glances at the mountains in my rearview mirror. Some nights, when the moon hits right, they glow back there. Light’s not phony tonight, baby, I whisper. ***

These are all the things, from little to big, that I can’t believe still exist even though Mason does not:  me 

tube of toothpaste we were sharing (on the bathroom counter, where he left it that morning)



penciled list of measurements he made for the new pantry door (sitting on the coffee table)



our shitty little jokes—the line about “We’ve been married how long?”—I still tell it to myself



baby how-to book he was reading, as an attempt to show me he was getting on board (still on his nightstand, a piece of string holding his place on page 4)



our old farmhouse, inherited from his parents, that we were fixing up room-by-room like there was time



the farm, which Mason worked since he could walk until the day he died—like Mason, it exists but is also dead

37



our one-year-old daughter, Scarlett, who lives in Wyoming with Mason’s parents, Sean and Melissa ***

One night, soon after we got married, we had a big fight. If you’ve been in love, you’ve had one. It happened across multiple rooms of our home and over multiple hours. We alternately gave each other the silent treatment, screamed deep and loud at one another, and whispered dramatic questions and pronouncements under our breath, but just loud enough to hear, like, “Why are you doing this to me?” and “As always, I have no fucking clue what you want from me.”

I’d had them with other men. But this was my first one with Mason, and I was eight-weeks pregnant. And I'd tricked him. I'd gone off birth control and didn't say a word to him, just had him joyously stunned at how much sex I wanted to have. And the cruelest part was—the guilty plea that will stay forever on record in the courtroom of my life—was that we had agreed on no kids. He'd told me he didn’t want to be trapped, that this was his one, single fuck-you to being told what to want and how to oblige the world. He made me promise him.

We slept in separate rooms that night. When I woke up, he was long gone as usual, but there was no note, no promise to talk later, no apology for things going too far.

Starting that day and for nearly two months after, we lived in the same house, but he did not speak to me. We did not go anywhere together. We slept in the same bed and he did not touch me. Sometimes I caught him staring at me. When I was standing over the sink doing the dishes in the evening, I would see his reflection in the window glass. He’d hold my gaze there for a few seconds—daring me to turn and face him—and then he’d turn away.

One morning he woke me with his movements as he was getting ready, and I felt him watching me from the bathroom.

“Please,” I whispered into the darkness. He was an animal I was afraid to startle. But then he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

It was like being crushed into nothing, ground up in some horrible machine.

At first, I was sad, desperate for forgiveness. But as the days piled up, my anger began to take everything over. I realized that I had uncovered something cruel in him—in this generous and quiet and gentle man there was a meanness that I had never even thought to suspect.

I guess he’d uncovered the same in me.

His rage was a thing to behold. I kept wanting to tell him that. I imagined some scene out of a movie where I would turn towards him with my hair half in my face. I’d look into his eyes, say, “You know, Mason, your rage is really a thing to behold,” and then I’d take a pull on a cigarette.

One evening he came home coiled up, ten shades darker than he’d been the night before. He had the animal look again—the wacko eyes and rigid slouch that meant he wanted to fight me.

I was between jobs, so I was always just at home waiting for him. Each day hoping, then losing all hope when he walked in the door in the evening. I 38

had stopped making dinner for a while, my pathetic little way of showing him I was mad too, but that evening I’d flipped it, had decided to try and be nice.

There were mashed potatoes already on the table and first he shoved my face into them. I felt a warm spot of blood bloom when my head hit the rim of the casserole dish.

He still didn’t speak. He didn’t even breathe loud.

Then he put me up against the wall, with his body pressed up against mine, and he grabbed my hair and pulled. Now he grunted. He hit my head against the wall once, twice, again, until I got fuzzy. He was monitoring me, knew when to stop, didn’t want me to pass out and miss this.

I swerved a little when he let me go. I didn’t have the strength to do anything, I couldn’t even cry. Just as I was about to slide down the wall, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder, took me, limp, out to the barn and threw me onto a rotting hay bale. He looked down at me for a second and through a cracked eye I could see he was shaking. He walked out. I think he said, “Goddammit” as he did, but I couldn’t be sure. I might have just been inventing feelings for the monster.

Still, I couldn't cry. I crawled to a corner and hovered and shook there for hours, like a rattled dog. I licked my lips and could taste the potatoes. *** The next night he came home drunk. His brown eyes looked black, and like he’d been crying—his face was red, his hair, which was normally flattened from his cowboy hat, was mussed and unruly, cowlicks exposed.

I thought he was going to yell. I wanted him to. But he stumbled from our back door to our kitchen table, fell into a chair, and spoke softly, in the voice I hadn’t heard in weeks.

“You tricked me. I love you so much—I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you. If it wasn’t you, it’d be no one. And you tricked me, like a bully, like a predator.”

Now it was me who couldn’t speak—an apology caught in my throat.

He kept going: “And now you’ve forced me into doing what I told you I wanted the least. You have me now trapped in this pit where I have to be loyal, I have to do my duty, or I’m no good.”

“Mason. I just want to start over, have a clean slate.”

He laughed at me. Barked. “Are you kidding me? You’re pregnant. Isn’t that the big joke about being pregnant—when it’s done it’s done.”

I wanted to meet his anger with my own, but I felt him slipping from me and couldn’t bear it. If I could keep him focused he’d see it was just having a baby with his wife, so I stuck close to platitudes. “Mason, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything.”

He was quiet for a long beat, but then he spoke, almost normalsounding, but with something still just off. “You know I can’t live without you, even if I did want to cut and run.” He slurred his words at the end, held his head between his hands, and then worked to make his eyes focus on mine.

I went over to him, and rubbed his hair and ran my hand over his face, his neck, the skin there soft, undamaged somehow despite all the time he 39

spent outside. I heard him moan. I kissed his neck and worked my way into a straddle across his lap, and I kissed him more, and more desperately. “I’m so sorry, Mason. It was just ‘let’s have a baby’ to me. I didn’t think.”

He ran his fingers over the giant bump on my head, and I made myself not wince.

The booze made him warm to the touch, his whole body flushed with the relief of it—the alcohol, the words finally spoken. I took off his shirt, I led him to our bedroom. I told him, “We’ll figure this out. We’ll both be happy somehow.

Just please be close to me now. I’ve missed you.” And then I took off his jeans, and ran my hand down his chest and into his underwear. Now I see: like a bully. Like a predator.

The next morning, it was like we had a deal. *** Though Melissa and Sean live just over the border, the drive to Wyoming always takes longer than I plan for. The wind shakes my old car and makes me nervous. Les always says she might get up the courage to ride with me one time so that she can meet Scarlett, but I know she couldn’t even handle the wind.

Mason’s parents had just moved to their house in Cheyenne when Mason and I met. They’d been wanting to escape the out-of-state interlopers and mounting traffic of Colorado for a while, so they passed the small, barely-stillworking farm to Mason and me as a wedding gift. I think to Mason, though he had always known and accepted that this was the plan, it was like he was having his whole life handed to him in one fell swoop, all the surprises and twists of fate plucked out like weeds.

These drives are good for self-evisceration that almost feels good, for designing and then doling out to myself the punishment I wish someone else would give me.

I talk to him mostly in the car for some reason. I feel him with me there— I think he likes to find me in the in-between times when I've got nothing real to cling to. Maybe you wrapped us in silence, I tell him, but when you finally spoke I refused to listen. And then, since I’m headed towards her, I bring Scarlett in. I don’t know where Scarlett begins and I end. And that’s not a motherhood quote.

It’s mid-November but no snow yet, so the road to Cheyenne is just rustcolored, a slow-moving letdown as I drive farther away from Colorado—the mountains crumple to hills, then flatten into plains. I have Mason’s sister’s hulking, ancient Nikon F3 on the seat next to me, since group thinks I need to begin taking steps toward embracing motherhood. I know I could use my cell phone, but I want this to be special—old-fashioned and real. “Take the one tiny step that gets you back on the road to being Scarlett’s mommy,” one of them told me, voice sickly sweet. They’ve asked me to take a simple photo of her and bring it to them to share this week. “An assignment,” Jon Davies, the minister who runs the group said. “Something small to take your mind off the big things.”

Mel looks me straight in the eyes when she comes to the door. Her long gray hair is pulled back into a ponytail and she wears an old work shirt of 40

Sean’s over baggy jeans. Her eyes are different from Mason’s, but they pierce through me and gouge out my insides the same way when they’re mad. Each time, when I come here, there’s a moment when we’re standing on opposite sides of the screen door and I wonder if she will even push it open and let me in. And each time, in that moment, I want to say, Oh Mel, we agree on the main points. I killed Mason. No, I’m not a mother.

“She’s in the back bedroom in her playpen. I’ll be in the backyard with Sean. We’re picking up sticks.” And then she’s gone.

They live in a one-story, ranch-style, so all the bedrooms are down one dark, windowless hallway. The whole thing is lined with old photos of Mason— sometimes I wonder if Mel wants me to stop and look and think about what I’ve done. I always do. His brown eyes lit to copper by farm sun, posed senior-year football photo, a black-and-white his sister took of his hands for one of her shows, probably with the camera I’m carrying now. I’ve seen most of them before but I can’t move today looking again. There’s one I’ve never seen of him up on a tractor with his arm around a girl—not me. She looks sweet, he looks young and strong, and they are laughing. Then on the far end, nearer the back rooms, there’s about ten million of Scarlett. Scarlett on a horse, with Sean holding her up, Scarlett in Thermopolis with Sean and Melissa behind her as she sits staring out at the Big Horn.

I let myself look: at the very top there’s the single photo of the two of them together. Mason’s sitting in a hospital chair with Scarlett in his arms, and he’s looking down at her. It’s normal enough, acceptable for the wall, but I can see. I can see it there in his face about to burst.

In the next instant, after the camera flashed, he would stand up and bring Scarlett over to me in the bed. "You know I've got to get back," he would say. And then he’d drive into Fort Collins, to the Mulberry train tracks, and get out of his truck. There was something fitting about him doing it that way. Like letting the meanest, hardest wave on the planet overtake you, pulverize you, eliminate you. The way a body looks after it’s been hit by a train—airless, limp and wrongly bent—it couldn’t possibly have a soul left inside of it.

I hear a Scarlett coo from the backmost bedroom, and I force myself to move—go do what I came here for. I expect to see her in the playpen engrossed in a toy, drooling a little like always. But she’s escaped it. She’s in the room’s back corner, and I watch her break from her quiet cooing and into a rage. I can’t tell what it’s about—she’s got something in her hand, and now she throws it at the wall. A shriek comes out. She hits her fists against the wall, trying to do damage, but she’s too weak. She doesn’t hear me, but I whisper, “Go on sweetie, get it out of you.”

I walk into the room and still, she doesn't know I'm there. I go for my camera in my purse. I guess I do want to go over to her, scoop her up, hug her to me—there is a microscopic thing in me that wants to. But I can’t.

I raise the camera, don’t bother with the lens cap, though it disengages itself when I hit Scarlett’s soft, veiny skull with the camera. One swoop of my hand and she’s silent and lying back on the floor. There’s blood beneath her and on her, and on me. I’m warm with it again, like when she was born.

41

I need to sit, my edges have blurred. I lean back against the wall and slide down it, go to run my fingers through my hair and try to take the big breath I need, but then I remember Mel and Sean, gardening out back. I think I hear the clink of garden tools, but maybe I’m imagining. My legs are heavy, tingling, but I force myself up, find a few baby blankets in the playpen. I wrap her up, hang the camera around my neck, and we go.

To the Wyomers, I-25 is a racetrack, so I just join them. With Scarlett swaddled on the floor of the backseat, I push ninety-five. My car almost floats up off the road, but no one really sees us.

I clean her up in the big old farm sink in our kitchen. I use a pretty towel to wipe away the blood. I hold her. I say, “It will be over very soon.” I lay her on our bed and use blankets to hide where I’ve ruined her head, and use the Nikon to take a photo of her looking like she’s sleeping sweetly. I walk with her in my arms out to the barn and find, by chance, an old ruined shirt of Mason’s, which I double wrap around Scarlett. I lie her down on the seat of Mason’s tractor. An offering. *** I switch to Mason’s truck and drive into Fort Collins to a Walgreens that still develops film. Even if it takes an hour, I’d still have enough time to make it to group, but it turns out they can do it in fifteen. I buy a little black frame for it and slip the picture inside. I drive into the canyon and park at one of the early pull-offs, under a bridge. I stare at the photo of Scarlett and plan how I’ll show it to the group. I know what they will say, the responses on babies are rote. I want to hope that this is the only group of people in the world that might guess at all that’s contained in her, and might absolve me for failing her. But then I don’t know that they will; who can really get hold of another person like that, manage to perceive with any authority the dark, and the ruined?

Our group is called “Living with Guilt in Tragedy’s Wake.” It was started by the minister at Second Methodist, whose daughter is lost to California or Oregon, maybe western Canada now, on drugs and where he can’t find her.

Each year his church takes up a collection so that he and his wife can go out there for two weeks and search for her.

My sweet friend Les had an ugly argument with her older sister and then let her drive off into a rainy August night mad as hell.

There is endless dark open space between what we did and what happened. But something lives there.

When I pull into the church lot, I see Les waiting for me. Her blonde hair, so long it’s silly, blowing wildly in the wind. She’s got cops with her, trying to hold her back, but she breaks free and is walking towards my car. I hear someone yell, “Stop!” To her or to me, I don’t know. I sit and watch her stride towards me. When we go out for drinks in a dimly lit bar or sit and talk in the dark church, she always looks so glamorous to me, like a broken beauty. But in the waning light of the day, I see something new, something ugly—a barely perceptible trait beyond altering or repair. She walks up to the truck and reaches up to the door, pulling it open.

42

“What did you do, Sarah?” She whispers it like she wants to help me, but she can’t make herself look me in the eyes.

We meet in the basement and we blame God, but just as a joke.

43

Way, Way Back and then Some

By Karl Koweski Way, way back and then some, before doing the dirty dime at the bloody Bilt, Hoyt was the best meth cook in all of Cullman County. Due to his aversion to all things methamphetamine, Culley didn’t come around much in those days, but Hoyt never lacked for friends. Half of them he didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of. Wild-Eyed Billy Udee fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

Billy was the youngest of the Udee brood, a family who bore the distinction of being the most ignorant, inbred, white trash, piece-of-shit-clans ever to settle atop Royale Mountain. The last Udee progeny to bring infamy to the family name, Bill’s older brother Brian, got arrested several months earlier for fucking a goat in view of a passing school bus. It wasn’t even his goat. No one knew how he came by it. No one knew how he came by it. No one claimed the goat. It was all very mysterious.

Wild-Eyed Billy Udee didn’t much like talking about his goat-fucking brother. However, when he smoked his meth or drank his whiskey, he liked to recount the story of the time his father got himself pinned to the barn wall by an overzealous calf he tricked into nursing on his cock. Apparently, calves carried an incredible lust for the mama’s milk and couldn’t tell the difference between a teat, a thumb or a penis. Papa Udee’s screams for help were answered by his children who rushed to the barn and separated the sucker from the sucked.

Now, Hoyt never quite saw the humor in the story especially by the eighth or ninth time Billy told it. Regarding Hoyt’s stone-faced reception of the story, Udee would shrug and say “my daddy tells the story a lot better than I do.”

While Hoyt didn’t share the Udee tolerance for bestiality, he did appreciate Wild-Eyed Billy's zest for criminal activities. Hoyt was the sort of fella who would yank an eyetooth from a seven-year-old's mouth, stick it under his pillow, then rob the tooth fairy when she came to make the transaction.

Udee, however, was the sort of guy to pull every fucking tooth out of the kid’s head, rape the tooth fairy, and spend all the money on Sudafed and concrete cleaner to cook up on his hot plate and inject in his arm.

So when Billy showed up at Hoyt’s house trailer toting a half-baked scheme and a meth skinny blonde with pock-marked cheeks and a swollen red staph infection under her chin, Hoyt felt inclined to humor him.

Not anticipating any intrusions on his day of relaxation, Hoyt was stripped down to his ball huggers, lying in a ten-dollar kiddie pool half filled with tepid water from the garden hose. Five yards away, his twenty-seven inch Sony television perched atop a charcoal grill rusted beyond culinary usefulness. A snake pit of extension cords connected the television to the 44

electrical outlet inside the foyer of his house trailer allowing him to watch Creature From The Black Lagoon while the pool water marinated his ass and the bong smoke sautéed his mind.

The blonde exited the robin’s egg blue Chevy LUV first. She was all bruises and knotted legs. The too short denim shorts and discolored halter top were holdovers from back when she was hot, maybe as recently as six months ago. Since the driver’s side door of his little pick-up truck was jacked, Billy Udee had to climb over the shifter and clamber out the passenger side.

“Billy, you never told me you had a sister Udee,” Hoyt said.

Billy’s eyes were so wild-looking this afternoon, you’d have thought they were on the verge of exploding from his narrow head like the death orbs from the Phantasm movies Hoyt was so fond of watching. He wiped his hands on his dirty denim, thumbs touching the pads of each finger as though testing for sensation before he wiped his hands on the front of his jeans again.

“She ain’t no sister of mine,” Udee said. “No relation at all, actually.

That there’s Mara Kinney. Use-ta hang chickens with me up at the Tyson plant."

Holy God, no, Hoyt thought. An Udee working at the chicken plant?

What could be more unnatural? The poultry likely saw more Udee dick than this Mara girl ever experienced. Hoyt made a mental note to refrain from stealing any more Tyson chicken breasts from the Wal-Mart.

“How’s it going, Mara? I’d get up, shake your hand, but I don’t feel like getting up.”

“Suits me,” Mara said, eyeballing the yellow water bong setting like the Statue of Liberty on top of the Ellis Island of Hoyt’s distended belly. “You mind I grab one of those Pall Malls off you?”

Mara straddled the line between looking sexy enough to bum a cigarette and rancid enough to get the old “fuck off”. It was her face, Hoyt found so offputting. She should have been pretty but recent use and abuse had scoured the flesh into a lined and waxy horror mask.

“Help yourself to one,” Hoyt decided. “And don’t try to pocket my Zippo.

That’s my good one.”

“I ain’t no thief,” she said, shaking out two Pall Malls, one for her lips, the other stuck behind her ear for later.

She lit the cigarette and glanced at the Zippo; nothing special until she flipped it around and read the ornate letters etched into the side. SUCK MY DICK. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t appear to be seriously considering it.

Hoyt watched her with the intensity of a Korean shopkeeper eyeballing a store-full of black kids. Mara set the lighter back down next to the pack of smokes.

45

“So what brings y’all out to the compound?” Hoyt asked. “Hope y’all ain’t looking for anything. I ain’t had shit all week. Except maybe a little peace of mind. And I ain’t sharing.”

Udee looked mildly offended. “I ain’t come for any shit.” A brief pause.

“You really ain’t got nothing?”

Very little made Hoyt nervous in life. The way Udees scoped his property looking for shit he could grab at a later date, the buddy-buddy tone of voice, his jerky movements as though he were a marionette in service to a methaddled puppeteer all conspired to jangle Hoyt's nerves. Udee didn’t have any history of strong-arming local dealers, and Hoyt considered himself on friendly terms with the Udee clan despite their questionable sexual proclivities. It also wasn't lost on Hoyt, friends were the sort of folks aspiring criminals with meth holes drilled through their gray matter looked to prey upon first.

He reached behind the pool and nonchalantly unholstered his German P38 his grander brought back from the war and set it down next to the mellow yellow bong within easy reaching distance.

“Now,” Hoyt smiled. “What’s so important y’all had to come all this way and interrupt my Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

“Whatcha think about making some money, Hoyt?”

“Ok, that’s a good start. I’m listening.”

“Me and Mara’s been running some escort ads in the back of The Swapper for the last few weeks now and we got a bunch of dumbasses lined up for tomorrow. A whole slew of them as a matter of fact.”

Hoyt chuckled. “You ain’t no pimp, Udee. And this girl don’t look like she could tolerate one good jack-hammering let alone a whole slew of it. You’d be better off staking your goat out front of your property and offering its ass for five bucks a pop.”

“I ain’t no pimp and Mara ain’t no whore.”

“Of course y’all ain’t.”

“We’re outlaws.”

“Hey, good for you two.”

“We wanna cut you in on it, Hoyt. We’re thinking about setting up at the Green Park Motel. We know you got connections up there, maybe get a room on the back side with one of your funny IDs?” Of course, Hoyt was familiar with the hotel, did a lot of business up there. It served as a haven for the area's bad element, isolated as it was, with a two hundred, seventy-degree view of the surrounding scrapyard owned by backwoods land baron Aaron Heaney. Newly paroled sex offenders were housed here, ideally to keep them away from decent folk.

What Udee was not taking into account was the level of interference they would likely encounter from the Green Park tenants. You couldn’t walk two steps onto the property without some jangly ass motherfucker with pervert eyes 46

and a Gestapo attitude shaking you down for a cigarette, cigarette money, or anything else they could wheedle with their entitlement begging.

“All right, I’ll go down that rabbit hole with you. What’s in it for me?”

“How does two hundred and fifty dollars sound?”

“It sounds like I’ll be spending the rest of my day in this here pool, soaking in the sunshine.”

“C’mon, Hoyt, that’s fair for what we need you to do. Shit, man, where else you make that kinda money in a single day doing not much of nothing.”

“I think between the two of you, y’all can handle sucking whatever dicks you got lined up.”

“Ain’t nobody sucking no dicks, man,” Udee reiterated. “Look, the plan is, Mara’s got the guys gonna put the money in an envelope, leave it on top of the bureau. Then she’s gonna have him wash himself in the bathroom so she can count the money. Standard procedure for whores, right? Mara’s gonna take the money and bounce her sweet ass on outta there.”

“And the guy you leave behind?”

“Reckon he gets tired and splits.”

“And what if he don’t feel like splitting?”

“That’s where I come in at. I tell him I’m the Green Park Motel proprietor and the room’s not registered to him and he needs to get the fuck out.”

“And if he calls the police?”

“Ain’t no one gonna call them motherfuckers. Most these hard dicks is married. They don’t want no trouble. They see what the play is, they walk away, chalk it up to experience. Anyone wants to get their Charles Bronson on, I’ll call you in, we’ll knock his head, strip ‘em down buck ass naked and drop ‘em off somewhere along Suck Egg Road. Let him hike ten miles back to town, with his dingus dangling and his head knotted up.”

“You got it all figured out, then.”

Udee showed what his smug smile looked like. “Damn straight.”

“You sure you want to do this?” Hoyt asked Mara.

“Why you asking her a fucking thing? This ain’t on her. This is my show. All she gotta do is walk in and out. That’s it.”

“That’s it, huh?” Hoyt didn’t break eye contact with Mara. “A week, two weeks down the road, I don’t want you getting recognized by one of these jackasses while you’re at the Wal-Mart. You know where I live. Now I gotta worry about you pointing some son of a bitch in my direction. All of the sudden there’s a guy with a bullet in his head lying on my porch. For two hundred and fifty bucks?”

“I’m not even from around here.” She rolled her eyes.

“She ain’t from around here,” Udee parroted.

Hoyt shook his head. “Two hundred, fifty dollars?”

Udee nodded.

47

“Up front.”

“Awwwwww, man.”

“Another hundred on the back end for every time I gotta wear out some clown’s head don’t wanna leave the room in a timely manner. I gotta beat down three guys, that’s an extra three hundred dollars.”

“Two hundred, fifty up front? What the fuck, man? How’m I suppose to have that kinda money? It’s why me and Mara planned this shit to begin with.”

“Well, that’s your first failure.” Hoyt stood up in the pool, his wet underwear clinging to his cock and balls. He held the .22 in his right hand, casually scratching his belly with the barrel site. “Never come up on my land with no money in your pockets. This is Pay to Play Land here, and I don’t take kindly to broke dick trespassers.” *** Hoyt parked in front of the Green Park Motel office quarter to noon the next day with two hundred, fifty dollars in his right front pocket. Jamie Keown worked the front desk, a job which required him to sit on a stool watching daytime television and ignoring the constant parade of Green Park residents shucking and jiving, looking for action. Looked like the Food Network held his attention, two nattering bitching making a seafood salad and acting like it was the greatest moment of their fucking lives, mixing crab meat and mayonnaise.

Keown and Hoyt went way, way back and then some. It was with Keown’s blessing Hoyt sold his bathtub crank to the motel’s miscreants back when you could buy a crate of Sudafed without raising an eyebrow, back before the dark times, before the government regulations.

“Hey, player,” Jamie spoke in creepy falsetto. “You got something for me, my man?”

“I’m dry as Suck Egg Creek in the middle of summer.”

“Awww, that sucks.”

“Won’t be long, government’ll take the pseudoephrene outta pills altogether and it’ll be back to the drawing board.”

“Awww, that sucks, too.”

“In the meantime, I’m gonna need a favor from you, Jamie.”

“Aww, it’s one of them kind of visits, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid it is. Nothing you can’t handle, though. I’m gonna need access to two adjoining rooms until tomorrow morning. Far end of the court, as isolated as you can get me."

“Whatcha got going on, Hoyt?”

“When the fuck I ever start explaining my business to you?”

“Aww, yeah, yeah, right. No problem. Of course I got the rooms for you.

No problem. Just wondering how I should cover things. You know. On my end.”

“Same as always, Jamie. You don’t know shit about anything.”

48

While Mara situated herself in the whore room, Udee and Hoyt sat down at the small circular table near the window in the room next door. Udee withdrew a grimy deck of cards from the interior pocket of the leather jacket he wore despite the summer heat. He quickly dealt five cards to each of them.

Hoyt left the cards lying face down. “What are we playing for?”

“What are we playing for?” Udee repeated looking all kinds of stupid.

“Money, dummy, how much we playing a hand? Two dollar ante? Five dollar max?”

“I ain’t got any money, Hoyt. You took all my fucking money in advance.

I got nothing.”

“Well, there ain’t no sense in playing cards without wagering. Defeats the whole goddam purpose. Takes away the sense of urgency.”

“I thought it’d be a nice way to pass the time.”

“Shit. I don’t even twiddle my thumbs without betting a twenty spot I can twiddle ‘em faster than you. Look, man, you don’t need to put money up front, we’ll set up a tab.”

Green Park Motel wasn’t the sort of place that kept personalized stationery near the phone. Hoyt grabbed the Gideon’s Bible from the bottom drawer and a pencil nub and wrote their initials on the title page.

Udee won the first two hands which put a gap-toothed smile on his goofy face and a scowl on Hoyt’s mug.

“I ever tell you the time I first laid eyes on Mara?” Udee said.

“Met her slinging chickens at the Tyson Plant, ain’t it?”

“Nah, even before that. I was driving that old Z28 down route 231 there between Arab and Blountsville. They had this yard sale off the side of the road there next to Steckler Funeral Home and there was Mara wearing these cute little short shorts and a halter top, picking through the second-hand negligee.

The wind was whipping her red hair round her shoulders and I hollered out the window "show me them titties.”

“So did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Show you them titties?"

“Nah, man, I told you she ain’t no whore.”

Hoyt glanced at the alarm clock’s insistent red digits. “Reckon it’s been longer than a little while since we left Mara to it. She might be in there proving you wrong right now.”

“Bullshit.”

“She suppose to come in here once the dude hits the bathroom, right?”

“I ain’t seen no one go in.”

“While you’re staring holes through them cards willing the Jack of Spades to fall.”

49

“Well, shit-fire, I told her, she gets in a bind, hit the wall, I’ll come running.”

"I guess we'll just sit here, then. Until she hits the wall. With the headboard.

Repeatedly."

“Goddammit.” Udee slapped his pair of fours on the table and stood.

“Reckon I’ll just peek in next door and see what the fuck’s going on.”

“I’ll come with.”

“Hell no. I ain’t paying you a whole ‘nother hundred dollars for a whole lotta nothing. I’ll handle it. You sit tight.”

One of the worse aspects of human nature, Hoyt figured, was when a man doled out a little bit of money to another man for his time and efforts, it always seemed to entitle the former to make demands on the latter. Hoyt recognizing this aspect of human nature for the horseshit it was, vehemently refused to adhere to this perspective to the exclusion of most employment.

He’d be damned if he compromised his ideals today, for the sake of a chickenfucking Udee.

Hoyt unzipped his backpack, rummaged past his trail mix, his ditch weed, his bags of barbecue bacon jerky, to the P-38 pistol wrapped in oil cloth.

He jammed the .22 in the back of his britches and stepped out into the Alabama sunshine, hot enough to scorch the flannel right off a Mexican’s back.

An hour past noon. Still too early for the folks indigenous to Green Park Motel to mobilize in any great number. Already he could hear male voices pitched several tones beyond polite conversation in the room next door. Hoyt filled his hand with pistol, pressed the gunmetal against the side of his leg and entered the room.

Mara sat on the edge of the bed. She was still fully dressed without wearing much clothing. Tears streaked her mascara down her cheeks, giving her an Alice Cooper by way of Bordello Betty appearance.

Udee stood near the door with his back to the corner. He held a dime store knock-off, Rambo survival knife. The serrated edge looked like it couldn’t grate cheese. The stupid fucking compass peeked out of the bottom of the handle like a miniature magic eight ball that always answered NO WAY IN HELL every time you asked if Udee had the slightest idea what the fuck he was doing.

Between Mara on the bed and Udee back into the corner with his toy blade stood the Boosinger brothers. Mickey and Dickey Boosinger. Not twins, but with their blonde mullets, Elvis Presley sneers, nonexistent chins and aggressively vacant eyes, they may as well have been. The brothers looked as though their mom seriously considered Downs Syndrome for their life paths and each time decided fuck it halfway through the terms.

Hoyt knew the Boosingers, knew there was a sister Nickey, knew the family made the Udees look like the Rockefellers, knew they didn’t read books 50

in their youth; they had a staring tree out in their backyard and when they finished their chores, they’d hit the staring tree, study the pattern of elm bark for an hour or two.

He knew these were the last two people he wanted to see in this hotel room.

“Hoyt,” Mickey Boosinger said. “What the hell’s going on here? One moment our whore’s broken, don’t want to fuck. Next thing we know, we get Rambo busting in here acting like he’s going to rob us with his little pigsticker.”

“She ain’t no whore,” Udee spat.

“You got that right,” Dickey said.

“Oh, I disagree,” Mickey said. “I”ve trucked with whores my whole life and I’m here to tell you, this bitch’s a whore. Reckon she just needs a bit more motivating.”

Hoyt inched away from Udee, putting some distance between them. It was a gesture lost not at all on Udee.

"I told you to stay outta this, Hoyt,” Udee said, finding a squinch of timber in his voice. “I need you; I’ll call you.”

Behind Mickey's vacant eyes, neurons fizzled and crackled in the approximation of thought. "Hoyt? You ain’t truckin’ with this chicken fucker?

Tell me you ain’t.”

Hoyt positioned the pistol so everyone in the room could get a good look at it. “I’m here to make sure y’all behave yourselves.”

“You can start with this whore,” Mickey said.

“She ain’t no whore,” Udee took a tentative step forward.

“That’s what you keep saying,” Mickey said. “But here we are.”

“Here we are,” Hoyt agreed. “So what’s the deal? You boys so use to tagteaming your sister, you can’t fuck a regular girl without your brother holding your hand?”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”

“Shut up, Udee.”

“You fellas got nasty minds. Dickey was more than willing to wait his turn.”

Most of the conversation, Dickey had been silently edging toward Mara.

“Dickey,” Hoyt said. “You take one more step toward the girl and I’m gonna put a bullet between your inbred eyes.”

“Don’t you threaten my brother with that kraut popgun,” Mickey hissed.

“I’m gonna stab you both in the throat.”

“Goddammit, Udee. Shut up a second.”

“These cocksuckers ain’t even got any money,” Mara said.

“We don’t pay until after we’re satisfied.” Mickey crossed his arms over his manboobs.

51

“Kinda like expecting a jukebox to play all your songs without putting a quarter in the slot, ain’t it?”

"Yeah, you can say that. Course, I beat the hell outta jukeboxes don’t wanna play my songs, too.”

“Go ahead and lay a finger on her, you son of a bitch.”

“Last time, Udee. Shut your fucking mouth.”

“Quit telling me to shut up. Who the fuck you think you are?”

“I’m the manager, here.”

“The manager?”

“Of my peace of mind. You say one more goddam word, you’ll be the first jackass I put a bullet inside.”

“You ain’t shooting shit,” Udee sneered. “Waving that gun around like you’re a hard dick. You think that scares somebody? You think no one in this room sees right through you?”

Hoyt didn’t fear much in this life. Feeling his control of this situation slipping definitely instilled a sense of uneasiness, though. Being the man with the gun, he knew exactly what had to be done to get back on top of things.

Hoyt intended to discharge his .22 in the direction of Udee’s blockhead, gentle him down a little bit with some general vicinity bullet velocity. But Udee chose to face him at an inopportune moment. And, of course, Hoyt’s aim had always been suspect. The bullet caught Udee’s left ear lobe, tearing off a generous portion of his lower ear. The way Udee screamed, though, you would have thought he’d been gutshot.

He dropped his Rambo knife at his feet and cradled his mutilated ear.

Blood streamed freely from the side of his head. He dropped to one knee, hands shaking.

Dickey reacted instantly, grabbing Mara by the throat and trying to use her squirming body for a shield. Hoyt brought the smoking barrel in line with Mickey’s face. Mickey froze.

“Tell your brother let loose the whore,” Hoyt said.

“She not a whore,” Udee whimpered.

“Shooting three dumbasses,” Hoyt continued, “concerns me no more than shooting one.”

“Go easy,” Mickey told Dickey. “We can settle with this sumbitch later.

You’re not a hard man to find, Hoyt.”

Hoyt nodded in agreement. “I know exactly what you mean. Little Boosinger Nickey works evenings at the Circle K out near the Decatur exit. It gets pretty quiet out that way once the sun goes down. Desperate fella, feeling threatened, could really do a lot of damage to her, I bet.”

“I’d kill you, motherfucker.”

“Shut up, Dickey. And get off the broken whore. Scuzzy bitch ain’t worth no more of our time or effort.”

52

Mickey got up as if he were going to walk right out the door. Hoyt dropped him right back to the bed with a front kick to his belly sack.

“What the fuck, man.”

“Sit your ass back down, dumbass. You think I’m gonna let you go out there ahead of me and lay ambush? Room's paid for, gents. You're gonna sit right here the next ten minutes and watch Udee bleed.”

Hoyt opened the door and motioned toward Mara. “You going or staying?”

“What the fuck you think?” She didn’t so much as glance at Udee lying prone as she ran through the doorway.

Outside in the parking lot, Hoyt assured Jamie Keown there were no mortalities to cover up in the hotel room. Further, he had to convince several Green Park Motel residents he had no cigarettes, pocket change or dope to give.

Mara declined his offer for a ride back to his place and Hoyt declined Mara’s request for a cut of the money Udee fronted him, which Hoyt felt made them square, all things considered.

Hoyt left feeling pretty good about the way he handled things during the Green Park fiasco. Two weeks later, however, the Cullman County drug task force busted him with a fresh batch of dope. The authorities seemed to have a real good handle on his meth operation. The next ten years as a ghost of Biltmore Correctional provided Hoyt plenty of time to figure out which earless piece of shit gave him up.

53

Hatchet

by Michael O’Keefe In the early 1980s, in the USSR, the monstrosity that was the Soviet state had already begun to die, but it hadn’t yet started its death rattle. Among the millions of dissidents, the KGB had imprisoned an angry, slightly talented poet of little note. Ivan Ratchikakhov became an enemy of the Soviet state merely because he voiced his dislike for it.

This shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Ivan liked nothing, ever, and Ratchikakhov was a bad poet. His poetry failed to resonate with anyone, other than the very angry, and inconsolably frustrated. Among his problems was that he lacked empathy. He was unfamiliar, and thus inarticulate when trying to express human emotion of any description, except anger. He had the anger thing down pat, and in spades.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, ending the Cold War, the gulags jettisoned their dissidents, setting them loose to pursue their happiness in a new, free Russia. That presented a dual problem for Ratchikakhov. His angry poetry was now quite pointless, and he had absolutely no idea what happiness was. With no income, Ratchikakhov emigrated to Brooklyn, where he found work as a porter in his building. There he married and had a son, Gustav.

Given his unlikability and utter lack of potential for anything other than menial labor, it wasn't long before Ivan’s anger morphed into blazing resentment. He resented how his life turned out. He resented the fact that he had to live it in a land he would not have chosen. Rather than being grateful for having a roof over his head, and steady employment to keep it there, Ratchikakhov resented everyone he perceived as being responsible for the fact.

In his bitter and limited imagination, that would be everybody. The two people nearest at hand to bear this resentment were, of course, his wife and son. He expressed his disappointment most frequently to his wife and son with a cruelty and brutality unmatched by anything other than its consistency.

Ratchikakhov’s wife, Mariyah, bore it until Gustav was six. Then she fled back to Saint Petersburg, leaving her son to fend for himself. The boy was tough. Years of cruelty will do that to anyone. But, all young Gustav knew was pain. So much so, that it lost its significance. Nothing he did had any effect on the amount, frequency or severity of the torment. It was constant, and yet somehow random. Savagery absorbed without limit or reason soon became understood by Gustav as a normal condition of life. His only ambition was to one day be the inflictor; as opposed to the target.

Gustav’s own capacity for cruelty began to develop when he was young, first torturing neighbors’ pets. When that failed to satisfy him, he started killing them, in more and more elaborate ways. He experimented with fire.

Gustav found the screams enjoyable, but it lacked the satisfaction of cutting or bludgeoning. He was after a motif to satisfy his blood-lust. He was looking for something to make the act of the destruction of another living being, all his own.

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While in elementary school, Gustav naturally graduated to bullying.

Bigger than the other children his age, what distinguished him from his peers was his willingness to inflict all manner of pain on others. There was nothing he wouldn’t do. He was only limited by his imagination. The bullying had the effect of helping Gustav expand upon that. He liked the fear he inspired in his classmates. High School became a laboratory for his developing viciousness.

He hurt a lot of people. He also picked up a nickname. Because of his penchant for violence, and his Russian heritage, he became known as Red Gus. He embraced the name and the concept.

This burgeoning talent for violence, coupled with Gustav’s utter void of human compassion, soon drew the notice of a local loan shark. Gustav was hired as a Mob collector. This was an over-reach. Because of his legendary lack of compunction, Gustav seldom left his clients with the ability to work. He could not understand that the goal was to scare the victim. If you crippled them, they couldn’t pay anything. His failure facilitated his ascension to the vocation he was meant for.

Sabato Melchiore was the Capo of the Genovese family in Bushwick. He had a use for Gustav. He offered him a job.

“I notice you like to hurt people. Ever think about killing them?”

“All the time. Bill collecting sucked. What’s the point?”

“I think the point is to leave them well enough to go to work, so they can pay their debts. I have something less frustrating, and not nearly as nuanced.

Sometimes, I need to make someone dead. I need it public, and messy. I’m sending a message as much as anything else. Interested?”

“Sure,” Gustav didn’t hesitate.

“Don’t you want to know what it pays?”

“You’re going to pay me?” Gustav asked with wonder.

So began Gustav’s career as a hit man. He was good at it, and he loved the work. So well, that he began free-lancing. He started selling himself for short money to anyone that wanted someone dead. He was doing so much wet-work, that he was on the verge of killing more people than cancer. His blood-lust was insatiable, but there was a point to all of this mayhem. Gustav was in search of that one method of murder that he could call his own. He thought he found it when he took that contract from Jimmy Gutless Ciocio.

Gustav became more concerned with perfecting his craft, than with his duediligence. The opportunity to kill blinded him to the huge gaps in the background information the client provided him. Other than the fact that the girl was Ciocio’s ex-girlfriend, he knew nothing about her.

In his quest for the perfect method of murder, Gustav discovered there is nothing as satisfying as the sound of a hatchet being buried in a living skull. It feels good too, he admitted. Like making perfect contact on the sweet spot of the baseball bat. You don’t even feel it. It’s the same with a hatchet and a head.

He was glad he learned to look at his victims’ faces—because it was worth it. They would get that Oh shit look, accompanied by the sound of their 55

bowels giving way in a liquid splat. The uncontrollable twitching, Gustav found amusing as fuck. I really like this method, he thought.

Every hitter had a signature; that one method that was their own. This one was Gustav’s. He used it until he thought he had elevated it to an art form. But his growing fascination led to over-use. Over-use leads to mistakes.

The rising blood-lust prevented Gustav from appreciating as much. Other than the exhilaration of snatching the life right out of his many victims, Gustav had trouble appreciating anything.

So he definitely didn’t appreciate the irony of the position he was in at the moment. He had made a canoe of the head of his boss’s niece. He hadn’t known she was Sabato Melchiore’s god-daughter. When the naked and broken body of Celine Abandondo showed up on Decatur Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue, with her head caved in, Melchiore was briefly distraught. When he composed himself, he knew instantly who he had to speak with. Jimmy Ciocio was called Gutless for a reason. Even though his own death was already a certainty, he rolled over on Gustav within seconds.

That is how Gustav Ratchikakhov found himself tied to a chair in a filthy Bushwick basement. The feel of his own urine, warm and spreading down from his lap, pooling at his feet, brought Gustav into intimate contact with the fear he had inflicted upon so many others. When Melchiore picked up the dull hatchet, swinging the tool to get the feel of it, Gustav was forced to concede; I really don’t like this method of murder at all. It was the very last thing he ever thought.

56

Waiting for the Perfect Girl

by Caitlin Ehlenz I never cared much for the pretty girls. I always preferred the fat, plain ones. Colorless lips. Brown eyes. Indifferent noses. Nothing to see. Nothing to miss.

Surveying the café from my corner by the window, I evaluate my options.

Not so many girls today. A shame. Usually girls cluster here like crows at roadkill.

A young thing sits two chairs away from me. Headphones on, laptop up, latte empty. I can’t see her screen. No doubt surfing Facebook and the like.

Idiotic generation.

A big black woman with hoops and endless necklaces sits in the opposite corner. Bags taking up any free space around the table. Shopping day? Could be an option, but I prefer the white ones. Put up less of a fight.

A woman in her thirties sits checking her phone, one eye on her daughter, who tries to mash a cookie with her tiny fists. Women with children aren’t usually an option. Too much of a hassle. Too much concern from the authorities and I have no use for the child.

A man in a suit and tie sips coffee from a to-go cup as he thumbs his Blackberry. Who knows why he even sat down. Meeting someone? Wasting time between meetings? Looks like a stupid fucker. Use a mug, idiot!

My options are slim today and then she walks in. The perfect combination. Big bottom and gigantic rack. Thick thighs. Carries herself confidently, but I can tell it’s a show.

Shouldn’t stare too much. Women notice that. Most don’t stare back. I’m not much to look at. Never have been. My sister always said I would be a good catch someday. What did she know?

Molly. Always had something to laugh about and when she laughed, oh, that was something. She’d throw her blond head of curls back and open her mouth, exposing her neck for all to see. She was special and someone was bound to take notice.

The woman orders a coffee. Black. She sits facing the windows. I’ll have to be careful. I lift my book a little higher to peek over the edge. No make-up.

Impressive. A woman like her should.

Molly didn’t wear make-up. No need. No need at all. She had great eyes.

Huge and brown. Long, full, dark eyelashes. Big lips. Always moving. Always talking. Molly never knew when to shut it. It’s not that I never told her.

Her green summer dress cuts low exposing her cleavage. I can’t chance a look now. Some things get me too excited. I look at the book in my hands.

Grisham something or other.

I wonder if I should sneak in her car. An easy task with how many people are in the café, but she is facing the window. Most don’t look anyway. Yes, here, she takes out her phone and a magazine. She’s wearing heels. Perfect.

This keeps getting easier.

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My sister always wore heels. Molly would never be caught dead in flats.

And she wasn't.

Focus. Get a new cup of coffee. Walk by. Notice the hands. Quick look.

No wedding band. She notices you. Yes, short eye contact. Polite nod. Brief, embarrassed smile. She is cute.

Taking my seat again, I glance around the room. Blackberry man left.

The woman with the child is packing up. Big black woman is reading novel.

Romance, no doubt. Surfing girl--still surfing.

I could risk it. Dates are more fun. Ask for drinks tonight. Then, heavy compliments. Innocent fondling in a dark booth. Sheryll and Danielle went that way. Sheryll with her flabby arms and Danielle with her big pouch of a belly.

Joan was much harder. Kickboxer.

Coffee is hot. Small sips. Quick glances over the pages. She flips the magazine’s pages lethargically. Fingers caress the pages. Stop it now. Look at the eyes. Kind eyes. Brown. Match the hair. Soft. Not too long and not too short.

Molly's hair was always too long. It ran the length of her back. All those curls. Softness. Men like it long. She should have cut it.

Look at the book! Peer over the edge. Yes. This woman is worth meeting. I could spend some time with her. A glass of wine. Or two. Red or white? Or maybe she is a beer person. Cocktails? No. Wine. Definitely wine.

They never found her heels. She had to be wearing them. Probably in a landfill somewhere or perhaps not. Creeps kept stuff, didn’t they?

Focus. Scan the room. No new customers. Big black woman makes no sign of moving. Surfing girl will probably sit in her corner till close. It was time.

Getting up, I place the bookmark. Yawn. Stretch. Woman notices. I smile.

“Hello.”

58

The Timid Librarians

by Tom Barlow Kelsey Flood cursed the 17-year locusts which had emerged by the billions in the past week and now filled the woods with a rattle that blocked out any other sounds, such as a cop car coming up the gravel drive. She knew, after setting fire to two other empty rural homes up for sale, that the County Sheriff would be keeping an eye on this one, and she would have liked the early warning.

The moon was not her friend, either, shining so brightly it cast a faint shadow of her frame, naked except for the shower cap and cheap slippers, as she crept up to the back door of the two-story tucked back in the crook of a hill in Appalachian Ohio a few miles outside of Hawksbridge. She knew that the sign in the front flowerbed warning of an alarm system was bullshit, so she didn't hesitate to take her crowbar to the back door. Sure, she could have used her key, but that could tip off the cops, if the place didn't burn completely.

The sound of the door frame splitting was lost in the cicada song. She crept inside, carrying the five-gallon can of gasoline she'd driven to West Virginia the evening before to buy at a gas station where she wasn't known.

She began by soaking all the furniture, the fabric of which would serve as wicks. She took particular pleasure in dousing the recliner her mother-in-law had been sitting in the day she told Kelsey she was unworthy of her son Brandon's affection.

She had studied a Kay Scarpetta story in which a house was torched and therefore knew enough to open all of the windows on the first floor to allow the fire to breathe. Since her moron of a husband had not got around to turning off the propane feed to his mother's house, she was able to snip the line at the stove with the bolt cutters that had been in the shed for ages; the smell of rotten eggs immediately began to fill the room. She grabbed a book of matches from the kitchen junk drawer.

Having dispensed most of the gasoline she exited the back door, pouring a line behind her. Once she was clear of the porch, she struck one of the matches and dropped it onto the petrol. The fire raced toward the house and within seconds the entire first floor was ablaze. The propane would assure it remained virulent until the place was consumed.

She jogged to the back of the lot and struck off into the woods, climbing the hill on a long-abandoned logging road. She found herself giggling as she imagined the look on the face of the friends and family who thought her so very timid; if they only knew what she had done.

In five minutes she reached the dirt road that crested the hill, where she had parked. The chance anyone had seen her truck was infinitesimal; there

59

were only a couple of houses on this dead-end road, and those inhabited by old people who never went out after dark.

She pulled off the shower cap, wiped herself down with moist towelettes she'd swiped months before from her mother-in-law's hospice room until she could smell no more gasoline, then dressed. She'd found with the first fire that her hair and any clothes she wore would hold the scent, and she couldn't afford to throw away yet another outfit.

She tossed the slippers, shower cap and towelettes into a ditch on the way to the new Wal-Mart in Chillicothe, 30 miles east. There she fished through the trash can at the exit, pretending to look for a lost wallet, until she found a discarded receipt time-stamped within five minutes of the time she set the fire. Luckily, it was for only a few food items, which she proceeded to purchase so that anyone checking the receipt against her larder would be satisfied it was hers. She was sure there were no Lincoln Rhymes working for the local sheriff, so her alibi should hold. *** She was confident torching two other houses before the one her husband had inherited, the one that they couldn't even give away now thanks to the local housing depression, would satisfy the insurance company that it was the work of a pyromaniac. And certainly no one would suspect someone as meek as her.

However, her idiot husband Brandon, who she had counted on to maintain his routine of bowling in his Wednesday night league, had instead stayed at work by himself to complete a transmission rebuild, and therefore had no alibi. The insurance company declared the situation suspicious, since he had opportunity, motive, and ready access to gasoline, and so refused to pay as long as the case remained open on the police blotter with a viable suspect.

And so failed her plan to divorce Brandon as soon as the settlement came through, a marriage she knew was doomed within a month of their ceremony although she'd toughed it out for five years. She had thought to take half the cash to fund her dream to build her own tiny house in the hills in the form of a hobbit hole full of books.

Worse, she caught him a month later at the Super 8 in Portsmouth with his second cousin, and her mother would not rest until she filed for that divorce. Since she made more at the library than Brandon did at the garage, the judge refused to award her any alimony. *** "They still haven't paid up on your insurance?" her mother asked as she set the table for Thanksgiving a few months later.

"I've about given up there," Kelsey said, scooting back in her chair to allow her sister to slide by. There was barely room for the three of them in the 60

decrepit trailer her mom had moved into after being thrown out of her apartment in town for falling behind on her rent. Again. Kelsey had tried sharing an apartment with her a couple of times, but the two of them fought like teenagers when in one another's presence. She nonetheless felt endless guilt about it.

"Speaking of which," her mother said, "I saw you talking to Brandon at the coffee shop last week."

"We're still friends," Kelsey said. "He's a dimwit who can't keep his pants zipped, but I knew that going into the marriage. Might as well blame a fish for biting at a lure."

"You could have at least had a grandchild before you kicked him to the curb."

Not wanting to repeat that tired conversation, Kelsey said, "I have a bag of books for you in the truck."

Her mother looked up from the oven, where she had been staring through the window at the turkey, waiting for the popup timer to appear. "More of that crime stuff? Those give me the willies. I wish you'd read some romances for a change. You could use a little romance in your life."

"We just get what people donate," Kelsey said. "Crime novels are popular.

Besides, you can learn a lot."

"Like how to burn down a house?" Elise said, smirking.

Kelsey kept her calm. Although Elise was known to be slow and therefore her blathering went generally ignored, she didn't need anyone planting the seeds of doubt. She was happy if people went on thinking her the same shrinking violet she'd been in high school, when even meeting the gaze of a boy caused her to blush. No one need tweak to the feelings of empowerment she'd found by following in the footsteps of her literary heroes. *** A year later, Kelsey was devouring the latest Lee Child when her ex and Debby Decker entered the library. She knew the reading habits of most of the town of 5,000, and had never seen the woman in the library before. In fact, she hadn't talked to Debby since the woman laughed in her face when she dared to express an unrequited fondness for a Latino boy in their class. She had changed little since high school, still a curvaceous big-hair queen complete with gum.

She wasn't surprised to see the two of them together. Debby had the reputation as easy while Kelsey had discovered, after they were married, that Brandon had a taste for the cheap and tawdry. He approached the checkout desk with a smile that she recognized as solicitous. She made sure her purse was hidden.

But of course they had to work through the polite exchanges of concern about relatives, health, job satisfaction, before he got to the point. To her relief, 61

he simply wanted her to dog sit the mutt he had taken from their marriage while the two of them went to Nashville for a few days.

"Not like you have anything better to do, right?" Debby said with a smile that she seemed to think would take the edge off her insult.

"No problem," Kelsey said. If she had to choose between the two bitches, she would choose the dachshund, Viener, any day. "I guess I lack your talent for making friends. Your tact, especially."

"You could spend a few bucks on your haircut," Debby replied. "That Flowbee must be about worn out." Again with the smile, which had a tint of malice.

"Come on, you two," Brandon said. "I'd like you to be friends. Debby and I are planning to get a place together." He was speaking mostly to Kelsey, while Debby looked bored.

Kelsey was reminded of a date when they were courting, when she was propositioned by a drunken cowboy while he was in the restroom. Brandon settled the conflict by buying the cowboy a shot and a beer. He had always been an appeaser, and she had longed for him, just once, to show a little guts: not Joe Pike, but at least Elvis Cole. Kelsey couldn't see the relationship with Debby working out in the long run; she would eventually tear him apart. But hey, it wasn't her life. "Good luck," she said, holding out her hand, which, after a pregnant pause, Debby shook. *** Her ex and Debby had indeed moved in together, so when he came knocking on her trailer late one Thursday evening a few months later, interrupting her rereading of a Virgil Flowers novel, she was a little surprised.

"Hey," she said, inviting him in, "What's up?"

"I need your help." He stepped into the living room and flopped onto her futon. She knew that hangdog look, the one that said he was overwhelmed with some problem. He had a habit of scraping the greasy fingernails of one hand with those of the other that set her teeth on edge, and he began to do it again.

She took a seat next to him, grabbed one of his hands and planted it on the couch arm. "Trouble with Debby?"

He gave her a wan smile. "Not this time. Much worse."

"Explain."

"You know my cousin Lanny."

Her concern immediately ratcheted up. Since twenty-eight year old Lanny had bought a Harley motorcycle and joined a club with a criminal reputation, he'd undergone an evolution from the lost child returning from Iraq into a hard case, including openly carrying a .44 magnum everywhere he could, even his sister's wedding.

Brandon leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "Well, he's got this idea that I was the one that burned down Mom's house."

62

"He's not the only one. No word from the insurance company?"

"Same old same old. Anyway, he wants me to do the same thing to this bar outside of Morgan. Evidently, it's stealing business from one his club owns."

"Wow. Can't you just tell him no?"

Brandon pulled a Camel out of his shirt pocket, dug a lighter from his pants, fired it up. "Not so easy. I've been buying car parts from them for years, kind of under the table. It's the only way I've been able to stay in business."

"You mean, stolen parts?" She wanted to slug him.

"I never asked and they never told. But I'm sure. Two of them were busted last week for running a chop shop in Wilmington. If I don't do this, they'll name me as a customer."

"So they've got you by the balls. What are you going to do?"

"I was hoping you'd do it for me." He wouldn't meet her gaze. "He said they'd also give me 10 grand. You could keep that."

The money caught her attention. The plans she had for her house suggested it could be built for not much more than that, and since she'd never lived in one place for more than two years while growing up, she was obsessed with the idea of permanence. Still, the whole idea sounded lame-brained. "Me? What makes you think I would? Or could?"

"I know it was you burned down Mom's house." Now he turned to look her in the face.

She sat back, took a deep breath. Two years and he'd never breathed a word of such suspicion. Of all the people she thought she could fool, she'd considered him the easiest. "Don't be crazy. You know I was in Chillicothe."

"I saw you drive by the garage five minutes after the fire was reported, and the fire department said they figured it was reported no more than ten minutes after it began."

"It couldn't have been me." She had always had success arguing with Brandon by holding her position, no matter how lame.

"I could tell your truck by sound of the valve slap alone, much less the busted back window and the Perot bumper sticker. Remember, I drove that piece of shit for ten years. And they never looked at the security footage from Wal-Mart, did they? They just bought your story, the innocent librarian. What if they went back and watched it?"

"How come you never said anything until now?"

"I may have been pissed at you, but I didn't want you to go to jail. For Christ's sake, Kels, we were married. At the time. And I figured you were just trying to help me out. It wasn't your fault it didn't work."

"So, what? You'll turn me in if I don't do this for you? And they'll turn you in if you don't do this for them? This is what's known as a cluster fuck."

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She had the odd sensation she'd cribbed these sentences from an Elmore Leonard novel.

"More of a chain fuck," he said.

"But it's a bluff, isn't it? I mean, you'd never turn me in. I know you."

He was back to digging, and flinched as a corner of a fingernail flaked off.

"Yeah, but you know Debby."

"What?"

"I knew that I could never stand up to you myself, so I told her about you setting the fire and told her to go to the cops for me if you refused to do this.

No way you could talk her out of it."

She slapped him hard on the back of the head, seething. "Then you have to tell her to stop."

"I already told her to ignore anything I said about changing my mind.

She promised."

"You are such a complete asshole. Now you two break up, she'll run straight to the sheriff anyway."

"Who said anything about breaking up? She asked me to marry her."

She could imagine their relationship, her ex cooking, cleaning, paying the bills while Debby stayed on the couch scarfing Twinkies and watching Judge Judy until she was as fat as her mother.

But she knew when she was cornered. And the money was alluring. "I do this, you owe me."

"What do you mean?"

"I do this for you, we swap trucks." She thought it worth a try, although Brandon loved his Silverado more than he'd ever loved her. She was determined to get something out of it that came out of his pocket.

"I'll rebuild the Ford for you," he countered. "I can get a low-mileage 7.5 liter engine block from the club for next to nothing."

She had read enough noir to know what had to come next. "I need $5,000 up front." *** After the library closed she drove down to Morgan, a town of 7,000 deadcenter in the county, to check out the bar. Just outside of town she passed the one that Brandon had named as the one owned by the motorcycle club; there were Harleys lined up like an honor-guard by the front door. The name was a giveaway, too–Fat Boys. The parking lot was gravel, the building in need of a paint job, the neon beer logos in the filthy windows several generations out of date.

Less than a mile further down the road was a new one-story building, larger, painted black and electric blue with a large orange neon sign on the roof proclaiming it Club Rev. The parking lot was paved, and almost full, including a long line of Japanese and German motorcycles. A large sandwich board 64

placed near the road proclaimed Thursdays Bike Night, offering prizes for the best customizations. Apparently, the promotion was working.

She parked well away from the front door, on which a security camera was focused, and reread the scene in a Lawrence Block novel where Keller cased a club until she knew what to look for. She donned the ball cap she kept in the truck, which would at least partially conceal her face from security camera. Before she went in, she took a couple of minutes to visualize herself as V.I. Warshawski, with all the confidence and competence she exuded.

The front part of the interior was filled with cafe tables surrounded by booths lining the walls. All were spoken for by groups chowing down on chicken wings and pitchers of beer. A long, two-sided bar divided this space from the dance floor in back, where a small stage sat against the far wall. A three-piece band was setting up. In the interim, loud country music was being piped into the room.

She bought a Bud at the bar and wandered toward the south wall, where a hallway led to the restrooms to the right, offices to the left. There appeared to be a fire door between the bar and the office. From this vantage point she could see sprinklers installed in the ceiling, and she was sure the sign on the door warning of a security system was not, in this case, bullshit. This was not going to be easy.

Next to the women's room, however, was a janitor's closet. When the hallway was deserted she peeked inside, and sure enough, discovered the main water shutoff valve behind the sink.

She finished her beer and returned to her truck to think through the challenge. The good news was the county sheriff's office and the nearest fire department were on the Ohio River, a good twenty minutes away. The building was built of wood, with oak flooring. The front door was substantial, but the builders appeared to have cut some corners on the back door; the fit between the steel door and jamb would easily accommodate a pry bar.

Was it worth $10,000? Her dream was in sight, so yes. Even though she'd have to trust Brandon to keep Debby in check. Nothing was simple. *** She knew better than to postpone the job; she would never be able to sleep soundly with it hanging over her. The next morning she called off sick from work and drove the hour and a half to Columbus, where she bought a pair of coveralls, some oversized boots, an axe and a gas can, which she filled at the local Shell station. She caught lunch while there, and didn't arrive back in Hawksbridge until mid-afternoon. She dug around in the tumble of clothes Brandon had left when he moved out and found his dad's old balaclava, the one he wore while hitching cars to his tow truck in the dead of winter. It still reeked of Brylcreem. She threw her stepladder and five-foot pry bar in the bed of the truck.

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She also called Brandon, told him to warn the club members that they should arrange a solid alibi for that night. He told her they were prepared to ride up to Cedar Point on Lake Erie at a moment's notice and spend the night at a motel. After work, he dropped off the $5000, all in $20 bills. It made an impressive stack.

Club Rev closed that night at 2 a.m., by Ohio state law. She waited until 3:30 a.m. before donning her new clothes and heading out. She made one pass to make sure the parking lot was empty before returning, cutting her lights and navigating by moonlight for the last 100 yards. There was parking behind the building, but she feared the truck would be caught by the security camera, so she parked at the back of the side lot in the darkness.

Her goal was five minutes, in and done. She had gone over the steps in her mind. Should she be seen by person or camera, the coveralls and shoes would make her appear larger, hopefully passing for a man, an idea she got from Donald Westlake. The balaclava would hide her face.

Since there was no cell service this far out in the hills, she figured that the security camera feed was piped by cable to the security firm's office. So the first step she took was to carry the step ladder to the corner of the building, climb it, and snip the cable lines coming into the club. Now she only need worry about the camera feed recorder which was no doubt in the office.

She returned the ladder to her truck and carried the gas can, pry bar and axe to the back door, entering the view of the camera. The pry bar gave her exceptional leverage and she quickly popped the back door, then carried the gas can and axe inside. The security alarm began bleating, urging her to hasten.

The place was faintly lit by the neon beer signs so she didn't need the flashlight in her pocket. She immediately crossed to the wall adjacent to the office. Standing on the seat of a booth, she attacked the drywall with the axe, which bit through like it was a saltine. Another whack broke out a wall stud, allowing her to squeeze through the insulation into the office where the security camera recorder was in plain sight. She yanked it free of its wires and tucked it into her coveralls.

Four minutes gone. She stepped back through the wall, crossed to the janitor's closet and closed the main water valve. She then circled the interior, pouring gas as she went, until the can was dry. With the ax, she broke several of the small, high-set windows before returning to the back door, taking matches out of her pocket and dropping a lit one on the floor. There was a wooshing sound as the gas burst aflame.

She grabbed her equipment and sprinted to the truck. In thirty seconds, she was on the road headed north. About a mile later she passed a Camaro flying south like it was going to a fire. *** 66

Kelsey disposed of the coveralls, boots and the recorder, which she had destroyed with the axe, in a deep ditch full of poison ivy along a dirt road on her way home. By the time she arrived, the sun was coming up. Although she didn't have to work on Saturdays, she was still on a high from the incident, and couldn't get to sleep until she took one of the OxyContin left over from when Brandon broke his finger doing a brake job. *** When someone pounded on her door around 3 p.m., she was so groggy it took her a couple of minutes to dress and answer. She prayed she wouldn't find a county sheriff waiting.

Instead, there stood Brandon, a scowl on his face. He brushed past her, took a seat on the futon.

"You have the rest of my money?" she said, sitting across from him.

"That's the least of your problems, right?" His hands were shaking, which she'd never seen before.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, murder." When she looked at him blankly, he continued, "The owner of the club got called by the security company. When he arrived the place was burning. They think he tried to reach the office, get to his safe, but the ceiling collapsed on him. Now Lanny and his friends think I killed this guy.

I never told them about you."

Kelsey struggled to make sense of his words. "You mean I burned the guy alive?"

"He probably died from the smoke, but you can't be sure."

"Holy shit." The sudden reality of what she had been dealing with as an episode of fiction struck her hard. "So no one knows it was me except you and Debby?" As she spoke, she realized she should have frisked her ex for a wire.

"I can keep my mouth shut, but I can't promise for her."

"What about the money?"

"They're not about to pay it now; it would look like an admission of guilt."

"You got to turn yourself in," Kelsey said. "It was your idea."

"Even if I was willing, Deb would never stand for it. I told you, she's got a thing for me."

"Then what?"

He reached into his back pocket, brought out a fat envelope. "I been saving for a diamond. Here's $1200. You can get quite a ways on that and the five grand."

"You want me to run away? Become a fugitive?"

He was doing that thing with his nails again. "I can't think of any other solution. Can you?"

She picked up the envelope. "Get lost. I have to pack."

"Where you going to go?"

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"None of your business. And don't expect me to call you. I don't ever want to talk to you again."

She got as far as dragging out her suitcase before the thought of running away broke her down. Where would she go, with what wasn't really all that much cash, entirely out of her element? What would her mother and sister do without her? She wasn't going to transform from a librarian to a refugee in the blink of an eye. Yet... She was appalled at herself when a better idea of how to save her neck occurred to her.

Killing the witnesses was such a clichĂŠ, but sometimes things became clichĂŠs simply because they worked. *** Debby and Brandon had taken an apartment above a former hardware store, now a lawnmower repair shop, on the main strip in Hawksbridge. As Kelsey drove by that morning at 3:00 a.m. she spotted Debby's Focus parked at the curb in front. An alley ran behind the buildings on that block. Brandon's Silverado was parked on the other side of the alley, in the space left when an old shed had been demolished. She pulled in behind him, turned off her motor.

The buildings on either side of theirs were deserted.

She slipped the suicide/confession note she'd written in Brandon's familiar scrawl under his windshield wiper, grabbed the gas can and her crowbar. There was a side door to the mower shop, which was secured by a deadbolt mounted in a door jamb that had been eaten hollow by termites. She barely had to nudge it with the crowbar before it sprang open.

The old wooden plank flooring squealed mightily as she followed the walls, pouring out gasoline as she went. There was no sprinkler system to worry about, thankfully. There was a barrel of motor oil between two repair benches, so she pumped a few gallons onto the floor to aid the fire.

She found herself wiping tears from her cheeks as she returned to the open door and carefully poured the last of her gasoline on the exterior stairs leading to Brandon and Debby's apartment. She tried to hold one thought in the front of her mind; the man at the club had died from the smoke before the flames reached him, so maybe they wouldn't suffer much.

Just as she reached into her back pocket for matches, though, someone stepped out of the darkness from behind a tree adjacent to the stairs. But before she could turn, a sharp pain struck her in the back, accompanied by a loud snap. She lost all control of her muscles and fell heavily in the doorway.

Lying there, paralyzed, Debby appeared in her field of vision, holding a Taser. "Bad girl," the woman said, as she leaned over, grabbed Kelsey by the collar, and dragged her inside. She slid easily on the motor oil. "I just knew you were the type of trash to do this kind of thing."

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Just as Kelsey began to regain some control of her muscles, Debby zapped her again. "Lanny offered me ten grand to solve this cluster fuck," she said, as she took Kelsey's book of matches from her pocket.

Kelsey was just able to move her mouth. "What about Brandon? Aren't you going to save him?"

Debby laughed. "That's not part of the plan, dumbass. They'll find you here, assume you got caught up in your own fire. Me, luckily I was out late, came home to find the place in flames. I took the note from his windshield, by the way."

She struck a match and dropped it on the floor, then hustled out of the shop. As Kelsey saw as the flames leap onto her coveralls, felt the heat on her face, she thought: this is all wrong. None of her heroes died in the end.

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BIOS Scott Klingbeil lives with his wife and Bernese Mountain Dog in Cleveland, OH. He works in banking, writes lots of stories and is very, very tall.

Amber Bunnell is an English teacher currently living in rural Japan, where she teaches junior high school students. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and caffeinated beverages.

Tom W. Miller holds a master's degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin and now lives in Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley. When not writing or having to earn a living, he enjoys tennis, pickleball, and family adventures. His stories have appeared in various literary magazines including The Writing Disorder, Red Fez and more.

Andrew Riconda lives on City Island in the Bronx, with dogs, cats, and wife.

His stories have appeared in The Amherst Review, Criminal Class Review, Vols.

3 & 6, Oyez Review, Phantasmagoria, Rio Grande Review, Watchword, Vols. 6 & 7, The William and Mary Review, StreetLit, Spinetingler Magazine, and Manslaughter Review, Vol. 1. (Since you are here already, perhaps you should go check it out now, you hump.) Another story is forthcoming at Crimespree Magazine.

Otto Penzler and Harlan Coben selected his story, “Heart Like a Balloon,” for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2011, which features the same protagonist in these pages, as does the novel Andrew claims he is “finafrigginally finishing up,” The Three People I Had to Kill Last Year.

Alison Preston is a writer living in Fort Collins, Colorado. She also teaches in the Young Writers Program at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.

Karl Koweski is an enemy of the Amish everywhere. His latest collection of short stories, Kockblockers is available from Kleft Jaw Press.

Michael O'Keefe is a retired NYPD Homicide Detective. He is an award winning poet, and the author of the recently published novel, Shot to Pieces. He is presently near completion of his second and third novels.

Caitlin Ehlenz is a former music teacher from the U.S., currently teaching English as a foreign language and finding her way through German language and culture in Cologne, Germany. She writes in her spare time.

Tom Barlow is an Ohio writer. Other stories of his may be found in anthologies including Best American Mystery Stories 2013 and Best New Writing 2011 as well as numerous magazines including Heater, Needle, Plots with Guns, Plan B, 70

Mysterical-E, Mystery Weekly, Thuglit and Pulp Modern. He is also the author of the short story collection Welcome to the Goat Rodeo and the adventure novel I'll Meet You Yesterday.

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