BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled

Introduction by
Ron Scheer

Cover by
dMix

Copyright © 2011 by BEAT to a PULP

All stories copyrighted by their respective authors. Any story previously published in the BEAT to a PULP webzine, or otherwise noted, is copyrighted the date it originally appeared online.

Copyright © 2007
Patricia Abbott ("Ric with No K" previously published in Spinetingler)

Copyright © 2009
David Cranmer ("Vengeance on the 18th" first appeared online in May)

Copyright © 2011
John Hornor Jacobs ("The Death Fantastique" first appeared online in February); Thomas Pluck ("Black-Eyed Susan" previously published in Powder Burn Flash)

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.

The stories herein are works of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events portrayed in this collection are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Image credits:
Cover photo from iStock.com, Photoshop effect by dMix.

PO Box 173
Freeville, New York, 13068

Other titles from BEAT to a PULP:

BEAT to a PULP: Round One

Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles

Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Vol. II

CONTENTS
Introduction: Hard Times
Ron Scheer

The Tachibana Hustle
Garnett Elliott

A Small Thing at the Devil's Punchbowl
Kent Gowran

Obstruction
Glenn Gray

The Death Fantastique
John Hornor Jacobs

Ric with No K
Patricia Abbott

Black-Eyed Susan
Thomas Pluck

The Blooming of Lester
Brad Green

The Janitor
Ron Earl Phillips

Vengeance on the 18th
David Cranmer

Second Round Dive
Benoît Lelièvre

The Second Coming of Hashbrown
Kieran Shea

.38 Special
Amy Grech

Bull's-Eye View
Wayne D. Dundee

Introduction: Hard Times

We all see things through our favorite pair of reading glasses. Mine date from the turn of the last century, 1895 to 1915, the period of the early-early westerns. These were the years of Teddy Roosevelt, remembered as the champion of a Progressivist era of expansion, reform, and optimism. You see this celebrated in the western novel, where the freedom of the frontier lets ordinary men and women escape the constraints and corrupting influences of civilization, government, and Eastern capital.

Optimism does not disappear in the decades that followed, but it takes a beating. Victorian ideals and sentiments fade. What were once glimpses of disillusionment among writers like Jack London and Frank Norris become more widespread, and hardboiled fiction emerges as a new genre.

What came along to cause the big shift? Several jolts of twentieth-century reality: WWI, the promise and failure of Prohibition, the growth of organized crime, the noisy materialism of the 1920s, the stock market crash, and the Great Depression.

Fractured

The change was gradual, but you could argue that 1912 was the year it got started. A three-way split in that year's elections fractured the political landscape and produced an "accidental President." Republicans, divided between Roosevelt and Taft, lost out to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who moved into the White House with only 41.8 percent of the popular vote.

Wilson may be remembered for his idealism, but his years in office were marked by a growing national discontent. As the age of Roosevelt-style social reform ebbed, a fierce anti-capitalist spirit grew, and along with it the labor movement. Suppressing anti-war sentiment going into WWI, the feds targeted activists and other dissenters. Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist who got as much as six percent of the vote in 1912, was thrown into prison as a "traitor."

Even if you ignore the politics, you'd sense a major slippage along cultural fault lines when you pick up Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930). Both writers, born in the 1890s, have found a voice that speaks of loss of faith in a dependable social order.

Fool to care

The new order now revealed in fiction is corrupt, hypocritical, and complacently indifferent to the consequences. The bleakness of that vision found expression in a break from literary styles that had served the past. Others no doubt preceded them, but Hemingway's and Hammett's influence was profound and is still felt today.

It's a style marked by a stripping away of old-style sentiment. It feigns to not care—to have no feelings about the loss of all that used to feed dreams and faith in the old truisms. Only a few short decades before, mainstream culture thrived on the mythology of the Old West, cowboy stories, and the likes of Horatio Alger. Gumption, courage, and honesty were the American way.

These notions would linger in popular fiction and the new medium of movies, but there was a growing chorus of writers and an army of readers who didn't buy them anymore. Toughened, in the way that the runny insides of an egg turn solid in boiling water, they responded to the stripped-down style we've come to know as "hardboiled."

Over the decades hardboiled has come in different forms, but at its purest, it uses language and constructs sentences that shun emotion. Its tone is matter of fact, which is often a mask for deep irony. It also makes no effort to be polite. While the fiction that came before wouldn't offend anyone's maiden aunt, the new fiction could be rude and crude, even purposely shocking.

Betrayed

Understand that I'm not saying the new fiction had no feeling. It just drew a hard line on sentimentality—the open display of sentiment. Beneath the surface of hardboiled fiction are the feelings that attend disillusionment. There is sorrow and anger on the one hand and a kind of relief on the other.

The sorrow and anger you can understand, but it's also a relief to be freed from old, restrictive notions way past their shelf life. No more effort wasted on trying to make old verities work after they've been revealed as no longer operative. Thus the scorn for pretense, willful ignorance, and hypocrisy. Common is the belief that ninety percent of everything is crap and will probably stay that way.

In self-defense, hardboiled protagonists retreat to the private world of the individual. There they rely on their own judgment, distrust others, and question authority. Power is assumed to be misused and wealth ill gotten.

True, hardboiled fiction is also escapist. It offers a low-risk walk on the wild side. And in that regard, it makes romance of anti-romance. Cheap thrills. Kiss, kiss, bang, bang. But I'd argue it's about far more than that.

If you listen closely, there's a tone of mourning under the words. The social order may have become unhinged, but worse is the loss of a moral order. The rage that often drives this fiction comes from the betrayal of human decency, fairness, and honesty. All the virtues once found, by the way, in the early cowboy westerns.

Gender divides

Polite fiction of the turn of the last century kept women on a pedestal and rarely alluded to those who'd fallen from it. Cowboys and other heroes routinely fell in love with the sweetest of sweet young things. Some were both pretty and intelligent. But most could be trusted to be what they seemed. Altogether, I'll add, it was an arrangement that suited men.

Enter the femme fatale, never what she seems to be and hardly to be trusted. Gladly displaying her sexuality, she's the kind of woman that dared not speak its name for turn-of-the-century readers. Does it matter that women had just won the vote, been the driving force behind the 18th and 19th Amendments, cut their hair short, threw away their corsets, and let their hemlines soar? Probably. A new creature, sprung from the confines of Victorian propriety, how could she not strike fear in the hearts of men? Fear and desire, too. Flip sides of the same coin.

Hardboiled, as it flourished, was chiefly for and about a gender in shock. The brotherhood of man was now a quaint old notion and the docile female a thing of the past. The new fiction said it like it was, for a generation of males whose sexual anxieties were aroused by the arrival of a newly liberated woman.

Crime fighting

The cowboy hero of pre-war fiction was strong, but tough only when he had to be. In general, he was congenial and a willing defender of the social order. The code he lived by honored ideals of trust and honesty. Corruption and depravity were confined largely to the "civilized" East, and outlaws were kept as much as possible to the untamed fringes of the frontier. Until the coming of the law, there were vigilantes who took up guns and enough rope for hanging to remove undesirable elements.

In hardboiled fiction, the crime-ridden East and the Old West style of law enforcement often converge. In place of the cowboy is the private citizen, possibly armed, up against a corrupt world that extends as far as he can see.

Like the earlier cowboy, there is still a kind of honor in what he does. Often poorly paid, he takes pride in being incorruptible. He also works alone, living by his wits and, if necessary, his fists and a firearm. The cowboy of postwar pulp fiction evolved along similar lines.

Wrapping up

My argument here, if I have one, is that hardboiled fiction reflected the cultural crisis that followed the disruptive events ushered in by WWI. As social conditions worsened with the Crash, its bleak vision was further amplified. And the ordered, promising world found in earlier popular fiction receded even more swiftly into the distant past.

Looking back to 1912 and the election of an "accidental President," we see history repeating itself in 2000, when two reformist candidates split a vote that put a third into office. The result has been a rolling back of Progressivist achievements at the expense of everyday working men and women. Waging war abroad has brought us so-called "Patriot" acts that have been used to justify the erosion of basic liberties.

Government and the media are unduly influenced by big corporations. We hover on the brink of economic collapse. International relations are confounded by terrorism and loose nukes. Public trust is abused right, left, and center. Our government, we're told, is broken, while the rich get super-rich and the poor get poorer.

Reading hardboiled fiction written today, as collected here in David Cranmer's new volume of BEAT to a PULP, we see reflected the same conditions that gave birth to hardboiled fiction almost a century ago. No surprise that hardboiled has found a renaissance among a new generation of writers. Like its antecedents, it is partly escapist and tongue in cheek. But read the news, and try to believe it's not a fitting response to the new normal.

Ron Scheer
October, 2011

Ron Scheer reviews western fiction and movies at buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com. He is currently at work on a book about early western writers, 1880-1915, and a glossary of early western slanguage.

The Tachibana Hustle

Garnett Elliott

Rain pelted the shops walled with corrugated aluminum, the worn signs, the flow of umbrella-wielding customers coursing down the clean, yet shabby streets of Uchiega district. Shinjuku skyscrapers loomed in the distance, monoliths of black glass and blinking corporate logos.

Viper Ogata ducked under a shop awning to escape the rain. He lit a cigarette and passed it to the man squatting on a piece of sodden cardboard next to him. The man was dressed like a Buddhist monk. Fat drops spattered off his enormous straw hat and made splish sounds as they filled his begging bowl.

"That's the one?" Viper said, nodding at a shop across the street.

Smoke curled from under the hat's brim. "Check out the sign."

Viper squinted. The shop used to sell oranges and persimmons, but now the windows had been blacked out. A circle of bright yellow neon glowed next to the front door. As Viper watched, the circle blinked, turned into a pie-chart with one slice missing, and blinked back into a circle again.

"I don't get it," he said.

"You'll have to see to understand." Junichiro rose from the cardboard square, flicking rain off his hands.

Viper followed him across the street. A few customers came drifting out of the nameless shop. Their eyes were red and hollow, like junkies. After a moment, the rain's assault seemed to batter them back to reality, and they slunk off, fingers twitching.

Viper pushed his way inside. The shop smelled of damp fabric and too many sweating bodies crammed together. Teenagers, salary-men in crumpled suits, housewives, Ginza prostitutes, and old pensioners wearing cheap plastic rain hats stood elbow to elbow, hunched over rows of arcade consoles, their faces awash with digital glow. Electronic music chattered.

"Over here." Jun gestured towards the sole unoccupied console. Viper had to remove his sunglasses in order to see the screen. Colorful ghost-shapes chased a yellow circle through a maze of dots.

"I still don't get it," he said.

Jun shoved a coin in the console's slot. "Paku-paku taberu."

* * *

They'd hit several takeout places on the way back to Boss Gomyo's building. Arms loaded with Styrofoam containers, Viper had to shoulder the pachinko parlor doors before staggering inside.

The parlor was dead. A few decrepit seniors flicked away at the machines, under a pall of blue-white cigarette haze. None of them looked up as Viper and Jun made their way to the lobby. In better times a dozen young men sporting perms and loud suits would've been hanging around the place, but now the couches were empty. Fumiko sat with her long legs braced on the reception desk, face hidden behind a manga.

"Where's Hanzo?" Viper asked. "He's supposed to be floor security."

Fumiko shrugged. "Resigned."

"When?"

"Couple hours ago."

"Who's guarding the boss?"

"You are now, I guess."

He traded looks with Jun. The two of them wrestled their take-out over to the elevator. Jun managed to bump the 'up' button with his knee. They rode to the third floor.

"If Hanzo's really gone..." Jun said.

"Let's see what he says, first."

The elevator doors opened onto a darkened hallway of bare steel frame and exposed wiring. All the interior panels had been removed from the third floor, making it a single, skeletal room. Black felt screened the windows. The only light came from an ancient Sony console set in a far corner.

"Boss?" Viper called out. "Boss, we've brought food."

A grunt echoed. Boss Gomyo lay sideways on a tatami mat, his back to them, watching TV. He'd slipped his robe down over one thick shoulder, exposing the Gomyo family tattoo: a cockroach leaping from the open petals of a lotus blossom.

Viper cleared his throat. "Boss?"

Gomyo pointed at the screen without turning. "Wrestling's on."

"Sorry."

Viper and Jun started setting down the containers, pulling back lids. After a moment the smell grew thick and Gomyo glanced behind him.

"Did you get the tempura udon?"

"And spareribs," Jun said.

Another grunt. Gomyo slid around and grabbed a handful of steaming ramen. He choked the noodles down.

"Hanzo's just left," Viper said.

"Huh. Promote Shigeda."

"Shigeda left two weeks ago."

"Huh." Gomyo slurped his udon. "This tempura's fucking soggy." He flung the bowl at Viper's feet, who danced back in time to avoid having his slacks splashed.

Jun bowed his shaved head. "Boss, we found out why the pachinko parlor's been losing all its business. And why many of the shops have stopped paying protection."

Gomyo seemed to forget about his food. "Go on."

"There's a new video game."

When Jun finished, the boss looked puzzled. "But people don't win anything, playing this Paku Man? No actual prizes?"

"You can enter your initials if you get the high score," Viper put in.

Gomyo shook his head. "So it's not actually gambling."

"It's electronic heroin, is what it is," Viper said. "I myself played for two hours."

"I as well," Jun said. "I figured out a pattern. The red ghost tries to chase you down by the most direct route."

"But the pink ghost is trickier," Viper said.

Gomyo wiped robata sauce from the corner of his mouth. "Then why have the shops stopped paying protection? Our fees should be going up, if everyone's playing this game."

"Another family must've established a relationship with the Paku distributors," Jun said. "The protection is being assumed by them."

"Which family?"

Jun shrugged.

"Find out. And find out how we can get our hands on these games. I'll mortgage this whole building to buy some." Gomyo heaved himself up from the floor and started pacing. "We'll undercut the competition, somehow. With money coming in again, I can hire our men back. Lease more games. We'll go to war if we have to."

Gomyo turned away and Jun glanced sidelong at Viper, who shook his head. He gestured towards the elevator.

"We should get going then," Jun said.

"We'll have the information for you by morning," Viper added.

Gomyo settled himself back on the mat. "No later."

They hoofed it for the elevator. Once the doors had shut, Jun transferred the old Nambu Type 14 pistol from his pocket to the nylon rig slung under his shoulder. "Gomyo's got some of his spirit back. It'd be a shame to smoke him now."

Viper nodded. "He'll die soon enough anyway, all that shit we've been feeding him."

* * *

Hideo "Needles" Nakane ran an all-night tattoo parlor in the seedier part of Uchiega district.

He had business even now at two a.m., with the rain leaking through his shop's cheap tarpaper roof. Jun held one of his skinny arms pinioned behind the back of an old dental chair. The flexible lamp Hideo normally used for detail work had been twisted to glare directly into his narrow face.

"How's it feel to be the guy in the chair for once?" Viper said, brandishing a tattoo gun. The cabinet nearby held jars of stainless steel needles in alcohol, gauze pads, and smudged ink-tubes. None of the equipment looked very clean.

"You two are in trouble," Hideo said. "Big trouble."

"So you keep saying."

"What'd you do with Chiyo? If you hurt her...."

He was referring to his girlfriend, whom he routinely pimped out for the benefit of waiting customers. Viper had shut her up in the shop's only bathroom, with strict orders to stay put.

"She's alright. We're not sadists, Needles."

"I don't have to tell you guys shit."

"What's with all the cockiness?" Viper shook his head. "You used to be one of Gomyo's most loyal clients. Did his family crest and everything."

"Gomyo's finished. Word is, you and Jun are the last two men he's got. Too stupid to leave a sinking ship."

Viper reached out and pressed the lamp's bulb against Hideo's cheek. A wisp of gray smoke rose from the contact.

"Let's try that again," Viper said. He jerked his thumb behind him, at a cramped waiting room cluttered with miss-matched chairs and stacks of bondage magazines. Along one wall three brand-new Paku Man consoles stood, their screens glowing. "Where'd you get 'em?"

Hideo licked his lips. "I don't have to tell you."

Viper nodded to Jun, who jerked Hideo's captured wrist higher. The little man beat his shoes against the chair like he was dancing.

"I'll talk," Hideo said. "I'll talk."

"So talk," Viper said.

"T-tachibana. I got them from the Tachibana Group."

"And they're providing protection, as well?"

Hideo nodded.

"Get the details," Viper told Jun. "I'm going to check on his girl."

A short hallway off the waiting area led to the bathroom. Viper kicked the door open.

Chiyo was gone.

Over the cracked sink gaped a two-foot square window. The cheap plastic pane had been torn out, and the metal grill protecting the exterior sagged to one side. Chiyo had somehow wriggled her way to freedom.

"Jun," Viper called out, bolting back through the waiting area. Just as he passed the front door it shuddered from a tremendous blow.

"What's going on?" Jun said. He'd released Hideo, who lay slumped at the foot of the dentist's chair.

"Chiyo must've gone for help. Get your gun."

Jun clawed at his shoulder holster, made a face. "I left it in the car."

"What?"

"I didn't think we'd need it for a guy like—"

The thin metal door crumpled, hinges popping from the frame. An enormous foot shod in patent black leather kicked the remains away. Attached to the foot was a burly pant leg thick as a stone column. Two hundred and forty pounds of Japanese/Korean hybrid rippled through the doorway, muscles barely restrained by the black silk confines of a hand-tailored shirt. Narrow eyes blazed out from the scarred face. Just below the right cheekbone gleamed a scarlet tattoo: an ace of spades.

"Holy shit," Jun said. "Eisu Crimson."

From the floor, a grinning Hideo said, "I told you guys you were in trouble."

* * *

Viper spent three days in the communal ward of Ryukogan General before being discharged. "You're running up too much of a bill," Gomyo told him over the phone.

Jun showed up with a wheelchair. Viper didn't remember the drive back to Uchiega district, but he did recall Jun helping him to the second floor of Gomyo's building. He stretched out on a couch in one of the deserted office suites and covered himself with a blanket. Jun brought juice and cigarettes.

Fifth day, Viper felt well enough to talk.

"Professional fucking wrestler," he told Jun, over a tray of cheap sushi. He had to chew carefully; his mouth was still tender.

Jun cracked a can of Asahi Super Dry. "He did his signature move on you. 'The Bullet Train.' Man, that looked painful."

Viper winced. When he closed his eyes he could still see Eisu's giant meat-hand closing around his right ankle, catching his attempt at a roundhouse kick. The tendons had sounded like taut guitar strings snapping. "How come he didn't give you the business?"

Jun pointed to the yellowing bruise on his forehead. "He caught me with a couple, but I managed to parley. My smooth-talking saved your life, man."

"I bet."

"Anyway, we've got lots to do." Jun handed over a mirror. "Brace yourself."

Viper looked. And groaned.

"It's not bad as all that. The teeth can be replaced. Your right foot's in a metal brace, but you can still walk on it. Don't try to run, though. Or kick. Your ribs have been taped, so don't breathe too hard, either."

"What about my hand? What's with all the bandages?"

"Oh, that. You don't remember?"

"Remember what?"

"The boss demanded an apology. He thought you getting trashed by a Tachibana goon caused him to lose face."

"Jesus." Viper felt for the tip of his left pinky finger. It wasn't there.

"On the plus side, I managed to save these." Jun produced Viper's sunglasses. One of the lenses was cracked, and the bridge had been wrapped with electrician's tape. Viper slid them on.

He felt better.

"I got the location of a warehouse from Hideo," Jun said, "just before Eisu showed. Main distribution point for the Paku consoles. Warehouse's full of 'em."

"We're going to steal some?"

"And burn the rest. Undercut the competition, like Gomyo said."

"But the Tachibana group's likely providing security." Viper shuddered at the thought of running into Eisu Crimson again.

"Yeah. We'll have to play it smart."

Viper tried standing up. His left ankle felt like molten gel. "I can't do this."

"Yes you can. I brought some special inspiration." Next to the sushi carton was a brown paper bag, wrapped tight with rubber bands. Jun snapped the bands back and extracted a prescription bottle. "Shootfighters take these just before a match. Mixture of painkiller and military-grade amphetamine."

Viper unscrewed the cap and shook out a large yellow pill.

"Think of it as one of Paku Man's power pellets," Jun said, grinning.

* * *

It took Viper two days to infiltrate the Toyondai Short Haul Trucking and Delivery Company. Jun helped him forge his application, and Gomyo's union contacts, along with several hundred yen, pushed the paperwork through.

"We'll need to make further arrangements to get you a shift," Jun said.

At five the next morning, Viper found himself hurtling down the Metropolitan Expressway. Traffic was heavy, despite the hour. Big diesel trucks roared alongside, silhouettes in the pre-dawn light.

He was riding shotgun on a big diesel himself. His bandages chafed under the snug white fabric of a Toyondai uniform. The warehouse with all the Paku Man consoles lay somewhere ahead, at the terminus of their morning route.

"Fifteen years I've been hauling for this company," said Ishikawa, the carp-faced driver, "and I've never heard of you. Never seen your name on the roster."

"I told you back at the hub. I was a last minute replacement."

"And Goro's sick? He's never been sick before."

Viper shrugged. "Bad flu, I heard." His head was throbbing. The painkillers were wearing off again. Mournful gaijin country music wailed from the tape deck.

"Can't you turn that down," Viper said, "or change to something else?"

"Huh-uh. In my rig we listen to Tammy."

"Who?"

"Tammy Wynette, you moron. Me and Goro are huge fans."

The sun had just crawled up behind heavy cloud cover. A white disc, suspended over the steel waters of Tokyo bay.

* * *

Forty-five minutes later Ishikawa had finished backing the truck against the loading dock's concrete lip. "You're driving the next leg. Wait here while I talk to the dispatch office."

Viper cracked the passenger door.

"What'd I just tell you?" Ishikawa said, irritated.

"Going for a smoke."

"Stay out of the warehouse, then. This place is crawling with gangsters."

Viper watched him disappear through the loading gate. He pulled a Toyondai cap down low over his head, stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and followed.

His footsteps echoed off worn concrete. The warehouse interior loomed dark as a cavern. Forty feet to his left glowed the dispatch office windows, with Ishikawa inside. The driver was talking to someone behind a desk, waving his pudgy hands. Viper couldn't see anyone else.

He checked his watch. In a couple minutes, workers were supposed to start loading consoles onto the truck. Somewhere out there among the rows of plastic-wrapped boxes and wooden crates waited a fortune in Paku Man games.

"Hey, you," boomed a voice. "You can't smoke in here."

He whirled. A janitor in a gray smock came loping towards him, pushing a wheeled bucket. He had a thick head of hair cut spiky in punk-rock style, and after a moment Viper realized who he was.

"Nice wig."

Jun grinned. "Those coveralls are very slimming. Anyone watching us?"

"Not that I can tell."

Jun crouched and pulled a plastic bottle from the bucket's soapy water. He squirted sharp-smelling liquid onto a nearby pallet. "Lighter fluid. I've doused half the warehouse already."

"I'm supposed to deliver the consoles to a Shinjuku mall by eight. After I pull out, that's your signal to torch this place."

"You taking care of the driver?"

"Oh yeah. Got a roll of duct tape under the seat." He imagined chucking Ishikawa's music out the window. "But I think you pulled the dangerous job, this time around."

"Not to worry." Jun patted at his armpit. "I'm strapped. And a good thing, too. I could've sworn I saw—"

The crash of heavy doors slamming shut drowned him out. Overhead, bank after bank of fluorescent lights came snapping to life.

Shouts rose from the dispatch office. Four men in expensive blazers and Vuarnet sunglasses came boiling out, headed straight towards them. Ishikawa and a manager-type watched from behind a window. The trucker looked smug.

"Split up," Jun said.

Viper glimpsed a familiar bulky profile filling the office doorway. His heart caromed against his chest. Not again. He sprinted towards a row of forklifts. Big no-no, trying to run on an injured ankle. Splinters of pain shot up his right leg, making him gasp. He ran anyway. Ducked down an aisle formed by giant cardboard boxes and Paku Man consoles stacked two-high.

Footfalls scraped behind him. He darted left, taking another aisle. This place was a labyrinth. If it wasn't for the white light glaring down he could try and hide.

A fork ahead. He took the right. His ankle blazed like a furnace. No other choice: he had to stop and dose with Jun's magic painkillers. His hands shook, snatching two yellow tabs from his coverall pockets. He dry-swallowed.

Voices, coming closer.

Around his left wrist he'd sheathed a tanto knife with a six-inch blade. His instincts screamed run rather than fight, but there wasn't any other option. Out came the knife.

Adrenalin trickled through his fingers as he gripped the hilt. Or maybe it was the amphetamine kicking in. A synergy of both. He still felt the pain in his ankle, the fear, but it didn't matter as much. What mattered: two distinct pairs of footsteps, shuffling close.

Coming around the corner.

He thrust quick as his namesake. The tanto's chisel-tip pierced the first man's white blazer through the breast pocket. His eyes went wide beneath the big Vuarnet lenses. Viper yanked the blade out with a spray of arterial blood. The second man raised a hand, his mouth forming an 'O' as his companion slumped to the concrete. Viper's slash caught him across both carotids. He went down clutching at his neck, the red stuff spurting out between his fingers.

Sweet music hummed in Viper's head. His vision narrowed to a scarlet circle. Another Tachibana heavy came spilling around the far corner, clutching a knife like his own.

Viper loosed a war-shout that would've shamed a samurai. He charged. The knife-wielder hesitated, turned to run. Viper stabbed him just under his left shoulder blade, angling up. The man dropped like a wet leaf.

Three down, Viper thought. He turned a corner and found himself back in the warehouse's open area. Jun was grappling with the fourth heavy, both men rolling across the floor. Ishikawa and the dispatch manager were nowhere to be seen.

"Get off him," Viper said, leaning down over the two men. Jun had drawn the Nambu, but his opponent gripped it by the barrel. Viper reached between them and tore the pistol free. Jun looked up. His face contorted in terror.

"Behind you," he shouted.

Viper felt air shifting against the nape of his neck.

He turned, jerking back the Nambu's lever action, and fired point-blank into Eisu Crimson. The little gun coughed and spat. Eight millimeter rounds walked tiny holes up the front of Eisu's dress shirt. Struck the ace of spades tattoo, caving in a cheekbone. Pulped his right eye.

The big man fell.

Jun grunted a warning. Viper turned again to see the fourth Tachibana goon barreling for an exit. He aimed and put the pistol's final slug into the back of his skull.

"You should see yourself right now," Jun said, breathing heavy. "You look like a fucking werewolf."

Viper rubbed at his face. His hand came away slick with blood.

"What do we do now?" Jun said.

"What we came here for. Did you see them loading any other trucks with consoles?"

"Yeah. One. I think."

"Show me. We'll find the keys."

* * *

Tendrils of black smoke were already pouring from the warehouse when they roared off in a diesel rig identical to Ishikawa's. Viper, driving, didn't hear sirens until they'd cleared the industrial district.

"Gomyo's cousin has a garage on the waterfront," he said, watching the rear-view. "We'll make for that."

They made it.

After the truck had been parked and the garage doors closed safely behind them, Viper allowed himself a cigarette. He kept waiting for the medication to wear off, to leave him in the deflated, pain-wracked state he knew he had coming.

"You must've gone through those Tachibana men like a buzz-saw," Jun said, slapping him on the shoulder. "A real killing machine."

"I did alright."

"Those consoles will be hotter than hell. We'll have to find a way to swap out the serial numbers."

"Gomyo's got people, I'm sure." Viper tossed the keys to Jun. "Let's take a look at our haul."

The truck's back doors opened with a clang. Jun peered inside.

"Um, Viper..."

* * *

Four months later.

The line for Gomyo's yakitori stand curled around the block. A huge turnout, considering the little plywood shack had just opened for business. But after the first few customers, Viper figured out why half of Uchiega district had shown up.

"There's not enough meat on here," said an old woman, who'd just received her plate of skewered chicken. "I want to talk to your manager."

Viper bowed so low the paper hat almost slid off his head. "Sorry. He's—"

"Get him out here, now."

Gomyo was already sidling up to the counter. He leaned forward, fixing the woman with the same glare he'd reserved for rival crime-bosses. She reached over and tweaked his nose.

"More meat next time, fatty," she said, "or I'll demand my money back."

Laughter erupted down the line of customers. Gomyo turned and slapped Viper's head. "More meat, idiot."

"Yes, boss."

"And tell that good-for-nothing Jun his break's over. I need him up here."

"Right away."

Viper limped out of the kitchen and into the shack's tiny seating area. Jun was hunched over a game console in the corner, the single Paku Man they'd found loaded on their stolen truck.

"Gomyo wants you," Viper said.

"Just a sec...there's a strawberry. No! Damn." Jun pounded the console.

"Move your lazy ass."

Viper watched his partner squeeze back into the kitchen. Behind him, Paku Man launched into a happy tune promising excitement.

He sighed and shoved a coin in the slot.

Mr. Elliott lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Recent stories have appeared or are slated to appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Pulp Modern #1, Drive In Fiction, Dirty Noir (Quarterly Issue), and BEAT to a PULP: Round Two. Follow him on Twitter at @TonyAmtrak.

A Small Thing at the Devil's Punchbowl

Kent Gowran

"This should take the edge off." Wally Zook rolled across the green and black checkerboard tile of his tiny kitchen and poured bourbon whiskey over his bowl of corn flakes. He shoved a spoonful of them into his mouth and talked around the mush. "It's like a pack of rabid monkeys playing skee-ball in my brain, know what I mean?"

"Sure." I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched the heavily tattooed mountain of a man shovel his booze-laden cereal into a mouth that looked like it could take in a small dog in a single bite. Wally had been a circus strongman until a cuckolded clown cut his legs out from under him with a blast from a double-barrel shotgun. "I didn't drive out to the middle of nowhere to watch you eat, Wally. You said you had something for me?"

He put down his spoon and turned his chair so he was facing me. "You got the cash?"

"Yeah."

"Let's see it."

"I want to know what I'm buying first."

"You don't trust me, Ray?" He actually looked hurt.

"I don't trust anyone."

"But we're cousins."

"Just the same. What have you got?"

Wally smiled real big. "Jed Romweber."

I don't know what I expected, but it certainly wasn't that name rolling off Wally's tongue. I guess the look on my face said it all, because he about busted a gut laughing as I peeled off hundred dollar bills.

* * *

To hear his own mother tell it, Jed Romweber was a world-class son of a bitch right from the start. And she said it with a certain amount of pride in her voice and a sparkle in her eye. When I told her I might have a line on her missing son, she came off the old floral print couch in her living room like a mama tiger ready to pounce.

"You know where my boy is?" Doris Romweber grabbed both my arms with her withered hands and squeezed. "Do you?"

"I think I do," I said. "But are you sure you wouldn't want the cops to handle this? Or even a private investigator?"

"I don't trust the police," she said. "And I've hired my share of detectives, Mr. Perkins. I'm done with all of that."

I almost asked her why, but I didn't really want to know, so I skipped it. "All right. I'm going to need a plane ticket to Las Vegas."

Doris released my arms and went back to the couch and lifted a cushion. She unzipped it slowly and peered inside for a moment before reaching in and bringing out a stack of cash. She held it out to me. "This should cover your expenses."

I took the money. "Want a receipt?"

"I trust you," she said.

"You don't know me, Mrs. Romweber."

"I know Georgia Samson's mother."

She didn't have to say anything more.

* * *

I figured I'd grab some sleep on the flight from O'Hare to McCarran International, but it didn't work out. For the first part of the flight, a nervous guy in a suit that smelled like he worked in a flower shop talked to me about the system he had worked out for counting cards. He finally turned to talk to the guy in the window seat when I told him I was pretty sure the casinos had goons on staff to hurt guys like him.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and saw Georgia Samson's face.

Georgia Samson was a sweet kid, once upon a time. Back when we were in high school together, I was crazy about her. The one and only regret I have in life is that when she asked me to go to California with her, I said no. I don't even remember the reason anymore.

The next time I saw Georgia, it was ten years later and she was dead, her body nailed to the floor in the master bedroom of a mansion in Beverley Hills. I can still see her dead green eyes staring up at me. There was no accusation there. Just a void of hopelessness.

Her killers never saw the inside of a courtroom, and that mansion burned down to the ground. I brought Georgia's body home to her mother, and I don't think more than a handful of words passed between us, but she knew.

That's the kind of thing that will eat you alive it you let it. I stepped off the plane and reminded myself of that fact. Still, as I walked through McCarran, I wondered if I'd be bringing another dead body home to a waiting mother.

* * *

I got a cab from the airport over to Frankie's Tiki Room near the Las Vegas Strip. The pink neon that lit up the nighttime sky was something else. Inside the place, the carved wood and cool artwork on the walls immediately had me thinking I should ditch Chicago and call Vegas home.

I made my way to the bar and waited for the bartender to finish placing a couple of impressive looking drinks in front of a pair of customers who plainly worshipped Tupelo's favorite son. As she turned and walked her way to my end of the bar, I watched her in a way that made me feel a strong kinship with the wolf in those old Tex Avery cartoons. Red hair fell past her shoulders and it was all I could do just then to not reach out and touch it, to pull her close and tell her I was a lost sinner ready to come home and worship her the rest of my days.

"You'd have to be Ray Perkins," she said.

"And that would make you Amber Karch."

She looked at me like she was reading my mind. "You're here on business. Let's keep that in mind, Mr. Perkins."

"Call me Ray." I leaned on the bar. "I have money."

"For what?"

"Jed Romweber."

She frowned at that. "I don't know what Wally told you...."

"He said you know where I can find Romweber."

"I do."

"And I've got the cash to pay you for that information."

"I don't want your money."

"It's not my money. It's from Romweber's mother."

"I don't want her money either."

I couldn't figure out what kind of game she was running. "Everyone wants money," I said. "I don't have the patience for games, Ms. Karch."

She surprised me by reaching out and taking hold of the collar of my shirt. She pulled me close enough to kiss and said, "I'm not playing games with you, and I don't want the money. Understand?"

"Sure," I said. "All right." I could see the headlines. Tough Guy Ray Perkins Beat Up By A Girl. And then I started to think maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if that were what she was into, I could get to liking it real quick.

"I'm done here in half an hour. We'll go get Jed then." She let go of my shirt and stepped back. "Now how about a drink?"

"What do you recommend?"

She narrowed her eyes, tapped a finger on the bar three times and said, "A Lava Letch is the drink for you, Mr. Perkins."

"Let's have it. And call me Ray, all right?"

"We'll see."

* * *

I don't know what all was in the Lava Letch I drank, but it was powerful and good. As I followed Amber outside, I thought I might need to have another one of those before heading back to Chicago.

"Here we are," she said and stopped in from of a sea foam green 1958 Impala.

"Wow."

"I like to think so." She unlocked her door and opened it. "Get in the car. We have a long drive ahead of us."

I walked around the car and admired its lines as I went. An absolutely beautiful machine. I got in on the passenger side just as she cranked the engine. "Where are we going?"

"To the desert," she said. "To The Devil's Punchbowl."

"What's that? Some sort of geological formation or something?"

She laughed at that. "No. It's a bar. Jed's there."

"You sure?"

"He's always there, Ray."

It felt good to hear her say my name. "I think I could get used to this place."

"That's funny." She pulled out onto Charleston and pointed the impala toward the Strip. "I was just thinking maybe I could get used to you."

* * *

We drove a couple hours outside of Vegas, and in that time we covered a lot of territory. And I don't mean miles on the road. By the time Amber brought the Impala to a stop along the road, I was shakin' all over, just like the song. I'd never connected with anyone some immediately, and completely, and I really didn't know if I should grab onto her and never let go, or run away as fast as I could, screaming like a madman through the desert at night.

"Do you know Jed?"

"Not really."

Amber opened her door. "Let's go inside."

I got out and went to stand next to her. We stood there and looked at the low building that was The Devil's Punchbowl. There were quite a few cars in the lot, and we could hear music coming from inside the place.

We walked side by side, and when I took hold of Amber's hand she didn't pull away. At the door, we stopped and she took hold of the front of my shirt again. This time we kissed.

* * *

We took a small table at the back of the place and ordered a couple beers and some food.

"They do great barbecue here," she said.

"Yeah?"

"The best."

"That's a bold statement."

"Wait until you taste it."

The jukebox in the place played an impressive mix of old rock'n'roll, rockabilly, instrumental surf tunes, and some electric blues. There was a group of bikers at the bar, the real deal, not the stockbroker weekend warrior types you see most of the time. One of them had a very big and mean looking bowie knife on his hip. He was the teddy bear in the bunch.

"You don't need to size up the place, Ray."

I looked at Amber. "I don't?"

She shook her head. "Listen, about Jed—"

"Here you go. Two brisket platters." The waitress put the food in front of us and my mouth started to water. "Anything else?"

"A couple more beers would be good," I said. "Thanks."

"Be right back." She walked off and I turned back to Amber. "You were saying?"

"Jed ran with a weird crowd."

"Like those bikers over there?"

"No, not like them. Try the barbecue."

I forked a bite into my mouth and was more than impressed. "Goddamn. This is good barbecue."

"Told you so."

I took the last swallow of beer from my glass and by the time I put it back on the table, the waitress was back with two more and swiped away the empty glasses.

"She does good work," I said.

"Her name is Gloria. She and Jed were married."

I swung around and got another look at her. "And why aren't they married now?"

"Jed had other interests that were more important to him than marriage."

"I'm thinking Jed was a fool."

"That's probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about him."

I thought about his mother and said, "Seems likely."

* * *

The big guy standing outside the door to the backroom looked like a gorilla who'd lost all his hair and had a bad attitude about it, but when Amber smiled at him he lit up. "Amber! Been a long time. How're you doing?"

"Good, Victor." She looked at me quick and added, "Real good, actually."

Victor turned his eyes on me and stuck out a big right hand. "Victor Schlitz. Just like the beer."

I shook his hand and we managed to avoid any of that macho see who can squeeze harder bullshit. "Ray Perkins. Good to meet you."

"You here about the little guy?"

I looked at Amber. "Little guy?"

"He doesn't know the whole story yet," Amber said to Victor.

"Oh. Sorry."

She waved him off. "It's nothing. Can we go on back?"

Victor used a key on the padlock that secured the door and opened it up for us. "Use the back way when you leave. We don't want anyone seeing Jed on the way out."

"Of course. See you later, Victor."

Amber disappeared into the darkness beyond the door and I started to follow but Victor put a hand on my shoulder and stopped me. "She likes you," he said.

"I think the feeling's more than mutual." That's about as close to pouring my heart out to a stranger as I've ever come. Talk about an uncomfortable feeling. Or maybe that was just the weight of Victor's hand on me.

"You hurt her, I'll twist your head right off your body."

I had didn't doubt he could do it. "You have nothing to worry about."

Victor released me. "She's waiting."

* * *

The back room of The Devil's Punchbowl was dark, lit only by candles, and the walls were covered with old rock'n'roll show flyers, weird artwork, and lots of bones. Most of which I was willing to assume, but some of them, well, they looked like human bones to me. I kept that observation to myself as Amber directed my attention to a birdcage with a cloth over it in the corner of the backroom.

"There's Jed. Want to take a look?'

"What do you mean?"

"Lift the cloth and get a look at him."

"He's in the birdcage?"

She nodded. "Jed got involved with some people into some weird shit. Really weird, Ray, nothing garden variety or cute and kitschy about it. He got in over his head. And when he tried to run, they caught up with him."

I walked to the birdcage and yanked off the cloth. "What the hell is that?"

"It's Jed."

Inside the birdcage was a shrunken head. Its mouth was sewn shut and its eyes were closed. It hung from the bird perch by its hair. I pulled out my wallet and removed the picture of Jed I had there. I held it up in front of the cage. "Sonofabitch."

"They left it on Gloria's doorstep a little more than a year ago. She didn't know what to do with it, so she brought it here. It kinda blends in back here."

"How did Wally know about it?"

"Victor told him. They were in the circus together. Victor saved your cousin's life when that clown shot him."

"He never said much about it."

"Would you?"

"Good point."

"So, Ray, what do you want to do with Jed?"

Hell of a question. I put the cloth back over the birdcage and turned to Amber. "I should take him back to his mother. She's a tough old bird. She'd want him back, I think, even like that."

"You'll never get him through airport security."

"Good point," I said. I looked at her there in the flickering darkness and remembered Georgia Samson. I wasn't going to make a wrong decision again. "Are you up for a really long drive?"

She didn't hesitate. "I'll need to stop off for a few things."

"All right."

"And you'll have to use that bankroll of yours for gas money."

"I'm sure Mrs. Romweber won't mind that."

Amber moved in close and we kissed again. Fireworks went off in the darkness. She broke off the kiss and said, "You could use a shower, too."

Kent Gowran lives and works in Chicago. His stories have appeared in Plots with Guns, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, F Magazine, A Twist of Noir, and other wild venues. Along with two nefarious cohorts, he edits the online flash fiction zine, Shotgun Honey.

Obstruction

Glenn Gray

Javier Santana was dead.

Doctor Mitchell Ross gowned up, clicked a shiny new blade on the scalpel, shook his head thinking how young the guy was.

Ross leaned and pushed. Sliced. Parted skin overlying the left pectoral muscle. Shoulder to xyphoid process. Another smooth cut opened a deep gash from the right shoulder, connecting the other gash at the xyphoid. Continued the incision down midline, carving a semicircle around the umbilicus to the pubic bone, ending up with a crude "Y" gouged into Javier's chest and abdomen.

Ralphie Gomez strutted in, late again, set a cup of coffee on the counter next to the sink, saying, "Hey, Doc. You know you really gotta try the salsa thing man cause I get so much ass. Know what I mean? I mean, I get ass anyways but when you dancing so sexy and you get that puta so close, man oh man, give'em the eye and they melt, man. Telling you."

Ross lifted the V-shaped breast plate, angled it over Javier's face, exposing neck, heart, lungs. He started to hack through abdominal wall, tearing fat and rectus musculature, exposing lumpy omentum, mesentery and bowel loops, which glistened like loose coils of wet Italian sausage in the overhanging light.

"That's fine, Ralphie." Ross half-smiled, only mildly annoyed. Ralphie did provide much needed daily amusement. "About the ass and all, but we gotta get through this autopsy. Gotta give a lecture to the first year med students in an hour. Get that tray over his legs. I'm gonna yank this stuff out, see what the hell's going on."

"You want me a give'em that talk, Doc?" Ralphie snapped on latex gloves, smirking. He slid on a mask with a clear plastic shield, protecting his eyes. Grabbed a tray off the floor that looked like it could be used for a breakfast-in-bed thing, dropped it over Javier's legs, providing an elevated workspace below the abdomen. "I know this shit like anybody."

"Don't doubt it, Chico." Ross had his hand buried under intestine, pushing it aside to see the attachment. "I think these students want a professor who's actually been to med school."

"Whatever." Ralphie shrugged. "I serious, man. I take you to the club uptown. You see what I mean. Spanish chicks with big ass and all, man. Real concha peluda, too. You like that shit, eh?"

"Don't think the wife and kids would appreciate the club. Eh?"

"Let me know you change your mind," Ralphie said. "Who this guy anyways?"

"Javier Santana. Twenty-nine. Found dead in his room. Marriott Express by Kennedy Airport."

"Sucks." Ralphie pulled apart layers of the abdominal wall, helping Ross, getting into the flow of things. "The hotel's shit anyways."

Ross splayed the pericardial sac, slit the pulmonary trunk, slid a finger into the main pulmonary artery, checking for clot. Nothing.

The abdomen exposed, Ralphie busied himself on the neck, tying off the carotid and subclavian arteries as they tunneled out of the thoracic cavity, coursing toward the head. Cut the larynx, esophagus, wriggled them downward. "You think happened?"

"Probably drugs, this kind of story." Ross cut and pulled, got the heart, lungs and mass of abdominal organs detached. Flopped the whole mess onto the tray, dripping, sliding. "But who knows. Room was clean. Could've been an aneurysm or something."

"Where he coming from? Colombia?"

"Don't know." Ross reached for the scalpel. "I mean wasn't known yet. Had no passport or tickets. Just a New York State driver's license."

Ross severed each lung at the hilum, plopped them on the hanging scale, read off the weight. Ralphie jotted it down on a sheet of paper, put the heart and lungs onto a separate tray on the counter. Next to Ralphie's coffee. With a sword-like silver knife, Ralphie started cutting the lungs like a loaf of bread. Ross got busy with the abdominal organs on the tray.

"These lungs lookin juicy, Doc." Ralphie pushed on a thick slice of lung with a gloved finger. "Like a soaked sponge."

Ross craned his neck, got a glance at the tan tissue. Nodded. "Edema."

Ralphie continued slicing. "The heck that lecture on anyways?"

"Ovarian tumors. Radiologic, pathologic correlation." Ross held the stomach, snipped with scissors. He abruptly stopped, whistled.

Ralphie tabled the knife. Looked over.

"Well lookie here." Ross flicked at the stomach contents with a finger. "Goody bags."

Ralphie got alongside. A better look. "Holy crap. That what I think it is?"

"Yesiree." Ross stretched the stomach walls, parted them. Better exposure. Looked like a wet leather purse stuffed with soggy cigar butts.

"Coke or smack?"

"Gimme that basin," Ross said. "Probably heroin, given the pulmonary edema."

"Mierda." Ralphie presented a silver metallic bowl. Ross grabbed it. "How many there?"

"Don't know. Twenty, twenty-five." Ross plucked out the oblong capsules with forceps, plopped them into the basin. "Bet there's some in the small bowel too."

"Look like them stuffed Greek grape leafs," Ralphie said. "I like them shits."

"They're okay. Wouldn't want to eat one of these suckers, though."

"The high of your life, eh?"

"Then death," Ross said. "Stomach looks pretty distended. These here are all lodged in the duodenum. Guy obstructed at the gastric outlet."

"Ate too many, huh?"

"Not just that. Check this out." Ross held up a flattened baggie between pinched fingers. "Ruptured."

"Damn," Ralphie said.

"Got a huge blast of heroin. Gastric mucosa sucked this stuff up like a starving vacuum. Straight to the bloodstream."

"How many grams each a those things?"

"Think about ten."

"They packed with condoms?"

"Usually. Seem more advanced, though." Ross fingered a capsule close to the light, squinting. "Some sort of latex. Sometimes they layer it with cellophane, maybe put on a wax coating. Whatever Javier did, it failed."

"Stupid chico. Pendejo."

Ross slid the basin on the counter, cupped the colon, massaged gently. "Sigmoid feels a bit lumpy. Probably has some stuff packed in there, too."

"Man, he loaded. Still gonna crack his head?"

"Sure. Gotta be complete. You know that."

"Right. I'll crank it up. Get it going." Ralphie crammed a stained wood block under Javier's neck. Angled the head up and forward. Got a scalpel. Put metal to hair and skin. Sliced the scalp from ear to ear around the back of the skull. Peeled the tissue forward with force, tearing connective tissue, twisted it upside down over Javier's face. Pulled the Stryker saw from a drawer, plugged it in.

Ralphie clicked a button. The saw whirred to life. The sound dropped a pitch as it sunk to bone.

Ross continued clearing the stomach. After a moment, Ross chopped a hand at Ralphie. "That the door?"

The saw stopped whirring. Ralphie threw a questioning look. "Que?"

"Thought I heard a knock."

"Didn't hear nothing." Ralph clanked the saw to the table. Pulled off his mask. Floated it to the counter. Went to the door. He peeked through the small square tinted window at eye level. Squinted. Two guys in suits. Didn't look familiar. He cracked the door.

Ralphie said, "Sup."

"We're from the FBI. Need to talk to you."

"Bout what?"

"That patient there."

"In the middle of the autopsy."

"Don't matter. Racing against time here."

Silence.

From deeper in the room, Ross: "Who's that Ralphie?"

"Says FBI."

"Fifteen minutes, okay?" Ross didn't take his eyes off Javier. "Almost done."

"We need to talk to the doctor in charge." The guy stared down Ralphie. "You him?"

"I'm the diener"

"The what?"

"Diener. Pathology assistant."

"Great." The guy brushed past, a little elbow jab for Ralphie. "Can't wait."

The door swung shut. The other guy waited outside.

Ross stood beside the body, gloved hands out in front, neck twisted, looking over. Tugged the mask down around his neck. Ralphie stood by the door, hands at his sides, fists balled. The guy stood between them, closer to Ralphie, hands clasping the lapels of his coat, grinning.

Ralphie sensed something wasn't right. "You guys usually wait till we're done. Give us our respect."

"This is a very unusual circumstance."

The guy reached into his coat. Came out with a pistol. Held it up, looking at Ralphie. "9 mm Semiautomatic. Fifteen round clip. Can put a few in you. A few in your boy there, just like that. Like a little sing song. Even have a few left over."

"What the fuck?" Ralphie stepped toward the guy.

"Easy, hotshot." The guy leveled the gun at Ralphie's chest. "What are you? The doc's secret service boy? Huh?"

Ralphie hesitated.

The guy looked around, made a scrunched up face. "Man this room smells nasty."

Ralphie leaned in. "You just turn the fuck round it bothering you so much." Jerking his head to the door.

"Okay wiener man. Whatever you are. You a big hotshot, right? We here for our shit. We need our shit like now. You got our shit?"

"You ain't getting no shit, amigo."

"Ralphie," Ross said, voice different now, softer. "Let the guy talk."

"Smart move. Guess that's why you the doctor. Can make this easy or hard. Actually I wanna make this quick cause the smell is killing me. Don't wanna get no cancer or something breathing this shit. Doc, can I get cancer breathing this shit? Well I guess not or you wouldn't be breathing it, right? How the hell you work like this?"

"Who're you guys anyways?" Ralphie said.

"You don't worry," The guy said. "No. Know what?" He looked over at Javier, thought about the heroin, nodded. "You just call me Scag. Okay?"

"I got a better one," Ralphie said. "How bout Pinga?"

"Funny." Scag relaxed on his heels, spun quickly, cold-cocked Ralphie across the head with a handful of metal, a spray of spit arced the air. Ralphie crumpled. Met the tile floor. Ralphie struggled, a little dazed, got onto an elbow, took a kick to the head with a steel-toed boot. He stayed on the floor, out cold, on his stomach.

"Like I was saying, Doc." Scag massaged his knuckles. "How you work in this shit?"

Ross didn't move. He spoke deliberately, stone-faced. "You. Get. Used to it."

"Not me. Nope. Never get used to this nasty shit smell. Guess that's why I never went to med school huh, Doc?"

Ross squinted. Evaluated Ralphie. "Whatever."

"You know? I seen dead bodies before. Was okay with it, but never like this with all the freakin lights and guts hanging and everything. All naked, opened up. Creepy shit, man."

"Another reason I guess you didn't go to medical school."

"That's it, Doc. You enjoying yourself now. What I like to see. Nice and easy. I bet you can guess why I'm here. Being you all smart and shit, huh? You get my shit from Javier?"

"I got it, yeah. Who the fuck are you anyway?"

"Wow. You say 'fuck'? Man you gettin' nasty. Don't think I ever hear a doctor talk that way. All street and shit. You allowed to do that, Doc? Say 'fuck' and 'shit'?"

"Actually, that would be intercourse and feces. That's what you would learn in med school."

"That's nice with the words and all. You really teaching me nice. All the big science words. Glad I came today. Now you don't worry 'bout who I am. I'm Scag, remember? Let's just say the Big Boys sent us."

Ross inhaled. Wondering if he was pushing it. "Fine."

"Fine. I like that. Starting to get into the whole thing now. Things are gonna go just fine. Now Doc, you think you can teach me a little more shit while I'm here? Like a little bonus or something? Maybe teach me some amatomacal shit or something?"

"If you like. Be glad to help out. Better the world some."

"Man, you funny. A funny cool doctor. Street doc. Ain't that a riot?"

"Just take the stuff, okay? It's right here."

"That all of it?"

"Think there's more in the colon. Was just about to retrieve it."

"Retrieve it from the colon? Like the ass? Retrieve? I like that, too. Man, I learning all sorts a shit from you. We'll wait, Fuckface."

Scag approached the table. Had his back to Ralphie. Leaned in to better see in front of Ross. Kept a slight distance.

Ross slowly, mechanically, picked up the blunt-tip scissors from the counter, started to cut the top wall of the sigmoid colon along its length. As if he were cutting a sheet of wrapping paper.

Ralphie stirred on the floor. Rubbed his head. He glanced Scag. Made a mad crawl, like some rabid animal. Grabbed Scag around the knees, pushed off, hooking his hands, squeezing and pushing.

Scag lost his balance, tipped, reached for air, tumbled over. Cracked his forehead on the table edge, sending the pistol skittering across the floor. Scag's hand had hooked into Javier's vacant chest cavity, dragged the body half off the steel, so that Javier's head, chest and arms were dangling. Stiff arms overhead now.

Scag landed on his back, face to face with Javier. A gush of viscous body fluid poured from Javier's chest cavity, splashed onto Scag's face and neck. He didn't move.

The door burst open. The other guy rushed, gun drawn, looking around. Trying to figure what the hell was all the racket.

"Hold it!"

He saw Scag. Supine, unconscious. Forehead gash. Ralphie climbing to his feet, turning. The guy reacted, from the gut, pumped off a round. Sent Ralphie to the floor, against the wall. He sat still, his shoulder looking like fresh ground beef.

Nervous, the guy looked around, agitated, said to Ross, "Come on man. Just gimme the shit. Give it to me. Let's move it. Move it!"

"Okay, okay." Ross tried to calm things down. Don't get shot. "It's not all out yet. There's a bunch in the colon. Was just going to cut it out."

"Come on come on, then. Cut it out. Get it to me." He leaned. Beckoned Scag. "Yo. Get up, man. Get. The. Fuck. Up."

Scag stirred.

Ross watched.

Ross knew this was it. His only chance. He cupped a load of small intestine. Both hands. Webby mesentery. Unraveled, floppy loops of wet sweet Italian sausage. Lifted it. Sent it flying. Slammed the guy's face. Encased his head. He let out a muffled yell. Reflexively dropped the gun, hands grappling. He danced back, arms flailing, as if fighting some alien octopus.

Ross turned swiftly, like a dance move. Lifted the long steel knife from the counter, an automatic reaction. An uncharacteristic throaty savage yell. Jabbed forward as if holding a dueling sword, buried the blade in the guy's neck, right through a mushy sausage segment. Ross stood frozen, arm still extended. Watched the guy stumble around drunkenly.

Gurgling. Oozing. Ross couldn't help but think which structures his weapon had traversed. Probably just below the level of the vocal cords. Maybe through thyroid cartilage. Esophagus? Thyroid isthmus? Pretty damn good placement.

On the floor, Scag was coming around. Rubbing his eyes. Moaning. Face and shirt slick with wetness. Mumbling fast. Something along the lines of getting Javier's shit.

Scag's partner pedaled in reverse, crashed back-first into a glass cabinet. Ross slipped into the cooler, thudded the heavy reinforced door.

Scag glimpsed through burning eyes. Grabbed at the basin full of heroin capsules. Frantically stuffing his coat pockets, moving quickly, starting to hear some commotion in the hallway. Trying to get all his shit.

He spotted the gun. On the floor. Swept it up, took a step to the cooler, grabbed the handle. Tugged. It was stiff. He banged the door, said out loud, "Get you next time, doctor asshole." He started for the door. Freedom. He skidded on the wet tile, almost lost his footing.

Hand gripped door handle. That's when he heard it.

It was Ralphie, from across the room. Weak. "Yo, amigo."

Scag looked round, turning his head first, slow motion-like. Knew he was in a bad position. His back to the main action. Swung his body. Then the gun-arm. Knew it wasn't going to be fast enough.

He glimpsed Ralphie. Just a flash, a fleeting image like a fuzzy bad dream. Sitting against the wall, shit-eating grin. One arm limp, the other outstretched, reaching for its life. His fist tight, crushing the pistol. The black metal glowed in the harsh light.

Ralphie ticked his head at the gun. "Think you forgot something."

Glenn Gray's stories have appeared in numerous online magazines and print anthologies. He lives in New York.

The Death Fantastique

John Hornor Jacobs

She had a tattoo on her right breast that read "le morte fantastique." After they fucked—fucked hard for forty minutes and in every position he'd ever performed or even seen before—Efram lay on the motel's broke-down mattress and listened to the air conditioner tick and hum while he inspected her body, running thick fingers over her skin.

"What's that mean?"

"What?"

"Your titty. Is that French or something?"

She smiled, weakly, and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. Efram liked the way she looked, wary, big-eyed and delicate, like she'd spent too much time indoors when she was a girl. She had some bruising here and there, but nothing that didn't come with the business.

"Means a 'fantastic death.'"

"I got that much. What's that mean, though?"

He balled thick fingers into a fist and then opened them, as if he'd caught an insect and then released it just to be sure he'd caught it in the first place. He didn't like to be talked down to, not by men or women. Not by trim like her. But there'd been too many misunderstandings in the past that ended with blood, screaming, or prison, so now Efram asked questions. Enough questions to know when no more questions were necessary.

"Hon, I don't know. It looked cool. The tattoo guy said it meant to come. Like it was French for creaming your jeans." She lit a cigarette and then gave a little laugh, blue smoke coming from her nose. "But I found out later, that wasn't what it meant. It's pretty, though, ain't it?"

The tattoo arched over her breast, fluid script, with little flourishes and florals and a bird worked into design, as if descending to seize the fruit of her nipple, plum colored and erect in the cold air blowing from the conditioner.

He wanted another beer, but he couldn't leave her here.

"Time to go, Melissa."

She looked at him, squinting her eyes.

"You trying to get rid of me?"

"Nah. Just want some more beer, and you can't stay here without me."

"Why, you got some blow or something?"

That was exactly what he had, a brick of it, blood spattered and fresh from New Orleans, waiting for Gene Corso to pick up, but the Dew Drop Inn in El Dorado, Arkansas, wasn't high on Corso's priority list and there was some understandable heat involved with the merchandise. So, Efram had to babysit the shit while it cooled. A week or more, from on high.

He grunted, sat up and found his jeans, tugged them on. "Nah. A ton of Krueggerands." That sounded cool. He'd heard the boys talk about the coins they nabbed from a B&E in Little Rock.

"We can't stay a little longer?" She sat up in the bed, pulled the covers over her breasts, pouted, changed tack and cut him sexy looks, batting the lashes. Then she rolled her eyes and laughed.

"I need a beer."

"I can make you forget all that, honey." She laughed again. New to tricking, maybe. Nervous. Still new enough for there to be some laughter left.

"Cost me more?"

"Sure. Nothing's free."

"I need a beer."

She lay back down, put an arm over her eyes. "Gimme the money then. Ray-Ray'll want it right when I get there."

She rolled on her side and sobbed once, a lonely, desperate little girl sound. He pulled on his jacket, withdrew his wallet and thumbed the bills, counting, and then dropped the money near her face. She grabbed it, levered herself up from the bed and stomped into the bathroom.

She showered but didn't wet her hair. Efram thought about the logistics and reasoning behind that as she dressed, pulling on the tube top and tight skirt. Why do you take a shower if you're not gonna wash your hair? Because you got some localized dirt, maybe. Between your legs. Most whores he'd been with were content to piss after a tussle.

He sat on the bed watching her while she touched up her makeup in the mirror. When she put on her heels, Efram realized how small her feet were and felt a moment of sadness that she had to live like that, fucking strangers, but the moment passed and they went out into the motel parking lot, bright with the buzz of halogen lights and swarmed with insects.

* * *

Tin-roofed and directly across the highway from a rank smelling bayou, the tonk was called The Shoehorn and had a down-beat blues band garbling Muddy Waters and Albert King while middle-aged women, running to fat, waited tables in outfits that were obvious knock-offs of Hooters waitress garb, the porn-star roller derby look. The building buzzed with neon beer signs and stank of stale beer and cigarette smoke but promised to stay open until 5 a.m. When the band stopped for a break, Efram heard the cicadas whirring heavily in cypress beyond the thin walls. A patron fed dollar bills into the juke-box, breaking the drone of insects.

He sat near the front plate glass window with a view of the parking lot and ordered a beer. Melissa went to a back booth and sat down with a thick-set, mulleted man.

Efram drank his beer, ordered another, and watched the TV in the reflection of the barback mirror, trying to puzzle out the reversed words. He wasn't surprised when the big man slid up to the bar and sat down next to him. Ray-Ray, most likely.

"So, you enjoy your little party with Melissa?"

Efram looked at the man. He was missing his eye-teeth and had jaundiced skin, but was bull-thick and young enough to be stupid and careless. His mullet curled in greased ringlets and his leather jacket creaked when he moved.

"Yeah. It was a good time, you know, cake and punch and shit." Ray-Ray looked puzzled so Efram said, "Pin the tail on the donkey."

"Ha. You're jerking my chain."

"Nah. I'm sure you can jerk it yourself."

He laughed, maybe a little too hard. "Good one. I'm Ray-Ray." He stuck out his hand.

Efram glanced at his outstretched hand, took it, gave one pump, and then turned back to the mirror.

Ray-Ray gestured to the bartender, raising a meaty paw. She brought him a glass of whiskey, rocks. He slurped half of it and then turned to face Efram.

"El Dorado's a nice little town. You moving down here?"

"Nope. Just visiting. Seeing the sights."

"There's a lot of nice stuff to see, you know. El Dorado is the city of gold, if you know what I mean."

"That right?"

"Sure."

"Interesting thing to know. You a history teacher or something?"

"No." He laughed again, this time with less force.

"You the local bully boy, then?"

"Damn straight."

"I'll keep that in mind then, pard. Thanks for the heads-up."

Ray-Ray finished his drink, ordered another one, and sat with his arms crossed on the smooth dark wood of the bar.

"''Lissa tells me you want to move some merchandise."

"She did, huh?"

Efram tilted his head to peer around Ray-Ray's bulk, down the length of the narrow building, where Melissa sat in a booth. When she saw him staring at her, she fumbled with her cigarettes, lit one, and then looked into her drink.

"Yeah, that's right." Ray-Ray smiled again. "I can help you move whatever you got."

"You must've got some lines crossed, pard. I ain't got nothing to move."

"Right. Not what she says."

Efram finished his beer and ordered another.

"Well, thanks for the offer. I'll let you know if I need your help."

Ray-Ray stood, raised his glass and knocked his head back. He set the glass on the bar and leaned in close. "This here's my town. You shitbag fucks come down here from Little Rock and try to do business, I'm taking what's mine, you hear?"

Efram took a swallow of beer.

"That right?"

"That's one hundred percent right."

"Okay, hoss. Next time I try to do business in this dump, I'll be sure to let you know."

Ray-Ray stood like a bull, air coming through his nostrils, all trace of joviality gone. Efram waited. When it became obvious Efram wasn't going to throw a punch or pull out a wallet and give him all the cash, Ray-Ray turned and walked stiffly back to Melissa in the back booth.

Efram drank his beer and watched the reversed television in the bar's mirror.

* * *

The air conditioner had totally beaded the window with condensation when the knock came at the door, so he had to wipe it clear to check if she had anyone with her.

Shirtless, he opened the door, but kept on the chain.

"Yeah?"

"It's me."

"I can see that. You forget something?"

"No." She huddled in the yellow glow of the parking lot lights holding a bag with both hands, pushing her tits together with her arms as if she was cold, even though it was steaming in the dark. "He was..."

She sobbed and turned her head so he could see her face. Her left cheek was swollen and her eye socket purpling and streaming with tears.

"You look like shit."

"Ray-Ray got mad after you talked."

"Sorry to hear that. Looks like he did a number on your face."

She shivered again, took a deep breath of air, and then said, "I didn't have anywhere else to go."

"You don't have here."

"Please. Let me in."

"No."

"I'll take care of you, baby. Please."

The whine in her voice made Efram want to slam the door, but he stood there, looking at her for a long time. Finally, he undid the chain and opened the door all the way. She came inside.

He said, "Empty the bag on the bed."

"Why? It's just clothes."

"Don't give a shit. Empty it."

She stepped to the bed, opened the bag, up-ended it and shook out the contents. Clothes, panties, unopened cigarettes packets, a pint of Old Crow tumbled onto the bed followed by a cheap patent-leather wallet, tampons, and a hand-gun. Chrome.

"See you got a Saturday Night Special." He snatched it up, took the magazine and worked the action to make sure there were none in the chamber. He tossed her the gun, walked back to the motel room safe at the bottom of the closet, dialed the combination, and put the magazine inside. She watched him closely.

"What, you don't trust me?"

He laughed, then, and grabbed her pint of whiskey. He poured them both a drink in the small motel glasses.

"Thanks. I needed the laugh."

She scowled and then sat down on the bed. "I don't like being laughed at."

"Don't like being lied to."

"I didn't lie to you."

He didn't say anything. It was late now, but he turned on the TV to ESPN SportsCenter and slid back against the headboard, holding his whiskey on his chest. She stayed at the foot of the bed, hunched over. After a while, she scooped her clothes and belongings back into the bag, picked up her glass and moved to rest beside Efram.

He sipped his whiskey and put his arm around her, pulling her in close. His hand hung above her breast with the tattoo, and eventually she bent over, worked open his jeans and took him in her mouth. He sipped his whiskey and watched the television while her head moved up and down and he brushed back her hair and held it so he could watch her bruised face in the blue light of the TV when he came.

A long time later, he fell asleep, her head cradled in his lap.

* * *

The muzzle pressed into his eye-socket but it was more than the pain of the muzzle that woke him, it was her screaming and the opaline stink of Ray-Ray in a tight space and the sensation of his sclera popping and his own blood and vitreous fluids gushing from his socket like tears.

"You said you wouldn't kill him!"

"Where is it?" Ray-Ray wasn't playing the gadabout now. He pulled the muzzle from the ruined eye-socket and swiped it across Efram's skull, which made the world go white and sounded like the tolling of a bell.

"You crushed his..."

The blurry figure tilted and righted itself.

"He's bleeding from his eye. He's gonna have to go to the hospital..."

"Shut up." The closer silhouette raised an arm, and even blurry, Efram could tell he was threatening to hit her. "Just shut your fucking mouth."

He grabbed Efram's arm and jerked him up. "Where is it? I'll jam the barrel so far in your hole that it'll tickle your goddamned memory."

Efram tilted his head toward the closet. It was disconcerting that Ray-Ray called it his "hole" but there it was. No more eye. Ray-Ray pushed him toward the back of the motel room, one beefy hand on the nape of his neck. He shoved him onto the floor in front of the safe.

"I told you he had it in the safe, baby. I did just like you said."

Ray-Ray put the gun to Efram's skull.

"I don't give a shit about this carpet. I'll decorate it."

Efram went through the combination, once, twice, but couldn't make it open.

"You're dead if you're fucking with me." The way Ray-Ray made threats, unnecessarily and with such force, it made Efram redouble his efforts to calm his hands.

"Having trouble seeing. Can we turn on a light or something?"

"Turn on the light, 'Lissa."

She moved to the light switch near the TV credenza and switched them on. Things began to come into focus for Efram, the safe, the threadbare stained carpet, the trash bin under the motel sink. His head spun and he put a hand up to his eye—it throbbed, full of pain, yet it had an empty, slack feel and he couldn't open his eyelids, even when he tried.

"You ain't never seeing out of that motherfucker again, Popeye." Ray-Ray gave a hoarse laugh. "Now open the fucking safe if you want to keep your other one."

Efram went through the combination again, turned the miniature safe latch, and the steel door swung open. Ray-Ray put a boot in his ribs, bowling him over, and reached in the safe and withdrew a gym bag. He tossed it on the bed.

"Open it." He waved the gun at Melissa and then back at Efram.

From where he lay on the floor, Efram could see the magazine to Melissa's handgun still in the safe. Not much help without the pistol to go with it, but he reached out and grabbed it anyway while they inspected the gym bag. He pushed himself to his feet and backed into the sink, keeping his hands at his sides.

"What's this?" Ray-Ray said. "Where's the fucking gold?"

"Gold?" Efram said. For a moment things didn't make sense. He shook his head. The motion made his socket and face erupt with pain but it was too funny not to laugh. "What gold?"

Ray-Ray swelled in the small room, inhaling air.

"Baby. Look." She held up the brick.

"Yeah, so what?"

"It's blow, baby." The brick gleamed dully in the motel room's light and they moved it to the small table. Melissa sat down, cradling it like a baby. It had been dipped in some sort of paraffin.

"Bullshit."

"Honey, it is."

"Open it."

She found a pen in the bedside drawer and jammed it into the paraffin, past the plastic wrapping so the cocaine spilled onto the cheap wooden table top. She swiped the powder with her finger and rubbed it on her gums.

"Oh shit."

"Lemme try."

Ray-Ray jammed a finger into the paraffin's breach, wormed it around, and then rubbed his gums as well.

"That's one helluva nummie. Fuck." He turned around in a circle, as if trying to find what had brought him such good luck. "Can you believe this shit, babe? You said Krugerrands and I thought he had a few thousand in gold on him. But this! It's like winning the fucking lottery."

They made Efram sit in a chair, but didn't bother to tie him. When Ray-Ray saw his balled fist, he swiped the top of his head again with the pistol and pulled the clip out of numb fingers.

"What were you gonna do with this, asshole?"

Efram sat cocooned in pain, his eye socket throbbing and pulsing and sending tendrils up to join with his aching, gun-sapped head. Melissa couldn't find a mirror, so she took down one of the cheap framed pictures from the wall—a hideous farm-scene done in pink and orange sfumato style—and cut the blow on the glass. She huffed two lines, one in each nostril, and then tilted her head back and held out the rolled up twenty to Ray-Ray.

He took it and bent to snort the lines. For an instant, Efram thought of attacking him while the man was occupied with the cocaine, but Ray-Ray still held the gun and Efram's head was spinning. The blood welled in his eye-socket and dribbled down his cheek.

"You know you guys are dead, right?" The vibrations from speaking nearly made him vomit. Bile burned in the back of his throat.

Ray-Ray held a finger against a nostril, shutting it, and snorted cocaine deep into his sinuses.

"That right, tough guy?"

"That's right, dumb ass."

Ray-Ray stepped toward Efram, but before he could pistol whip him again, Efram vomited yellow bile on the floor.

Melissa squealed, ignoring the retching sounds from Efram.

"Baby, this is good shit." She thrummed, her leg bouncing.

"Cut some more. Then I'll take care of this asshole." He ignored the vomit.

She dug a key into the brick, knocking loose powder and rocks onto the picture's glass and cut them with a driver's license. Before, she had seemed concerned for Efram's health, but now, with an unlimited high in front of her, she wasn't as finicky about his welfare. Typical.

"You just can't walk with a brick of coke and think nobody's gonna come lookin' for you." It was better now that he'd vomited. His eye still throbbed horribly and the pain made it hard to think, but he could function. Could still speak. Feeling was coming into his hands and legs. Maybe I'm going into shock. Or coming out of it. Better than feeling it. Fuck. My eye.

"They won't give a shit about me, but the brick..." He shifted in the chair. "They'll find you."

Ray-Ray laughed again then bent to do two more enormous lines. When he straightened, nose caked in powder, he grinned. "'Bout time we visited family down in Lake Charles, huh, babe?" He gestured for Efram to rise with the gun, a casual gesture like it was an extension of his hand.

Efram stood and moved to the door.

"I'll be back in a little while, 'Lissa. Just gonna put him on the next bus back to Little Rock."

She looked up and smiled at Ray-Ray. "Really?"

"Sure. Why not? We got what we wanted, right?" He put the pistol below Efram's crushed eye, brushed his bloody cheek. "He's got a little taste of how we play down here."

"Okay, baby. 'Bye Efram. It was fun."

He looked at her, her wary bruised face, her long slender neck and the slope of her breasts and realized that a forty minute fuck and a blowjob weren't worth this shit.

Ray-Ray shoved the gun in his back. "Put on some clothes, asshole."

Efram pulled on a T-shirt and boots, watching Ray-Ray. The big man grinned and worked his jaw, in and out and around, the way the blow takes them.

Ray-Ray shoved Efram out the door once he was dressed, into the over-bright afternoon sunlight and sweltering heat. He held Efram's arm. The man was strong.

He led Efram to a sunburst Camaro with "Ray-Ray" painted on the jet-black rear window-shield. It had a shovel and tool box in the bed. There was dirt on the shovel blade, which didn't make Efram feel much better.

"Nice." Efram nodded at the paintwork. "Subtle."

"Shut up, dead man."

He shoved some keys into Efram's hands. Efram got behind the wheel and the seat burned his back and legs while Ray-Ray raced around the front and hopped in and jammed the pistol into his gut.

"Right about now, you're thinking all kinds of shit, I imagine. Just forget it. If you so much as put a hair out of line, I'll just start pulling the trigger."

"Right."

"There ain't nothing you can do to stop what's coming." He smiled. "That's just the way it's gotta be. Start the car."

Efram twisted the key and then followed the burly man's directions. They drove out of town and turned off the highway, and followed a gravel road for a few miles and then turned off it into a cypress brake where the air grew thicker. They followed the road and Efram noticed that the jitters that had affected Melissa before leaving the motel were hitting Ray-Ray now. He was pale and flushed with sweat. He considered running the car into a tree, but they weren't going fast enough here anyway and the other man was built like a damned tank.

"This is Bayou Bartholomew. You're gonna get to know it better than you've ever known anything before or since."

The sun was directly overhead, hazy and bright and pounding, and Efram could feel his shirt sticking to the fake leather Camaro seats. His armpits were wet, and he felt the trickle of sweat down his obliques.

The coke must've really been working on the man because Ray-Ray was chalk-white and dripping when he told Efram to stop.

He stopped the car and opened the door.

"Slow down, fireball," Ray-Ray said, grinning. He snatched the keys from the ignition. He mopped at his face with his forearm.

They exited the car and the big man motioned Efram to walk in front. Crickets whirred in the cypress and the grass of the rise. The path was surrounded by stagnant water, thick with the scum of blue-green algae. The air was still.

"Like soup out here."

"Shut up." He jabbed the gun in Efram's back again.

They walked the path, grass tugging at their pants cuffs. It became overgrown, edged in ball cypress roots, shaded by trees. The grass diminished until the ground was covered in brown cypress fronds and golf-ball sized seeds. The trail ended in an old dock. There were a couple of flatbottoms upturned on the muddy shore.

"Keep walking."

They walked to the end of the dock, a good twenty feet out from shore. There was no reflection of sky in the scummy water but, out in the distance, Efram watched a moccasin sliding across the bayou's surface.

"Ok. Here's where you get off."

The silence of the bayou drew out, and everything stilled as he turned to face Ray-Ray, who mopped the sweat from his forehead with his gun arm, and this time Efram moved, slamming his shoulder into Ray-Ray's gut and propelling him into the air and down to the water with a huge splash.

The pop sounded muffled and indistinct, under the water, and when they broached the surface, Efram on Ray-Ray's back, one arm tight around his neck and the other grappling with his gun hand, Ray-Ray pulled off two more shots, away and in the air, and then the gun clicked and Efram drew the larger man underwater again.

When they came up again Ray-Ray didn't have the gun anymore and Efram had both arms locked around his neck, pushing his chin hard down into his chest. Efram gasped and took in a huge draught of air, while Ray-Ray grunted and tore at the bands cutting off his breath, digging red furrows in Efram's arms. They rolled on the surface and submerged again into the dark water.

The cicadas whirred, their drawn out chirrups rising and falling. The circle of water where they had risen was slowly choked out by the returning ring of algae.

Efram rose to the surface, alone, gasping.

He only had to swim a few feet before he could stand and then he trudged back to the shore and was halfway to the car when he realized he'd have to dive for the keys.

He found the gun, water-logged and useless, before he found Ray-Ray's body, and was able to swim him close enough to shore to dig the car-keys out of his pocket.

From the Camaro, he retrieved the shovel and used the blade to put a hole in Ray-Ray's belly and throat so that he wouldn't float, at least not for a while, but it was tough going, jabbing a dirt encrusted shovel into a corpse. Finally he had to get back into the water and swim Ray-Ray as far out as he could and shove him away, hoping that the bayou had alligators.

Four hours later he pulled Ray-Ray's Camaro into the motel parking lot, twilight seeping up into the western sky and the halogen lights of the parking lot buzzing, swarmed with insects. He could see the blue light flicker of TV through a gap in the drapes. He went to his room and held the key, staring. He put a hand on the door and imagined he could feel the fluttering beat of the heart of a bird beyond it, tenuous, frantic, powerless. He didn't know what he was going to do once he opened the door.

She lay on the floor, one hand clutching the bed linens, mouth rimed in spittle and bile. In her spasms, her shirt twisted and pulled away to expose most of her tattooed breast.

Efram shut the door.

He stripped his sodden shirt and jeans, picked up the pint of Old Crow and poured himself a drink. He drank it naked. Then he went to the sink and washed out the ruin of his eye. He added more whiskey into the glass, bent his head to the glass's mouth, and put the burning circle to his eye-socket and titled his head back and screamed at the ceiling as the whiskey filled his eye-hole. He wiped it out with tissues.

When he was dressed in dry clothes, he poured the rest of the pint into his glass, grabbed the phone book from the credenza drawer, and sat at the table. He stepped over her body to get there.

There was a mound of blow on the picture frame and it looked like she'd kept tooting until her heart gave out, or had seized. This brick had been cut once, maybe, before packaging. No telling really.

In death, her coloration hadn't changed much except for blue lips and grey nipple underneath the words "le mort fantastique." Now the bird looked as if it shied away from the fruit, and time had withered the florals and ivy.

"Just fantastic, Melissa. You fucked me real good."

He opened the book and began searching for a store that sold paraffin candles.

John Hornor Jacobs has worked in advertising for the last fifteen years, played in bands, and pursued art in various forms. He is also, in his copious spare time, a novelist, represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. His first novel, Southern Gods, was published by Night Shade Books. His second novel, This Dark Earth, will be published in July, 2012, by Gallery/Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. His young adult series, The Incarcerado Trilogy comprised of The Twelve Fingered Boy, Incarcerado, and The End of All Things, will be published by Carolrhoda Labs, an imprint of Lerner Publishing.

Ric with No K

Patricia Abbott

Ric didn't look at me once when they took him out of the courtroom. I was sitting next to Mrs. Roney, my latest foster mother. Mrs. Roney put her arm around my shoulders as Ric passed by, probably 'cause people were watching. I noticed when I came to their house three months ago that Mrs. Roney was a lot nicer to me when other people were around. She put on a little show, hugging me, whispering in my ear, pretending to know all about me.

Mr. Roney, a little bitty man with hair that stuck out and a nearly flat nose, never came to the trial at all. There was no real meanness in him though. Meanness took more energy than he seemed to have.

It was Mrs. Roney that took in stray children. Mr. Roney just went along with it. If he had something to say to me, he usually told his wife—even with me standing right there. Like, "Tell Rumer she left her jacket on the patio."

Mrs. Roney didn't actually repeat his words, but looked at me till I went to do it. This is just an example though 'cause I never left my jacket anywhere but in my room. I wasn't the only kid coming and going in that house. Most of Mr. Roney's remarks were about chores needing doing or things done wrong. Square corners on beds was one of his biggest worries and he made me cover all my school books with grocery store brown bags to protect them—even after I told him they didn't charge nothing for marks on books at my school. He also hid bags of the kind of candy that comes at Halloween in the yellow shoe pockets that hung from his closet wall.

Ric's lawyer and the court's attorney both said I should be there for the sentencing, not that I'd ever have missed it. And that Mrs. Roney should be there too. They told me to stay away the rest of the time.

"You never take your eyes off him," Ric's attorney said. And we didn't need to keep reminding him I was fifteen.

I planned on making everyone understand about Ric and me during the trial. I lay in bed every night, first at the Children's Home, then at the Roney's place in the Whispering Pines Subdivision, trying to figure out what I'd say. I had a good idea of the questions Ric's lawyer and the D.A. would ask from the times we talked before the trial. But when I said that stuff in court, it came out all wrong. Sounded dirty and cheap—the things Ric and me did together.

Maybe I can get it down right on paper, when there's no one watching or listening or telling me what to say. Ric's lawyer said he was going to appeal the sentence so I'd get another crack at getting it right.

The trouble is— it seems so long ago. Some of the things, I might have made up in my head, and the D.A. might have made up stuff to keep there too.

"Don't let them manipulate you," a therapist in the Children's Home told me once. But it's hard to know when that's happening.

`No one guessed the judge would come down so hard on Ric—sending him away for twelve to twenty years. I wanted to gasp or scream when I heard the judge say it. But I knew Ric wouldn't like any of those dramatics, so I held back. If there's a new trial, like Ric's lawyer says there'll be, I can get my story right. I can explain what we were to each other to the whole world.

My mother—Jessie— was only seventeen when she had me and I don't know if she even guessed she was going to have such a thing. Folks say my mother was a dreamy sort of girl. It was hard to talk to her about anything like the weather or who's president, but she knew every fact about Demi Moore and Tom Cruise. Grew up on those stars. She didn't even need to see their movies after a while—just made her own movies up in her head. I could see those movies whirling around when she looked at magazines from the eighties she'd saved in an old red record player case. I could see her lips mouthing the words. She even named me after Demi and Bruce Willis' first kid, Rumer. I'm just glad I was born before the third girl came along, the one called Tallulah.

Welfare took away my baby brother, Emilio, when I was seven, but let me stay with my mother 'cause I was pretty good at foolin' people into thinking she could take care of me. I went to school every day, in clean if used-up clothes. I got good enough marks to move up every spring. Made sure Jessie showed up at school or at the church once in a while, watched what she wore outside, and chased her home from her stopping places before midnight. You might think I mean bars by that, but I always found her swinging in the playground or sitting on that low wall over by the Peasley's garden.

Lots of people knew Jessie Simcoe couldn't take care of a guinea pig much less a kid, but they probably also knew firsthand what happened to kids in foster care. So no one said anything. And I was doing all right mostly—even if I didn't have any friends or much money to spend on things. I could live with that easy. I could do that with my eyes shut.

I was still in middle-school when I met Ric. This is exactly how it happened: I was coming home from school, just passing the convenience store at the corner of Walnut Street and Fifth when I saw Ric coming out through the glass doors. He was about to put a cigarette in his mouth, but when he saw me he put it behind his ear instead and squinted, shading his eyes with his hand. That was about the first time I remember anyone really taking notice of me. He stopped flat in his tracks, eyeing me good. I figured he was about eighteen, though it turned out Ric was twenty-five or more then. Never said he was younger than he was; I just believed it.

I saw him again the next day except this time, he said, "We've gotta stop meeting like this," which made me laugh though I tried to swallow most of it down.

Knew enough not to take up with strange men on the street. That's a good way of ending up in the children's home or, even worse, at that place for girls that get knocked up or flunk out of the tough love class at the high school.

The third time I saw him was about three days later 'cause the weekend came up about then and got in the way. Ric was already out in the street that Monday, leaning against his car, a little red Contour, when I passed by. He did a little dance and I stopped dead, probably with my big mouth open.

"Name's Ric with no K," he said. But I misheard him and thought he said, "Name's Ric. Okay?"

"It's okay with me," I said, shrugging. He laughed, thinking I was making a joke. And that's how we met finally.

It turned out there was no K in Ric because his real name was Ricardo not Richard. He was short and awful skinny with dark hair and even darker eyes. I thought he was pretty nice-looking, but I'm nearly the only one ever did. No one took a shine to either of us before that day. About made each other up.

We kind of stood there till Ric lit a cigarette and offered me a drag. I'd been smoking since I was ten—any time Jessie had money to buy her Salems I took a few. Ric never smoked the same brand twice. Said it was like buying the same candy bar every time. I took the drag and made the smoke go up my nose. I'd practiced that at home enough to be pretty good at it. Ric said he guessed I could keep the cigarette for myself after that stunt. Lit another one and we mostly just smoked cigarettes and watched the cars go in and out of the lot.

I started counting those cars the way I always do but kept that information to myself. Nobody needs to know I count everything that can be counted. Cars turning into a lot, number of people waiting in line, number of chairs in a room. A real bad habit, but I need to keep track, otherwise things get away from me.

The lot was busy with people buying stuff for dinner. Pastor Wilkins, from the church I sometimes dragged Jessie to, pulled into the lot and I took off, hoping he hadn't spotted me. Pastor Wilkins' church is kind of strict but it's the closest one to our apartment and we never did get a car since Jessie don't drive. I think if she did, she'd drive till she hit the Atlantic Ocean and still keep going.

Ric and I met up quite a bit. The D.A. said later, he was reeling me in, but it wasn't like that. Not really. We just played music, and talked, and smoked cigarettes. Ric never tried to get me to drink or smoke weed. And he didn't try to kiss me. Not for a long time. By the time he did, I wanted him to, been thinking about him doing that and more every night. Putting my own hands where his would soon be.

So one day we just started kissing and it felt like something we should have been doing all along. It was like falling off the bank into Tyson's pond for the first time each summer. When that water flowed over you, nothing ever felt so good. I wanted to do more than just kissing right away—even if doing that stuff made me a slut like some people might say. I wanted him to pour into and over me. I wanted to carry him inside me like he was my baby and my boyfriend all at once. I bet nobody in that courtroom wanted to hear that, but that's how it was. For me, at least. Before Ric, I only had mama and that wasn't enough—cause of how she was.

Ric made his living doing favors for a man named Mr. Nerone, who owned a club 'cross the river. That's what Ric always called it—doing favors—not working for him. Favors like picking up Mr. Nerone's laundry, chauffeuring him around town, picking up money from people who owed him. One time Ric was waiting for me in a navy-blue Cadillac. That was the car used for driving Mr. Nerone around town. Ric made me sit on a towel to keep the seat clean, but it was still nice.

Mr. Nerone was an important man. I could tell that from how twitchy Ric was when he'd just been to see him or was planning to go. I pictured him as big, but when I finally saw Mr. Nerone, he was a tiny man, fat, with piggy blue eyes, and smelling of some old cologne. Mr. Nerone had a regular guy named Tommy who drove him most places, but Ric was the backup driver and fixin' to be number one some day.

After a while, it seemed like a good idea not to hang around that 7-Eleven store all the time so we drove around the times Ric had enough gas. Or else we sat in the car next to our rinky-dink airport and watched planes come and go. Not many did, but I counted them, of course. Ric didn't mind. He said there were a couple of weird things he did too, though he wouldn't say what.

One day, we were sitting there doing nothing when Ric asked me if I wanted to make a little money. "You just have to go into the bathroom at that gas station over on Birch and wait till a lady shows up with a package."

I didn't much like the sound of hanging around in a bathroom, but Ric said he'd be right outside and it would definitely be a woman who came in with the package. It was the same nasty bathroom for men or ladies so why couldn't he wait in there? Truthfully, I was scared that some man might come in and show me his thing. This had happened to a few girls at school in public bathrooms, and, once on a bus, Sheri Mason once had to hold a man's thing till he rang the bell to get off.

"He got off in more ways than one," Sheri told us the next day, making a face.

I don't think it really was a woman who came in either. She was too big and her voice wasn't right though she didn't say much. She was wearing a peacock-blue dress like she'd just been to dinner at a fancy restaurant and wore makeup and nail polish and lots of heavy gold jewelry that rattled when she walked. After I gave Ric the package, he peeked inside, smiled, and then he gave me ten dollars.

"Not bad for ten minutes' work," he said, trying to get past it. When I didn't smile or say anything at all, he added, "I hate sulky women." So I had to stop being a big baby.

There were other days Ric asked me to do things. None of them were sex things like the D.A. said though. Not unless you count letting his friend, Pico, go to third base on me for his birthday. Pico was eighteen and had never been with a girl. Ric said it was the best present we could give him and it hardly bothered me at all. It didn't even take five minutes before he was finished. And I knew Ric was standing outside if Pico tried anything more, but he didn't. Pico just got a shit-eating grin on his face when Ric opened the car door afterwards. Then we all split a pizza and never once talked about it.

The thing that finally got us in trouble happened because of my mother. I really didn't know why Ric wanted to meet her so much. I finally brought him home to meet Jessie on one of her better days. She was only a few years older than him and knew some of the same people from high school. She wore her best pair of jeans and her hair was fixed up pretty good though she was always prone to sticking something in it. That day, she'd stuck in a pinwheel. I don't even know where Jessie found things like pinwheels. But wandering around the way she did, she found some wondrous things and stacked them up all over the apartment. Once in a while, I would get rid of some of the smellier or dirtier stuff, but the pile grew up again like she watered it at night. You'd think Jessie'd come across something valuable from time to time, but if she did, she hid those items away. The piles I saw were the same things you saw in trash cans at the park: broken toys, candle stubs, empty food and wine containers, discarded magazines, dirty combs, torn clothing, a lost glove. So the pinwheel was a pretty good find for her.

Ric went out later and brought back takeout from the Summer Palace Restaurant, and I found out that day that my mother knows how to use chopsticks. Ric held one in each hand and stabbed his food, which made us laugh. That was one of the best nights we ever had. Later, we watched an old movie called Stripes with Bill Murray and drank a liter of Diet Coke and ate a jumbo-sized bag of Cheetos between us.

When I fell asleep, Jessie and Ric were still looking through her high school yearbook, which I didn't even know she had. Ric said later it was somebody else's yearbook—from some other high school in some other state, but that makes it even better to me. Maybe my mother even walked over to that other state to get it. Jessie could walk farther than anyone I ever met as long as she was going forward. Anyway, it was nice to fall asleep with the sound of my mother and boyfriend laughing in the next room. Felt real normal. Later people'd say they did more than just talk, but I don't believe it.

Ric came over a couple more times, but Jessie was never that good again. On her worst days, she just rambled on about old TV shows that no one else even remembered. But that's why we lived as good as we did—for her being crazy. She got a check each month from the state and a little more money from the county. We could stretch that money into a life for us if nothing bad happened.

Ric was nice about it though and never said anything mean to her. And when she fell asleep in her armchair, we could have sex in her bedroom instead of in the car. That part worked out real good. Even though the sheets were gritty and the window bled cold air right in on us, we didn't mind 'cause we could be naked there instead of half or more dressed—like in the car.

Next comes the hardest part to tell right. My grandmother, who lived down in Kentucky, left us some money from selling her house. After she died, that is. It was a lot of money— about ten thousand dollars. Granny's lawyer made Jessie put it in the bank, telling us to keep it for a rainy day. When Ric was fooling around in her room one day, he found her bankbook in an old purse and asked me about it.

"You know I could double or triple it in no time," he said. "You know, Mr. Nerone has a guy does nothing but make money for him."

Wasn't hard talking my mother into it either. It was raining outside but she marched right down the bank, got that money out, and handed it over. Ric gave us an IOU, which Jessie fastened to the fridge with a Strawberry Shortcake magnet.

A month or two later, Jessie got a letter from her half-brother in Kentucky saying didn't we want to put a headstone on Granny's grave? Jessie decided she really did want to do that and while she was at it, she wanted to send a gift to Coco Arquette, Courtney Cox's new baby. Jessie had been a real fan of Courtney Cox since she saw her climb up on the stage with Bruce Springsteen in that "Dancing in the Dark" video

"Just get me two thousand dollars of the money for the headstone and Coco Arquette and let the rest keep growing," Jessie decided. "I can get something nice for both of them with that." She was sitting in the chair, looking at a catalogue from the Target store when I left.

I couldn't find Ric that day, nor the one after that. I took a bus up there twice a day for the next three days. But he was never home. I could tell that from a distance 'cause the mail was making the door hang open and his Ford Contour was gone. Ric had disappeared like this before so I wasn't the least bit worried except Jessie kept dogging me. She'd forgotten about the headstone already but she had a bunch of stuff picked out for that Coco Arquette. Stuff that even I knew no rich lady's kid would wear or want.

"I'll go up and get it tomorrow," I told her, figuring Ric would be home by then. "And maybe we can even have a party—like we did that one time."

Jessie's face lit up. "Chinese food," she remembered. She looked around wildly, and I know she was worrying about those darned chopsticks.

"Maybe we'll buy some other kind this time," I said. "How about Mexican? We'll bring it home after I get him. Burritos," I reminded her, not sure if she knew what Mexican food was.

I took the bus to Ric's place again. It'd gotten real dark, like it might start to rain and I didn't have an umbrella. I'm not fussy about much, but I hate to get wet, and all the kidding in the world about me melting won't change it. Ric's door was shut, the mail gone. I knocked for ten minutes but nobody answered. Finally some old man from next door came out and screamed at me to go away—that I was disturbing his sick wife and his old dog. I could hear the dog howling so I left after a bit.

Didn't have any money just then so I couldn't go and get Jessie any tacos and came home empty-handed as usual. Or to where our home used to be because the house wasn't there. All that was left was some smoky, burnt boards, electrical wiring, a few old pipes, a sink, and some pieces of metal and furniture that hardly looked like furniture at all. Our refrigerator looked like someone took an axe to it. Jessie's bed, an iron stead, was black where one it was golden. The chimney was propped up like a drunken man on the porch next door. What was left smelled twice as bad as the processing plant south of town. It wasn't just the smell of fire but of chemicals mixing in with it. That yellow tape you see on TV kept me from going inside.

"This your house?" a policeman asked, stopping me when I tried to duck under the tape. I nodded. "Looks like someone burned it down," he said, half-scolding and half- feeling sorry for me. "Your mama a smoker?"

I nodded. "But she never smokes inside. Had a cousin died that way." I looked around, feeling sick to death. "Where is she?"

He didn't answer me. "How do you think this happened if she doesn't smoke? Who would have burned down your house? Do you have any enemies? Owe any money?"

While I was thinking about that, the neighbor lady walked over and said, "I saw Jessie lighting candles all over the house. Like she was getting ready for a party. Twitting about like some damned fairy."

She started to laugh but stopped herself when she saw that cop's face. I wanted to tell that lady to be quiet 'cause she made it sound like Jessie was crazy, not like she was just getting ready for Mexican food and having Ric over again.

"I could see inside real good," the old witch explained. "I could see her flitting around from one room to the next, her long white skirt catching the draft from time to time."

I started shaking my head. I knew that skirt she was talking about, but where would Jessie get all those candles? And then I remembered those piles of junk and the dollar store in town that had closed down a week or two ago.

"Where's my mother?" I asked again.

"Why, she's at the hospital," the neighbor lady said. "They took her there in an ambulance." The cop grabbed my arm just in time.

* * *

Jessie didn't die that night, but I never did see her face again because they had so much ointment and stuff covering it.

"Was it those dollar store candles?" I asked her more than once, but she didn't say a word or move a muscle. I don't know why I kept fixin' on those candles. It was all I could think to say with her under that gauze. I couldn't pick up her hand, or touch her at all. Just stood there and talked about candles—the nurses, one black and one white, lookin' at me like I was brain dead instead of Jessie.

After that, they took me to the children's home and started looking for Ric. I had to tell them about Ric—just too many things came back to him. Never thought they'd blame him. Didn't see how they could. It was Jessie who burned the house down after all.

Those cops did though 'cause they heard lots of other bad stuff in my story. The D.A. said all Jessie's money was gone as far as they could tell. Ric used it up in the first few days after I gave it to him though no one ever said how. They also said he'd raped me and hired me out as a whore and a drug courier. Lots of other bad stuff too. The biggest lie that D.A. told was that Ric slept with my mother and that was why Jessie got dressed up and lit candles all over the house. She was dreaming of her lover.

The love we had for those four months was real—the realest thing I ever knew. I think when Ric gets out we will be together again, maybe have a place of our own. I just wish Ric looked at me once when he passed out of the courtroom. Maybe he didn't even recognize me after all this time. My hair's a lot longer. Mrs. Roney says it might be because I'm practically a woman now. I'm counting on that.

Patti Abbott is the author of Monkey Justice, a collection of her stories from Snubnose Press. Future stories will appear in Off The Record, Plots with Guns, Grim Tales, BEAT to a PULP: Round Two, Yellow Mama, and The Texas Gardener. You can find her at http://pattinase.blogspot.com or walking the streets of Detroit.

Black-Eyed Susan

Thomas Pluck

"What do ya tell a woman with two black eyes?" The doughy slob with the buzz cut asked me. "Nothin'! You done told her twice already!"

I wiped the bar down, then laughed. "That's a good one."

He fired a machine gun laugh, and his two stringy buddies hooted along, slapping backs and shoulders. They'd marched in with the factory crowd at quitting time. Rest of the customers had already gone home for supper.

I wrung the rag out, tucked it in my apron.

"I finally made you laugh," he said. "New here, ain't ya? What's your name, boy?"

I'm no boy. Even got a few gray hairs in my sandy mop. "Name's Zeke."

"Don't get many Zekes no more," he said. "My name's Jed." He looked like a big kid, with a pig nose and freckles.

"How about a round on the house, since we both got Bible names?" I said.

They smiled. Thought it was a joke, flashed jumbled teeth. Their eyes went wide when I poured four drafts, whiskey back.

"Y'all mind if I drink with ya?" I said.

"Not one bit! Put her there!"

I did.

"You got soft hands," Jed said, and gave my hand the crusher. His wedding ring dug in.

"Pulling taps and pouring whiskey ain't that hard," I smiled.

"Huh." He threw back his shot, followed with a slug of beer. His pals followed suit.

I sipped mine, savoring the fire.

"Ya ain't warshed many glasses, then," Jed said. "Ollie's hands got more cracks than a plumber's ass. Where is Ollie, anyway?"

"I do believe he is gettin' rode hard and put away wet," I said, "by a member of the female persuasion."

"That's Ollie," he said, hoisting his beer. "Regular ol' pussy hound."

"He does like to brag about his belt notches."

"He's even had a taste of what I'm gettin'," Jed laughed. When I raised my eyebrows, he added, "I couldn't say no to the price!"

His friends whistled, like they'd had a taste, too.

"You sound like a local boy, Zeke."

"Ya got me, Jed. I used to live round here." I said.

"Why would you ever leave?" he asked, and they laughed.

"I'm not cut out for hard work," I said. "I got a job up in Pittsburgh."

"What kinda work? I know you ain't no bartender."

"Well, let's just say Ollie kicks up to the fella I work for. He does real well, but boss says he's gotta expand a little."

Jed and his boys looked around the place. It wasn't much more than a trailer with a few deer heads, neon signs and a busted Trophy Hunter arcade game.

"Y'all fixin' to bring in poker machines?"

It was my turn to laugh. "If you mean poker in front and liquor in the rear," I said. "We figure you factory boys need to let off some steam. We're gonna have girls out back."

"We got truck stop bunnies by the Interstate," Jed said, with a knowing grin.

"This is high quality merchandise," I said. "Ollie's giving her a test drive. Redheaded girl, with pipe fitter lips and a set of freckled melons that'll make you sit up and beg for buttermilk."

They looked at each other, dug in their pockets for cash. Jed said, "Zeke, ain't it customary for the first round to be on the house?"

"A free ride?" I rubbed my chin. "Aw, hell. I like you boys. And you'll want more."

They laughed, and we headed out back to Ollie's pad. It was a small trailer with a lean to it. One sickly yellow light glowed at the dirty window. We heard humping and moaning through the thin walls.

"She sounds wild! Headboard's bangin' like mad!" Jed hooted. "I'm goin' first."

The twins grumbled amongst themselves.

"No rough stuff," I said. "Boss don't want damaged goods."

"Can I smack her fine ass a little?" Jed asked.

"You leave a bruise, you'll meet the boys who got rough hands," I said. "From ax handles and bolt cutters."

They chuckled nervously.

I knocked hard on the door. "Finish him off, Susan," I hollered.

The banging stopped. A curvy silhouette appeared in the window.

The boys sucked air through their teeth, eyes locked on the door.

It swung inward, and a creamy white leg slid out. Toenails painted blue, thighs full and firm, leading up to Daisy Dukes cut like bikini bottoms. Tight bare midriff, shirt cut ragged exposing the heavy crescent swells of her breasts.

"Damn," Jed said.

"Lord," the twins echoed.

She stepped into the light and snarled with scabbed lips, below two smoldering black eyes. She held a bloody shovel, looked up at us and hissed like a pissed-off raccoon.

Jed stammered. "Katie Sue?"

I thumbed back the hammer of my Colt. Two flat cracks and Jed's knees spat streams of red. He fell with his hands in the dirt.

The twins froze, piss blooming on the front of their jeans.

"Y'all got four knees, and I got four shells."

They gave me a look like I was the devil waving his pecker, and took off toward the road.

Jed looked up, moaning through puke bubbles.

"I'd say it's nice to meet you, brother-in-law," I said, "but it ain't."

Jed tried to speak, and threw up in the dirt.

I turned to Katie Sue. "Sis, you go right ahead."

She swung without a word. The shovel's blade clanged off his temple, sent an eye to right field.

I took the shovel, and started digging.

Jed watched with his one good eye, and pawed at the dirt.

"What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? When she's my kin, you beg her to shoot, so you don't get buried alive."

Thomas Pluck writes unflinching fiction with heart. His story "Black-Eyed Susan" won the 1st place Bullet Award in September 2011. He has been published in Pulp Modern, Crimespree Magazine, BEAT to a PULP, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Utne Reader and elsewhere. He is co-editor of The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology, and he is working on his first novel. His home on the web is www.pluckyoutoo.com.

The Blooming of Lester

Brad Green

Three things Lester Leroy Haight knew without a doubt: peanut butter tasted like dandelions, a woman's voice curved, and he was going to kill Hilton Fishtrap. Ever since Hilton had clubbed him with a tire iron and wooed away his sweet Evaleen, the world had been awry. Snow filled his eyes when the sun shined. The soft blush of water drops splintered ice into his thumb. Everything was backwards and wrong, but, most of all, Lester Leroy Haight had lost his love. For that, Hilton Fishtrap had to die.

* * *

Lester had taken to writing what he wanted to say on a chalk board since the tire iron had left his tongue permanently confused.

GUN, he wrote, shoving the board across the counter.

Mr. Kaufman of Kaufman's Mercantile had a neck baggy with skin. "What you planning on doing with a gun, Lester?"

Lester tapped the word he'd written, said "Sausage patty."

Kaufman pushed the chalk board back across the counter. "I can't help you."

Skunk was what Lester wanted to say. Kaufman should believe that. After all, Lester lived in Skunk Hollow, but each time Lester opened his mouth, sausage patty came out. He couldn't help thinking of the gun turning Hilton Fishtrap's face into a red mist, but he didn't trust his hand to not confess on the board. He gripped the chalk in his fist, trying to untangle his mind enough to speak.

"Sausage patty," Lester repeated.

Kaufman shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

* * *

It'd been four years since Lester had last seen his brother Malcolm. Malcolm wore round glasses that turned his eyes vague. His mouth was small and red, like a woman's.

Lester knocked on his door and waited. A warm stripe of sunshine turned his back golden. He hoped Malcolm didn't hold a grudge.

When the door opened, Lester instinctively ducked, but Malcolm just stood there rubbing the bald dome of his head. "Lester, it's four fucking a.m."

"Cockatoo," Lester said, then shook his head. Four a.m. reminded him of nights with Evaleen, her shuddering marshmallow thighs. Lester scratched the chalk against the board while Malcolm squinted his eyes and yawned.

HEAD GOT BUSTED, Lester wrote. CAN'T TALK STRAIGHT.

"I heard," Malcolm said. "You went after a Fishtrap brother."

The side of his fist wiped the board clean and Lester scratched out a message, showing the board to Malcolm.

"No. The Fishtrap brothers have been good to me," Malcolm said.

Lester shook the chalkboard at his brother's face.

"I'm not giving you a gun." Malcolm closed the door.

* * *

Lester worked the prybar under the back window of Kaufman's Mercantile. Wood splintered and, when the window raised, a cough of air smelling like mildew and vanilla spilled out. Inside was a long room of shelves with silver eyes of glass on the floor. Lester stepped so the glass didn't crack under his boots.

He found the .38 snubnose. He rattled a box of ammunition against his ear. On his way back to the broken window, he stopped before the candy shelf. Something grape sounded good. He'd missed grape since the tire iron. The wrapper crinkled. Lester thumbed one of the purple candies into his mouth and spit. Tasted like it was full of hair.

He pulled the chalk from his pocket and scratched the word SORRY on the counter.

* * *

The gun was cool and light in his hand, like the breast of a witch. The black handle grew slick in Lester's palm while he crouched in the rectangular shadow of a garbage bin. Heat oozed from the bin's metal. Lester watched the barber shop across the street. Every Tuesday, Hilton arrived a bit after noon to have his hair trimmed.

"Falling skies," Lester whispered.

Evaleen had cut his hair last. Her cool fingers against his scalp. The warm pillow of her belly against his shoulder.

Sometime later, Hilton Fishtrap's '41 Olds creaked to a stop in front of the barber shop. Lester pulled the hammer back, settled his elbow on his knee and pointed the gun. Sunlight glinted on the window glass as the door swung open. This was it, Lester thought. No one crosses Lester Leroy Haight.

When a head appeared, the gun bucked.

* * *

Lester Leroy Haight ran as fast as he could. A bullet chipped the brick and left a warm scratch across his cheek as he ducked into an alley. Damn the sun. He'd only missed because of the window glare. Lester glanced around. The back door to the Nickel and Dime was ajar. Lester pushed inside.

The Nickle and Dime was where he'd first seen Evaleen drinking beer through a straw, that yellow dress tight across her thighs. There was nothing more wondrous than the curve of Evaleen's calf or the dark, moist flesh under her left breast. Lester tried to catch his breath while two men in the bar narrowed their eyes at the .38.

"What are you doing, Lester?" The bartender's tee-shirt was yellowed under the arms and he worked a gray rag against a wet glass. "Don't even think about robbing me."

"Buzz buzz," Lester said quickly, gulping air.

The bartender chuckled. "Where's your chalk board, Lester?"

Lester heard the back door squeak open at the same time Eliot Fishtrap walked past the front window.

Lester Leroy Haight was not going to end like this. He raised the .38. Hilton first, then Eliot. That was the plan. He'd have to be fast. Ridding Button of both Fishtrap brothers would make him a hero. There might be a parade, the air full of ribbon and color. Thunderous clapping. Cheers.

The bartender clocked him in the temple with the glass and Lester fell to the ground.

* * *

Bouncing over a road. A sliver of light sparking, fading away, sparking again. A rip in a tarp? Or his eyes opening? His arms were snakes, his belly fat with black rocks. Lester moaned.

"Hit him again, Eliot. We're almost there."

The sliver of light closed.

* * *

A yellow light bulb swung from a black cord in the ceiling. Naked, Lester was strapped to a cold metal table in a green and white tiled room. Malcolm's clean room. Lester thrashed against the straps but froze when Hilton Fishtrap's long face leaned into his vision.

Hilton smiled. "Malcolm here has found a doctor in Templeton willing to pay cash money for livers, spleens, hearts. You,"—Hilton tapped Lester on the nose—"will be launching this new venture for me."

Malcolm rolled over a cart with a squeaky wheel. Toothy saws. Grinning, silver scalpels. Lester watched his brother's vague eyes blink. "Sorry, Lester," Malcolm said. "Mr. Fishtrap has offered to send me to veterinary school. You think I forgot about four years ago?"

Hilton Fishtrap tapped the bulb and started it swinging.

"Sausage patty!" Lester screamed, spittle flying from his mouth.

But as the scalpel opened his belly, Lester felt only warmth, like caramel melting on his belly. His chest full of the beating wings of doves. That tire iron had turned him into a flower. The yellow light bulb a sun. Lester was warm, so warm. If he squeezed his chin to his chest, Lester could see inside himself. What a tangle. What a quivering mess. Blue gloves pulled out a mound of flesh wobbly with veins. His heart? Had Hilton taken his heart? No, his heart hammered still in his chest. His heart was a rose unfolding like Evaleen's palm. Evaleen's fingers curling over his cheek like the legs of a spider. Lester was warm with love.

As Malcolm sliced open his skin, Lester opened to the room. He was becoming fully alive under that swinging sun. Lester Leroy Haight bloomed magnificently under the yellow light bulb.

Brad Green lives with his wife and three children in North Texas. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Surreal South '11, The Minnesota Review, The Texas Observer and elsewhere. Find him online at http://about.me/bradgreen.

The Janitor

Ron Earl Phillips

Conny Parker didn't answer his phone and it went to voicemail after the seventh ring.

"This is Conny. If I know you, leave a message."

Why bother? I flipped the phone closed and dropped it on the counter next to my cup of untouched coffee, now tepid. Conny hadn't returned the last half a dozen messages. I didn't expect another would tip the odds in my favor.

I wrapped my hand around the cold cup, taking sip of the bitter coffee. I blanched and set the cup down again. Carol, the waitress, must have seen my expression and bustled down with a fresh pot.

"Need a warm-up, Mike?"

"Afraid it will take a new cup to warm this batch up." She looked at my cup, barely a sip gone. "Sorry."

She pulled a cup from under the counter and curled me a smile as she set it down in front of me.

"Hon, it's no problem. So, he still not calling back?"

She poured me a fresh coffee. Always with a smile, Carol had been waiting here for a better part of a decade; breakfast, lunch and dinner. She knew me like I knew the well-worn menu, never changing. She knew Conny, too, from me bringing him around the last few months.

I shook my head no, picking up the fresh cup and taking a hot sip. Still bitter, but I gave her my best grin. I set it back down and Carol patted my free hand.

"Well, he's probably just forgotten to charge his phone is all. Dead battery, you know. He's probably sleeping it off, getting much needed rest with the way you work him."

"Yeah, I'd think that, but Conny's phone is ringing through. Don't they usually go to voicemail when they're dead? Turned off?"

"Mike, I don't know? I just know when my niece doesn't answer she always says it's because her phone is dead. Or she has no reception. Maybe that's it? You think?"

"Could be?" I said thoughtfully.

But in my gut, I knew different.

Conny had come looking for a job after his last rotation in Afghanistan and his final exit from the Marines. He was used to routine and responsibility, and had been his entire life. His father, Conrad Senior, had been my training officer on the job and, for a while, we had been close friends. Senior had been a strict disciplinarian and raised Conny the same. It made Conny a good Marine. Even six months out, he lived for the daily routine and proved more reliable than any help I'd had since starting All Good Cleaners back in '07. Had he been any other kid, I could imagine Conny sacked up, ignoring my calls. Only twenty-four, he deserved to be an ordinary kid.

I looked down at my watch, a faceless Timex. It was roughly 8:30 and I thought about trying the phone again when it rang.

I flipped the phone open, "Hello?"

"Hey, Mike. You coming or not?"

Carol could see the disappointment on my face.

"Tommy. Sorry. I'm still waiting on my help."

"Listen, I can't wait all morning. The bus has already left. The room's free and waiting. I need it done today."

Thomas Salamone, a ruddy Italian with a big heart and a bigger belly, owns the Moonlit Motel out on 19. It was a quiet, single floor place with fifteen units that filled up most nights with truckers and hookers. It was far enough out that cops didn't hassle Tommy about his clients. This morning Tommy, who had early on been a silent partner in All Good Cleaners, called in a favor. He had an early check out as he put it. That's why he called me.

At All Good Cleaners, we clean the messes most services don't. An early check out was when some shmuck ate a bullet or slashed their wrist or found some other creative way to punch their clock. Tommy had said it was a bleeder in a tub. That was good as long as the bathroom wasn't carpeted. At the Moonlit, it wasn't.

With Conny's help, we'd have been in and out in just over an hour. I could do it on my own, a simple tub job but I couldn't wrap my head around Conny not calling.

"Tommy, I'm not going to make it. Sorry. Give Sal a call. He'll get you fixed up this morning."

"Mike, you are going to hang me out like that? You know Sal and me don't get along."

"I don't mean to, Tommy, but what can I do? You got his number?"

The line clicked dead. I'm sure Tommy had an idea of what I could do and would be sure to tell me next time we talked. I just hoped Sal was in a good mood or I might have another clean up.

I flipped open the phone and hit the call button and stared at the contact list before selecting Senior's number.

"Hello," the voice answered on the other end.

"Conrad, this is Mike Banks. How have you been?"

"Alright, I suppose. Retired now, after thirty years, can you believed it? And you, still playing Philip Marlowe?"

"No, not for a while, I packed away the gumshoes, Conrad. I was wondering, have you heard from Conny?"

"Conny? A few days ago, I suppose. Sunday? Maybe, it was Sunday. Why?"

Conny visited his father daily, fixed him dinner and made sure his clothes and meds were laid out for his dad the next day. Senior had early onset Alzheimer's and at only fifty-eight had become your typical sundowner, which is why Conny spent evenings with him. Early in the day, however, Senior was as cogent as he had been five years before he was diagnosed.

"Conny's been working for me the last few months, helping me out with my cleaning business."

"Cleaning? Like a maid? Janitor?"

"Yeah, like that. It is good hard work, it pays well enough. I, just, thought maybe you'd seen him."

"Sunday, I think? You want me to go down to his place? I probably should go see him and how he is keeping himself."

"That's okay; I can swing by Conny's apartment. It's on the way to the office."

"If that works for you? Tell him to come by for a visit. It'd be nice to see Conny more often. We aren't getting any younger. You're welcome to come too, Mike."

"Thanks, Conrad. I'll pass along your invitation."

I finished my cup and left money enough on the counter for tip. Carol eyed the money and shot me a smile, always a smile, as I left the diner.

I'd never been to Conny's apartment, but according his work records it was only a few blocks from the garage. He lived in a narrow three story walk-up, with twelve apartments, on the third floor, number 303. I buzzed.

No answer. So I buzzed the next one, 304.

"Ello?" the speaker crackled as a woman answered.

"Hey there, I'm a friend of Conny in 303. I was supposed to pick him up this morning, but he's not answering. Wondered if you could buzz me up?"

There was a long pause.

I pressed the call button again. "Hello?"

"He's not here."

"What do you mean? 'Not here?'"

"Conny took off last night. Didn't come back."

"Did he say anything?"

She went silent.

"Listen, if you know something I need to know? Maybe you can let me up and we can talk?"

She didn't respond. I buzzed 203. An elderly woman answered.

"Yes."

"Ma'am, could you buzz me in? I just stepped out to put some change in the meter and I left my keys in my apartment. I live right above in 303."

"I don't know. Don't you know the passkey?"

"Sorry. I just moved in. I'm subletting from Conny. You know him?"

"Oh, the nice boy who helps me with my bags?"

"That's the one. He's working out of town for a couple months, so I'm covering his rent while he gone and keeping his plants a go."

"How nice. But how will you get in the apartment without your keys?"

"The thing is, I'm pretty sure I left the door unlocked. I just wanted to feed the meter."

"Oh, okay."

She buzzed the door and the lock clicked.

I took the stairs two and three at a time, leaping passed the second floor where the older woman peeked out of her door. I called back a thank you.

Winded, I stood at the top of the stairs and took a moment glad I had stopped smoking when I was still young. 303 and 304 were on the backside of the building. The frame on 303, Conny's door, was splintered and the door stood partially open.

I hesitated and the 304 opened behind me. Turning I saw a pretty black girl with caramel skin, "You saw this?"

A child cried behind the door and she shut it tight.

She could wait; I needed to know if Conny was in his apartment? I needed to see what lay behind the broken door. I hoped it wasn't Conny.

I took a rag from my coveralls and slowly pushed the door open.

The inside of Conny's apartment was as sparse as a barrack, but I could tell there had been a fight, a struggle. On the floor there was a smear of blood and on the wall another. The place had been tossed. Drawers emptied, cushions torn. I ducked back out into the hallway and pounded a flat hand on 304.

"Ma'am, I got to talk to you. Tell me what happened?"

"Go away." She threatened, "I'll call the cops."

She wasn't going to call anyone. She'd had done it already. I pounded hard with the ball of my fist. I heard shuffling inside and hushed voices.

"Tell him to go away."

"I tried, he's not going."

"Ma'am, you okay in there?"

Silence, again. I stepped back, ready to put a heel to the door.

The latch clicked.

The woman poked her face out and whimpered, "Go. Please. I don't know anything." Her brown eyes were pooled with fear.

I held up a calming hand, moving closer to her and the door.

"I'm looking for my friend. I'm not here to hurt anyone."

I inched closer, pushing my hand through the open door, easing her back.

"Just looking for my friend, Conny." I repeated calmly, slowly before shouldering the door. The chain snapped and she stood back. 304 was a mirror of 303 but with more furniture. Junk, curbside finds.

I could see a toddler bobbing up and down in a bouncer, but couldn't see the other voice.

I mouthed, "Where is he?"

She nodded towards the hall closet. I motioned to the baby and the woman followed my lead, going to the child's side.

I pulled the closet open and a scraggly white guy stumbled out over a stroller and a fold up grocery cart. I picked him up by the collar. His bone thin legs clumsily found footing.

"You're not going to do anything stupid?"

He shook his head, still clumsy and wobbling the jitters. A tweaker.

"You know Conny next door?" He nodded, as did the girl. "What happened?"

"I...I don't know. Some guys came. They traded some fists but there were too many for that Conny guy."

"What happened after? They take Conny?"

"I guess, I shut the door when they came up. I don't need that kind of hassle."

"How many guys? You recognize any of them?"

"Three, maybe four. Does it matter?"

"Conny has a sick dad he watches after and a worried pissed off boss. The latter being me. So yeah, it matters. Do you know any of them?"

"No." He said too quickly. I looked over to the woman, a girl really.

"You?"

She looked down at her child. "They was here for Nic. They grabbed Conny, instead."

I looked at the guy at the end of my arms and pushed him into the wall, "Nic? Why would they mistake Conny for you, Nic?"

"I don't know? We kind of look alike, a little?"

I drew back a fist.

"Yeah, you're both white."

"Wait. I know where they went. I can tell you where. I can tell you."

I dropped the arm. "No, you can show me."

"But?"

"Nothing. If they want you, they're going to get you. No buts."

Nic took me down to The Rico Act, a converted warehouse turned nightclub. I knew the place and the owner, a reformed Columbian, Alejandro Rojas. I knew Rojas by reputation and had done some work for him indirectly. Reformed or not, he still pulled a lot of strings. I don't know what he wanted with this loser, Nic, but I prayed for both our sakes Conny was okay.

I dragged Nic towards the club.

"Conny better be inside. I don't know what you're into, but you'd better be worth a trade."

We were met at the door by two of Rojas' men, interchangeable from one another, both with barely concealed guns hanging under their shoulders. I told them I had a present for Rojas and they guided us in.

Alejandro Rojas sat a table near the bar. He was an older man, with a trim white beard and dark skin. He didn't seem exceptional and he looked like he was someone's endearing grandfather. And he was.

"You must be Mike, the cleaner. Let me introduce you to my grandson, Mateo. It seems your Lonny..."

"Conny," I corrected and then put my hand up in apology.

"Conny," he repeated. "They serve together. Mateo was just returned to me, a man. Even before today, he speaks of your Conny. A good man. A friend, much like you, I think."

"Yes, Conny is important to me. That is why I'm here. Where is he?"

"My men took him back to his apartment. Is this the man who stole from me?" Nic flinched at the accusation and Rojas' man took him by the arm.

"I couldn't say. Since you mistook him with Conny, I'm guessing you're not sure either. He brought me down here, so he knew your men. What did he take?"

Rojas laughed to himself, knowing better. "It was a trifle and will not be missed. However, it cannot happen again."

I looked over at Nic, "It won't."

"Let us hope not." Rojas said in earnest and his man let go of Nic.

"Can we go?"

"One thing," Rojas motioned to his grandson, Mateo stepped forward.

"Conny said the men tore up his apartment. And he was detained a while, before we came. We want him to have this for his troubles, incidentals." Mateo held out an envelope of bills.

"Why didn't you give it to him?"

"He wouldn't take it."

"Then I won't. You understand?"

Rojas spoke up, "Take it for you, a finder's fee."

"I haven't found anything."

Nic look sheepishly away.

"I think you have found a friend."

I acquiesced, taking the money promising myself I would drop it in a charity box.

I flipped the phone and dialed Conny. He picked up on the first ring. It was good to hear his voice and I told him to take tomorrow off.

I looked at Nic as we got in my All Good Cleaners van.

"You ever work a mop?"

"Like a janitor?"

"Yeah, like that."

Nestled in the foothills of West Virginia, Ron Earl Phillips lives with his wife, teenaged daughter, and their three cats. When not attempting to keep a roof over their heads through the mundane and legal job as a web developer, Ron reads and writes crime fiction. He also acts as co-editor on the online flash fiction magazine, Shotgun Honey, and for the upcoming e-book charity anthology, The Lost Children. You can find out more about Ron Earl Phillips at his website, www.RonEarl.com.

Vengeance on the 18th

David Cranmer

Truman Krup took his nine iron and slammed the back of Jackson Lee Mercer's head with such force that Jackson's glass eye popped out of its socket and came to rest on the rim of the 18th hole. Breathing hard, he repeatedly swung the club until Jackson's crumpled body lay still.

Striding to the golf cart, Truman grabbed the shovel and pick that Jackson had inquired about earlier—but he'd brushed it off by saying the caretaker must have left them. He threw the tools on the body and dragged it to the edge of a knoll alongside the green where he began chipping away at the earth. This was his golf course, he owned it, and he could damn well bury a body here if he wanted.

Truman planned it well in advance—right after he discovered his wife's betrayal. He had come home early and heard her upstairs pacing the floor, talking on the phone. A blinking cursor alerted him to the abandoned computer where he found a love letter in progress to jmercy@ether.net, addressed to "my darling." Realizing she hadn't heard him, he positioned everything back in place and quietly left.

He spent the next week driving past the house at different intervals until one afternoon, Mercer's SUV was parked outside. For fuck's sake, his wife and best friend! He remembered reaching for the 9 mm that lay on the passenger seat. He gripped the handle firmly and then just as quickly let go: Why ruin my life?

Instead, he invited Mercer to play one last game before he closed the course down for a year-long renovation. The club manager and caddy were already dismissed for the season so he could privately say good riddance to his wife's fuck buddy. And what an appropriate ending for a golf aficionado, this being the last hole of the game and the closure of a friendship.

Truman dug about three feet down and heard a moan. He looked up and saw the back of Mercer's bloody head trembling ever so slightly. He climbed out, pick in hand, and walked around the body to find Mercer staring at his own glass eye.

He tried to whisper but nothing came out. Truman knelt down. "Save your fucking breath. I know you're asking 'Why?' but shouldn't I be asking you why? I treated you like a brother and how did you thank me? By screwing my wife!"

Mercer's lower lip quivered and his one eye filled with tears that ran down his face and mixed with the dark blood around his mouth. He tried to speak but again, nothing came out.

Truman raised the pick and brought it down hard into his friend's temple. He wrestled the pick out of Mercer's head and went back to digging with the bloody tool dripping specks of brain.

Finally finished, he dragged the lifeless body to the grave's edge and pushed it into the hole with the heel of his foot. He was filling it in when he remembered the glass eye was still on the green.

Truman plucked the prosthetic orb from the grass and tossed it in the grave. It hit Mercer's upper lip and rolled onto his partially opened mouth and stayed there. An idea struck Truman as the eye looked up at him, unblinking. He jumped in, landed on the dead man's shoulder, but lost his footing. Knees buckling, he dropped onto the body, jarring it enough so that the eye fell into Mercer's mouth. Truman cursed and reached his dirty fingers in to scoop it out. He placed it in his shirt pocket, crawled out, and continued with the burial.

* * *

The ground was packed firmly and neatly before Truman carried the tools to the golf cart. Going back to the green, he pulled out the cup and buried the glass eye several inches underneath. Replacing the cup, he drove away. He planned to return the following day to cover the exposed ground with a fresh bed of flowers.

At the clubhouse, he went straight for the bar and poured himself a drink to unwind before going home. It had been a month to the day that he discovered the love letter. He'd spent weeks in preparation and now, he smiled to himself at a job well done. He drained his martini, smacked his lips, and left.

* * *

That night, Truman positioned his wife on all fours and enjoyed himself. Yanking her hair back, he sneered as she scrambled to her fingertips to ease the pain. He slapped her on the side of the head and held her face down into the pillow until her muffled cries grew tiresome. Hours later, he threw her aside.

She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and looked away toward the window. She was tired of this life but, with the prenup, she was trapped.

"Good fuck?" Truman asked.

"Oh, yeah," she lied. "A beautiful fuck."

"How was your game with Jackson Mercer today?" she asked running her free hand through her blond mane and unapologetically tapping cigarette ash onto the Persian rug. She was leaning over the edge of the bed and he admired her perfect form as he lit his own stogie.

"Ah, it was fine but he developed a splitting headache and cut out early."

* * *

Over the next several weeks, Truman reveled in dissecting her mannerisms whenever she dug for information, often bringing up Jackson Lee as if it was an afterthought. Her mood grew somber as her lover failed to respond. She stayed at the Mercer's house for several days consoling Mercer's wife, Johanna. Truman found the friendship with her lover's spouse unusual but chalked it up to Catholic schoolgirl guilt or an effort to glean some insight into where he may have gone.

The police investigated, of course, and then lost interest in Jackson Lee Mercer. The golf course was renovated—except the 18th hole. Truman explained it was his father's favorite part of the course and wanted it to remain as it was when he was still alive. The developers attributed it to typical rich eccentricity.

First day of the grand re-opening, Truman, his wife, and several other couples gathered to celebrate. A local news crew filmed the event as he cut the ribbon and was the first to tee off. He watched his wife in a dainty yellow sundress take a swing and curl her upper lip as the ball ended in the rough. There would be other lovers that would need to be taken care of, but for today, it was a wonderful afternoon and there were no signs of anything amiss. She played the part of the ever-loving wife and he the doting husband. Mercer's wife, Johanna, showed up as well. He wondered if she knew the truth of her husband's infidelity, would she thank him? Probably not. She seemed lonely and distant.

Truman Krup was in the lead as the group approached the 18th. He putted the hole for par and won the game. Reaching into the cup for the ball, he felt deep satisfaction knowing Mercer's decomposing body fertilized the beautiful flowers growing nearby while the glass eye buried under the cup was watching him win.

Smiling at the photographers, he saw, but could not comprehend, the look that passed between his wife and Johanna. A look and feeling that Truman and his wife would never share. A look that expressed unconditional love and sympathy. His wife softly kissed Johanna's cheek and took her hand. Their eyes met with a shared expression of regret. A whisper passed between them that no onlookers could hear...

"I am so sorry."

"Me too. We should have run off together when we had the chance."

David Cranmer is editor and publisher of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and is a member of the Western Fictioneers. Born and raised near Ithaca, New York, he now calls Maine his home with his wife and daughter. He can be found online at www.davidcranmer.com.

Second Round Dive

Benoît Lelièvre

Every boxer receives the offer at least one time. Taking a dive for money. When you're undefeated, it doesn't make sense. But when you have lost a few bouts and your body is broken down with injuries, the real world is catching up to you. You're not a contender anymore. Chances are, you will never be one again. The sport is too big, too full of young bucks, built like bulls, who dream about the same things you were dreaming of five years ago. Suddenly, money makes an awful lot of sense.

It's never much. One grand is the market price for the soul of a local boxer. I've seen it go as far as four grand for a regional championship fight. And there's a good chance you will use some of that money to pay your hospital bill if you have done a credible performance. The first time I dropped a fight, I didn't want to. The promoter is Joe Piscano, a fuckin' wop with long, white shark teeth, orange spray tan and a stupid bolo tie. He looked like...I don't know. I've never met someone that silly looking. Not even Don King.

He tried to convince me by suggesting he could offer me exposure in my next fight. Maybe he could find me a place on a card in Vegas. He said he had good connections there and that he would not forget that I did him a favor. Truth is, I accepted because of my kid, Andre Jr. I was two months late in child support and my ex refused to let me see him if I didn't pay. When you have children, it's the beginning of the end of your boxing career. All the guys I fought and trained with that became something lived with their folks until they started tapping into serious money. They don't encumber themselves with a wife and kid and they have sex with many beautiful women instead. Boxing is that kind of sport. It's a cruel mistress. It will only accept the best, not the nicest.

My record was sixteen victories and six defeats, what did I have do lose? The name of Andre Wallace wasn't worth what it once was. Not that I was ever a golden goose.

So I went down in the fifth and got eight hundred dollars after the fight. Piscano fucked me over, but Elise was happy enough. By the next weekend, I could see Junior again. But once you go there, you're done. You're tagged as a has-been, a check collector. Everybody starts asking you to take dives, all the time. I must have had eight offers the following month, from San Diego to Tacoma. Apparently, I was a good diver, but not good enough to make it seem natural to other promoters. That or Joe had a big mouth. I turned them all down anyway. Once you start dropping fights for money, things get cozy for you quite fast. Until one morning where you wake up and you have thirty, maybe forty, defeats on your record. I know some guys who racked a hundred. Nobody wants to spar with you at the gym, no promoter wants to hire you anymore because you give them a bad name, and you're too punch drunk to do anything else.

One hot and steamy August morning, Piscano called at the gym. He says he wants me to fight Sergio Pauligno, his nephew. A mulatto his sister had with a Brazilian guy who ran away as soon as he knew she was pregnant. That made Old Joey pretty much his father. The kid was a natural talent. He qualified for the Olympic team three years before, but he tested positive for THC. It was a major scandal back then. It didn't surprise me. The kid was scum, a wisecracking wannabe mobster who watched too many movies. He turned pro right after that, got a few wins under his belt. Maybe seven or eight, then disappeared for over two years. I would be his comeback fight. Piscano wanted him to fight a southpaw. He said he had big plans for him. I should've known something was off. Sergio Pauligno fought at welterweight back then. I fought at middleweight all my life.

I don't know why I accepted, but I did. Sergio Pauligno vs. Andre Wallace was set up for the end of September, at the local casino.

My record was decent, twenty-two victories, nine defeats and one draw, with eight K.O.'s. I was getting back on track. I could have gone a few years as a journeyman, take some evening classes and try to make something with myself. But I chose the money. I guess I was tired of offering Junior nothing but weekly escapades at the burger joint and stupid dollar store gifts. He was still too young to understand what it was to throw a fight, but he was old enough to understand the importance of money. I wanted to buy him a bed. It broke my heart when he came over for a night and had to sleep on my couch. So I accepted. I said I would go down in the second. I could almost hear Joe's beaming smile over the phone.

There was no press conference, nothing before the fight. Pauligno wasn't the main event, so if he did some press, it was without me. He wasn't on the posters either. His name was, but not his face. It was at the weigh-in that I understood. Sergio weighed-in at fat one fifty-seven as I had to cut nine pounds to do one sixty. He smiled at me like he knew how this was going to be played out. He bumped his chest into me and told me something, but I was too fucking pissed to hear. I get like that sometimes. I black out.

Most of the boxers were humble before a fight and appreciated humble opponents. This kid wasn't, he was rubbing me the wrong fucking way.

Boxing is a weird sport. Training takes a lot out of you, sure. But fighting, stepping inside the ring, is another ball game. There's an old saying that training is ninety percent physical and ten percent mental, but fighting is the opposite. It's true. When the bell rings, you have to make peace with one very simple fact: no one gives a shit.

No one gives a shit if you're a good Christian, if you're a family man or a faithful husband. It's irrelevant. If you're injured, if your brother died or if your dog is sick, nobody in the crowd cares. If you lose and open your mouth about it, you're going to get boo'ed like a pro-wrestling villain. The spectators paid good money to see you destroy your opponent or to see you get destroyed. Who you are doesn't count. That's what I love most about boxing. It's a sport that is so pure, so ruthless. I was a gamer, I always performed average in training, but on fight night I would give you your money's worth.

Round one started. Obviously, Sergio was a lot quicker than I was. He danced around me like Ray goddamn Robinson and peppered me with his jab. I was getting tagged, but the kid couldn't break an egg and I knew it. He was still fighting like an amateur. He didn't put his hips into his punches. He was happy to score and look good. To him, it was a game. He didn't want to hurt anybody or get into serious exchanges. He had a good five inches on me, so he kept doing this for most of the round. I stalked him and tried to time a power punch, but I had a hard time with his timing. Dancing and jabbing in his silly Italian flag trunks, the crowd was happy to see him again, yelling "Pauly, Pauly, Pauly". I connected with a straight left to the solar plexus right before the bell. He winced, but blew me a kiss. Fucker.

I came back to my corner angry as hell. Everything around me started fading out, except for little Sergio at the other end of the ring. I couldn't hear what my coach Duane was telling me. Maybe he didn't say anything, I don't know. He knew better than to talk to me when I'm like in that state. Fucking Sergio. I was about to throw the rest of my dreams away for that little shit and he was having fun. He never needed this. To him, boxing was fun, glamour, and girls. He was showing off in front of his little faggot greaseball buddies. I snapped. I entered a long black corridor and Pauligno was blocking the exit. I barely heard the bell ring.

I don't remember for how long we stood in the middle studying, pawing at each other, but I dove on him and ducked his first jab. I placed a right hook over it and caught him flush on the mug. He didn't fall, his knees didn't even buckle, but his eyes changed. His body could take a punch, but his mind quit on him. He did not expect that. Some guys are like that. They can't keep their cool under fire. He tried to back me up with an uppercut-hook combo. Wrong punch buddy. I stepped outside his foot and cracked him with an overhand left. Then with a hook to the body. His knees buckled, but he stayed up, the tough little fuck. I hit him at the same exact place again and threw a right uppercut to his chin that sent him reeling in the ropes.

If I remember well, I bounced up and threw a leaping right hook to finish the job. I could feel his jaw break against my hand. He bent backward over the ropes, out cold and fell out of the ring. That was the biggest win of my career and the most silent crowd I've ever witnessed to a gnarly knock out. The only two people screaming were the local television announcers. It was the kind of Mike Tyson moment I daydreamed about since I was a kid.

Then I realized.

What a fucking idiot I had just been. I didn't win anything. Fucking with Joe Piscano was a really dumb decision. For me, for Junior, and for everything I ever loved in this life. There was no "winning" in this. I had my little moment on the ring, but Piscano's gorillas were waiting for me in the locker room. They dragged my sorry ass out in the street behind the casino and worked a number on my spine with base-ball bats. That was the end of Andre Wallace.

I lost my legs, my son, the roof over my head and the only thing that made me feel that I belonged. Boxing. I saw the police records. There's a bullshit story about a car accident and a getaway driver. It was so bad, it looked like Piscano filled it himself. Somebody was filming that night. I've been told the highlight reel has been picked up by ESPN. I don't know if it's true because I haven't watched cable TV in so long. People around here remember me. Wallace, the neighborhood kid who knocked out an Olympian. They remember, but they don't see.

They don't see Wallace the cripple.

They don't see his now teenage son, locked in a juvenile hall.

They don't see the void I created for myself.

No, they don' see any of that.

Benoît Lelièvre lives in Montreal, Canada. He is very active online and in the writing community, but it's only because he's a real life hermit that lives in his living room. He's currently working on a novel and on stories for his character Lowell Sweeney. Easiest way to reach him is through his web site, Dead End Follies, where he discusses reading, writing, movie watching and pop culture in general.

The Second Coming of Hashbrown

Kieran Shea

In some cardboard box under the accumulated crap in my one bedroom apartment I have a black and white photograph of Hashbrown taken from the stage. Even now I can picture the eight by ten image without even looking at it—Hashbrown's naked torso caterwauling out over a crowd of frenzied upturned hands and faces, his sweat-soaked jeans pasted to his scrawny legs, the telltale patterns of his Vans sharp as the skids on a waffle iron. The picture was taken at that show back in Virginia Beach where we opened for those one-hit-wonder jag offs who fucked with our levels. Probably one of the last decent gigs we ever played together as a band, about five or six months before Donnie found out about his mother's tumors and not too long before I got anxious about my future, sold my guitars, and joined the Navy.

Of course through the grapevine I'd heard about Hashbrown's problems. The high drama of his two pokes at rehab and his final relapse where his folks threw him out, literally, for the last time. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear from him again after that botched nail salon robbery just over the Carolina line that landed him in Bayboro. When he called me a few days before New Year's Eve it really was more than a bit of a sandbag. Hashbrown? I mean, how the hell did he even get my number? I didn't even know he'd been released from prison, but the more he talked the more I knew it had to be him. We agreed to meet up at a bar in Kill Devil Hills the following evening.

When Hashbrown showed at the bar he looked nothing like how I remembered him. Gone was the hundred and sixty-five pound surf rat I grew up with and gone was the slinking stoner stride too. Hashbrown had transformed himself into a brick bulldozer clocking in at a formidable two-twenty-five with a full beard and exposed skin darkened with Aryan allegiance ink. I never saw Hashbrown as any type of a hardcore racist, but my guess was he teamed up inside to survive a nightmare I couldn't possibly imagine.

Hashbrown snaked his way through the evening crowds. Two carpenter dudes engrossed in a joke blocked his final steps to me and I watched Hashbrown's face broil over with irritation. Once the two carpenter dudes got a good look at him they parted like a pair of ash-faced swimmers letting a fourteen foot hammerhead cruise on through.

Hashbrown's voice was smashed shale. He pounded my shoulders.

"Goddamn! Fuckin' Roberto! Rob the King, Robbie-Bobbie, Mr. Rob-tastic...."

I laughed, "Hey, Hash? S'up, bro? Jesus, when I saw you come through the door back there I hardly recognized you. Holy shit, you're looking kind of—wow. You're looking kind of—"

"I'm looking kind of what?"

I finally found the right words.

"Kind of robust."

Hashbrown roared with laughter. He threw a sharp, singular glance back at the two carpenters and then turned back to me.

"Now there's a thing I've not been called before."

I'd saved him a seat at the bar so I moved over to accommodate his new size, "What can I get you?" I asked, "You want a cold pint of beer or something?"

Hashbrown thumbed his nose and sniffed back hard, "Nah," he answered, his eyes scoping out the room, "Don't drink no more. But, hey, if you're laying money down I guess I could drink a Dr. Pepper if they got any."

I flagged the bartender and a minute later the bartender brought another pale ale for me and a warm can of Dr. Pepper and a tumbler of ice for Hashbrown. With great care Hashbrown poured the Dr. Pepper over the shifting ice in his glass and watched the fizz settle.

"Been a long time," Hashbrown said.

I noticed that Hashbrown kept one boot planted on the floor, cocked.

"Almost eight years," I answered.

"Eight years? Holy crap. Has it really been eight whole years? Fuck...."

I started slow and kind of filled him in on things. I told him about my time overseas in the Persian Gulf and at the VA Hospital up in DC, how I ended up with my job as an orderly at an assisted living facility there on the Outer Banks. Hashbrown nodded a lot as I talked and he seemed to be fighting a wormy inner itch when the details got too many to digest. When I paused he started right in.

"So, I guess you've heard all about my colossal fuck-up, huh?"

"Yeah. I'm real sorry."

"Biggest mistake of my life, man, that robbery," Hashbrown groaned, "If you don't mind, I'd rather not get into all that if that's okay with you. It's kind of embarrassin'. Let's just say I'm out, I'm clean without Christ and that pretty much covers all I want to say about it," Hashbrown chewed the plastic straw from his soda relentlessly and narrowed his eyes, "So, you're doing what exactly again?"

"I said I'm working at an assisted living facility."

"That's an old folk's home, right?"

"They don't call them that anymore, but yeah."

"Man, got me a hard time picturin' you wipin' some old geezers's crack."

I worked some pale ale down my throat, "It's not all that bad," I countered, "Most of the time I'm just wheeling the patients around and helping them with their therapy. Money is pretty solid. Keeps me fed and pays the bills. Plus my boss? She's pretty cool."

"Still, I can't picture it. My old bro Rob...a goddamn nurse."

"Dude, I'm not a nurse. I'm an orderly."

"Splittin' hairs."

"Did I mention that I'm also studying to be an EMT?"

Hashbrown arched his eyebrows as he considered this, "An EMT? No kidding? Oh, well, I guess that's cool then. That's sort of respectable."

"So, what's up with you? Are you working now that you're out?"

Hashbrown grimaced uncomfortably, "Yeah. They got me on this state-run placement program. Got me a slot a quick lube over in Greenville. Kind of sucks, but it'll do for now. Once I'm totally clear I'm gonna come out here like y'all and try to get some dock work, maybe get on as a mate down around the inlet. My cousin says he can hook me but he also says I got to be done with my parole obligations first. Figure after that maybe I can get a place instead of checkin' in all the time with my case officer and watchin' my back at that rat hole they assigned me to. Everybody in that halfway house looks like they're ready to explode and the group meetings, shit, they are like fuckin' MMA. Hey—y'all still playin' guitar?"

I waved a hand, "Not really. Some. I got a beat up Fender acoustic that I sometimes strum to unwind, you know. Neighbors kind of frown on that as it is."

"Jesus. Don't everybody got a complaint...."

I shifted my weight on my stool, "So what're you doing way out here on the Banks, man? I mean, when you called me the other night and said you were cruising out here from Greenville I was kind of surprised. I mean, I don't how all that parole stuff works, so no offense. Is that stuff even allowed? "

Through his beard Hashbrown flashed a shrewd smile and for the first time since he sat down I got a real good look at his darkened teeth. More than a couple were missing.

"No offense taken," he answered, "It's the holidays so they kind of relax some. I borrowed a Dodge and as long as I check in with my case officer I'm cool. Gonna roll back out there later tonight anyway."

Even though he was dismissive, the twitchy look in his eyes gave me a bad feeling. A couple of pretty girls in sheepskin boots wandered by us just then and we both gave the girls an appraisal as they passed. I noticed Hashbrown's eyes quickly washed from soaking pleasure to bitter petulance as the girls didn't bother to look at either of us at all.

On a flat screen above the bar The Weather Channel was running the hearing-impaired blocks of text. A low was churning out of the southwest. Hashbrown saw me looking at the screen and flicked his eyes up. The Weather Channel is always on in the Outer Banks.

"Getting any surf?"

I frowned, "Who has the time? But, yeah, sometimes I head out when the weather is nice and it's not so cold. Got an old beater fish for screwin' around on. I still totally suck and need to drop fifteen pounds. How about you?"

Hashbrown's face snapped dark. His voice tensed.

"Y'all fuckin' with me?"

"What? Fuckin' with you? No, man. No."

"Boy, you think I got leisure time on parole? You think after being inside with all those crazy nigger motherfuckers I want to be out there in the water with a bunch of half assin' kooks and soft boy wolfpack wannabes? Hey, look at me when I'm talkin' to you, bitch. Why do you have to be like that, man?"

"Dude, I was just making—"

Hashbrown stomped a boot on the floor and I jumped a little. His eyes sparkled. He cackled.

"Ha! I'm just messin' with you, bro. Just messin' with you. Damn, Rob, guess I scared you a little bit there, didn't I?"

I chugged the rest of my pale ale.

He did.

* * *

I didn't hear from Hashbrown for a long while after that night and felt significant relief thinking he'd moved on.

One balmy afternoon in late March a south swell was happening so I finagled an excuse with my boss and blew out of work early to go surfing. I was alone and the lineup was pretty thick so I just kept my distance, paddled out, and picked off some scrappy leftover rights. A couple of heavies threw some stink my way a few times but I ignored them. After about an hour of chasing short rides the conditions tanked. I'd had about all I could take anyway so I headed in.

Walking back to my truck I stored my beater fish in the bed and was about halfway through peeling out my wetsuit and sandy boots on the tailgate when I heard somebody walking around my pickup from the front.

I looked up. It was one of the heavies who had been throwing me bad looks out in the water, the thick-necked one. I didn't see the second guy when he punched me in the throat and knocked me to the ground. A follow up shot chopped into my kidney and I stayed down as they both went to town on me, kicking and spitting. The two dragged my board from the truck bed and tossed it into the street. They stomped on it, snapping off the four tail fins. When I got to my feet ten minutes later my assailants were gone and the hood of my truck was keyed.

* * *

My girlfriend Sarah was finishing her face in the bathroom when Hashbrown pounded on my apartment door a week after my post session beat down. It wasn't exactly raining outside yet but the early Spring sky was full of pewter and black boulders. I finished buttoning my shirt and opened the front door.

"Rob-bo. Roberto. His Robness...."

I tried to contain my unease but my tongue felt thick.

"Hash? Jesus, what's up, man? What're you doing here?"

Hashbrown swayed from side to side on the landing. He'd shaved off his beard and was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, dirty jeans, and Redwing work boots.

"Thought I, y'know, stop by," he replied, "Sunday mornin' I figured y'all be crashin' in late. Got us some doughnuts."

I looked at the waxy bag in his hand and then looked up.

"How'd you know where I live?"

"Come on, man. It may be short a few million brain cells but I still have a brain."

I stepped aside, "Well, come on in then I guess. I was just going to make some coffee."

Carefully he wiped his boots on the mat outside my front door and slid his shades to the crown of his head. As he passed I caught a strong metallic whiff of bitter chemicals and a hint of liquor leeching through the pores of his skin. His eyes were greasy and bloodshot. So much for being clean without Christ.

Hashbrown looked around at my meager furnishings, "So this is what the nursin' dime gets a Navy man."

"Dude, I told you. I'm not a nurse."

"Right...."

Hashbrown drifted into the living room. In a corner I'd propped my broken surfboard next to a bookshelf where I kept some CDs. He took one look at the snapped off fins and cracked fiberglass before he shot me a bewildered look and chucked the bag of doughnuts onto my couch.

"Dude, the fuck is up with this?"

I shrugged and traipsed to the kitchen to start the coffee, "Yeah, that. Couple of hard cases Jackie Chan-ed me a while ago ago post-sesh. Locals."

"Locals? What the fuck, man? You're a local now. You, like, live and work here and shit. Where was this?"

"Down in Avalon."

"Where exactly?"

"Near the fishing pier. Keyed the hood of my truck too."

Hashbrown was uncomfortably loud, "They WHAT?! No way! They keyed your fucking truck? Oh, man, that is so not right. That is so not cool. What a bunch of dicks. What a bunch of four-flushin', motherfuckin', ass-licking peckerwoods."

I shook some coffee into a paper filter and took the glass carafe to the tap, "Hey, it was a piece of junk board anyway."

Behind me I saw that Hashbrown had picked up the board and was examining the extent of the damage when my girlfriend Sarah breezed in from the bathroom. Her skin glowed fresh from her shower and she flipped her brown hair back with a hand.

"Hi," Sarah said.

Hashbrown looked up at Sarah as she tugged a skinny purse strap over her shoulder. Hashbrown gazed at Sarah for about ten seconds as if she didn't appear real. Then he looked at me and then back at her.

"Hash, meet Sarah. Sarah, Hash."

Sarah draped out a hand and after another unsteady moment Hashbrown braced the broken board on his hip and shook hers.

"Nice to meet you. Sarah was it?"

"Yes. Sarah. Nice to meet you too."

Sarah glanced at me. I knew from her wary look that she saw the heavy prison eighty-eights on Hashbrown's neck. Her voice pealed uneasy.

"So, uh, you're a friend of Rob's?"

Hashbrown crossed the room and leaned my surfboard up against the bookcase, "Yep. Me and your boy Rob here go way back. Ain't that right, Rob? About a thousand years ago we used to play in a band together back in Virginia Beach. But hell, he probably hasn't mentioned me."

"No, he hasn't."

"Well, that's par for the course."

Sarah tittered, "You were in a band, Rob? I mean, I knew he played guitar, but you two guys were in an actual, like, band-band? Like real gigs and stuff? That's so cool. What kind of music did you guys play?"

Hashbrown shoved his hands in his front pockets, "Kind of garage surf, some ska but more with a classic southern rock bent. Pretty original all in all. We were workin' out our sound but then we just kind of fell apart. Lost our drummer because his momma got sick and Nurse Ratched over here decided to join the Navy and be some global force for good, whatever the fuck that means."

"Were you in the Navy too?"

Hashbrown bugged his eyes and scoffed, "The Navy? Sister, my bones have been so far from the Navy it ain't even funny."

After a few awkward minutes I joined them in the living room with mugs of coffee. We made vague small talk for a while before Sarah passed on a doughnut and said she had to get going. She asked me to text her later and I said I would.

After Sarah left it felt like the air in my apartment had grown taut like someone had sucked out half the oxygen.

"She seems nice," Hashbrown said, "so is sweetness and light a nurse too?"

"No. Sarah manages a cell phone store in Nags Head."

Hashbrown nodded, "Oh. A cell phone store. Man, how long have you been poundin' that action?"

"Hey, man. That's my girlfriend. Be polite."

"Be polite he says."

"We've been together for a month or so."

"Lucky man...."

Outside the rain started and a gust threw some against the front windows with a sizzle. I drank my coffee and it tasted like wet, hot ash on my tongue. The doughnut helped dull the taste.

"Must be nice havin' a piece of ass who smells so fine," Hashbrown said as he took his doughnut, a pink-frosted with rainbow sprinkles, and dunked it in his mug. He finished the doughnut off after a few slurping bites and changed the subject, "So these Avalon meatheads...what happened exactly? Snake them on a couple of mushburgers or what?"

I wearily filled him in on what had happened as we finished our second doughnuts and summed the whole mess up with a shrug.

"Localism," Hashbrown said sourly as he licked some pink frosting from his thumb, "Never understood it, never will. Bunch of tools thinkin' waves have some actual value in this world, the dicks. If you want I can show those pussies what messin' with an amigo really means. Seriously. No one will see a thing. Whup their butts but good."

"Forget it."

"That's a hard thing to forget, man. A hard thing to forget."

"I'm over it," I said and looked at my watch, instantly regretting the gesture as Hashbrown looked annoyed at me for doing so, "Look, Hash," I continued, "I can only hang out for a bit because I'm doing a second shift at the assisted living facility in a few hours and then I have to study."

"But it's Sunday."

"I know, but I need the overtime and I really do have to hit the books. Anyway, you're welcome to hang out for a while if you like. I mean, I won't be back until after ten or so but there's sandwich stuff in the fridge, some orange juice, and I've got all the HBOs. Are you going back to Greenville later?"

Hashbrown crossed into the kitchen and poured some more coffee into his mug. His back was to me.

"I'm all done with Greenville," he answered, "Yours truly is a free man now."

Quick math in my head told me that didn't figure at all.

"You need a place to crash?" I asked.

Hashbrown shuffled back to where I stood in the living room, "Actually, I sort of do. I mean, I was fixin' to ask y'all if I could, y'know, but your little fuck bunny was here. I just need to rack out for a day or so if you can swing it. I'm movin' south."

"South?"

"Yep. This state is really gettin' to me. All these Yankee transplants and their fancy vacation homes. Hell, it's like goddamn New Jersey."

"How far south you moving?"

"Florida."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Wow."

Why the hell would Hashbrown come all the way out there to see me in the Banks if he was moving south to Florida? Just to say goodbye? Sure, but a straight shot down Interstate 95 would have been more direct from Greenville and why not a phone call? More math that didn't figure. Suddenly my stomach felt very, very cold.

"Yeah," said Hashbrown, "My cousin knows a guy north of Miami who's got a slot open on his charter, so I'm thinkin' cool, a fresh start. New place, new people who ain't privy to my personal disasters. Reef fishin', bottom fishin', rig trollin'...I mean, I know I got to pay my dues and all, but I'm an animal once I fix my sights on a goal. Just like back when we were playin' gigs together before things got all gunked up. I was so sure that if you and me and Donnie worked at our music with the right break in front of the right people we could've made that leap. But all that's gone now. We ain't kids no more but bet your sweet ass I'm still an animal, dude. An animal."

"You got wheels?"

Hashbrown's eyes didn't waver from mine.

"Parked right up the street. Piece of shit Toyota but she'll do."

I was real nervous but I went to get my stuff and left a short time later anyway.

I guess I sort of deserved it for being so stupid and trusting whatever tenuous bond we had as old friends. When I came home Hashbrown had taken just about everything I owned that was of any value. My old laptop. The television. My iPod. The Fender guitar. Some spare cash I stashed in a shoe box in the top of the closet. He even took my wetsuit but left the boots behind. When I left the apartment earlier to head in for my shift thankfully I had the presence of mind to go to the bedroom and stuff my nine millimeter Browning into my knapsack and take it with me. Hashbrown found the spare ammunition for my nine so that probably tore it for him because the bullets were scattered about the bedroom and there was a raging set of craters in the drywall, with each hole the size of his fist.

Hashbrown didn't get far. A patrolman saw him lifting himself into a vacation home down in Myrtle Beach and when backup showed those cops took him down with five crisp shots. The reports say he was armed, but I don't know.

All I know is it wasn't my gun.

In 2010 and 2011 Kieran Shea was nominated for the Story South's Million Writers Award and didn't win, not that he's bitter about it or anything. He divides his time between 38°58'22.6"N- 76°30'4.17"W and 39°17'N -74°35'W and is now hard at work trying to write the longer stuff.

.38 Special

Amy Grech

"Let's play a game, Charlie," Heather Moore whispered, her breath hot and quick in his ear. She kissed him roughly in her husband's bed without regrets. Charlie Dent kept Brad's side warm whenever he went out of town and Heather wanted some company.

He held her tight and ran eager fingers through her curly red hair. "Sure. What do you have in mind?"

"You'll see." Heather reached over, opened Brad's nightstand, and pulled out the shiny, steel blue .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver. It was his spare, tucked away for safekeeping. Heather handed him the gun, and Charlie took it without hesitation.

"Do you know how to play Russian roulette?" She ran her fingers playfully across Charlie's hairy chest and he shivered.

He leaned over and kissed her perky breasts. "Show me."

"Not until you shoot your load."

"If you insist." He set the revolver down on the nightstand and lay back on the bed.

Heather took his growing erection slowly into her mouth, swirling the head and shaft with her tongue. She placed her hand over his balls. He grabbed her face, urging her on. Heather felt his balls tighten when he came, warm and sweet in her mouth.

Charlie sat up, kissed her deeply, and reached for the gun. It was surprisingly heavy in his hand, and he struggled to hold it level.

She licked her lips. "We'll take turns. You go first. Spin the wheel. There are six chambers and only one bullet. I love those odds. Don't you?"

"You bet I do. There's nothing more exhilarating than the element of surprise. Wouldn't you agree?" He gave it a whirl while she watched.

"Absolutely." Heather clapped her hands. "Now, put the gun to your head and hold it steady while I pull the trigger. Don't blink. I might be the last woman you ever see. Savor the moment."

"Anything for you." Charlie drank Heather in while he honored her request. The cold muzzle pinched his temple. He blinked when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, sending a blast of compressed air straight to his temple. Feeling cocky, he smirked and handed her the gun. "Your turn. This is if you're up to the challenge."

Heather licked her lips and gave the cylinder a good spin with the tip her manicured red nail. When it stopped, she put the gun to her head, right between her eyes Charlie placed his hand on top of hers and, together, they squeezed. The weapon kicked, catching him off guard. He cursed when he realized what he'd done. When the bullet pierced Heather's forehead and pierced her skull, her bright green eyes widened, full of pain and wonder. She landed flat on her back with a soft thud. Blood gushed, a crimson, wet rush onto the pristine sheets.

Charlie gawked at Heather's ruined face—her blood and brains splattered on the bedroom wall—while he recalled the loud pop moments ago and felt the weight of the revolver still clutched tightly in his hand. He screamed, tossed the smoking gun on the bed, and hightailed it home.

* * *

Standing with his legs spread and his feet planted firmly on the smooth concrete floor of his garage, Brad Moore pressed the eerily familiar cold muzzle of the .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver against Charlie Dent's forehead and grinned, revealing two rows of perfectly straight, Chiclet-like teeth.

His stance, typical for a cop and expert marksman, set Charlie on edge.

"Do you know what I have here, Charlie?" He released the safety and cocked the gun. A nerve-wracking click echoed loudly in the small space.

He studied the weapon, found it eerily familiar, couldn't help but think of Heather. "It looks like a gun," Charlie said matter-of-factly, calmly, not at all the way that a man staring death in the face ought to reply. Goose bumps appeared on his smooth, tan skin, revealing his fragile state of mind. He fought a wave of nausea, hot and vile, aggravated by the strong stench of gun oil that stung his nostrils.

Brad nodded, a maniacal grin plastered on his face. "It's that and so much more."

Charlie raised his eyebrows, biding his time. "What do you mean and why are you pointing it at me?" He shifted, trying to get comfortable in a rickety, wooden chair. Coarse ropes bit into the tender flesh of his ankles and wrists, making them throb dully.

Brad laughed. "You know exactly why. Don't play dumb with me."

He sighed. "I haven't got a clue."

"Have you seen Heather lately?" Brad pulled the gun away long enough to polish it with his expensive button-down shirt while Charlie watched.

Charlie rolled his eyes. He took a deep breath and said, "I might have. This is a small town. You never know who you might run into."

Brad jammed the gun against Charlie's forehead. Beads of sweat formed on and ran down Charlie's face in sticky torrents as he shrieked.

"Go ahead and scream. No one can hear you except me. I had my garage soundproofed so we can't hear my son Jacob and his band when they jam—I never hear a peep."

Charlie stopped screaming.

"See this gun cylinder? It's like a roulette wheel. Round and round she goes; where she stops nobody knows!" Brad gave it a spin. It clicked and whirled around before stopping abruptly. He stared at the shiny, steel blue revolver, fascinated by its finality.

"Six chambers, one bullet. Looks like the odds are in your favor." Brad held the sleek gun in his open palm for his captive to inspect, which he reluctantly did. "The bullet's in there, all right, but the question is where?"

Charlie stared at the cold concrete beneath his feet.

Point-blank, Brad posed a question: "Have you ever held a gun in your hand, Charlie?"

Charlie frowned, shook his head.

"You don't know what you're missing. It's a real kick, better than sex, get some action whenever you want, absolute power in the palm of your hand." Brad tightened his grip. The gun wavered. "Heather's dead. Your prints were all over the gun, hers too. What the fuck?"

"I'm really sorry." Charlie stared at his feet. "It was just an innocent game, I swear. I had no idea the gun was loaded."

"I don't buy it." Brad paced back and forth. "Are you a gambling man, Charlie?"

Charlie shook his head. "Stakes are too high. I hate to lose."

Brad laughed again, louder this time. "Then why did you sleep with my wife? Did you feel lucky, willing to risk it all for a good fuck?"

"What? I—"

"Don't be shy."

Charlie gasped, guilty as charged. "I'm an impulsive guy. I acted on a feeling I haven't felt in a long time: love."

"Wrong, I think you mean lust—there's a big difference. You were thinking with the wrong head when you bedded Heather, my friend." He pointed the gun at Charlie's crotch.

Charlie expected Brad to pull the trigger, depriving him of his manhood with a single blow. Brad couldn't—no, wouldn't do that—would he? He wanted to make Charlie squirm. "Heather may have loved you in college, but her tastes are refined now. Why do you think she married me?"

"Because you're a sure bet, safe and secure."

Brad glared at Charlie. "That's pretty blunt."

"It's true." Charlie shrugged. "Then there's me. I'm passionate and reckless. Heather craved excitement and knew where to find it."

Brad balled his free hand into a fist and pointed the gun at Charlie's face once more. "You weren't the first guy I caught. My wife had a wandering eye, you see. I did my best to overlook her transgressions, but I know you. That changes everything."

Charlie stared at Brad, grappling with harsh reality.

"How did you end up in bed?" Brad towered over him, obscuring Charlie's haphazard thoughts. "Let me guess. Heather talked you into keeping her company while I was out of town because she was lonely. You jumped at the chance without thinking twice. Isn't that right? Now that's poor planning."

"You're absolutely right." Charlie squinted. His eyes teared, blurring his vision.

"Round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows!" Brad spun the cylinder that held his captive's fate. "Care to guess?"

"Have I got a choice?" Charlie's eyes locked on the proverbial wheel until it stopped spinning.

The gun loomed inches from his face. "You're not a coward, are you, Charlie?"

"N-n-n-o-o-o." He blinked and swallowed hard.

"Funny, you don't sound too sure of yourself and why do you look so scared?" Brad shook his head. "Are you afraid to die?"

"Isn't everybody?" Charlie's eyes darted around the remarkably tidy garage, finally setting on Brad.

He shrugged. "I suppose, but I'm not the one staring down the barrel of a gun."

Charlie bit his lip. "Let's forget I ever laid a hand on Heather, okay? I'd take it all back if I could."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Charlie. Your half-hearted apology can't bring Heather back. What's done is done." Brad spun the cylinder once more for good measure. "It's time to pay. I mean play."

Charlie shifted, his restraints dug deeper.

Brad fondled the revolver's cylinder. "A wheel is spun. The players put their chips down on a number. If the ball lands in the slot that contains their number, they claim the jackpot. If it doesn't, they lose everything. It's all or nothing. Do you understand?"

"I think so." Brad started to shake uncontrollably.

Charlie watched him tremble and tightened his grip on the gun until his knuckles turned white. "This isn't Vegas. Your life is on the line; you can't afford to lose. It's time to try your luck, Charlie. All bets are off." This time, he pressed the revolver's cold muzzle against Charlie's forehead and caressed the trigger lovingly with his finger. "Is Lady Luck on your side? Only one way to find out...."

Charlie shut his eyes, tight, steeled himself for the inevitable.

Brad pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber, sending a blast of compressed air straight to his temple.

Charlie flinched; his eyes snapped open. "I must be luckier than I thought." His voice rattled.

"Too bad Heather isn't here to see this. I think she would have enjoyed the show. Don't you?" Brad twirled the gun between his fingers like a seasoned outlaw.

Charlie licked his parched lips. "It's hard to say."

"Are you telling me you don't know what my wife likes even though you fucked her?" He folded his arms.

"That's right." His voice cracked under the strain.

Brad scratched his head. "Right about what? That you slept with my wife or that you don't know how to please her?"

"Both, I suppose." Charlie frowned. "Don't you want to give it a whirl? That way we've both got a fair shot."

"You think I'm crazy enough to hand you the gun?" Brad wiped a smudge off the gun's barrel with his shirt, ever the perfectionist.

"Not crazy, just playing the game." Charlie nervously smirked.

Brad gave the cylinder another spin and stared at the gun, deep in thought. "What have I got to lose?"

"Do you think the chamber is full, or empty this time around, Brad?"

"Only one way to find out." Brad leered at him, put the gun to his head, and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked in his hand, launching the only bullet in the chamber. He hit the cold concrete with a soft thud.

"Un-fucking-believable."

Amy Grech has sold over one hundred stories and three poems to various anthologies and magazines including: Apex Digest, Fear on Demand, Funeral Party 2, Inhuman Magazine, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, The Flash Fiction Offensive, The Horror Express, Space & Time, The Brutarian, Zombie CSU, and many others. Damnation Books published her second collection, Blanket of White.

She has a story forthcoming in The Uninvited Magazine, exclusively for the iPad. Amy is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association who lives in Brooklyn. Visit her website: http://www.crimsonscreams.com. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/amy_grech.

Bull's-Eye View

Wayne D. Dundee

"I wonder," William Thunderbringer said casually, around the forkful of cole slaw and deep-fried walleye he had just pushed into his mouth, "what brings a big ticket Louisiana hit man up here to our neck of the woods?"

Not one to process things quite as coolly as Thunderbringer, I froze with my own loaded fork part way to my mouth. "Say again?"

"Don't make it obvious," he replied between chews, "but glance around when you get the chance. Just to the right of the juke box over there, guy with slicked back hair and a big floppy nose like a gibbon monkey. Name's Dale Garma. He's a hitter from the New Orleans area. Works mostly for Po'boy Meechum down there. Also been known to hire himself out for freelance jobs once in awhile."

I didn't question the accuracy of the claims Thunderbringer was making, nor did I ask how he knew these things. He knows stuff that I don't want to know how he knows.

Our light-hearted little exchange was taking place one Friday evening in the Lassoed Walleye Saloon, a tin-roofed honkytonk tavern on the shore of No Name Bay, Lake McConaughy, west central Nebraska. No Name Bay is home turf for me, residing as I do in cabin number six of the No Name Bay General Store and Lodge located on the opposite side of the boat ramp from the Lassoed Walleye. My name's Joe Hannibal; I carry a PI ticket and run a private security patrol serving homes and businesses around the perimeter of popular Lake Mac. Thunderbringer had driven out for the weekend from Denver, where he lives and works these days as a bounty hunter—oops, excuse me, make that fugitive recovery specialist—for an outfit officially called Heller Enterprises but more commonly referred to as the Mile High Manhunters. Our history together doesn't go back all that far, but the resulting friendship is as solid as it gets. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with somebody and throwing lead against return fire tends to forge a unique bond.

I got the chance to take a peek at Thunderbringer's hit man when my ladyfriend, Abby Bridger, returned to our table following a trip to the powder room. Standing to hold her chair for her allowed me to covertly scan the room, lingering an extra clock tick on Dale Garma as I did so. He was easy to spot from Thunderbringer's description. He was seated alone at a square-topped two-up table, back to the wall, Jesse James style, so nothing or nobody could come up unexpectedly behind him. He was wearing expensive leather sandals, no socks, blue jeans, and a flowered Guayaberra shirt pushed a little tight in front by the beginning of a middle-aged pot. The slicked back hair appeared to be thinning in contrasting proportion to the thickening paunch. In short, except for the oversized nose, he was about as average-looking as a guy could get.

I sat back down and said to Thunderbringer, "Not all that menacing from the outside."

"What's not menacing?" Abby wanted to know.

"Nobody pays the guy to look dangerous," Thunderbringer said, shrugging.

"Good thing," I allowed.

"Who's not getting paid to look dangerous?" Abby said. "What are you two talking about?"

The Walleye's all-u-can-eat Friday night fish fry was doing a brisk level of business tonight, especially considering we were now past the peak of summer. The resulting chatter of other conversations taking place around us and the warble of the jukebox created enough offsetting noise so that we were able to talk freely with little concern for being overheard by neighboring diners. Thunderbringer went ahead and gave Abby the same quick rundown on Dale Garma that he'd given me.

Abby was seated so that she was facing Garma's general direction, making it easy for her to pick him out. "Him?" she said when Thunderbringer was finished. "I know him. He's staying in one of my cabins. Called a couple of days ago, caught me with an opening, and booked five days. I was happy to fill the vacancy. He arrived yesterday, but he's not calling himself Dale Garma. He's registered as David Gale from Chicago."

Abby owns and operates the aforementioned No Name Bay General Store and Lodge, the "lodge" part consisting of six cabins, including mine. The others she rents out to fishermen, boaters, and general vacationers in the warm months, hunters and ice fishermen in the winter. This makes her, in addition to being my main squeeze, also my landlady. And, according to what she'd just told us, it now made "David Gale" my new neighbor for the next few days.

Thunderbringer had gone back to eating. "Well, well," he said. "This gets more intriguing by the minute."

"Yeah, intriguing," I muttered.

"Are you sure it's the same guy?" Abby asked Thunderbringer.

"Wouldn't've said anything if I wasn't."

Abby frowned. "So what should we do? Do you think he's here to, you know, do a hit on somebody? Do we need to contact the sheriff and let him know what's going on?"

"Trouble is," I told her, stabbing another cut of walleye off my plate, "we don't know what's going on. There's nothing illegal about Garma just being here."

"He's not wanted anywhere for anything specific," Thunderbringer said. "There's a big difference between people in certain circles knowing about somebody like Garma and the cops having sufficient proof to actually bring charges against him. So there's really nothing the sheriff could do, even if we did tell him. All we'd accomplish might be to alert Garma he'd been made."

Abby's frowned deepened. "So what does that leave?"

Thunderbringer and I exchanged glances. I gave it a beat and then said, without enthusiasm, "I guess it leaves us needing to keep a close eye on 'Mr. Gale' until we do figure out what he's up to."

* * *

Five o'clock Saturday morning found Thunderbringer and me standing at water's edge beside the No Name Bay boat ramp, motioning guidance to B.U. Gorcey as he backed his pickup and attached trailer down to where we could offload his eighteen-foot pontoon boat, the Let 'Er Buck, and put in for a few hours of fishing.

Everything was clear and still. Cool, as you would expect for the middle of September. The surface of Lake Mac lay as flat and motionless as a giant mirror reflecting the sky's canopy of fading stars. The first hint of dawn was just beginning to edge above the eastern horizon.

B.U. Gorcey and his wife, Mamie, are owners/operators of the Lassoed Walleye Saloon. Mamie is a former Las Vegas showgirl, a brassy, sassy, sexy, busty blonde bombshell like they don't hardly make anymore. B.U., twenty-five years her senior, is a grizzled veteran of the rodeo circuit, that hard life showing on his weathered, deeply seamed face, his stiff-backed posture above the bow-legged, rolling gait of his walk, and in the streaks of gray shot through the pony tail that dangles down the back of his neck from underneath a battered old cowboy hat that seldom leaves his head. It was, in fact, the point of much conjecture amongst a few No Name Bay semi-regulars as to whether or not the hat might actually be nailed in place. I knew better because I'd seen the man with it off on at least two occasions. But I kept mum—who was I to tamper with a legend in the making?

Once he had his truck backed far enough down into the water so that the rear of the Let 'Er Buck was afloat, B.U. set the brake and got out to help us shove the rest of the craft on off the trailer.

"Mornin', boys," he greeted.

Our outing had been arranged the previous day so this was the first we were seeing of B.U. this morning. We good-morninged him back and then the three of us set our shoulders to the prow of the boat and got all of her out onto the water.

Still breathing a little hard from the effort, B.U. promptly shook out a cigarette and fired up. Then, streaming smoke, he said, "Listen, men, gotta tell ya—hope you don't mind, but I went ahead and invited another fella to join us on our little fish hunt this mornin'."

Thunderbringer and I both gave a "no problem" response. Plenty of room, the more the merrier and all that. Abby's twelve-year-old son, Dusty, often made a fourth when our crew went out, but on this occasion he wasn't around because he was having a sleepover at a school chum's house in Ogallala. Besides, bottom line, it was B.U.'s boat; he could invite whomever he wanted.

Nevertheless he felt the need to explain a bit further. "This guy's out here for a few days' stay, burnin' up some leftover vacation time he had to use or lose. Easy fella to talk to and shoots a helluva mean game of pool, let me tell you. He's been comin' around the Walley sorta regular. Says he likes the 'ambience' of the place—whatever that means." B.U. blew some more smoke. "Anyway, he showed up for the fish feed last night and stayed 'til near closin' time. Came over and sat at the bar after things had slowed down and me 'n him took to shootin' the breeze. Like I said, he's easy to talk to. Somewhere along the way I mentioned our plans to go out on the lake this mornin' and, well, it just felt natural and polite to invite him along."

"Quit worrying about it, will you?" I said. "Once and for all—it's not a problem."

B.U. checked his watch. "I'm surprised he ain't here yet. I told him five sharp. He seemed plenty eager to...." He let his words trail off and looked around at the row of cabins that comprise the lodge part of Abby's operation. Mine was at the opposite end, farthest away from the beach. Four cabins closer there was one with the lights burning inside and, as Thunderbringer and I followed the line of B.U.'s gaze, we saw the door open and a man emerge. "Okay. Here he comes now," said B.U.

Whoa. Maybe not so okay.

In the moment he was silhouetted in the lighted doorway before killing the switch and turning to head in our direction, his profile with its distinctly oversized nose revealed our new fishing buddy to be none other than the guy calling himself David Gale, aka Dale Garma, notorious New Orleans hit man!

* * *

It all made for a weird, somewhat tense, awkward to the point of being almost comical situation. Thunderbringer and I only had time to throw a couple of what the fuck? looks back and forth and then Garma/Gale was right there in our midst, smiling, shaking our hands, and thanking us for letting him tag along under such impromptu circumstances. B.U. went ahead and made introductions that were only partially necessary and only partially accurate, as far as that goes, since he introduced Garma under his David Gale guise.

After that there was nothing for it but to commence with our fishing. The only alternative would have been to call a halt to the proceedings, confront Garma with what we knew about his true identity, and demand to know the real reason for him being here. But we'd already covered that option last night and decided not to play it that way. We'd agreed to instead hang loose and keep an eye on the guy in order to try and determine his intentions before making any kind of move against him. None of which, unfortunately, we had shared with B.U. Partly because there hadn't seemed any particular urgency to do so. But mostly because we left the Walleye not long after finishing our meals last night while other diners were still packing the place and both he and Mamie were being kept so busy taking care of business that we'd barely had any opportunity to say more than "hi" to either of them all evening. Certainly we would have brought B.U. up to speed once we got out on the lake this morning—that is, if he hadn't unpredictably decided to invite along the very subject in question.

On the bright side, I told myself, holding back an ironic smile as the Let 'Er Buck moved away from the shoreline, what better way to keep an eye on someone than to have them right under your nose as a palsy-walsy fishing buddy? Hadn't no less an authority than Sun Tzu, the ancient military strategist, taught to keep your friends close and your enemies closer? I looked over at Thunderbringer to try and gauge what might be passing through his inscrutable quarter-blood Cherokee mind. Whatever it was, nothing showed on the outside. His expression was as impassive as a slab of stone. Maybe he didn't agree with the teachings of Sun Tzu. Or maybe he simply lacked an appreciation for irony.

* * *

B.U. took us about three hundred yards out toward the middle of the lake and then held that distance from the irregularities of the shoreline as he turned and aimed in a westerly direction. He was, I knew, headed for the Otter Creek inlet where we would drop anchor and make our first casts of the day. Unless someone had recently stopped by the bar with a hot tip on some other spot where the fish were hitting particularly good, Otter Creek was always B.U.'s favorite place to start.

Looking around, I could see the lights of only a handful of other boats out this early. Two or three down by Kingsley Dam and Spillway Bay, one over by the south shore, and a tiny glimmer of one way off toward the west end of the lake. Good, I thought, we'd have things mostly to ourselves at least for a couple of hours.

As we skimmed along, Thunderbringer broke out the jumbo thermos of coffee Abby had prepared for us and poured steaming cups for himself, Garma, and me. B.U. furnished his own coffee—a vile concoction brewed so thick and strong that unwary souls have been known to experience a three-days-without-sleep caffeine high simply from catching one whiff of it. "Cowboy coffee" B.U. called it and claimed the true test for whether or not it's made right is confirmation that a horseshoe will float on top without sinking.

It didn't take long for Garma to reveal himself a surprisingly gregarious sort, full of quips, jokes, and wry observations. I say 'surprisingly' because it was behavior that seemed—to me, at least—out of character for a guy in his line of work. Without that knowledge, I likely would have found him as easy to talk to as B.U. predicted, probably even likable. As it was, I conversed with him only to the point of being sociable but otherwise kept things guarded. Thunderbringer did the same. After all, if the guy was here to do a hit on somebody, and although we'd avoided mentioning it in front of Abby last night so as not to alarm her, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that Thunderbringer or I might even be his target. If that was the case, it didn't seem likely Garma would have been careless enough to expose himself right there at the Walleye like he'd done. Nevertheless, there was no getting around the fact that the big Indian and I each had enemies from the past who weren't above trying to retaliate by putting out a contract on our lives. As far as I knew, neither of us had ever gotten crossways of the Dixie Mafia, but Thunderbringer had also mentioned Garma was know to do freelance work from time to time. So if he was here on business but it wasn't one of us, that could still mean he was looking to snuff somebody, virtually in my back yard. Hardly grounds for feeling at ease, any way you cut it.

Hence, like I said, we were on our guard. If B.U. thought we weren't being cordial enough to his last-minute invitee, he made no comment. And Garma himself continued babbling enthusiastically, like a guy without a care in the world.

That was, until the other boat appeared in our wake—coming up fast, no running lights on.

Garma was the first to spot it. "What's up with this?" he muttered. And in the time it took to say those four words, his whole demeanor changed. Eyes went narrow, mouth pressed into a razor-thin line, his posture tensed and took on a wariness, poised like a predatory animal sensing danger, or prey.

While this transformation was taking place, the rest of us swung our attention to the oncoming craft. In that pale gray, half-light time just before the first actual rays of sunlight reached into the sky, objects were still somewhat blurred and shadowy. But there was enough light to make out that the other vessel was a speedboat, sleek and aerodynamic, with a sharply pointed bow aimed straight for us. Attuned now, I could hear the pop of its prow slapping down on the waves and the low grumble of its powerful engine. The latter wasn't being revved to anywhere near full capacity yet the boat was closing steadily on us all the same.

B.U. swore. "Any fool ought to know better than to run without lights while it's still this dark."

A handful of seconds later, the other boat swung abruptly out of our wake and, its engine now gunning louder and stronger, began to rapidly move up on our port side.

"Cut our lights!" Garma ordered B.U.

B.U. heard him but seemed either confused or angered by the harsh command. "What'd you say?"

"I said cut our fucking lights! And then get down! Everybody—fast!"

Garma tossed aside his coffee cup and dropped into a half crouch behind the deck rail and its flimsy side panels. In the same instant he reached with his right hand to the small of his back and, from under the rear hem of his jacket, he drew a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver.

The next sequence of events played out like somebody hit the fast-forward button. It was almost as if the acceleration of the speedboat caused everything else to kick into high gear right along with it.

As B.U. was dousing the Let 'Er Buck's lights, Thunderbringer and I dropped into crouches on either side of Garma and drew our own guns. Thunderbringer never goes unarmed, his weapon of choice—and the one he brought into play now—being a .40 caliber Glock 23 with a custom 17-shot clip. I seldom go unarmed either, most days usually relying on a little hideaway 9mm carried either strapped to my ankle or in a pocket holster. This morning, however, in consideration of Garma being on the scene, even before he turned out to be part of our fishing party, I'd upgraded to my old reliable heavy duty piece—a Colt .45 semiauto.

This flashing of hardware hardly went unnoticed by Garma, but neither did it seem to rattle him unduly. "Who the fuck're you guys supposed to be—the Lone Ranger and Tonto?"

"More to the point," I replied, "who are the guys in the boat and what about them turns this to a shooting situation?"

Before he could respond, the guys in the boat gave me at least part of my answer.

As the speedster started to draw abreast of us, I could see it had three occupants. All were clad in black, making it difficult at first to distinguish one from the other. But then I was able to discern a driver, hunkered low over the wheel, with the other two positioned behind him, crowding the starboard side, facing directly toward us. The latter were wielding long objects. Some kind of poles, I thought for a moment. No, rifles, I decided. And then full recognition hit me—shotguns!

I can't say who fired the first shot. It all erupted at once. Shotguns boomed, spouting long tongues of flame and hurling ripping bursts of heavy gauge shot. Handguns roared and bucked in our fists, returning rounds in a frantic broadside exchange.

It was over in a matter of seconds, scarcely a quarter minute. The speedboat shot on past, picking up more speed, giving no indication of turning back for another pass. The shotguns fell silent. Thunder-bringer stood and emptied the rest of his clip after the craft as it angled toward the middle of the lake and faded once more into the gloom.

And then everything went quiet. The only sounds were the soft licking of the waves, the heavy breathing of Garma, Thunderbringer, and me, and the faint metallic snicks as our hands instantly and automatically went to work reloading our guns.

We'd been lucky. The deck railing had provided no substantial cover yet the shotgun blasts—fired at an upward angle from a bobbing, speeding boat—had gone mostly high, only grazing the rail and top edges of the thin paneling.

Unfortunately, there'd been no indication that our return fire had scored much better.

B.U. rose slowly from where he'd jammed himself within the contours of the wheel housing. His cowboy hat was still atop his head, although knocked seriously askew.

"Jesus Jumpin' Christ on a pogo stick!" he wailed. "What the hell just happened?"

I locked my gaze on Garma. "How about it? I figure you can provide the skinny on that better than anybody else."

Garma eyed me, and then Thunderbringer. All three of us still had our guns drawn, aimed nowhere in particular but poised to do so in a hurry, if need be. "All right," Garma said after a beat. "Maybe I do, maybe I don't, But before I say too much, I got a couple questions of my own. For starters, what's the story on you two? You pistoleros are a helluva lot more than just a couple of cow country worm drowners. You guys were ready—maybe not for exactly what happened, but ready for something. Why?"

"Because we recognized you last night at B.U.'s place," Thunderbringer answered. "When a big league mob hitter suddenly shows up in your back yard, it's only smart to be prepared, be on the alert."

"Mob hitter? Who?" B.U. wanted to know.

I ignored him for the time being. To Garma I said, "That was one question. What's your second?"

"Luckily, none of us got hurt in the shooting that just took place. And nobody else was around to see it. What I need to know is are you the kind of upright citizens who feel obligated to run to the cops and report all of this?"

I exchanged glances with Thunderbringer and B.U., who was still looking confused. I cut my eyes back to Garma. "Not something we'd necessarily be in a hurry to do."

The hint of a smile played across Garma's mouth. "Good answer."

"Now wait a goddamn minute," B.U. said. "Before I agree to anything, I want some answers. What's this about a mob hit man? What the hell's going on here?"

"B.U., meet Dale Garma," I said, gesturing. "His regular stomping grounds are down around New Orleans. He works for a mob boss there by the name of Po'boy Meecham. Mr. Garma is what you might call a specialist at, ah, removing things that Meecham finds annoying."

Garma shrugged. "Okay, so you've proven you know a few things about me and that you and the big Indian can handle guns and don't flinch when the triggers make them go bang. That still doesn't give me much of a back story on either of you."

Thunderbringer said, "Hannibal's a PI. He hasn't always lived and worked out here in Nebraska. He's been around some. Me, I've been around, too. These days I'm a fugitive recovery specialist operating out of Denver. Happens I was the one who recognized you. That enough back story?"

"And me," B.U. spoke up, "I'm just a broke-down old rodeo rider who runs a saloon in what used to be a quiet little lakeside community."

Garma was studying Thunderbringer. "Fugitive recovery specialist. Bounty hunter, you mean?"

"Some call it that. I prefer the other."

"You saying there's some kind of bounty out on me?"

Thunderbringer shook his head. "Not that I know of. Judging by this little episode with the speedboat and shotguns, I'd say more like there's a contract out on you."

"Hard point to argue," Garma admitted. His shoulders seemed to sag for a moment. Then, abruptly, he squared himself and a kind of hard, determined glint shone in his eyes. "Look, I figure it's a safe bet we're all out of the mood for fishing now, right? And even though our little firefight don't seem to have drawn any undue attention, it's probably best if we got out of here. So if you're ready to turn back, B.U., on the way I'll level with you guys as much as I can about what just went down."

"The short version is that I took on a freelance job about a month back that turned out to be a set-up. Stupid, stupid play on my part. And that's a fact. Things were going pretty slow with Po'boy and I started getting itchy. So I gave the nod to a couple guys in the know and had 'em spread word that I might be available for a little something on the side."

As he talked, Garma sat totally still, elbows resting on thighs, staring straight ahead. The hard glint stayed in his eyes and the only times his expression changed was when a wave spray would whip up over the deck rail and cause him to blink against the mist.

"That's how I got hooked up with this broad wanted her husband whacked," he continued. "Simple story: Hubbie was cheating on her with some chick half her age. Looked like it was starting to get serious with the young chickie so the wife decided she'd better dump him first, permanent-like, before he tried to get shed of her. Guy was loaded and they had one of those pre-nup deals where the wife would've got peanuts if there was a divorce. I make it look like an accident, she gets everything. Catch was: She wanted to be there to see it." Garma's mouth twisted briefly with a kind of sour smile. "That shoulda been a warning, I suppose, but I agreed—for extra dough, naturally—because I sort of admired the dame's cold-bloodedness, know what I mean? Plus I liked the idea of planning it like an accident. It's good to do a job once in awhile that ain't just gun work.

"So the way I rigged it was to be waiting in a stolen car, engine running, when the cheatin' bastard—his wife's words—came out of his girlfriend's apartment building late one night. The wife was parked at the curb in another car, watching. Hubbie steps out, I stomp the gas and nail him. I take time to check and make sure he's dead, give his neck an extra snap for guarantee, then I'm gone in the stolen heap which I dump in a canal twenty blocks away and hotfoot it clear."

We waited for the rest of it. Thunderbringer and I kept our expressions flat. B.U., listening as he steered the boat, was clearly ill-at-ease with what he was hearing.

"I had my money up front, the deed was done. According to the papers the cops were buying it as one more unfortunate hit-and-run, just the way I'd planned. Everything seemed sweet.

"The first hitch came when I saw news clips of the mourning widow and it wasn't the dame who'd hired me. And then the video showed up. Taken off one of those cell phone recorders, showing me clear as shit getting out of the stolen heap and doing the neck-snap thing after I'd mowed the guy down."

"This video showed up where?" Thunderbringer asked.

"Got delivered to Po'boy."

"Not the cops?" I said.

Garma shook his head. "Getting the cops involved wasn't the idea."

"The woman who hired you—the one who turned out not to be the victim's wife—obviously shot the video from where she sat in her parked car," said Thunderbringer. "But if not to hand you over to the cops, then what? Blackmail?"

"Something like that. Only not blackmail to use against me—instead, something to use against Po'boy. After Hurricane Katrina, see, the mob territories down in New Orleans got sorta shifted around from the way they'd been for years and years. Hell, the whole freakin' city damn near got flushed out into ocean, you think the mob bosses had their shit together any better than anybody else? Records got washed away, people got washed away—some by Mother Nature, some by guys looking to take advantage of the situation and give Mother a helping hand, if you catch my drift.

"So anyway, the way things got restructured left a little bigger slice for some of the newer guys—Cubans, Mexicans, Asians, even a few Russkies and the like from those old Communist countries. They'd all been latecomers to the show after the original boundaries were set, so they were stuck sucking hind tit until Katrina gave them an opening for something better. When all was said and done, it naturally left some of the old-timers with a smaller piece of the action. Been hard feelings ever since. Trouble simmering. Po'boy, he didn't lose hardly anything so a lot of those simmering hard feelings by other old-timers have been aimed at him."

"Let me guess," I said. "The guy you whacked was associated to one of those old-timers who were harboring bad feelings for Po'boy."

"Bingo," Garma responded. "He was some kind of hotshot lawyer or something. Nobody from the ranks I would've ever heard of or been able to recognize, but still important to their organization. And it was one of the old-timers from a different outfit—never mind names, just another one who was jealous of what Po'boy had been able to hang onto—who set me up. His message to Po'boy: Cut me a slice of your action to help balance out what I lost and none of this goes any farther. Otherwise we do it the hard way and I see to it So-and-So gets a copy of the video, showing your top hitter taking out one of his men. Then I'll sit back and watch the war break out. When the dust settles, I step forward and still claim that bigger slice I'm after—from the loser."

Thunderbringer gave a low whistle. "You boys play rough down there."

Garma shrugged. "Part of what keeps the juices pumping in an old gunslinger like me, I guess."

"Which sorta makes me wonder," I said, "why you're up here when it sounds like things are getting ready to pop down in the Big Easy. You don't strike me as somebody who runs away from a fight."

"Not hardly." Garma's eyes narrowed. "Been up to me, I'd've called the bluff of those video peddlers in a heartbeat. And that's a fact. Told 'em to go ahead and start the ball rolling and we'd meet whatever came with it in the war zone. Put an end to all that your-slice-is-bigger-than-mine business once and for all. Whoever's left standing wins the pot and that'd be the end of it."

"But I take it Po'boy didn't want to play it that way."

"No, he didn't. He's mellowed in his old age. A lot. Says he's seen too much of bloodshed. Thinks it's time we learn to handle things smarter. Thinks this dispute—his word—can be worked out with talk, avoid jumping to battle lines like in the old days. Figured he'd have a better chance of negotiating a peace settlement—his words again—if I was out of town, off the radar while he was trying to get it done."

B.U. managed a dry chuckle. "And everybody knows you can't get much farther off the radar than Nebraska. How came you to choose our little corner of the world, anyhow?"

"Might surprise you to hear I'm practically a hometown boy," Garma answered. "I grew up over near the little town of Brule, off to the west a ways. When I was a kid my pop would bring me out here to Lake Mac for fishing and camping. It was one of my favorite places." Garma's voice took on a trace of wistfulness. "Kinda funny. Living down where I do now, with the ocean right there and about a gazillion lakes all through Louisiana, I still always thought about coming back here again some day." He gave another shrug. "So when Po'boy said I needed get out of Dodge, well, I guess I saw it as my chance."

We were back at No Name Bay now. B.U. cut the engines and started to coast, expertly nosing the Let 'Er Buck in toward the boat ramp.

Nobody said anything for a minute, all of us going quiet along with the throttled-down engine noise. Thunderbringer and I exchanged glances. The next question for Garma was pretty obvious, only for some reason each of us seemed reluctant to say it.

Garma saved us the trouble. "The only one who knows where I'm at," he said, "is Po'Boy."

"So where did those shotgunners come from?" I wanted to know.

Garma held up a hand. "In a minute. Let's get to land and make sure I don't have any kind of welcoming committee waiting for me, then we can pick this up again."

B.U. arched a brow sharply. "What do you mean by 'welcoming committee'?"

"Not to sound like I'm bragging or anything," Garma said, eyes scouring the shoreline and surrounding waters intently, "but anybody seriously wanting to take out a guy like me won't settle for one try and they'd be smart to send more than just one team to get the job done. You were there for round one. I figure there's probably a back-up bunch lurking around somewhere for the next attempt."

* * *

We got the Let 'Er Buck to shore and loaded onto B.U.'s trailer without incident.

As he was getting ready to pull away, B.U. leaned out the window of his pickup and eyed each of us in turn before saying, "I'll leave you fellas to finish talkin' over...whatever it is you need to talk over. I know you're all pros at what you do and where this goes from here is way outta my league. I probably don't need to say this, but I'm gonna anyway—especially to you, Joe. This is a nice little community with good people coming in and out of here all the time. If there's gonna be more shootin', you got to find a way to steer it somewhere else and make double-damn sure somebody undeserving don't get hurt."

He drove away without waiting for any kind of reply.

"That was a good speech, but an unnecessary one," Garma said, squinting against the cloud of dust kicked up by B.U.'s departing tires. "Give me five minutes to pack, I'll be gone from here and take my shit storm with me."

"You sure that's smart?" Thunderbringer said.

"It's the smartest move right for the moment. And that's a fact."

"What about whoever sent those shotgunners after you? And that second team you talked about?"

Garma scowled. "There's only two ways those shooters could have found me here this quick. Either somebody got to Po'boy and forced my location out of him...or he sent them himself."

"What sense does that make? Why would he do that?" Thunderbringer said.

"Fail safe," I answered.

Thunderbringer gave me a look. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Old movie," I explained. "From back in the sixties I think. Henry Fonda plays the President of the United States. In the story, a squadron of U.S. bombers carrying nuclear warheads on a training exercise gets a wrong signal and think they're on a mission to bomb Moscow for real. Once they go past the Fail Safe point, there's no calling them back and the Russian defenses aren't good enough to stop all of them. One of our bombers makes it through. In order to prevent a retaliation and the full-out nuke war that would follow, President Fonda makes a sort of quid-pro-quo deal with the Russian prime minister—their main city for ours. He sends another bomber up over New York City and right after Moscow gets vaporized he orders it to drop its payload and the Big Apple is wiped out, too. Even Steven. No winner, only equal losers and a larger, more destructive war is averted."

"Now that," Thunderbringer said, "is hard and cold."

"Maybe so," Garma replied, "but I think it's also a damned accurate comparison to my situation. Po'boy is hell bent on avoiding a war at any cost. He made that real clear. I never saw it coming, but if what it cost was me—quid-pro-quo for the guy I mistakenly whacked—then, yeah, I think he's determined enough to make that call if he saw no other way."

We all went quiet again for a minute, letting everything sink in.

Garma broke the silence. "Look, there really ain't no more to talk about. You guys got no stake in this. You already stuck your necks out once to help me, and I appreciate it. Best way I can show that appreciation is to get clear of you and make sure, like B.U. said, nobody else gets hurt in the bargain."

"Seems to me," Thunderbringer said, "since we did side with you out there on the lake we oughta have some say about what role we play from here."

"I'm an outlaw, for Chrissakes. A hired killer. You nuts? We gonna turn into Christmas card buddies or something if I make it out of this alive? I might be good, but so are the guys Po'boy would pick to send after me. I'm on the wrong end of the gun barrel this time, man, I'm the one with the bull's-eye view for whatever comes next and I know it ain't gonna be pretty. Why the hell would anybody be lookin' to share that view with me?"

He'd barely gotten the words out before Garma gave a little grunt, like he was trying to suppress a cough or something—and then a finger-thick stream of bright red arced out from the hole that suddenly appeared in the center of his chest. He buckled at the knees and started to sag. The booming report of a high-powered rifle and another round arrived simultaneously. The second shot hit just above his left collarbone, tearing away meat, shattering bone and cartilage, spraying more blood.

Thunderbringer launched himself into Garma, wrapping his arms around the wounded man's waist, twisting and dragging them both to the ground. A third heavy slug tore a long gouge in the sand where Garma had been standing an instant earlier. I hit the ground, too. Together, Thunderbringer and I scrambled toward the water, tugging Garma along with us as we squirmed down in behind the concrete base of the boat ramp—the only cover anywhere close at hand. The rolling boom of the third shot rang in our ears as we huddled tight together in the shallow, reddening water.

"Fuck!" Thunderbringer bellowed. "Fuck! We never should have been standing out there in the open like that. What the fuck were we thinking!?"

He had his Glock drawn. I had my .45 in my fist. But it was too little too late. Garma had taken two bad hits. He was losing blood like crazy, too weak to pull his own piece, and barely able to hold his head up out of the water.

Thunderbringer risked a quick peek up over the edge of the boat ramp. He drew no further fire.

"How do you make it?" I asked when he ducked back down.

"Long range rifle. Scoped, most likely. Came from a good distance, somewhere off in those scrub trees along the shoreline to the east there. Out of range for our handguns, even if we could see anything to fire back at."

"Told you Po'boy would send somebody good," Garma rasped. "Some shootin', eh? Bet it was that fuckin' Grouchet. Never did like that Frog fruitcake, but he sure can shoot, gotta give it to him."

"Screw that," Thunderbringer said. "He didn't get the job done, did he? You're still—"

"I'm bleeding out, man," Garma interrupted him. "Don't pretend I'm gonna make it. You think I don't know better?" He emitted a thick-sounding cough and more blood spurted from the hole in his chest. "Like you said, we never should have got caught out in the open like we were. Must be losin' my edge That happens, just a matter of time before somebody was gonna punch my ticket anyway."

He coughed again. I pressed the palm of my hand down on the wound but it didn't do much good.

Garma rolled his eyes up at us. One corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked smile. There was blood on his teeth. "That bull's-eye view I was talking about before? It sucks the big one, boys." His voice was weakening fast. "Lots more fun being on the other side of the crosshairs. And that's a fact."

Then he was gone.

* * *

There was no way to keep the cops out of it after that, of course.

Thunderbringer, B.U., and I all played it dumb as far as having had any idea who Garma really was before the shooting started. Abby kept our little secret, too. And no mention was ever made of the first shooting, the one out on the water.

Saying anything more than we absolutely had to wasn't going to do Garma—not to mention ourselves—any good. I felt a little bad about holding out on Keith County Sheriff Gene Knaack, a good cop who'd always been square with me, but that was the way it had to be this time around.

Deputies were able to locate the spot the rifleman had fired from, a brushy point jutting out about seven hundred yards down the shoreline from the boat ramp. But other than some flattened twigs and a few ground markings, the killer had left behind nothing traceable to himself.

It didn't take long, however, for Garma to be ID'd via his fingerprints. From there the conclusion as to what had gone down seemed perfectly clear—a notorious hit man's past had caught up with him. And since the threads to whatever exactly was behind him getting gunned down undoubtedly led back to New Orleans, the local authorities didn't have a whole lot of interest in pursuing it much further.

Whether or not Po'boy Meechum had somehow been forced to give up Garma or if it was strictly his own fail safe idea to prevent wider-spread warfare, we could never be certain. But the fact that reports had him continuing to conduct business as usual down in the Big Easy seemed like a pretty good indicator which way it had been.

Then one day, just short of six weeks after Garma got taken out, Thunderbringer called me and read aloud a brief article he'd spotted in one of the Denver newspapers. The piece related how one Po'boy Meechum, a reputed long-time mob boss from New Orleans, had been shot to death while vacationing in the Bahamas.

"Guess he couldn't manage to stay clear of mob warfare after all," Thunderbringer commented when he was done reading.

"Guess not," I replied. "Let's just hope that, before he went down, he had time to appreciate the same bull's-eye view he arranged for Garma."

Wayne Dundee lives in the once-notorious old cowtown of Ogallala, on the hinge of Nebraska's panhandle. He relocated there after spending the first fifty years of his life in the state line area of northern Illinois/southern Wisconsin.

A widower, retired from a managerial position in the magnetics industry, Dundee now devotes full time to his writing.

To date, Dundee has had eight novels, five novellas, and over two dozen short stories published. Much of his work has featured his PI protagonist, Joe Hannibal. He also dabbles in fantasy and straight crime, and has recently been gaining notice in the Western genre. His 2010 Western short story, "This Old Star," won a Peacemaker Award from the Western Fictioneers writers' organization; and his first novel-length Westerns, Dismal River and Hard Trail To Socorro, appeared in 2011.

Titles in the Hannibal series have been translated into several languages and nominated for an Edgar, an Anthony, and six Shamus Awards. Dundee is also the founder and original editor of Hardboiled Magazine.

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