BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled 2

Edited by
David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker

Copyright © 2013 by BEAT to a PULP

All stories copyrighted by their respective authors. Previously published material is noted with the date it originally appeared in print or online.

Copyright © 1953
Charles Boeckman. "Tough Cop." Standard Magazines, Inc.

Copyright © 2009
Robert J. Randisi. "Shut Up and Kill Me." BEAT to a PULP webzine, December.

Copyright © 2010
Paul S. Powers. "The Killing on Sutter Street." BEAT to a PULP webzine, January.
Kieran Shea. "The Takedown Heart." BEAT to a PULP webzine, November.

Copyright © 2011
Jedidiah Ayres. "Down, Down, Down, Burns, Burns, Burns." BEAT to a PULP webzine, May.
David Cranmer. "The Wicked." Pulp Modern.

Copyright © 2012
Tom Roberts. "Hard Time." BEAT to a PULP webzine, June.

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.

Cover image from iStock (www.istockphoto.com); Design by dMix.

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CONTENTS

The Takedown Heart
Kieran Shea

The Loveliest Tail
Wayne D. Dundee

The Killing on Sutter Street
Paul S. Powers

Down, Down, Down, Burns, Burns, Burns
Jedidiah Ayres

Split the Take
Eric Beetner

Vicious Day
Matthew C. Funk

Hard Time
Tom Roberts

The Wicked
Edward A. Grainger

Double Your Pleasure
BV Lawson

Ghost Story
Jay Stringer

It's Coming
Jen Conley

Tough Cop
Charles Boeckman

Shut Up and Kill Me
Robert J. Randisi

Other BTAP Titles

Connect with BEAT to a PULP

THE TAKEDOWN HEART
A Charlie Byrne Grind

Kieran Shea

I leaned my back against a wall in Dodge Lee's windowless, claustrophobic gym office and considered the funky air-conditioned odors—inexpensive vanilla air freshener, staph-inducing mildew, old rubber, and dried sweat. Behind Dodge's brown, shaved skull, a large crop of dusty, colored ribbons dangled from a shelf crammed with old martial arts trophies. Lots of faded photographs of bare-chested and uniformed fighters in discount frames. Two shallow craters the size of fists caved in the far expanse of wall.

Years ago, when I was first starting out as an investigator, Dodge taught me a few things about taking care of myself, a dirty little bag of tricks of sorts. I had a notion that mastering a few moves might come in handy someday if I was stupid enough to get on the wrong side of trouble. Other than a few minor scuffles, I'd been lucky. I never really had to call on the tactics and moves I learned from Dodge, but I will say this. After eight weeks of suffering under his hard case Thai-African-American tutelage, I pretty much steer clear from those with any serious mat time.

I hadn't seen Dodge in a handful of years, and I wondered with the plummeting economy just how well his little gym was doing. Just on the outskirts of Atlantic City, D-Lee Fight & Fitness was located in a dumpy little strip mall next to an abandoned mattress wholesaler on Route 322. I arrived a few minutes after 10 a.m. on a balmy Tuesday in June and business seemed fair. A dozen odd patrons of varying ages working out: two chicken-sticked twentysomethings benching heavy iron in the pit, a few guys sparring on the mats, and a chunky dude with a beavertail haircut kicking a heavy bag. Human condensation streaked the "D-Lee Fight & Fitness" letters in the front window.

Dodge himself looked puffy and tired behind his desk. I hardly recognized him at first and he noticed my hesitating concern. He complained about a herniated disc in his back and brushed aside my troubled look. Dodge called me because he wanted to talk about a dude named Diego Guzman.

"He's a tough kid, Charlie," Dodge said. "Best grappling middleweight that's been around this dump for a while now. One hundred percent Guatemalan, a born fighter. Has a wrester's speed and the learning curve? Shit, he's like a goddamn mirror. Show him some obscure release just once and the son of a bitch executes it better than anybody on their best day. He actually listens to you when you give him instruction. You have any idea how rare that is? Most kids these days are borderline retarded and that's before they get their brains beat in."

I shuffled a thumb toward the front of the gym.

"Is Diego out there now?"

Dodge plucked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it rapid fire. "Yeah. He's sparring on the ringed mats by the door. You probably passed him on your way in so I'll introduce you when we're through back here. Anyway, with the MMA and some luck, Diego could actually make a little bread for himself."

"Are you managing him?"

"Nah."

"Why not?"

"It doesn't work that way now. Kids breaking in nowadays do their own managing at least until they get up to a level where someone with sponsorship juice takes notice. Anyway, who has the time to nurture and coach somebody who might not pan out? I've a small business to run here, you know how friggin' hard that is?"

I did indeed.

Dodge said, "Man, I swear if I had a dollar for every dope that came in here asking for management. Don't get me wrong, I love the spike in business with all this Tapout nonsense, but please ... you should see some of the pups who wander in here thinkin' this is some kind of charity gladiator school. People have seen too many movies."

I scratched the back of my head. I could hear the big, beavertail-haired kid on the bag out front grunting hard and the lonely clank of settled iron.

"So why exactly am I here, Dodge?"

Dodge's lips pulsed. I knew Dodge appreciated my directness, but I wasn't being direct so much as I wanted to move things along and snag myself a falafel sandwich from the Lebanese joint across the highway. Dodge tossed his ballpoint pen onto his blotter.

"It's about a girl," Dodge said.

"Excuse me?"

"My niece. Janae."

"Your niece? I thought this was about this Diego kid. What about your niece, Dodge?"

Dodge took a moment and then rubbed his fingertips into his baggy eyes in an effort to clear away some unseen mental aggravation. "I was against those two getting together in the first place but ...." Dodge stopped rubbing his eyeballs and waved a hand. "Janae has been dating Diego and messin' with the boy's fight mojo. Screwing him all kinds of up, you know, that crazy Latin blood of his."

"Fill in the blanks for me."

"Short of it is Diego thinks Janae is stepping out on him. It's all he ever seems to talk about. The boy is, like, obsessed. Like I said, he has that crazy Latin blood."

"Tell him to break it off."

"Obviously you're not Guatemalan."

"No, but that's what I'd tell him, I mean, if it's messing with his future."

"Yeah sure, you do that, and I'll stand by and watch as he caves in your skull like a milk carton. His temper issues are insane, Charlie. Here, let me tell you a story. Before he and Janae got together, Diego was all hot and heavy with this other girl, this smoking hot bartender chick from down in Wildwood. Anyway, word is some mofo twice Diego's size and a fighter to boot made a pass at this former hottie girlfriend and Diego thrashed the guy into a small coma. No witnesses, so no assault charges, but that's the word."

"Some word."

"Fuckin'-a right that's some word."

"So is Janae?"

"What? Cheating on the boy? D'hell if I know."

"Have you asked her?"

"No."

"But she's your niece."

"I don't talk to Janae all that much. Not at all to be honest. Not in a while anyway. Her mother—my sister—she kinda hates my guts because of something I said to her a while back and I think she's brainwashed her kids against me. Nice, huh? My own sister, a regular humanitarian. Quite the bitch."

"But back to Diego, so he thinks your niece Janae is stepping out on him, this means what to you exactly?"

Dodge waved his arms above his head. "He's distracted from training that's what. Normally I wouldn't give damn, But, like I said before, Diego has potential, an honest-to-God shot at going all the way. This amateur card he has coming up could mean big things for the kid, man. Big things. I'd hate to see him screw it all up or get hurt because he's worried and distracted about something that ain't even real."

"Who's Diego fighting?"

Dodge snorted a chuckle. "Oh, you'll totally love this. An Irish prick just like you. Dan Mooney from Allentown, Pennsyltucky."

"Mooney any good?"

"Sure. A southpaw. A bit older than Diego and quick on his takedowns and submissions, but Diego can beat him if he's focused."

"So, what do you want from me?"

What Dodge needed was pretty simple. Dodge had an idea that if I could just tail Janae for a few days and make sure she wasn't two-timing his boy, Diego would nut up and buckle down for his fight. It was a reasonable request. Works that way sometimes, and I'd done it plenty of times before. People get a notion in their head and all they need is an outsider to hold their hand and tell them their stupid dreams are still intact.

I told Dodge my methods might involve a little more than just following Janae and he didn't seem to care. Anyway, we worked out a deal—my weekly rate at a discount so long as Dodge threw in an old weight bench and bag he had lying around to cover the balance.

Before I left, Dodge took me out on the floor and introduced me to Diego. The Guatemalan and another bubble-armed Latino were clamped together in a cinch, and a few other patrons had gathered to watch.

Diego snapped free of the cinch and threw a pumping jab. The other fighter tucked his arms up, and his defense blinded him from the powerful cross Diego unleashed from the left. The cross sucked the air from his opponent's lungs and he staggered for a moment, bending forward toward Diego who saw the opening and launched a knee into the guy's face. Even with protective pads, the impact looked and sounded all the way unpleasant. His opponent recovered with a staggering bob and a halfhearted right. Diego dropped under the punch to seize the back of his opponent's legs, executing a brutal takedown that I felt in the soles of my hiking boots thirty feet away. The whole thing happened in seconds with the decelerated horror one associates with car accidents. Diego wailed punches until his opponent finally tapped out.

Diego sprang to his feet, sniffed fiercely, and wiped a wet forearm across his brow. He lifted his chin at me.

"¿Eras un policía?"

I glanced at Dodge then back at Diego.

"Who? Me? No. No way."

Diego snatched up and took a long, squeezed drink from a taped up water bottle sleeved in a wooden caddy on the floor. He dropped the bottle back into the caddy and mumbled some Spanish to his sparring partner who had finally gotten to his feet. The two laughed a bit and shared a secret joke. Diego then asked, "Dodge say you train here with him a long time ago, yo."

"That's true."

Diego and his sparring partner couldn't hide their mocking grins.

"Fight much?" Diego asked.

Dodge stifled a snigger. I gave Dodge a look.

"Not if I can help it," I said.

* * *

The picture Dodge Lee gave me of his niece didn't really do the young woman justice. The truth was Janae was a walking heart attack—a long sweep of brown hair, trim curves, and sharp wide eyes that you noticed before she even looked your way. Twenty-one and generously shelved. When I finally saw her in person, I immediately could understand Diego's intense pangs of jealousy.

Janae worked the sales counter at the Louis Vuitton boutique at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino on the south end of A.C., and tailing her to and from work was an easy, but fairly tedious, affair. Fortunately for me, straight across from the boutique there was a Starbucks outlet with stools at a wide window. A laptop provided decent cover.

After a couple of days tracking Janae's routines and observing her at work, I picked my way into her efficiency one morning after she rolled out for the Trop. Took me under an hour to cruise her computer, poke around in the frilly thongs, and pass a handheld scanner over her bills. I found nothing incriminating outright save for a little stash of mossy green chronic in a tin in her nightstand.

I sat on the bed, sighed, and pinched off a hit's worth of the tacky dope for myself. I dropped the bud of weed in my shirt pocket and slid her stash back in the drawer. Couldn't blame the girl. We all need a good night's sleep.

After a few days I was feeling pretty stoked that I had nothing to share with Dodge and Diego. Boring as hell, sure, but it was a nice feeling just the same, sharing some good news with a client for a change.

On Friday evening I sat on my couch, fired the pinch of Janae's bud in my one-hitter bat, and cued up Death Cab for Cutie's Plans on my Bose box. Then I gave Dodge a call.

"Looks like your boy just needs to work on his trust issues, Dodge."

Dodge was curt. "So, you didn't find out anything at all?"

"Nothing that's openly suspicious, no."

"You're positive?"

"People can be careful, but I'm pretty sure."

"But you've got a couple more days on her, right? I paid you for a full week, that was our deal, right?"

"Technically, yeah," I said, "but just between you and me and my cat Chomsky here, I think Janae is clean. In fact, it's a ninety percent lock. Well, maybe not ninety. Eighty-five percent, give or take, is more conservative."

"I want one hundred percent."

"Like I said—"

"I'm freakin' serious, Charlie. Keep checking. You've got to be sure you've looked under every single stone."

"Am I what?"

"What?"

"Hey, man, I'm not stoned."

"I said you got to be sure you've looked under every single stone. Not stoned."

"Oh." Wow, that Janae scored some good shit.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

I looked at my smoldering one hitter bat. "Ahh ... sorry."

"Jesus, are you flaking out on me, Charlie?"

"No."

"God damn it, you always were a half-ass. I knew I shouldn't have hired you."

"What? Hey, now—"

"No, you hey now. I'm paying you good money, Charlie. I'm the freakin' client here, remember? You work for me and you do what I say. That's how this agreement works. God, do you treat the rest of your clients this way?"

"Man, you need to relax. Get a massage or something."

"Don't be cocky with me, you little prick," Dodge paused for few seconds to collect himself. "Ah, crap. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I haven't been getting much sleep these days and my back is killing me. Look, Diego told me Janae is going out with a couple of girlfriends tomorrow night after work for some happy hour thing."

"So?"

"So, Diego thinks she's meeting another guy. One of the girls who Janae said she was supposedly going to hang out with—get this—Diego knows for a fact that girlfriend is sick in bed with the stomach flu."

"How does he know this?"

Another fleeting pause. "He didn't tell me."

"Fine," I said, "But after tomorrow, we need to renegotiate. I have other things coming down the pike, Dodge. I'd be happy to bill you as we go and all, but I really don't want to waste your money. My feeling right now is your niece is clean."

"Just follow her."

Dodge hung up.

I tossed my cell phone down on the coffee table and hit mute on the Bose. Feeling a bit wobbly from my dope intake, I crossed the living room to my desk and picked up my portable scanner. I scribbled a reminder on a neon green Post-It note and stuck it on my computer's screen and placed the scanner next to the keyboard.

Across the room, my three-legged, one-eyed cat, Chomsky, mashed a pillow on the couch with his good front paw and settled in for a snooze. With the dope kneading away the day's kinks and blues, a nice snooze sounded pretty good to me, too.

Right after a big bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats.

* * *

As Dodge requested, I blew the following evening nursing seltzers with lime and tracking Janae around with her gaggle of decked-out, mini-skirted girlfriends. And what do you know? When the pack hit the Trump's Casbah Nightclub at 11:48 p.m., sweet little Janae hooked up.

At first I thought maybe it was just, you know, club flirting but then the heavy grinds on the pumping dance floor and the deep kissing in the booth erased all notions of casual from my mind. Kind of gave myself a kick for assuming the girl was squeaky clean.

Around 2:16 a.m., Janae and her dance buddy slipped off to a room upstairs at the hotel, and I tagged along. I played the sleepy drunk in the elevator exceptionally well, but those two were so into each other I might as well have been a roach squashed in the corner.

On ten, we all got off. Janae and loverboy sauntered east and I stumbled west down the hall. Once they shut their door, I double backed, hung around, and put an ear to the door. Those two got right to it. Forgive me here, but baboons in heat have more decorum.

"Oh, Dan. Ohh, Dan! Ohhh!"

Dan?

Oh, no way, I thought. I pulled out my iPhone and did some searching on the Internet. Yup. Friggin' southpaw mook from Allentown, Pennsyltucky? It sure as shit was.

Dan Mooney.

* * *

Two days later I rapped on the frame of Dodge's open office door and folded a stick of cinnamon gum into my mouth.

"Hey," I said.

Dodge looked up from a couple of spreadsheets and blinked. "Charlie B., my man." He coughed into a fist. "Hey, thanks for coming by. What's going on? What's happening? Come in, come in. What do you got for me?"

"What I have is not so good, Dodge."

"How's that?"

"You were right."

Dodge's face fell, and it was some of the worst acting I'd ever seen.

"Damn, really? It's true? Damn."

"Yeah," I said, adding, "she's quite the little slut, that niece of yours."

Dodge jerked back like I keyed his car. He snapped out a finger. "Hey, watch your mouth. We might not see eye-to-eye, but Janae's still my family, motherfucker, so don't be talking about my blood like that. Show some respect. Talking nasty like that, I might be old, but I sure as hell can kick your bony ass."

I held up a hand. "Sorry."

Dodge huffed. "Goddamn better be."

I eased away from the door frame and stepped into his office. "So, which part do you want me to break to Diego first, Dodge?"

"What? What do you mean which part?"

"The fact that Janae had her dainty heels pointing toward the ceiling while her and Dan Mooney hipped the light fandango or the fact that you're setting poor Diego up to rage all over Mooney in the octagon?"

"Setting up who to do what? What're you talking about?"

"Jesus Christ, Dodge. This is my job, man."

"Your job?"

"Yeah. It's my job, don't you get that?"

"I'm confused."

I rubbed a hand over my stubble. "Look, after the other night on the phone something didn't feel right to me. You seemed genuinely bummed out that I didn't have any dirt on Janae and got pretty insistent. And that, for my money, seemed hinky. For the record, Dodge, people normally like hearing good news."

"So?"

"So, I mulled things over and the next morning I went back and scoured Janae's cell phone bill. I saw the number for your gym here more than a few times, so tell me something. Are you always open at three in the morning? Didn't think so. Then I remembered how you said you never talked with Janae because of some beef you had with your sister."

"I didn't say that."

"Oh, so we're full on lying to each other's face now?"

"I didn't!"

"Please. Plus the fact, this is Atlantic City, Dodge. Christ, even if it's an amateur card, don't you think I'd check the line on the Diego-Mooney fight?"

Dodge's lips tightened. "What're you talking about? You're crazy, Charlie. This is totally crazy. Nuts."

"Maybe," I answered, and then gestured around the room indicating the gym, "but this place? Your bank is suing the living shit out of you, Dodge. Hell, if I was insolvent and bleeding cash, I'd want to bet on a sure thing too to dig myself out of that kind of hole. Same with your niece, Janae. I mean, how the hell does a twenty-one-year-old run up forty plus grand in credit card debts? Boy oh boy, I can picture you two hatching this scheme right now. What the hell, fire up some of that, what did you call it? That crazy Latin blood of Diego's? Make sure he goes in for the slaughter on Mooney? Hard to prove, yeah, but why the hell not? The thing is you wanted to use me to sell it legit, and I dig that. But dicking around with the angles on an amateur fight, some people in this city might not like that."

Dodge shoved back from his desk.

"It's cool, Dodge," I said. "Really. It's all cool. You can make a killing, tell Diego whatever you want, and even pimp out your hottie of a niece all the livelong day, but leave me out of the equation, all right? Man, I don't like being used like this. I've enough low self-opinion issues. Jesus, what did I ever do to you, huh?"

"In exactly five seconds, I'm going to bust open your skull," Dodge growled.

I shook my head and stepped to the side. "Go ahead then."

Before Dodge could launch himself on me, a brown blur streaked past my right side and chopped Dodge down with a crippling three-count combination. I slipped back to the office doorway and watched the young cub take down the old lion.

Dodge was right. Diego did listen and, man, was he ever fast. A follow-up right cross threw a splotch of Dodge's blood across the spreadsheets on his desk, and a crunching knee to his balls splashed the older man to the floor with a gasping whoosh of air.

I waited until only Diego was moving before I said enough was enough.

Twice nominated for the Story Souths Million Writers Award, Kieran Shea recently signed with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He lives outside of Annapolis, MD.

THE LOVELIEST TAIL
(A Joe Hannibal Story)

Wayne D. Dundee

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As he approaches his 30th year in print (making him one of the longest-running, still-active PIs currently on the scene), Joe Hannibal's present home base is No Name Bay on Lake McConaughy, west central Nebraska. This tale takes place near the close of his Rockford, Illinois, years, not long before the murder of his two closest friends turned his life upside down and ultimately led to his relocation to the Cornhusker State.

When Clyde Grammercy peeled the skimpy halter top off his strawberry blonde playmate, exposing a pair of World Class breasts between which he eagerly buried his face, I should have been a reasonably satisfied fellow. A minute or so later, after the rest of her minimal attire had been removed and the playmate had in turn tugged down Clyde's trousers to better facilitate the frantic coupling they then began to engage in—all graphically captured by the telephoto lens of my camera—I should have been practically ecstatic. Not as ecstatic as the two love-birds, to be sure, but relatively so.

After all, I had just verified pretty damned convincingly that ol' Clyde was guilty of trying to work exactly the kind of insurance claim scam that the company who'd hired me suspected him of.

My name, by the way, is Joe Hannibal. I'm a licensed PI and documenting the activities of Clyde Grammercy and his anonymous playmate was being done strictly in the line of duty, not as some sicko pastime I engage in for my own purposes.

The whole insurance claim bit was wrapped in a tangle of legal mumbo jumbo about casual negligence and criminal culpability and so on and so forth, but the bottom line was that Grammercy had suffered a mishap at work resulting in alleged injuries for which he had filed a mega-bucks lawsuit. Nobody disputed the occurrence or the details of the mishap, not even that managerial incompetence was involved. The battle lines were drawn over the exact extent of the injuries.

Grammercy, a glorified go-fer at a sprawling corporate headquarters building in downtown Rockford, Illinois (our mutual home base), had been instructed by his supervisor to use a freight elevator previously reported to be malfunctioning. With Grammercy aboard, the car snagged on its first attempted descent, trembled violently for several seconds, then plunged a story-and-a-half before catching again and jolting to a stop between floors. Although initially diagnosed as "only shaken up", it didn't take long for Grammercy to begin complaining of headaches, insomnia, extreme body aches, and on and on. It reached a point where he claimed to lack feeling or function from the waist down. He got a doctor to confine him to a wheelchair. The inevitable lawsuit came next. Backed by a quasi-reputable team of lawyers, shrinks, and physicians, Grammercy laid it on thick, blaming the elevator mishap for "severe psycho-traumatic damage" that brought on the partial paralysis and all the rest.

With his lawyers at the helm to keep the legal action on course, Grammercy fled to Minnesota to stay with his parents in rural St. Cloud for a time, reportedly seeking relief from all the stress he was under. When he went, I followed. One of the insurance carriers who would be footing a big chunk of the bill if he won his case sub-contracted me to keep track and see if he continued to act as disabled a couple hundred miles away as he was claiming to be in his own back yard.

It took less than forty-eight hours for him to ditch the act, apparently (and stupidly) believing he was far enough away from any prying eyes for it not to matter. After only one quiet night on the farm with mom and pop, he went lead-footing in a borrowed car—sans wheelchair—to the Twin Cities where he hooked up with the strawberry blonde, obviously by pre-arrangement.

That had been yesterday. I had dogged the two of them through the balance of that day, as much of the night as I could, and into today. In that time I had snapped several shots of Grammercy standing, walking, going up and down stairs, and one beauty of him with his girl wrapped in his arms, whirling her, lifting her feet off the ground. Now, in the late afternoon, the clincher—this obligingly spirited rendition of the horizontal rumba performed right on the balcony of their getaway luxury hotel suite within range of the camera I had aimed from a neighboring window.

So now that ol' Clyde had demonstrated for my lens and for posterity just how bogus his injuries really were, his goose was cooked and my job was finished.

There was only one problem, one nagging little thing that was keeping me from considering the matter successfully wrapped up .... That bothersome detail being the fact that, while I had been tailing Grammercy and his playmate, somebody had started tailing me.

The somebody was female—strikingly so. Very blonde, very shapely, very lovely. In fact, she was by far the loveliest tail I'd ever had attached to me. Intriguing as that aspect of it was, however, it didn't necessarily offer any comfort. Nor did it offer any clues as to the motive behind the surveillance. Okay, so it wasn't the first time I'd been followed by somebody and probably wouldn't be the last. But why now, why here? Was it connected in some way to the Grammercy case? Was it a spillover from a previous case, some old trouble getting ready to re-visit? Or was it the first hint of something brand new getting ready to hit the fan?

Those were the questions still bugging me as I closed the flap on my camera and retreated back into my room. But now that I'd completed the job I'd been sent to do, I promised myself I wasn't going to leave the rest of it unanswered much longer.

* * *

I had booked myself into the same hotel as Grammercy and his girlfriend. Neither of them knew me, there was no risk of being recognized. It kept me conveniently close to my work and, as it turned out, made possible this afternoon's hot bonus shots of the bout on the balcony.

At a desk in the corner of the room, I connected my borrowed laptop to the hotel's internet service, downloaded the collection of photos from my camera, and then e-mailed them to my insurance company contact back in Rockford. After that I stretched out on the bed and phoned him to let him in on the good news that was heading his way via cyber space. I also informed him I would deliver a detailed follow-up report when I returned to town but not to look for me for a couple of days because I had some personal business to take care of here before leaving.

It was near dusk by the time I'd showered and changed and left the room again.

The street out front of the hotel was well-lighted and busy. Four lanes of vehicles streaming back and forth in both directions; neon-splashed pedestrians milling on the sidewalks in the warm evening air.

The side street that ran between the hotel and its tall parking garage was a different matter. Dimly lighted by older-fashioned street lamps, a high percent of its curbing marked off for loading zones only, at this hour it was quiet and basically deserted except for the lengthening shadows that crowded in with the close of the day.

My lovely tail was parked there in one of the few legal spots, seated behind the wheel of a fairly new Monte Carlo. Exactly where she'd been since I followed Grammercy and his playmate into the hotel earlier in the afternoon. It was a vantage point from which she could see all the necessary entrances and exits.

Her surveillance of me for the most part had stuck to that pattern. The first time I spotted her had been inside the hotel bar where Clyde had gone to rendezvous with his eager girlfriend. The next day I'd seen her meandering along behind as I followed my quarry on a hand-holding stroll with his honey along Minneapolis's heralded riverfront. The rest of the time my shadow had been content to observe from some stationary post at a relative distance—apparently only interested in keeping track of my general whereabouts without needing or wanting to know my specific activities. It was almost as odd as it was annoying.

At any rate, it was about to come to a head.

I exited the hotel with an extra bounce in my stride, spruced up, slicked back, looking like I was all ready for a big night on the town. I angled across the street toward the garage where my own car was parked.

I could feel her eyes on me.

I did a casual scan of the street until I got to her, let my gaze linger for a moment the way any red-blooded male's would. I kept it cool, kept it loose, though, softly whistling a snappy little tune as part of the act. I was just a guy giving her an appreciative once-over, a schmuck without a clue he had a tail pinned to him. No harm, little girl. Heh heh heh.

I let my gaze take in her car, too. Then, part way across the street, I let the bounce go out of my stride and slowed to a near halt. An exaggerated frown pulled at my face and the tune I was whistling faded in mid note. I altered my direction and approached where she sat with her window down in deference to the warmth of the evening. I made a catch-all gesture and said, "Looks like you got trouble."

She shook her head. "No. I'm okay. Just waiting for someone. He'll be out in a minute."

"I wasn't asking," I said, layering on my own fabrication. This time I pointed more specifically. "I'm telling you—you've got a big stain spreading under your car. Fluid of some kind. Transmission maybe, or brake or power steering. Could be serious."

"That stain must have already been there when I parked. I keep this car fanatically maintained. Really. Hard to believe it has suddenly developed any kind of serious leak."

I rolled my shoulders in a fatalistic shrug. "Suit yourself. Stain sure looks fresh to me, though. Looks like whatever's making it is still dripping."

She held me at bay with a guarded smile, all the while studying me carefully, gauging me. A looker like her was no doubt experienced at getting hit on just about every way imaginable. Part of her had to be wondering if that's all this was. Another part—the part in sync with the tail job she was doing on me—had to be wondering if I'd somehow tripped to what she was up to, if this was an attempt to turn the tables, gain the upper hand.

But the part I kept playing to was the basic core trust that resides in most of us, the part that wants to believe not everybody is out to do nothing but take advantage.

I checked my watch, as if concerned about the time, then held up both hands, palms out. "Okay. But at least have your friend take a look when he comes out, will you?" I started to back away, angling again toward the garage. "Promise me, right? No sense taking unnecessary chances."

That sold it. I was clueless and harmless, just a guy trying to be helpful. So, having swallowed that, now she suddenly had to be worried about what was wrong underneath her car. Especially in view of the fact I appeared to be getting ready to take off somewhere and she'd have to be able to tag along.

Scowling with irritation, she shouldered open her door and started to get out. As soon as she did that, I reversed my direction and moved back in on her. I caught her poised half-in, half-out of the vehicle and leaned my weight against the door, effectively pinning her in that awkward position. For added effect, I slipped the .45 semiautomatic out from under my blazer and put the muzzle against her rib cage. "Just take it real easy," I said, "any nobody'll get hurt."

"What the hell is this?" she wanted to know.

"I'll ask the questions. What you'd better do is answer them. Do what I say and tell me what I want to know. Otherwise this .45 might have to fix it so there is a stain on the ground by your car."

I snapped a quick glance up and down the block. Everything remained still, the shadows deepening around us. If anybody noticed the two of us standing like we were, we'd just look like a pair of lovers doing a little preliminary public pawing.

"You don't scare me." Her pink-tinted lips sneered the words from beneath cobalt blue eyes flashing defiance.

Up close, she was every bit as extraordinary as she'd appeared in the more distant glimpses I'd been getting for the past day and a half. Not just trim and shapely, but hard-bodied, buff. A real 21st Century kind of chick. She was dressed in matching denim jeans and vest, glossy black cowboy boots, a silver conch belt, sleeveless skintight tank top that accentuated the swell of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach. Her bare arms were deeply tanned and rippled with sleek musculature.

"You'd better be smart enough to be scared," I told her. "I don't take kindly to being spied on, so you've already got me good and pissed. You asked for this confrontation, not me."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't."

"You really think you can get away with using that gun on a public street?"

"If I have to, yeah. If I didn't, it wouldn't be out of its leather. I don't play around when it comes to guns."

"Look, whatever this insane notion you seem to have—what you're actually doing is interfering in something a great deal more serious than you realize."

"Maybe I've got a better idea of what I'm interfering in than you think. Out of the car."

I eased the pressure on her just enough to allow her to straighten the rest of the way up. I kept the gun in her ribs, though, the closeness of our bodies hiding it in shadow. I looked up and down the street again. Everything still okay, still quiet. But I intended to play this scene out all the way and didn't want to press my luck by continuing it right there in the open.

I motioned with a jerk of my head. "We're going into the garage together. Put your arm around me and lean in real tight when we start walking, like you can't keep your hands off me."

"In your dreams."

"Just do it. You know about the gun, you can feel it. Any sudden moves, any stupidness—you risk paying a steep price."

I was counting on the part of the parking garage where we would enter to be as deserted as the street. From the times I'd used it before, I knew the attendants hung out mostly on the adjacent side around the main entrance/exit off the busier avenue.

I pushed my captive up two flights of echoey concrete stairs to get us off ground level. I walked her to a far corner, threading between moderately filled rows of parking slots, distancing us from the stairwell. I wanted adequate warning in case anybody headed our way.

"All right," I said when we'd reached a satisfactorily isolated spot. "Now let's get down to it."

She pulled away and backed against a massive concrete pillar. "So that's what this is after all—just a cheap rape attempt?"

"In your dreams, sweetheart," I said, mimicking her earlier words. "You know damn well what this is. You've been tailing me for the past two days. I want to know why. I want to know who sicced you on me."

She looked incredulous. "Me ... tailing you?"

"As somebody who's been at the game awhile, let me give you a little free advice: You got a lot of work to do on being more inconspicuous. Especially when it's a man you're shadowing. Any guy with the right set of hormones is going to notice—and remember—a looker like you."

"Are you complementing me, or threatening me?"

"Take it any way you want. Just so I get some answers."

"You aren't going to believe me anyway."

"Not if you keep trying to play dumb and innocent."

She put her hands on her hips. "You know, you might get more cooperation out of a person if you didn't come on like some oversized Humphrey Bogart—the gun, the tough talk, dragging and shoving a girl all over the place."

I showed her a shark's smile. "Will you pretty please tell me why the fuck you're following me and who set you up to it?"

"Oh, yes. That's much better." She eyes me sullenly. "Okay, let's try it another way. But first will you answer me one question? A minute ago you said you were 'somebody who's been at the game awhile'. Does that mean you're some sort of cop? Fed? What?"

I gritted my teeth. "There's that dumb and innocent shit again. The way you've had yourself glued to me I'm supposed to believe you don't even know who I am?"

"Humor me."

"The name's Hannibal. Joe Hannibal. PI out of Rockford, Illinois. There. Now what? Are we supposed to exchange 'Pleased to meetchas'?"

Something that could almost pass for an amused glint suddenly twinkled in her eyes. "Very well, Joe Hannibal, PI ... I admit it. You're absolutely correct, I have been following someone. And that someone is even from your fair city." She reached very slowly, very carefully into a pocket of her vest and withdrew a flat piece of paper that, when she held it out to me, I could see was a photograph. "But this is the Rockford citizen I have been keeping an eye on ... not you."

I took in the features of the person in the photo with a couple quick eye flicks. When recognition hit, I may have goggled a little more than I wanted to show. The subject of the snapshot was none other than Clyde Grammercy's strawberry blonde playmate.

"Her name is Sharon Wyeth. She works as a file clerk in the office complex of a large corporation back in your town. She's here at the expense and in the company of a co-worker—a fellow named Grammercy. He works at the same corporation, in some menial capacity. He must have hit the lottery

or something, however, judging by the way he's throwing money around on gushingly appreciative little Sharon."

"So now we know all the players in the game except for one," I said. "Whoever you're tailing, you must have a name."

She considered a moment. Then, less grudgingly than I expected, she said, "Dakota Kiley. I'm not a licensed PI or anything but I do bodyguard work, bounty hunting, some related stuff. I operate out of Milwaukee. Off times, I run a gym there."

I rubbed the side of my jaw. "Let me try to get this straight. You're following this Wyeth girl, not me. I'm on the guy she's with—Grammercy. That's why I kept seeing you in all the same places."

"And apparently being equal parts pompous and paranoid, you automatically assumed it was you I had my eye on."

I was starting to feel a little silly, standing there with the .45 still trained on her. But, stubbornly, I said, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, kid."

She said, "Don't forget, I kept seeing you in all those places, too. I didn't jump to the conclusion you were some kind of mad stalker. I imagined you for just another tourist, perhaps a lonely businessman on layover or something."

"I try not to take anything for granted—especially when I'm working a job."

"So what's the job involving Grammercy? What is he up to?"

I shrugged. "Insurance claim fraud. He's trying to sue for big bucks on false pretenses. I'm guessing that's the money he's throwing around so loosely, counting his chickens way before they hatch. He doesn't know it yet, but the very thing he's being so extravagant on—gushingly appreciative little Sharon, as you called her—is exactly what's going to blow the whole works for him. No pun intended. With his alleged injuries, see, he's supposed to be a limp noodle from the waist down. You've seen them together—you think that's the case?"

"Maybe Sharon has miracle healing powers."

"Uh-huh. What's her story? Why the tail on her?"

"It's not her so much as who I'm counting on her bringing out of the woodwork." From her other vest pocket, Dakota took a second item—this one a folded eight by eleven sheet of paper, a photocopy of a legal wanted poster. "The charmer you're looking at there is named Horace Taxer. He's on the lam for armed robbery, criminal assault, and a whole list of good deeds that make him a low rung badass, but a badass all the same. He's big as a house, highly proficient in a variety of martial arts yet not above reaching for a knife or gun if the mood strikes him. He's originally from the Milwaukee area, that's where I first drew a bead on him. He skipped bail there and—as I only recently found out—spent some time hiding out in your neck of the woods before things started closing in and he had to flee again to parts as yet unknown. While in Rockford, he took up with Sharon Wyeth, became her big, cuddly, ultra devoted boyfriend. The insanely jealous type, as demonstrated by the series of broken noses and shattered teeth he handed out as forget-me-nots to a whole parade of unlucky slobs he caught daring to respond to Sharon's flirtatious ways."

"And now here she is carrying on a big-time fling with unsuspecting ol' Clyde."

"Indeed."

"Any reason to think Taxer's insanely jealous nature has abated in his new hideaway spot?"

"Absolutely none."

"So if word should happen to leak to him, wherever he's at, that his sweetie is going at it hot and heavy with some new guy on an out-of-town rendezvous, Horace might be inclined to allow his jealousy to overcome his instinct for self preservation and come storming in to break things up."

"Could happen. You never know."

"Then again," I said, "who would be unscrupulous enough to leak word about Sharon's little hot-sheet weekend in such a way that it might reach Taxer and risk him going ballistic like that?"

Dakota Kiley grinned impishly. "Who, indeed?"

I grinned back at her and finally got around to putting away the .45. Her story had me convinced. Why else would she just happen to be carrying the photo of Sharon Wyeth and the wanted paper on Horace Taxer? It made a lot more sense than the oddly-patterned way in which I thought she'd been tailing me. "I like your style, kid," I told her. "Sorry I misread things and got in your face like I did."

She shrugged. "No harm done, I suppose. There is one thing though ..."

"What's that?"

"As someone who's been at the game awhile, let me give you a little free advice." Her right hand streaked behind her and from a rig that must have been at the small of her back, concealed under the fall of the vest, she drew with blinding speed a gleaming .357 Magnum revolver. The snout of this she jabbed immediately and painfully into my ribs. "You got a lot of work to do on being more thorough when you get the drop on a subject. Always take the time to frisk them for weapons and disarm them ... no matter how macho and in-control you feel just because you're some kind of old war horse who's trotted across the battlefield a few more times than the next person."

I stayed real still and cast a careful glance down at the .357 burrowing into my side. "Point well taken," I said.

I lifted my gaze and our eyes met. I was hoping to see that amused glint still in hers, but I couldn't be sure. After a long count, she pulled the gun back, twirled it like Dale Evans, reholstered it. "And quit calling me kid," she added somewhat petulantly.

Before I could think of a reply, we heard the scream. It split the night, coming from somewhere outside, a long, ragged, terrified wail. It sliced into the parking garage and reverberated back and forth through the different levels like it would never end.

Dakota's eyes went huge. Maybe mine did, too. We were both probably thinking the same thing. Together we bolted for the stairwell, the slap of our hurried footfalls generating a fresh round of echoes that finally drowned out the last of the chilling scream.

We exited at ground level onto the previously quiet side street. It wasn't so quiet any more. The scream had obviously been heard by several people in the vicinity.

On the other side of the street, a handful of hotel employees had emerged from various side doors to see what was going on. Several curious bypassers from the busy main drag at the end of the block came spilling down, some more eagerly than others. Faces were turning this way and that, eyes were darting in various directions, many looking up. A gaggle of voices mingled and grew excitedly louder.

"Did anybody see anything?"

"Who was it?"

"Hell, I don't know—what was it?"

"Wow, man, what a blood-curdling scream. You always hear that expression: blood-curdling. That's what this really was, you know?"

"Whatever it was, it was awful."

"Did somebody get attacked, or what?"

"It had a kind of fading-away quality ... like somebody falling."

It took a car, probably attracted by the trickle of people rapidly turning into a stream, to swing down the street and literally shed some light on the subject. The headlight beams carved a path through the knot of bodies and then came to rest on one that didn't get out of the way. This body was done moving anywhere on its own. Forever. It was the form of a nude male, lying in a kind of flattened sprawl in the middle of the street. The shape was as still and stark as a freeze frame, except for the blackish red puddle spreading in an uneven halo around the head.

The car braked to a sharp halt, causing its headlight beams to flick up and down and cast the body in a kind of strobe effect. As one, the crowd coming down the street ceased its forward motion and re-coiled two or three steps. There were several audible intakes of breath, some low groans.

Only Dakota and I moved toward the corpse then. I got close enough to verify the sickening hunch that had started forming in the pit of my stomach right from the first .... Damn it all, the pitifully battered ruin of a person was none other than Clyde Grammercy.

I locked eyes with Dakota over the dead man for a hard second, then we turned our heads and together looked up at the luxury suite balconies jutting out high overhead. One of them seemed to loom more ominously than the rest. There was movement up there, and voices drifting down faintly; one frightened and pleading, the other loud and angry.

"Taxer!" Dakota spat the name. "The bastard is here. He did this. All the time I was watching for him—he must have shown up right after you dragged me into that damned garage."

"If that's the case, he sure as hell didn't waste much time."

"He wouldn't. That's Taxer's way."

I brought my gaze back down to ground level and looked around us. The crowd up the street was starting to edge in closer again.

I said, "We don't have time to stick around and explain this to the cops. Not right now—not if we mean to try and wrap up Taxer before he gets away again."

"I don't mean to just try." Dakota thrust an unwavering finger, pointing down at what was left of Clyde Grammercy. "We're responsible for this—you and I, equally. I saw to it word got leaked to Taxer, luring him here out of hiding to find his lover in a cheating situation. You pulled me off the trap I had set for him at a crucial moment. Our high-handedness cost a man his life. I'd say the very least we owe this poor bastard is to bring down the animal who threw him to his death."

I tossed another glance up at the balcony. "What goes up has gotta come down," I muttered. "Yeah, let's bring Taxer down hard."

* * *

We hit the main lobby of the hotel running.

I liked the sensation of Dakota beside me, moving with the sleek grace of a jungle cat, a tigress on the hunt. I'd made up my mind about her under sudden and extreme circumstances, to be sure. A snap judgment that—given we had together now crossed a line marked by violent death and drawn guns and escalating threat—carried a high risk factor if I was very far off the mark. But any doubts were strictly academic; in my gut I felt confident she had my back as solidly as I would have hers.

Despite the lousy turn things had taken, we still had a little bit of luck riding on our side. My time as a guest of the hotel had given me a good feel for its layout. I knew that it was a refurbished version of the original structure that dated back to the early 1920s. Its historic significance and popular riverfront location had warranted the face-lift but there had been limited opportunity for expansion as part of the process. Therefore it remained rather modest in size, only ten stories high. The top four floors housed the newer rooms and the so-called luxury suites and were serviced by a single express elevator that accessed strictly those floors. The other half dozen floors were serviced by the original elevator system, two cars located in the center of the wide lobby. That meant that Taxer, when exiting Clyde Grammercy's suite on the tenth floor, had no choice but to come down the express elevator or use stairs for at least the first four stories of his descent.

If Dakota and I moved fast enough, we could effectively cover all his escape route options. When I pointed this out to her, she said, "You take the express, I'll go the other way. I run stadium steps three times a week—I'm in better shape to handle those stairs."

The assessment stung, but there was no arguing the validity of it. With more lives potentially at stake I couldn't afford to get my hackles up about it.

"What about the girl?" I wanted to know. "You figure he's killed her, too?"

"Hard to say. He never harmed her in the past. But those other times were only cases of flirtation. What Taxer walked in on here was considerably more than that—he never killed any of the other guys before, either."

"What if he tries bringing her out as a hostage?"

Dakota's eyes flashed. "Don't even think about bargaining with this asshole. No deals! If he has the notion to kill her, he'll go ahead and do it regardless—and try with all his might to take us out in the bargain. Cut him no slack—he's stone cold dangerous."

"Got it," I assured her.

I swung out the .45 again. Several other patrons in the lobby scurried bug-eyed at the sight of the hardware.

"Watch your ass, kid."

"Watch your own ass, you old war horse ... and quit calling me kid!" Dakota snapped over her shoulder as she broke into a trot for the central elevator bank.

* * *

The express car came down empty. I went in SWAT team style, sweeping the .45 ahead of me in a two-handed grip, covering right, left, up, down. Nothing. Nobody. I hit the button for the tenth floor and the car whooshed upward.

The express lift was one of the showpieces of the hotel's refurbishment. It was the external type, its car a brightly illuminated glass bubble sliding up and down on an outside cornice of the building. From inside the bubble, passengers were treated to a panoramic view of the riverfront and downtown.

At the moment I didn't give a damn about the view. The only scene I was interested in was trying to get a focus on Horace Taxer. There was no way of knowing for sure what state of mind he was in. Given his penchant for violence, he might have snapped completely and now be on the brink of an all-out killing frenzy. On the other hand, his murderous assault on Grammercy might have had a mollifying effect and he could be ready to slink back into the defensive, evasive mode that had put him in hiding before.

Either way, if he was a calculating man he'd likely figure he had several minutes before he had to make his next move. He had no way of knowing about Dakota and I being present under the circumstances we were. Remove us from the equation, he'd reason that motel security and police arriving on the scene would eat up a fair amount of time piecing together what had happened before ever starting to zero in on the tenth floor suite where Grammercy had been thrown from.

Fine, I told myself. Let the fucker think he had all the time in the world. Dakota and I would have him in a box before he knew what hit him.

The car bonged to a halt on Ten.

I eased out cautiously, holding the .45 at the ready.

The hallway was empty and appeared calm and undisturbed. The room I wanted—1008—was four doors down, on the right. Two doors beyond that, on the left, I spotted the door marked for access to the stairs, the point where Dakota would be arriving.

I proceeded down the hall. In one of the rooms I passed, I could hear a TV program playing with bursts of an irritating laugh track. In another, I could hear a woman talking faintly, pausing every now and then the way you do when you're speaking on the phone. Whatever happened in room 1008 preceding Clyde Grammercy's fatal flight from its balcony had apparently been contained strictly therein and had not disturbed or alarmed anyone else on the floor.

The door to 1008 was ever so slightly ajar, closed but not quite to the point of engaging the latch. I paused in front of it, muscles tensed to a tight ache. No sounds came from the other side; I sensed no movement, no life. I glanced over at the door to the stairs. No sounds came from there either—no shouts, no one racing up or down the steps within the echoey shaft. So what was the signal? Was Taxer still in the room, lurking silently, alerted somehow to the fact someone was closing in on him? Or was he exiting via the stairwell, quietly and calmly because—in accordance with my earlier assessment—he figured he had plenty of time, no reason to hurry, no need to draw attention to himself by acting in a suspicious manner?

If Taxer was in the stairwell then that meant he would be encountering Dakota at any moment and I naturally wanted to be on hand to back her up. But I couldn't allow myself to be diverted from the room without checking it out first. If nothing else, there was the girl, Sharon, to consider. No telling what kind of shape Taxer had left her in ... if, in fact, he himself was gone.

I bumped open the door and went in quick and low, covering myself with sweeps of the .45. The room stayed as quiet as the shadows that filled it. No lights were on, only what came through the open balcony doors. I found a couple of switches and snapped them on, narrowing my eyes against the sudden wash of brightness.

There were no signs of a struggle. There'd been one, though; I knew that much going in. And then I spotted further evidence in the form of Sharon Wyeth, sprawled on the floor between the suite's two beds. The filmy nightgown she was wearing was torn to only a few remaining wisps, leaving her virtually nude. Examining her, I saw that her face was bruised and she was bleeding from one corner of her mouth and nose. She was unconscious, but still alive. The pulse at her throat felt strong, steady. She'd come out of this with some marks both inside and out, but at least she'd come out still breathing.

I took a second more to check the balcony. No Taxer there, either. Only a cold feeling in the air that he had been present and, peering over the low rail, the bloody evidence far below verifying that fact. Police cars and emergency vehicles were starting to arrive down there, splashing everything and everybody with whirling circles of red and blue light. No one bothered to look up at me.

* * *

When I returned to the hallway, this time I immediately heard sounds coming from the stairwell—footfalls ringing hard on the concrete-over-metal steps, shouts echoing.

Taxer and Dakota must have collided! It sounded as if he was retreating from her, coming back up. I bolted down the hall to intervene.

It was the heavy, steel-reinforced stairwell door that fooled me. Its density muted the sounds, made them seem like they were coming from farther away. I'd judged the closest of the footfalls to be half a flight or more down. Instead, when I jerked open the door Taxer was right there in my face! "Big as a house" was how Dakota had described him. Up close and looming unexpectedly like that, he looked big enough to have his own zip code.

He should have been as surprised to see me as I was him. If he was, it slowed him down only a micro-second. He dropped a massive shoulder and came barreling into me, trying to bull me out of the way. But I had the heavy door on my side. I used it to block the biggest share of the impact. After his forward momentum had been stopped, I whipped the door open and then closed again as fast and hard as I could, slamming it shut on him like a battering ram, rocking him back on his heels.

I couldn't see Dakota but I could hear her shouting something from somewhere down the steps.

I charged into the stairwell, thinking I had Taxer partially stunned. I was wrong. The big bastard was waiting with a sucker punch—make that a kick. His foot whirled in a lightning-fast arc, the heavy heel of his shoe crashing off the side of my face, knocking me back against the wall, hard. The taste of blood filled my mouth. He immediately threw a second kick, a reverse slash of the same foot, driving it into my gut. I doubled over and dropped to my knees. I lost my grip on the .45, startled by the sound of it clattering to the floor, catching a glimpse as it went sliding away.

Taxer closed in on me, trying to knee my face, but I twisted away and got a shoulder up, blocking him. He nevertheless drove me back against the wall again and pinned me there, grinding down on me. I felt suffocated and panicky, unable to gain any leverage, unable to fight back. I heard him grunting with effort and then the scrape of something hard, metallic on the wall above me. Scrunching my head back, I looked up and saw him struggling with a large red cylinder—one of those bulky industrial fire extinguishers that he'd yanked off its wall bracket. As I watched, he hoisted it high above his head, getting ready to slam it down and mash my skull.

The sound of a gunshot filled the stairwell with a deafening roar. The fire extinguisher jumped out of Taxer's hands, punctured and knocked away by the slug. Its pressurized load of CO_2 began to escape in a wild, screaming hiss. The cylinder hit the floor and bounced, somersaulting end over end, spewing a cloud of icy white mist that billowed and boiled, enveloping the landing, cutting visibility to zero.

I grabbed blindly, trying to seize hold of Taxer, drag him down. All I got for my effort was a clout to the side of the head that hammered me back into the hallway door.

When the frozen mist cleared, Dakota was poised at the top of the steps leading up from below. Her .357 was in her hand, raised and ready. Taxer was gone. So was my .45. I was sprawled in such a way that I was blocking the closed hallway door, meaning Taxer couldn't have fled that way.

Dakota gestured. "Had to've gone up. The roof."

I got to my feet, backhanding away some of the blood leaking from my mouth. "Thanks for the bullet," I said, nodding toward the ruptured fire extinguisher that now lay spent and silent, a few wisps of vapor curling around it. "Saved me a split skull, maybe worse."

"I ran into our man—almost literally—three flights down," Dakota explained. "I gave chase but held fire for fear of setting off a ricochet in this damned stairwell. When I saw him getting ready to brain you, I had no choice but to take the chance."

"You did fine, kid. I'm the screw-up here. First I let Taxer sucker kick me, then I coughed up my piece and gave him the chance to grab it. If he wasn't armed before, thanks to me he damn sure is now."

"He still has to make it off that roof. And it's not going to be through us!"

We started up the final flight of steps. The light had been doused at the top, but the door up there was standing open and I could see a star-sprinkled slice of night sky. I tapped a fingertip against one of the conches on Dakota's fancy silver belt and told her, "You'd better lose that. Go out with that on, you'll reflect whatever light there is and mark yourself as plain as if you were wearing a string of Christmas bulbs around your waist."

While she was shucking the belt, I hiked my leg and snared the little hideaway 9mm out of the spring clip in my boot. When I straightened up with it, Dakota took one look and said, "What are you going to do with that—throw it at him?"

"Get me close enough to the big fucker again," I growled, "I'll cram it down his throat and make him choke on it if I have to."

We broke onto the roof in a fast, flare-out pattern, me cutting to the right, Dakota to the left. The roof was tarpaper-sheeted and sprinkled with loose pea gravel. Scattered by our feet, the tiny stones made sounds like scratching rodent claws.

Wherever Taxer was, he wasn't waiting in ambush.

Dakota and I dropped into crouches and stayed that way for several beats, listening intently, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness of the shadowy roof. The winking, multi-colored lights of the city spread out all around us and overhead the sky was cloudless, clear. But the various stacks and pipes and vents that jutted up in wild disorder all across the broad roof cast a jungle of bizarrely-shaped, over-lapping shadows, some as black and deep-looking as death.

After a minute or so, Dakota edged over to me and whispered, "All we have to do is wait him out, keep this door guarded. He's got no other way down."

I wiped some more blood from my mouth. "I dunno. I ain't much on waiting patiently for—"

The familiar report of my .45 came from some distance away. We both flinched, but no slugs smashed into either of us, none hit anywhere close. In fact, none even came in our direction. The curious-ness of this was just starting to sink in when another shot sounded. Then a third followed quickly. But still no bullet whine, no rounds seemingly sent our way at all.

A patch of sparse light played across Dakota's bewildered frown.

Straightening up part way, craning my neck cautiously to scan the rooftop, I saw then what was going on. Dakota saw, too.

Taxer was at the far corner of the roof, perched somewhat precariously on the point just above the exterior cab of the express elevator. He was leaning out as far as he dared with one arm extended down and was firing repeatedly at the lighted bubble that hung suspended at its top limit just the way I'd left it. As we watched, one of the gold-tinted glass walls disintegrated and collapsed inward, cascading a shower of broken slivers like golden rain.

"Oh, shit! If he makes it into that car and starts it down," Dakota said, "we'll never have a chance to head him off."

She raised her .357, cupped it in a two-handed grip, and squeezed off three fast rounds. Shredded tarpaper and pea gravel erupted around Taxer's feet as the slugs tore in low. The fugitive spun to return fire, a pair of shots that sang off wide but were close enough to cause Dakota and I to both duck. Then, whirling back, desperate and determined, Taxer tossed the .45 ahead of him down into the elevator car and went over the edge of the roof after it—catching the cab's frame like a trapeze bar and swinging himself down and in, dropping heavily to the floor of the bubble.

"Double shit!" Dakota swore. Wasting no more words or time, she turned and plunged back into the stairwell, intent on trying to make a mad rush back down the flights of steps in an odds-against effort to beat the car to the bottom.

As for me, I can't tell you exactly why I did what I did next. Maybe I just wanted to get my hands on Taxer again so bad I simply didn't give a damn. Maybe Dakota's out-of-shape insinuation and the fact I'd allowed myself to get sucker-stomped and have my gun taken away made me so pissed and wounded my pride enough so that I couldn't help pulling a stunt of I'll-show-everybody bravado. Maybe I'm kinda nuts to begin with. Whatever the reasons, they propelled me—recklessly, without conscious evaluation or decision—across the roof straight for the elevator and its crash-in passenger.

I heard the hum of the car being activated, the cables and counter weights beginning to move. Felt the vibration of them under my feet. The bubble started to slide down.

The car had descended maybe seven feet when I went off the point of the roof and dropped down onto it. I hit hard, no room to tuck and roll. The roof of the car was flat metal, painted bronze in keeping with the whole golden motif. It dented badly under my weight, clearly not designed to be a landing pad for feats of derring-do.

We continued to hum smoothly downward.

The expected slug from Taxer ripped through the top, missing me by a full two feet.

Four to smash the glass; two to keep me and Dakota pinned down; and now one more trying to pick me off .... Seven. He'd fired all of his rounds!

Digging the hideaway out of the pocket I'd stuffed it in to make the jump, I flattened myself belly down on the roof of the car and squirmed cautiously toward the edge. I had a sudden bad moment when a disturbing thought knifed in: What if Taxer had another piece besides the one he'd snatched from me? But it was too late to worry about that now. I'd already rolled the bones ... I could only hope they didn't end up being my own.

Slowly, carefully, I leaned my head and shoulders over the side. The air rush was a momentary shock, making it feel like we were plunging downward way faster than I promised myself we actually were.

Taxer was waiting for me, braced inside the car in a kind of crouch. He was holding the .45—my goddamn .45—by its barrel. The slide was shot back, signaling the spent firepower. Making it now only an impromptu club, which was how he tried to use it. Swinging it at my head, heaving a mighty grunt of effort as he did. His movement was awkward and off-balance, though; he was clearly concerned about getting too close to the gaping opening he'd blasted out.

I jerked my head back, dodging the attempted blow. When I leaned over a second time, I shoved the 9mm in ahead of me. "Ride's over for you, asshole," I said, and shot him in the left kneecap.

* * *

The ambulances had come and gone ... and a few of the cops, too. There were still plenty of the latter left on hand, though. Milling around, their staticky radios hacking and spitting in the background.

At least they seemed to be done with me for awhile, giving me a break between rounds of grilling me with questions.

I sat beside Dakota Kiley on a stone retaining wall out front of the hotel. The river was somewhere off to one side. I could smell the water, even if I couldn't see it through the clog of onlookers jammed in tight against the police barricades. It was the first chance Dakota and I had to talk to each other since we'd parted ways to make our very different descents from the roof.

"You are a crazy goddamn fool, you know that?" she was saying. "That's the real reason the police are hanging around, pretending to consider how many charges they might bring against us. The truth is they've got calls out trying to find a rubber room padded thick enough to hold as big a lunatic as you've proven yourself to be."

She looked slightly disheveled sitting there, but still nothing short of awesome. The breeze off the river stirred her cascading hair and the spinning red and blue lights from the perimeter of the scene cast a shifting pattern of highlights across her flawless face.

I said, "You're just jealous because I beat you down."

She shook her head. "I can't believe you."

"What I can't believe is that after all the trouble I went through to retrieve it, the lousy cops won't give me my .45 back. Plus they took my hideaway, too—the one you scoffed at, by the way, because you implied it was too puny to do any good against Taxer. Let's see, in all the excitement I sort of lost track ... how was it that bullet hole got in Horace-baby's leg again?"

"What are you—angling for a cut of the bounty on him?"

"Hey, not a bad idea. Real generous of you to offer."

Dakota cocked an eyebrow. "Speaking of not bad ideas ... you and me could make a helluva team, Hannibal."

My turn to shake my head. "Not sure the world is ready."

She grinned. "No, it probably isn't."

"Besides, I doubt if I could ever get used to thinking of you as a partner."

"Is that some kind of sexist remark?"

"Not really." I grinned, too. "It's just that I figure I'd always be able to think of you in only one way, the way I first saw you ... as the loveliest tail I ever had."

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 nine 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.

THE KILLING ON SUTTER STREET

Paul S. Powers

I'd driven all night mostly over mountain roads, but I wasn't tired or sleepy when I hit Oakland at daylight. I parked the coupe near the Emeryville station, wondering if I'd ever see it again, but not caring. All keyed up, the thought of breakfast made me sickish and I grabbed the first train that came along. I sat on the right side of the first car so I could see the towers of San Francisco climbing up out of the mist. The weight of the .38 pistol in my coat pocket was friendly and comforting when I thought of what I was going to do. I would put the gun right to his belt buckle and shoot downward, and in my mind's eye I saw the bright, hard-jacketed slug spinning through his bladder, his prostate, his entrails, and on into the splintering base of his spine. It traveled very slowly, taking lots and lots of time.

From the station I phoned Helen, and from the way she sounded I woke her up. "Yes, my sister's here, but she don't want to talk to you," Helen said. "You've got gall, Mac, after all you've done. She won't talk to you."

"Judy isn't there. You're just covering up for Judy just like the whole family covers up," I told her. "And you know who she's been with all night, too."

She slammed the receiver. I stood thinking for a minute, then walked down the ramp and hailed a cab. I'd left my coupe across the bay because I didn't want to hunt for parking places in a place I didn't know very well. I'd got a ticket in Red Bluff on the way down and now I wanted no slip-ups. The cab took me up Market, then turned off and after quite a long ride dumped me out at the Turk Street address I'd given. It was a hotel for Elks, or Shriners or something, and he always stayed there when he was in town.

"I want to see Sheriff Dickson from Paloma County," I said to the manager. "I'm a friend." The word stuck in my throat a little.

"The sheriff checked out yesterday, same day he came. Say, did you know that old Kurt was married?" He grinned at me. When I didn't say anything he kept talking. "I've known him for years. A prince. But you could have knocked me down with a feather. They're staying at the D'Orsay Arms, on Sutter."

I took another cab. The D'Orsay was a dinky little place, and except for the room clerk the lobby was empty. On the register was: K.W. Dickson & Wife, Paloma City.

"They're out for breakfast. Want to wait?"

I waited outside, walking back and forth and keeping my gun warm. I hadn't intended it this way, but now I'd get them both. Dickson first. I wouldn't shoot through my coat-pocket because I wanted him to know what was happening to him. Suddenly, there they were! I'd been watching up and down the street and hadn't expected them to come around the corner right beside me. There was Dickson, big and good-looking, in spite of being away past fifty, with his diamonds flashing and wearing that hat with the wide, flat brim like the one you see in photographs of Jack London. I was slow in getting the gun out and he grabbed me.

I was slow because the woman with him was tall, slender and about forty years old. It wasn't Judy. While I was being manhandled she stood there smiling and I thought she would clap her hands. Just glowing with admiration for the brave sheriff who was demonstrating what he could do to a husky young man just half his age. He was powerful, and I'd been too surprised to fight. He'd twisted the pistol from my hand and now he had me on the sidewalk with his knee on my chest. My mind was as flattened as my body because I was remembering something I'd heard years ago, a story that Dickson had a wife who was dying, or was dead, in a tb. sanitarium down south. I knew that here she was, and that she'd saved Dickson's life.

I was crying and cussing his guts at the same time. "All right, I've been playing around with your wife, Mac, and so what," he said, and he split my lip with the fist that was holding the pistol. But a crowd was gathering, and he calmed down. When a cop pushed through he said something to him and showed his badge. At the same time he yanked me to my feet and told me to shut up. "Come on into the hotel. We'll talk this over."

It was a funny thing, that talk. Dickson got out a fifth of rye and poured shots for both of us while he told me that as far as Judy was concerned, sure, he'd only been human but that was past and why didn't I go back to her. I was shaking, and I said I never wanted to see or hear from that little bitch again. The woman listened to everything, not smiling now, and I could notice her make-up more and more as she got whiter beneath it. All at once she reached out and splashed a whole water-tumbler full of whiskey. She gagged on the first swallow, then drank it fast, before Dickson could get to her.

"What the hell, Stella!" he roared out. "The doctors told you, didn't they? What are you trying to do?"

"Celebrating my return to life," she said, and I never saw anybody getting drunk in such a hurry. "Celebrating. You always liked them young, didn't you Kurt? Even twenty years ago you did. Old Faithful Kurt." I didn't know whether she was crying or laughing.

"I'm leaving here," I said, when Dickson grabbed her and began steering her out of the little parlor into the bedroom.

"Damned right you are."

I was halfway down the hall when I heard him calling me. He sounded like a wild man. "Help me for God's sakes, kid! She's having a hemorrhage from the lungs! Get somebody!"

I went back, and on into the bedroom. The sheriff had forgotten all about the phone. I picked it up and called the desk. There wasn't any house physician, the clerk said, so I told him to get an ambulance, a police ambulance if that was faster. But to me it didn't seem to be of much use.

In my mind's eye I could see that bullet, traveling slowly and taking lots and lots of time.

The room was pretty awful. A chair with nylons hanging over the back of it was tipped over, and Dickson was sitting on the ruined bed, holding Stella. He still had that fool Jack London hat on and he was crooning to her like he was out of his mind. I don't know if she heard or not, but I did.

"I wouldn't lie to you now, Stella. Not at a time like this. It's only you and it's only been you, and there was nothing that happened between me and that girl. There couldn't be, and after last night you should know it, too, but I wanted the whole town to think I was as good as ever and a devil of a fellow, and that's how it was, I swear."

There was a coffee shop just around the corner from the hotel and I went in and drank two cups, black, because whiskey on an empty stomach never agrees with me and I was woozy. The waitress had heard the sirens and was curious. I told her there had been a killing, a kind of accident, and a woman had got in the line of fire. Then I went back to the phone booth.

"Helen, I want to talk to Judy," I said. "Please let me talk to Judy. Please ... please."

Paul S. Powers (1905-1971) was a writer who crossed many genres including western, horror, noir, romance, and memoir. He began his career in 1925, writing horror stories for Weird Tales. From 1928 to 1943, he wrote over 400 stories for Street & Smith's Wild West Weekly magazine, many under the pseudonym of Ward M. Stevens. He also wrote for many other pulp magazines, including Western Story Magazine, Thrilling Western, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Powers was also the author of Doc Dillahay, a western novel based on the life of his father, which was published in 1949 by Macmillan. In 1943, Powers wrote a memoir, Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street, but it was stored unpublished in an attic until 1999, when it was found in his personal papers by his granddaughter, Laurie. Pulp Writer was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Laurie recently discovered over two dozen unpublished short stories written by her grandfather in the years between1940 and 1952, "A Killing on Sutter Street" being one of them. She is now compiling a collection of Paul Powers short stories for publication. She keeps a blog on pulp fiction, westerns, and other interests at http://lauriepowerswildwest.blogspot.com.

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, BURNS, BURNS, BURNS

Jedidiah Ayres

Obed slumped against the wall and gazed out the observation slot in the hull to watch the landing. The planet's manufactured glow looked good if not exactly welcoming. Three months of rim work, out in the black, with the degenerates drilling foundation—and anything with an atmosphere looked good.

He felt the effects of the toxic fumes he'd been breathing dissipate and his head beginning to clear. It was awful, but it was nothing compared to the itch quickly building to burn deep inside him. He shook a pill out of his pocket pack and popped it in his mouth. It wouldn't be enough. He needed another hit, so he slunk back to the pit where Jurst and Gimmee were still in a stupor.

Gimmee's peculiar stream of giggles turned from mirth to malice and back again without ever breaking rhythm when he saw Obed. "Ey, shiny, boy, I knew you hadn't had no enough, like." He picked up a hand drill and shook it next to his ear. "Empty gone. We pop more 'fore leave. One oi."

Obed sat down with them his posture resigned and he waited without patience, chewing the capsule he'd popped into paste and trying to manufacture enough saliva to swallow it. He drew his lips back across his teeth leaving a dull, orange film to be collected by passing his tongue over them—it felt like sandpaper. As he tried to distract himself from the need building up in his body, a thought occurred to him, not for the first time. This furlough was going to mean proximity to dangerous habits and people. Coming home for the first time since his father had .... He was going to burn up all his will power resisting the urge to do something stupid ... er.

Gimmee fumbled with the valve on a new one-eighth drill. Obed screwed up his features still trying to dry swallow the Soothie-Q. He couldn't bear the thought of taking another three-month shift with these cretins who'd certainly gamble away their whole wage in the first forty-eight hours of leave. They'd wake up withdrawing from Toxi beneath three dirty gress with dubious cards or none at all and get the brig or an extended tour of the rim for their pleasures.

"I'm better than you," he said. There was a hiss of decompression from the hand tool. Gimmee had given up on the valve and Jurst had used a soldering-pick to make a hole. The two of them giggled while they sucked down the noxious fumes.

Jurst put his whole mouth over the puncture and held it until he vomited a foamy orange mixture out his nostrils. There was a dull smack as his head hit the floor. "Oh, fist!" chuckled Gimmee. "He might be dead see?"

Obed reached over and took the tool from the limp hand of Jurst. He wiped the bubbling puncture with his sleeve then took a huff. The burning stopped, his head became weightless, the pit lurched and spun away beneath him, and, from somewhere above, Gimmee cackled away.

"Yeah, you better than all us durty."

* * *

They'd been docked for an hour and most of the crew had vacated when the pit chief discovered Obed passed out on the floor surrounded by ruined hand tools and a puddle of coolant fluid. He kicked Obed in the gut, causing him to wretch his own stream of orange bile. "Congratulations, fisthead, you just spent your whole wage like on new chuck-chuck."

Obed found his feet and brained the pit chief with a wedge of heavy aluminum as soon as his back was turned. There was that impulse control issue again. Looking at the crumpled heap of his bossman on the deck, he considered his situation. Best case scenario, he was tossed and would be stranded on the surface without means, the vig still climbing, while he waited the week or two or three until the next transport came through and he could maybe hire on if they didn't care much about regulations. Worst case, the pit chief was brain damaged and the company bonded him to fill the position and extended his term. Fuck that. He hurried to the bath and unfastened the deep suit that covered him from under his chin to the tips of his toes. It was like peeling a bandage. A layer of skin came off with it. Beneath the suit he was a deeply creased white prune. If his thick, leathery derma could feel anything, it would itch.

He removed his catheter not gingerly enough and the pain brought his senses roaring back. His first clear thought was how fisting bad he smelled. He reached for and released the overhead water to do something about it. Standing under the overly-recycled shower, he pissed an orange torrent across the dingy, yellow floor, cursing at the top of his lungs while forcing the stream through his raw urethra, the exertion muting the pain some. Then he shat a bright pumpkin pie where he stood. He opened his mouth beneath the faucet and drank from the sulfurous tap. Needed to rehydrate, needed to cleanse his system.

Dressed like a person again and carrying his every possession in his pockets, he strode down the long ramp toward the docks. He popped another Soothie-Q and rattled his bottle. Just enough to get through the week if he slowed down. The pumped-in atmosphere was thin near the edges of the dome and his first breaths off the ship made him dizzy, so he walked slowly while waiting for acclimation.

Obed stood inside the tepid climosphere, ran his fingers over his face, and recoiled at the clammy feel of his skin. He found a fast-moving line for agro-fats and was standing in it when his throat spasmed and he coughed. Before he could catch himself, he'd spit on the ground—a mistake. The glob slid damningly orange and brightly toward the gutter. Fist, he thought. so much for blending in. It took weeks to work the dust out of your system. Food would turn orange in his mouth, even his eyes would be a dull, metallic citrus color until the dust was gone. In the interim, he would flush his body constantly to wash out the signs of outer-rim work, but the stinking site he'd spent months digging would live with him for weeks.

"Whatcha ya durty nulf wantin, oi?" the vendor asked.

"Your mother's card, quick-like," said Obed. "I seem to have lost it."

"Get your pretty fister outta." The vendor flashed his light stick at him. "And don't come back."

Obed leaned over the barrier and spit another colorful, gooey payload onto the vendor's window. "Keep her card. I still got your father's see?" He turned around and kicked a cab that was pulling up to the dock. The hard plastic hull sounded a thud against the steel in his boot that made him feel a little better as he trudged down the pier. Behind him a hobo in a ratty tuxish suit laughed and kicked the same cab Obed had and called out for him to wait up.

He hadn't had fresh food in three months and the thought of a breathing meal free of tammin had him ducking down a new alley hoping to find another live vendor. The streetdurt continued to hound him loudly for fraternal recognition, which, if granted, would only lead to an appeal for fats, then toxi, then a gress for the two of them, hey. Obed stopped in front of a vendor with noodle dishes, their smells stirring something close to sexual hunger in him.

The durty slowed up a few paces from Obed who still hadn't acknowledged him. "Ey, brat, just arrived like no?" He smiled revealing a randomly toothed grin and wild spiral eyes before continuing in an even louder voice. "The luck you in stumbling crost a brat like me, ey?" The vendor and other customers were taking notice of the uncouth toxed-out durty and his pal with the after-wave jacket and hair slicked back in the fashion offworlders mistook for cosmopolitan. But Obed continued to pretend that the bum didn't exist and fixed his eyes on the fluttery menu floating over the vendor's head. The woman in front of him turned to look at the durty and Obed, made a face like she'd smelled a turd, and quickly turned forward again. A moment later, she stepped out of line and walked away without ordering, leaving Obed to deal with the vendor.

"Six."

The vendor didn't make to fill the order. "You got bead? You'd better cause just you being here has already cost me and I got quota to make." Obed pulled up his sleeve and offered the vendor a swab. The man swiped his patch and sneered. "Chock fulla company credits, fisten worthless here, this is a respectable enterprise, all accredited like." He indicated the license imprinted under his logo. "Go find a company suck-suck."

Seeing an opportunity to show his commitment to Obed, the durty stepped up and spit on the ground in protest. "Lousy, fisten confederate bitch. Take my brat's bead or fist your uncle."

The vendor looked at Obed. "Outta now or I'll summon—"

"The what? Tin? Go ahead. I'm legal," he bluffed.

The vendor sneered. "Nah see, I'm bonded with the Nans. You know Cleo?" He smiled triumphantly. The Nans trumped all. "Outta."

Obed turned to leave and the durty fell into step with him, like they were butthole brats. He muttered for the both of them. "The Nans, I'd like to see the cunt just try." Obed clapped his unwanted compadre on the back in what looked like a companionable gesture, but he used the purchase to steer the bum head first into a low-hanging arch. The streetdurt dropped without ceremony and Obed walked on, fixing for a company suck-suck.

He was vaguely aware of the attention his minor confrontations had brought him and picked up his pace ever so slightly hoping to avoid any professional Tin. A left turn toward the city center presented him the cold glow of a vending machine and he stepped up, presented his arm to the eye, and hoped to god that whatever he got back didn't contain tammin.

The machine whirred and dropped a plastic sock into the receptacle. He slit the seal and squeezed gently from the bottom of the tube, gagged on the overpowering coppery flavor of the spice, and hurled the meal against a wall. Fuck. He'd rather go hungry than suck down a tammin-contaminated nutri-pack ever again.

A tap on his shoulder sent him spinning around, get fisted on his lips, but the sight of the pretty, sophisticated woman studying him without contempt caught him off guard. He had no hat, but tipped an imaginary brim at her. Gress or not, he didn't get smiled at much. He started to give her one of his own, but remembering his orange teeth at the last moment, pursed his lips into a grimace.

"Just touched down?" she asked rhetorically. "Looking for a real meal?"

Obed glanced around, but didn't spot anyone escorting her. "Where's your pimp?"

"Not here," she said. "I'd like to talk to you. I'll buy you a meal."

Obed wondered, Do I even care what she wants to talk about?

* * *

She bought their meals from the same vendor he'd just seen. She must have witnessed the whole transaction because she ordered exactly what he'd been wanting and one for herself without ever asking. They took their fats across the street, and she gave him a moment to enjoy his food before speaking. "Well?" the gress prompted.

Obed savored a fatty noodle between his lips. "You want my thanks? Where's the bank?"

"You're welcome, then. Come with me unless you like eating in this din." She indicated the crowded pier, then turned on her well-rounded heel and led him to a waiting cab. Obed hesitated a second for show and then jumped inside with her.

The seal hissed and he was aware of his own smell again. He realized that the jilo he'd doused himself with was overpowering as the neutralizer kicked on, misting delicately. The gress leaned over the console and waved her wrist. The cab rocked gently and hummed away on the magnetic track. "Now, why is it offworlders always hold the tammin?"

"Look, just because you lubed the meal, doesn't oblige me to entertain you."

She sat back and slurped delicately on a noodle. "I didn't think you'd be so sensitive, sorry."

He studied her face for hints of disingenuousness, but found none. "All the vacuum packed meals are loaded with it. Preservative. Get sick of it after a day."

"And how long was your last stretch?"

"Three months."

She let out an appreciative whistle. "How long have you worked offworld?"

He shrugged. "Two years." He wasn't going back. At least not with the same crew, but if he hired on again quick like somewhere else. "Two more to go."

"Till what?"

"Till I quit. Till I'm all paid off. Same story as most." He took an angry mouthful. It was savory and creamy without a hint of tammin and took the edge off his mood. "Of course, I'm always open to new opportunities. Where we go now?"

"Continental."

"A hotel? Look, you wanna have an unlicensed tristyfuck, my experience is cabs do fine. I'm not lubing any hotel."

She smiled broadly. "I am."

* * *

The Continental was a low, deep building of classic, durable stock. Obed gaped as he stepped on the belt and was whisked down the endless corridor. When they stepped off the track and into the room she indicated, Obed approved. "Some fancy digs. You live here?" The gress nodded her head. Her room was a palace to Obed's eyes. "So is this how you get off like, picking up durtys for illegal sex?"

"Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?"

Obed shrugged.

"Don't worry," she said, "I like it."

"Of course you do see, but I don't give my card away to just anybody."

"Good for you, but it's not your precious card I'm interested in."

Obed sat down and put his roid kickers up on her expensive furniture. "I knew you had a bank."

"That's the other thing I like about you." She knocked his feet off her table and sat down where they'd rested, sex dripping from her eyes. "I need a roughneck who needs some money."

"How much like?"

"How much do you need?"

Obed stood, smiled, and wagged his finger. "Uh-uh no. You first see?"

"Sit back down. C'mon, let's negotiate." She took one of his hands in both of hers and pressed it to her breast. Obed let her do it. He let her and then some. His fingers spread and he filled his hand with her. As automatic as pushing a button, she began to swell. "Where's your pleasure?" She took his other hand and applied it to her other breast. They swelled to match, but stopped well short of typical offworld tastes. "Refined, despite yourself," she teased.

He sat down again and took his hands off her tits. "You first."

"Fifty."

"I'm listening." But his tone had taken on a new level of skepticism.

"I've got transport lined up. I've got a destination with a safe house and enough bead put away to live off the grid long enough to disappear. But I've only a very narrow window of time."

"Who holds your license, yeah?"

"You anticipate me."

"Yeah, you're complicated like."

"Her name's Cleo. She runs this hotel."

Obed looked punched. He sucked in his cheeks and blew out the words "Fist me. Cleo Nans?"

She nodded, her eyes narrowing. "For an offworlder you seem to know a few things."

"Wasn't born out there. Listen, if you want help to knock over Cleo Nans I'm gonna need more than fifty hey."

"How much more?"

He thought a moment. "Seventy-five, at least."

But she was shaking her head. "I can't go that high, I've got to have enough to live, or I might as well stay here."

"And why don't you stay here?" He indicated the room and her fancy clothes. "You seem to be sitting plush like."

"Obviously, you've never met Cleo."

He got up and paced around the room. "Where's your valve?" She indicated a corner and he went there. He came back a few seconds later, drying his face on his sleeve. "Let me tell you about me and Cleo."

* * *

She pressed the piece into his hand and he tested its weight. It felt good there. It felt like never putting on a deep suit again, telling his crew and pit chief to massage his kidneys and flushing his system for good of the damned dust. "You have something to test this on?"

She led him into her bath where she assured him he could squeeze off a few and brought him some thawed meat. He hung the meat from a towel rack with a nylon cord on the far side of the bath and aimed the piece directly at it from ten feet away. The trigger action was stiff and, on the first pulse, he nearly dropped it, the vibration was so bad. "Where'd you get this piece, hey?"

"Just something I picked up a long time ago and held on to. You never know when you'll need one." She looked worried.

"Guess you haven't needed it till now, no?" He rubbed his right wrist with his left hand. "It hasn't been lubed in what a couple years?" He looked at the power gauge which had drained to about gone. "Or charged. Not going to be able to get another pulse out of it for ten minutes." He held the piece under his nose and sniffed. Then he put it near her face. "Inhale." She did. "It's got a drip too, see?"

She walked over and picked up the meat slab and held it in front of her. It was pink around the ends and featured a circle, three inches in diameter, faded near the edges and black at its center where it was charred carbon.

The pungent aroma of pulse residue tangled with that of cooked meat and the coolant drip and produced a heady mix. She stood close to him and the scent of her hair made him more light-headed than the drip.

"But it looks dangerous," she said and ran her fingers beneath his shirt, sending electric currents through his suit-pruned skin, "And it works once."

It took him three seconds to overrule his good sense and decide it was worth the risk. This time if he took his shot at Cleo Nans and missed, she'd have him castrated and displayed in the lobby. Either way he figured he'd never work on any lousy offworld drill again. The gress slipped her slender fingers into his pants. He didn't need the convincing, but didn't bother to tell her. Instead he said jokingly, "Where's your card, hey?"

She put her tongue into his mouth and then his ear where she whispered, "Where's yours, durty? You think you're better than everybody else?" She bit his earlobe hard and he pushed her to the floor.

He reached down and ripped the expensive blouse off her customized body. She looked hungry for it. "Yeah," he said, "I guess I do."

* * *

Afterward, he watched her bathe, then, when he was sure she couldn't see him, turned his head and popped another Soothie Q. She was washing orange residue down her thighs and he felt a twinge of guilt. She wasn't so bad, a gress, yeah, but he wasn't in any place to judge her for that. But he knew she was using him and decided that tide turned too. He wouldn't waste any more time feeling guilty about what he'd just done.

She told him Cleo would visit tonight and to expect at least one security guard. If he could resist the urge to shoot the bitch on sight, he should make out nicely. She felt that he needed to be continuously sold on the plan and he did nothing to convince her otherwise. It kept things pleasant. She spoke sweetly and flattering to him, ordered him some new clothes, and bought his dinner. Afterward she offered him a booster and he accepted.

When Nans came through the door it was after midnight and he was hiding in the closet. Cleo looked modified since he'd last seen her, younger, more robust, but with that unmistakable haughty air and cool meanness in her gait. "Where are you, Olly?"

The gress came into the front room dressed in a silk kimono opened near to her navel. She was good, Obed thought, "Olly" was. She looked like she'd been asleep for hours, but was happy to see her pimp and lover.

"Hey Cleo, baby. I'm all sleepy warm. Come see me." Cleo's ape followed the two women into the bedroom. What a job, thought Obed as he slipped out of his hiding place. He waited at the door, figuring he'd give them a few minutes to get started. The ape's guard was bound to be a little lowered by that point.

When he did come through the door Olly was facing him, straddling Cleo's face. Nans' wrists were bound to the bedposts and she didn't see him. The ape did, though. Obed felt a sharp pinch in his neck where the bodyguard had grabbed him and with a strong hold, slammed his head into the wall.

Obed kicked the ape in the balls and then stomped on his toes. The big man doubled over, but was raising a pulser at the same moment. Obed gave him a knee to the chin which took the fight out of him and stomped on the hand that gripped the gun for good measure.

Olly was smiling, but not at him. Her gaze was nowhere in the room and he realized what she was doing—smothering Cleo Nans with her crotch. Nans' legs were kicking and her hips bucked, but Olly dug in and pressed down harder.

Obed said "Stop it hey! Olly, stop it, now like!" But she wasn't hearing him. He reached for her, but she slapped his hands away and warned him with her eyes.

"Back away, durty. This is between me and her."

Obed stepped back and then punched her in the side of her head with the gun in his hand. Olly slumped to the floor. "Sorry, hey, you're not paying me enough for murder." Cleo Nans wore a mix of anger, relief, and confusion. Obed looked closely and saw that her face was slick with sex. He rubbed it into her mouth and nose good. "Cleo, you ugly cunt, hiya hey?"

"Who the fist are you?"

"Let you think on that one a while like. Meantime, I'll be escorting you upstairs and we'll retrieve some goods hey."

"The shit we will. You don't know who you're fisting with."

Obed leaned in close and was it his imagination or was there a slightly orangish hue to the smear that covered her face from her chin to the tip of her nose? "I've got a pretty good idea see." He knelt down on the other side of the bed and checked on Olly. She was out cold. Fist. He hadn't meant to hit her that hard, but she'd surprised him and he'd had to act fast.

Before untying Cleo and after borrowing the bodyguard's jacket, he lashed the big man's wrists and ankles together behind him with a belt and some plastic cuffs he found beside Olly's bed. When the gangstress was free and dressed, they left the apartment and stepped on to the belt for the long ride to the penthouse.

From a casual glance he'd look like just another big man guarding the goods, but he was nervous about other security she was likely to have around. Cleo stared at his face the whole time, picturing how it would look with a dozen new nostrils, no doubt, until she smiled and said, "Wexler." Obed's mouth tightened and he tipped his imaginary hat. "You're junior, huh? Look like him too. Bet you get that a lot."

"Used to, yes."

"Yeah, condolences, but hey, you're almost paid up now that he's not around to run up a higher tab."

"Guess there is a silver lining like."

"Tell you what, Junior. Give over that cute little ray gun and we'll take a good look at the books. Probably square the whole thing in an hour."

Obed sneered. "That what you used to tell him, too hey?"

"Hey, kid, that was just business. I do what I do and I don't break nobody that don't ask me to first. Rotten luck being related to a degenerate like that, but don't take it out on me, huh?"

"Shut your clam lapper and let's get some bead quick-like."

They walked off the belt in front of her door and she waved her wrist in front of the pad. Whish, the door opened. Whish, the door closed. They were alone in her apartment with her Chihuahua, who nipped at his heels till he kicked it and sent it scurrying to momma. This was easier than he thought. "Where're the goods?"

She walked calmly over to the safe beneath the throw rug in the bedroom and opened it, but Obed stopped her before she could reach inside. "Just have a seat on the bed, hey?" He hovered over the safe and kept the pulser pointed at her face. He reached inside and felt for a weapon and, finding one, he tucked it into his pants. "Now, I want you to find Olly's card. Hand it over fastish and put all paper you find inside a belt now."

Cleo found Olly's card among a collection of dozens. She handed it over and Obed inspected it. There wasn't much paper, but he didn't really think there would be. In the end he just wanted to burn Cleo Nans.

Cleo looked up at him, bored. "You know what happens now?" The dog began to yip. Cleo shushed him.

"Tell me, hey," said Obed and reduced the dog to muted growling with a hard look.

"You take that bead back to your little girlfriend and she dumps you at the first port. You'll stumble around wondering how it all went to shit for a few days, weeks maybe, and then we'll find you. Olly'll have just a bit longer, but that's not much paper for a proper run. She'll have her card back, but the kinds of places she'll have to work, probably wouldn't even ask for one. You two had it alright. You're gonna think that in a little while, and I'm gonna hear you say it before I'm finished with you."

Obed stood and strapped on the belt. The dog jumped up on his leg and he kicked it across the room a second time. He smiled and felt the pulser in his hand. "You're probably right see, but it does feel pretty good like right now, yeah, and that's more than I can say for the last few years. Who knows though? Maybe we'll beat the odds, hey."

Cleo snickered. "Even a dumb fist like you wouldn't believe that. I've got all the time and the resources I need to find you, so go ahead and—"

He never took his eyes off of her face even as the pulse vaporized the dog. Cleo yelped as the smell of pulse warp and burnt hair ruined her appetite. "—Now you've done it you sick fist! We're gonna go slow with you retard. I got a surgeon like your old man, degenerate too, can't stop wagering, owes me huge. He's gonna make you a woman and you'll earn back every stone lubing your gash with axel grease."

Obed punched her in the nose and sat on top of her when she fell back. He raised the obsolete pulser so she could see the red circle at the end of the barrel. A drop of coolant dripped from the grip onto her cheek. "I just wanted to burn you, Cleo. Bad see?" He pressed the overheating piece into the flesh of her forehead and she screamed.

It was everything he thought it could be. He tied her to her the bed post and concentrated hard in order to remember her in this moment with the bright, angry circle between her eyes.

* * *

He took a cab to the medical market and left Olly, still groggy, waiting inside. He found the head pharmer at the center of the market. "What can I get for you?"

Obed held out a pill. "Soothie Q."

The pharmer laughed. "Got a dose, huh? Next time check her card real good. Or go to one of the licensed places. Continental—that's a good one if you're looking. How much you need?"

"How much you got?"

The pharmer shrugged. "A hundred? Maybe."

"Check. Also, find everybody else with it on hand like."

He laughed again as he punched up some queries on his computer. "Buddy, I don't envy you. I had a dose once from a dirty gress, back in the day, before the crack downs. Wanted to peel the skin off my prick, it burned so bad before I got the pills, but, you know, it's even worse for ladies. Gets in there deep. Showed us footage in med school of a woman who eviscerated herself with a steak knife trying to get the burn out. Was a scary thing, so easily spread, a kiss, a bj, any kind fluid exchange, really, but that was before it was all but eradicated." The computer fed him some information. "Huh." He looked closer at the screen. "You're in luck, buddy. I'm the only game in town. There's not even a black market for the stuff anymore. There's no demand."

"I'll take it all. You're sure nobody else has it?"

"I'm sure. I could order you some, but it'd take a couple weeks to get here. They don't call it deep space for nothin'."

"Don't bother. I won't be around long see." Obed took some paper from the belt and paid the pharmer. "Thanks hey."

* * *

Back in the cab, Olly was alert and agitated. "Here see." He gave her a pill. "Take this now like."

"What is it?"

"Just take it yeah, trust me hey." He put her on her transport and gave her most of the pills along with her card. "I hope you've got a good plan, kid."

Cleo was right. She'd find Olly before long. Hell, maybe the kid was smart. Smarter than Obed, anyhow. Cleo'd find him too, but he wasn't going to hide. He wanted to see this.

Jedidiah Ayres is the author of A F*ckload of Shorts and Fierce Bitches, and the co-editor of the anthologies Noir at the Bar and D*CKED.

SPLIT THE TAKE

Eric Beetner

"He ain't coming." Haji crushed another cigarette underfoot. He ran a palm over the bare skin on the side of his skull, then let his fingers drag along the bristly line of his mohawk.

Mario kept his eyes turned to the mouth of the alley. "No," he said. "It looks like he ain't coming at all."

The two young men had been waiting over an hour, the smell of the alleyway passed into normal as their noses got used to the funk. A yellow street light blazed over the mouth of the alley while the two men stalked the distance between brick walls. Mario's jaw clicked as he ground his teeth, top row into bottom.

"He really think he's gonna keep it all for himself?" Haji asked. "Who the fuck does he think he is?"

"I don't know," Mario said. His eyes burned on the spot where their partner, Raul, should be standing. "But I'm gonna find out."

* * *

The sharp steel of Mario's knife indented the skin below Ricky's eye.

"You seen him?"

"I told you, Mario, I haven't seen him since before you guys went out."

The knife edge started to tear a line in Ricky's skin. He sucked in a quick breath as he felt the split begin.

"You and him do everything together," Mario said.

"Not everything, man. I swear, I didn't know shit about your job until you just told me."

"So you don't know where he's hiding out?"

"Maybe something happened. Maybe the cops?"

Mario lifted the knife away, a line of blood rolled down Ricky's cheek like a tear.

Mario looked to Haji who shrugged, cigarette dangling from his lip. "Could be," Haji said.

"Bullshit." Mario turned to look at Ricky who put three fingers under his eye, pulled them away to check the blood, and then put them back to slow the leak. "He ever do anything this stupid before?"

"Nah, man." Ricky shook his head, streaking a line of blood across his jawline. "I mean, he knocked up that girl the one time, but that's it, man. When it comes to a job, he's tight, man."

"And he would know how serious this is, right?" Mario's gaze tore into Ricky almost as sharply as the knife.

"Yeah, Mario. He knows not to fuck with you."

Mario nodded, satisfied his reputation preceded him. "Alright. If you see him, you tell him all we want is our take. I'll listen to why he was late for the split. I'll listen." Mario bent low in front of Ricky until he could smell the fresh blood. "And I better like what I hear."

"He knows, Mario, he knows. But I bet I won't even see him. You'll see him before I will."

Mario turned to Haji. "Break his knees."

Haji stood straight, pulled a last drag off his smoke. Ricky pulled his bloody palm away from his face.

"Yo, yo, yo, Mario, why would you do that, man? I'm being straight with you."

Mario turned. "You're right. It's not your fault Raul ran off, I guess."

"Yeah, see?"

"But still, there's that chance you're lying."

Ricky was near tears. "But I'm not lying, man."

"Probably not," Mario said. "Only break one knee." He stepped out of the room. Behind him, Ricky's screams couldn't drown out the snap of bone.

* * *

Haji leaned against the lamppost and lit a cigarette. Mario paced the corner, his hands stuffed deep into his jacket pockets. The night was cool with an early fall breeze. Watching the alley now from the street side they still saw no signs of Raul. And no signs of their money.

"I knew I should have handled the fence myself," Mario said.

"Who could know? We've done, what, six jobs with him now? I thought he was a standup guy."

"All six combined wasn't what's in this take."

"Yeah, maybe not. Still, he's gotta be long gone." Haji exhaled, the cloud of smoke rising into the yellow street light.

From up the block came a police cruiser. It whooped once and came to a stop. Mario rolled his eyes.

A muscle-bound cop stepped out of the car as his equally jacked up partner slid out the passenger door.

"Mario," the driver said. "I guess if I see you out in plain view I know you can't be off getting up to no good, right?"

"Right, Officer Lundy."

"But it happens so infrequently," Lundy said. "It makes me wonder."

"Wonder what?"

"Wonder what you're doing."

Haji stared at the sidewalk and smoked. Mario kept his hands in his pockets.

"Just hangin' out," Mario said. He was aware of the second officer walking a wide semicircle around them, checking the alley, keeping a hand on his nightstick.

"No big scores tonight?" Lundy asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Nah, you never do." Lundy squared off with Mario. "It's been more than five years since you been sent up. You must be doing something right."

"Keeping my nose clean, Officer."

"Yeah. Something like that." Lundy's partner gave him a subtle shake of the head. "Okay, Mario. Good to see you staying out of trouble. But it's late. Why don't you go home and go to bed?"

"Maybe I will," Mario said. Haji crushed his cigarette, never once looking up from the street.

The police cruiser jumped from the curb and roared away.

"Fuckin' pricks," Haji said.

"Open it up," Mario said.

Haji stepped over to the trunk of a black late-90s Impala and keyed open the trunk. A scared, skinny white guy gasped a desperate gulp of air.

"So, Waylon, you're absolutely sure you ain't seen him?" Mario asked.

"I swear." Waylon sucked air again. "I swear to God, Mario."

"Okay." Mario nodded to Haji who hauled Waylon out of the trunk by his jean jacket. Once deposited on the sidewalk the man stood on shaky legs, unsure if he was dismissed or not.

"You'll tell him we asked around about him?" Mario said.

"Sure, sure, Mario. If I see him. I doubt I will though."

"Yeah, well, you see him, you give him this." Mario shot out a hand that had been hiding in his pocket. His knife flashed across the skinny guy's palm, splitting skin. Waylon stifled a scream and held his wrist with his one good hand, staring down at his brand new wound like it fell there from the sky.

"You tell him that, will you?" Mario said.

Waylon nodded, then, off Mario's nod, sprinted down the street.

Mario turned to Haji. "What was that Ricky said about Raul having a baby mama?"

* * *

Raul felt the lock start to slide. He worked the screwdriver and felt the small brass piece rotate into the open position. With slow, deliberate movements, he set down the screwdriver and eased up on the window. He crouched on the fire escape, pushing up with his legs to slowly raise the window frame.

The room inside remained dark. When the window was halfway up, Raul paused and listened. He poked his head through, holding his breath. He didn't want his tequila-and-onions breath to be the thing that woke up the boy.

The boy was asleep, his face lit by a streak of moonlight coming in the window over Raul's shoulder. Raul lifted the window the rest of the way open by pushing up with his back, keeping his eyes on the boy and going slow.

When the window was fully raised, he dipped back out the fire escape, grabbed the gym bag by the handle, and swung it into the room ahead of him. He brought his legs over the window frame and was fully in the room.

He left the bag on the floor and crouched down next to the sleeping figure. He put a hand over the boy's mouth.

"Shhhh, don't be scared, Beto. It's Daddy."

Beto's eyes went wide, then the fog of sleep dissipated and Raul saw recognition. He knew it was safe to take his hand away.

"Daddy, what are you doing here?"

Raul set a finger across the boy's lips. "Quiet, now. I brought you a present."

He leaned over and lifted the gym bag onto the bed, laying it across the boy's legs.

"What is it?"

"Just a present. It's for you. You can't open it yet, though. I'm going to put it under the bed. I want you to keep it there until the weekend. You can't even tell your mom."

Raul swung the bag down and pushed it under Beto's bed. Several toys made a rattle as they were shoved out of the way and Raul pulled back on the bag. He checked the doorway, but it was empty and open.

"Why can't I look?" Beto smiled.

"It's a surprise." Raul chucked his son under the chin. "And hey, listen, I have to go away for a little while. But I'll be back, okay?"

"Mom said she doesn't want you around anyway."

Damn. Six years old and she already had the kid turned against him. "Yeah, I know. But she'll be happy once she opens that present with you."

"I thought you said I couldn't tell her."

"Not until the weekend. Okay, buddy?"

"Okay, Daddy."

Raul leaned over and kissed his son on the forehead. "Love you, buddy."

"Love you too, Daddy."

"You gonna be my little man and keep our secret?"

Beto nodded, his hair rustling on the pillow.

Raul felt the cold steel of a gun come to a rest on the back of his neck. "What secret?"

He closed his eyes. At the time giving Selena the gun was such a good idea. Now, she seemed to delight in pulling it on him.

"Can't a father and son share one little secret?"

"Can't a mother go to sleep without worrying her son's room is being broken into in the middle of the night?"

"It's just me."

"That makes it better?"

Raul looked into his son's eyes. The boy watched the conversation like it was an ordinary one, and for Raul and Selena—it was.

"Will you put that away?"

"Will you leave my son's room?"

"He's my son, too."

The gun came away from his neck. Raul turned to see Selena. He wished he knew exactly what he'd done to make her hate him so. Every time he saw her, he felt the pull again, to fall into her arms, to make a little brother for Beto.

Selena let the gun dangle by her hip.

"I was just leaving," Raul said.

"You have your visitation days," she said.

"I have to go out of town for a while."

"Where?"

"Just out of town."

Selena chuckled. No sense getting into it. More secrets and lies, she knew the drill. Her only job was to protect Beto from it.

"You can leave the way you came in." She gestured toward the window with the gun. "Next time there'll be a new lock on it."

Raul gave her a hard look, but she deflected it. He turned and ran a hand across his son's hair. "See you soon, okay buddy?"

Beto nodded.

Selena watched as Raul climbed back onto the fire escape.

At least the money was out of his hands. He felt strange leaving $326,000 under his son's bed. He was only slightly confident Beto would keep the secret until the weekend, especially when Selena would pressure him to reveal what they talked about. All he really needed were a few hours. After that, even if Mario did catch up with him, there would be no way to ever trace the money back to his family.

Mario could do what he wanted then.

Raul's feet hit the pavement of the alley below.

"Your watch broken or something?"

Raul froze. He could smell the smoke from Haji's cigarette. This was all happening much faster than he anticipated. He turned slowly, showing no threat, hands outstretched to his sides.

"Mario," he said.

"I mean, if your watch was broken or something I can see maybe being a little bit late. This, though, I don't know what to think."

There were no guns drawn, no knives gleaming in the overhead lights shining down from the backs of the buildings. Mario stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting for an explanation.

"Mario," Raul began, "I was gonna call you. Things have changed a little bit. I needed to pass off the money so we wouldn't get busted with it."

"Can the shit."

Raul swallowed hard, thankful, in a way, he could stop scrambling for a credible lie.

"I know who's up there." Mario lifted his chin to the top of the fire escape and the window Raul climbed out of. "And I know my money's inside. So here's what's gonna happen next. You climb back up that ladder and you get it for me. You come back down, you hand me the money, and then we go somewhere and talk."

Mario took a few steps closer to Raul, hands still in his pockets.

"If you don't get my money back down here in three minutes, I go up there and take it. And whoever is up there is not gonna like how I get it. I'll go into that apartment, kill every living thing inside, including any pets or houseplants, and then I take my money back. I think the first option is better for all of us."

"I don't like killing kids," Haji said, driving the point home.

Raul looked at the sidekick in his mohawk, then back to Mario.

Mario said, "You know I'm serious, right?"

"I know you are."

"Better get climbing."

Raul stood still for a moment. There was no use arguing. No use trying to come up with a clever plan. He was busted and he knew it. Two against one. Raul didn't even have a gun. Nothing to do but climb the fire escape and go steal $326,000 back from his son.

* * *

"Daddy? I thought you left."

Raul put a finger to his lips to shush his son. "Something came up. I need to take this back for a little while." He finished sliding the gym bag out from under Beto's bed.

"Why?"

"I'll bring it back, I promise." Raul eyed the open window, thinking. "Can you do Daddy a favor?"

Beto shifted in his bed. "What?"

"You know the gun Mommy had earlier? The one she was using to play the game with Daddy?" Beto nodded. "Do you know where she keeps it?"

The boy nodded again.

"I need you to get it for me. But, hey, listen to me." Raul leaned close. "She can't know you're taking it, okay? Can you be extra super quiet?"

"Yes."

"Okay. You be my little man and bring me that gun. You only touch the handle, okay? Only the wood part. Promise me."

"I promise."

"Okay." Raul kissed his son's forehead. "Go on now."

Beto slid out of bed and walked on bare feet to his open door. Like a miniature cat burglar he moved into the hall and out of sight.

Raul ran a hand across his scalp. Sweat beaded under his hair and across his upper lip. He had no real way out of this, but at least maybe he could even the playing field.

Somehow in all his days of stealing from other people, he never knew what guilt felt like. Now, stealing from his own son—stealing stolen money—Raul felt guilt like ulcers in his stomach.

He heard a toilet flush. Selena. She wasn't back in bed, she'd been in the bathroom. He heard the water run. Raul started to panic. Beto would have to pass her in the hall on his way back from her bedroom with the gun. If she caught Raul back in her apartment, urging her son to steal her gun, she would shoot him for sure. The money in the gym bag could pay for Beto's therapy later on.

But if Raul didn't come downstairs with the money soon, Selena and Beto would be dead.

The boy slipped into the room. Raul exhaled, moved on his knees over to the door, and pushed it most of the way closed as he heard the bathroom door open down the hall.

Raul clamped a hand over his son's mouth and took the gun from his hand. He hadn't lived with Selena long enough to know her habits. Would she stop off and check on the boy before going to back to sleep? Raul would find out soon enough.

Raul held his breath again as he listened to the rise and fall of her footsteps in the hallway outside the door. She passed by.

"Good boy," he said to Beto. "Now get back in bed."

He tucked the gun into the small of his back and swung the gym bag out in front of him. Raul could see Mario and Haji watching him descend. Haji had exchanged his cigarette for a gun in his hand.

Raul reached the last platform, but paused before taking the final ladder to the alley below.

"We still do the split," he said.

"Says who?" Mario said. "I think you gave up your share when you didn't show."

"I'm here now. We split three ways."

"Only reason you're here now is I found you."

Raul tightened his grip on the gym bag in his left hand. "It's my kid, Mario. I was giving it to my kid."

"He probably would have been very happy with your third. But you got greedy. Now come down."

"I fucked up. Don't take it out on him."

"I'm gonna take it out on him and his little pink belly if you don't come down off that ladder and give me my fucking money." Mario's voice was always unnervingly even. Even when he threatened you. He said such awful things so matter-of-fact that you knew he meant them.

"Throw down the bag," Haji said.

"Haj," Raul said. "You know I would never fuck you."

"You already did."

Raul knew negotiating time was over. If he gave up the money he was dead. If he went down to face them he was dead. Only one way out and it was a long shot.

Raul drew the gun, fired at Haji first since his weapon was out in the open.

From his high vantage point, Raul had clean shots. He fired twice, catching Haji through the top of the skull with one shot, he wasn't sure which. The scalp just below the bristles of Haji's mohawk opened up, spilling its contents. His body crumpled to the alley floor.

Mario was on the move. Raul got two shots in before Mario slipped behind a dumpster. At least one shot landed and Mario grunted hard.

Lights were coming on in neighboring buildings. A dog barked.

Two shots came winging up from behind the dumpster. Raul staggered back as one bullet dug into the meat of his upper arm. His hand released the gym bag and it banged to the metal grating of the fire escape.

"Daddy?" Above him, two stories up, Beto leaned out his window.

"Get back inside!"

"Raul is that you, you motherfucker." Selena's light was on in her bedroom.

Two more shots rang out from behind the dumpster. The glass on Selena's window shattered and Raul could hear her cursing loudly as she disappeared into the room.

Raul stuffed the gun back in his waistband and broke for the ladder, snatching up the gym bag and climbing two, sometimes three rungs at a time. Mario took one pot shot as him as he climbed, but kept his shooting conservative. The shot caught Raul in the meat of his upper thigh, an inch below his buttocks. Raul gripped tight to the ladder rung in his hand as he fought through the wave of pain.

Beto was out on the fire escape now, fear in his eyes as his dad moved slowly up the two flights. When he was below Beto, Raul stopped and lifted the bag high overhead, his body reluctant to do any more climbing.

"Take it," he commanded.

Beto leaned over the railing and took one loop of the gym bag's handle. The other he couldn't reach.

"Take it, little man." Raul's arm burned. He raised the bag as high as he could with his good arm. The money inside proved heavier than he remembered.

Another shot rang out. Mario's patience paid off. Raul felt a sharp sting in his side, then he was gasping for air. His knees went instantly weak and he fell to the metal grating of the second floor fire escape. As he did he pulled the bag down.

Beto held on.

The boy pitched forward over the railing, his hand still gripped tight to the loop of the handle. When Raul saw him start to go, he threw himself forward, clipping his collarbone on the top railing of the fire escape.

"Hold on!" With two hands pinched tight around the second loop of the bag's handle, Raul held on. His son went past him in the air, head down and aiming at the alley floor. When he got even with the lip of the fire escape the bag stretched tight, the loops pulling in opposite directions.

The stitching held. Beto was dangling from one loop of the bag's handle out over the edge of the fire escape, Raul gripping tight to the other loop, his chest pressed against the railing.

Mario came out from his hiding place. Raul could hear Selena scream above him.

"Why couldn't you just be cool, man?" Mario asked. "Why'd you have to skip the split?"

"So he won't have to do this shit, Mario. For him."

Raul could see the terror in his son's eyes. Beto held on silently despite the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Mario raised his gun. "I'll give you the choice. I can shoot him and get it over with. Or I can shoot you and he'll fall and maybe he'll make it. Maybe he'll get paralyzed, maybe he'll die. If he does die it won't be quick though." Mario followed the swinging boy with the barrel of the gun. "Up to you."

Raul spoke quietly to his son. "Can you hold on a little longer?"

The boy nodded. Raul swung his arm, pulling the boy to the left. When the momentum had carried him as far as it would, he pulled back to the right, getting the boy into a swinging rhythm.

Mario continued to follow the pendulum movements of the swinging boy with the sight of his handgun.

"Y'know, Raul," he said. "Everything you've done tonight has just been putting off the inevitable." He sighted down the barrel at the boy. "Guess I'll have to start making some decisions for you."

As Beto swung out wide to the left, Raul took his right hand off the handle and reached behind him. For a moment he felt the handle start to slip from his injured arm, but he clamped his fist closed around the strip of nylon and held on. From behind his back he swung the gun, his gift to Selena, and fired down into Mario. Two shots hit him in the chest.

Mario's gun dropped. His hands went to his chest and he fell onto his back, his head hitting hard against the pavement.

Raul dropped the gun. It rattled against the grate. He pulled Beto up on the gym bag and lifted him over the edge to safety.

Above them, Selena had come out of her room onto the fire escape. "Beto! My baby. Come here. Get away from him. Come to mama."

Raul looked his son on the eye. He pushed the gym bag into his hands. "Take it. It's yours. You don't need to hide it from your mom."

Raul kissed his son on the forehead and gave him a small shove up the ladder.

Raul dropped to the alley. He stepped over Mario and made sure he wasn't breathing. He passed by Haji's open skull. He knew he would be the driver so Raul bent down and dug out car keys from Haji's pocket.

Sirens wailed in the distance. As Raul stood straight again he grimaced in pain. His sleeve was wet with blood, his pants slick with a line of blood running down into his shoes. His chest wouldn't cooperate with his requests for more air.

He tried to remember what kind of car Haji drove as he walked to the mouth of the alley. A half block down he saw Mario's familiar black Impala.

Raul turned to see Selena wrap Beto in a hug as he reached the top floor. Raul turned toward the car, the yellow light of a street lamp lighting his way.

Eric Beetner is the author of The Devil Doesn't Want Me, Dig Two Graves, and the story collection A Bouquet of Bullets. He is co-author (with JB Kohl) of One Too Many Blows to the Head and the sequel, Borrowed Trouble, as well as writing two novellas in the acclaimed Fightcard series, Split Decision and A Mouth Full of Blood. His award-winning short stories have appeared in over a dozen anthologies. ericbeetner.blogspot.com.

VICIOUS DAY

Matthew C. Funk

"They did Mortimer late last night," Hunter tells me over the disposable.

The Sharper Image CD player/alarm clock reads 7:03 a.m.

"Dead?" I sit up in my silk sheets.

"Laid out and leaking."

"Pull your soldiers off the Desire corners." I slide on my Ray-Bans. I slip out my bed. "Put them across the hood on Law Street."

"We backing down?"

"Never." I get the shower running. Steaming before it hits the Milanese tile. Not like growing up in the Calliope tenements. "You're arming up and forming up. I'm making a call."

"Holler back." Hunter hangs up. I toss the disposable in the shower. It soaks in the Chanel body wash running off me. I soak in memories of Mortimer.

Six kids. Twelve-inch smile. Loved the jazz divas and Disney films.

My heart aches. I punch it. It mellows.

I turn off the shower, towel off in the mirror, tap my shaved head to get the Rolodex in it turning.

I place a call to the number that comes to mind.

"Ready Freddy Dry Cleaning."

"Morning, Freddy," I slap on the shaving soap, "this is Vicious."

"Hey, big man. What's the occasion?"

"Suit needs to be rushed. Dry clean by tonight."

Freddy agrees. We work out the details while I work my Gillette. I tamp off what's left and slap on the Dior and I get the second disposable purring again.

"¿Qué pasa?" Esteban answers over the whoops and laughs of his clan of rug rats.

"Mierda mal, hermano. I need you and yours to pick up a house guest." We talk and I dress. Shirt by Monti. Suit by Armani. Beretta by my side. Colt on the ankle. Berluti loafers. By the end, I feel ready and I hear Esteban sounds reluctant.

"Problem, hermano?"

"My people all got plans later." Esteban's voice is low. He's outside, escaped from the noise, to keep business and a Marlboro Light away from the kids. "Angela's quinceañera."

"Give her a kiss for me. This won't take that long."

He breathes hard, thinks hard, exhales. "Just any girl from the Desire Projects?"

"As long as she's related to someone in the Old Crows."

We don't say goodbye. I lock and alarm the house. I stroll to the Riverwalk before making my last call on my third disposable.

He answers with no answer.

"Silas." I watch gulls eat and tourists drink down their hangovers. "Light up anybody hanging outside my house after dark."

"Any cops and soldiers?"

"Anybody."

"Even real people?"

"Anybody."

My heart aches again. I watch the Mississippi's size and speed. I stop aching.

Both disposables go in the river. My suit goes to Ready Freddy. I spend an hour over coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde as men play trumpets, eat fire, and paint children's faces on the Decatur sidewalk.

I get a call from a toll-free number. I cancel it.

"Misery acquaints men with strange bedfellows," I tell my Vietnamese waitress as she cleans up, stoic and wizened as a goblin, before I am even done.

Cost of doing business so far: Three new phones, one coffee and beignet, $20 tip. $150 total.

I'll make ten times that before I even get to Carver High School.

* * *

Carver High resembles an old air depot: rusting buildings with boomerang roofs, compounds of anonymous brick, tumult of yellow grass, cracked asphalt, rushing children.

I sit in the administration office to hear if the books I ordered came in. I make calls.

Esteban: "Bitch named Jasmine, maybe 12. Duct-taped in our basement. Pissed her pants, but otherwise no trouble."

Hunter: "Word from the shorties on Louisa is that the Old Crows are massing up. Something pissed them off. They're rolling hard on us soon."

Silas: "Some strapped Old Crows drove by. If I see them again, should I pop 'em?"

"Chill 'til sundown." I stare at a poster of Mickey Mouse with a sorcerer's hat, wielding an open book that streams stars. I think of Mortimer. I rub the edge of my eye until the stinging goes away. "Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not."

"Okay." Silas hangs up.

I smirk at kids. I ruffle sprouting braids. I lay some skin.

When a boy with a flat-brim Hornets cap comes in on a disciplinary, I give him my business card and tell him to call me.

When Assistant Principal Eugene tells me that all the books came in for the English classes, I check the numbers—200 copies of Hamlet, To Kill A Mockingbird and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings—and I smile in contentment as she hugs both her hands around one of mine.

When Freddy calls, I'm on the way back to my El Dorado, and I stop just to frown.

"What do you mean, two days? You told me done by tonight."

"That's before I knew there were stains on the legs, sleeves, lapels, everywhere."

"Tonight, Freddy."

"Just the labor alone, Vicious..."

"I go to you because you're the best with blood stains. Tonight."

I hang up. I put Peer Gynt on in the El Dorado. I place my MBA loan payments to Northwestern by phone as I drive.

I do not smile. I sting.

Then I drive past the five bodies surrounded by cops and crying women on the corner of St. Ferdinand Street and Benefit.

I tap the CD track back to the start of "In the Hall of the Mountain King." I lean back into the leather seat and float to Federico's Florist. The humid air no longer needs to be swallowed—I can breathe it again.

* * *

Lunch is a disappointment. Emeril's is as dependably savory as ever, but Lucy, the reporter I'm treating today, only appears delicious.

She presses with questions and fumbles which fork to use.

I cancel another call from the toll-free number. Lucy likes this. But she looks lost when I take a call five minutes later. I excuse myself to the restroom, leaving her to sugar her coffee from her soup spoon.

"We spotless, they thoughtless," Hunter sounds keyed up and coked out, "Five Old Crows laid low for the five-O to pick up the pieces."

"Your tale, son, would cure deafness." I watch a fat cracker in a Brooks Brothers suit slip on his wedding ring again and check his shirt collar for lipstick. "Take the boys to Pass-Christian for a night at the casinos."

"And leave you undefended?"

"I got that covered."

"Like you got the Crows to come at us all fired up and crazy?"

"No. That dirty job, I gave to a Mexican."

We have some laughs and I pace the restaurant, a blur in its ubiquitous brass. Everything smells like linen and blossoms and boutique perfume. I hang up on Hunter and call the aforementioned Mexican on one of the new disposables.

"Dump her," I tell Esteban.

"Where?"

"Pick a swamp." I flash five fingers at Lucy as I pass. She tries a smile and fails. "Just make sure you put holes in her torso so that she stays under it."

"No problemo, jefe."

I step outside to call Silas on a different phone. I can use the fresh air, even though humidity sticks on me like marzipan. I pace along the roar and rattle of orange-tinted afternoon on Tchoupitoulas Street.

"Anybody else yet?"

"Nobody." Silas has his mouth full.

"Soon."

Three minutes later, I'm back with Lucy.

"Problem?" Her expression lacks any question mark.

"No, just had to make arrangements with a florist for a friend's funeral."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Want to talk about it?"

"I don't have much to say about flowers."

Lucy doesn't know if she's supposed to laugh or not. She settles with, "Dessert?"

"I'm not one for sweets."

* * *

I drop off the white lilies from Federico's to Mortimer's wife. She cries, face digging into my chest, as I pat her back and tell her it's all right. And it is all right. She doesn't get any snot on my jacket.

Then I drop off the other white lilies to Mortimer's other wife. She just slams the door in my face. That's all right too.

I drive back and forth on the I-10. I'm listening to Peer Gynt over and over, but I'm seeing "Night on Bald Mountain"—the scene from Fantasia, a summit erupting over a sleepy village, scattering ghosts and fire and shadow, a tempest directed by a monstrous black devil. Replaying that scene is the closest I let myself get to thinking of Mortimer.

I see it vivid against the screen of the sunset—swollen equatorial sun melting its red sherbet into the scant gray teeth of New Orleans skyline. New Orleans swallows. Night closes its wet blue mouth.

Silas calls. I ignore it.

I exit onto New Orleans Street.

The toll-free number calls. I answer.

Police Lieutenant Morrissey talks on full-auto. "Where you have been in the middle of this slaughter, Vicious? I've had six homicides, a broad-daylight kidnapping down at the Desire Projects, and now the murder of a French Quarter resident walking his dachshund right in front of the steps of your apartment building."

I hope Silas didn't hit the dog. I have other questions for Morrissey, though.

"I've been lying low, Ethan." I breeze down Broad Street with all its sleepy cottage shops and dozing oaks. "There's a war sparked between the Crows and some Mexicans from the bayou, and I didn't want to get caught in the middle."

"Well, you are in the middle. But it was this Royal Street copyeditor who caught one on your doorstep."

"We can't have this boil over into the polite society."

"Agreed, and I've been looking for you to talk about solutions, but your phone has been going to voicemail all day."

"I'm ready to resurface."

"Whatever. I want the lid on this pot, Vicious. No more dead white people."

"You want the lid, I'll need a lead."

That gets Morrissey silent. Now Saint Bernard Avenue is whistling by outside. I roll down the window to let a brew of boom box bass beats and laughing kids drift in.

"Just one address, Ethan."

"You know I can't do that."

"I know you have done that."

"Only in emergencies."

"Will it be an emergency when a tourist gets shot?"

He groans like a headache commercial. "It can't be someone made by the Ace or Stagger Crannock."

"It won't be. Give me Fish Williams."

"Fish is all paid up to me."

"No Fish, no foul, Ethan."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"It means I don't like just repeating myself."

I can hear his teeth about to snap. He makes me wait. That's fine. I like this part of the drive—when the ancient oaks reach their arms out and gather the Avenue into the bold colors of the French Quarter and the evening feels like an angel snuck a bit of rum into it.

"This ends with Fish?" Morrissey asks.

"He that dies pays all debts."

He gives me a number. I give him a goodbye, just as I'm turning onto Rampart. Ahead, I can see the Ursilines Street corner cluttered with the coroner van, the white unmarked cars, the patrol cops and the ever-present New Orleans crowd come for death watch and gossip.

I talk my way past the cops into parking inside my building.

Then I give Silas a call. I give him a 24-karat chuckle.

"My valiant monster," I call him.

"Word, nigga."

I give him Fish Williams.

"You know Fish killed Mortimer?" I can hear Silas is already driving.

"I don't know that. I do know Fish is the only Old Crow smart and connected enough to come back at me, though."

"Hrn," Silas says. He gets it now. He gets on it. I go to get my suit.

* * *

I brush my suit as I hang it up, even though Freddy put a dry-cleaning bag around it. All the blood stains from beating Euphezine to death last week are gone. Freddy is a miracle worker.

The boy from the Carver High office left a voicemail while I was hanging up the suit. I open my Cartier address book and enter his number with a Mont Blanc pen. I input it into my main cell phone. I set a Task to call him back.

I check the clock—7:35 p.m.—and call the Carver Desire Missionary Baptist Church about Mortimer's funeral services tomorrow. Pastor Willis and I talk, soft as candle flame, reverent. I wait until we're finished to eat my double-stuffed roast beef sandwich from the QuarterMaster Deli, so that I don't chew in the ear of a Man of God.

I dine while looking at pictures Esteban sent my phone: Him and his boys at the quinceañera, sweaty and rumple-suited and backlit by rainbow flash bulbs. I smile at one of Esteban and his cousin holding the birthday girl, Angela, upside down, her skirt flared above her like a white phosphorous sparkler.

I get in bed. I read the new novel everyone is praising, Atonement. It's exquisitely crafted, but I don't see what the big deal is all about. I spend most of the time with the TV on mute and the cops talking outside my window.

Silas calls my disposable after midnight.

Someone is gravelly with sobs in the background. Silas's voice is ironed. "You want to talk to this short-time motherfucker?"

I think on this and stroke the open pages of the novel with my thumb.

I decide I have nothing to say. I could call Williams "thou deboshed fish thou," but the quote would be lost on him. I educate through other means.

"I'm good, Silas."

"All right." On the phone, there's a sound like a door slamming in a distant room. Silas is using a silencer. He talks again, now without sobbing behind him. "Do the family, too?"

"Sure. I want to sleep soundly."

"And you're all right tonight?"

"I have the NOPD camped at a headline-grabbing murder scene outside my window. They'll do for bodyguards."

"Peace out," Silas says.

I turn on the volume and watch SportsCenter, surprised that the Saints beat the Bucs again, and realizing suddenly, inexplicably, that I don't like Disney films much at all. Only Fantasia and even then, only the "Night on Bald Mountain" part. I wonder if my memory lies to me, or if I lie to it.

I doze. I sleep. I dream of open books floating on the Mississippi.

Matthew C. Funk is an editor of Needle: A Magazine of Noir and a staff writer for Planet Fury and Criminal Complex. Winner of the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web, Funk has work at numerous websites and print venues, indexed on his Web domain.

HARD TIME

Tom Roberts

"How long you gonna keep me in this place?" shouted the boy, his freckled face pressed awkwardly between the steel bars overlapping one of his green eyes. The coolness of the metal felt oddly refreshing to his skin. His tongue came out and touched a steel bar. "Well?" He exhaled forcefully.

After a few moments, he shouted louder down the hall: "I said 'How long you—'"

"I heard you," the middle-aged turnkey replied. "You know the answer to that as well as I do."

The sheriff turned in his chair, the wood protesting as his stout frame shifted, to lay the tattered copy of Harper's he had been reading onto his desk, and look behind him toward the cells.

"Marshal's ridin' over to get you. Said to keep you locked in that cell 'til he gets here. Be here tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yup."

"Cripes. I'll rot by then."

"That ain't so long given what you got comin' to you," Sheriff Lindsey countered. "You know what they say about Deputy U.S. Marshal Taggart? You heard them stories, boy? Toughest sumbitch north of the Picketwire. Would not want 'im on my trail, I can tell you that. Bust your jaw jus' for looking cross-eyed at 'im."

"He ain't so tough," the redheaded boy said flippantly.

"That so, huh? That's what you think?" Lindsey put his wide hands onto the arms of the chair as if to rise, but did not.

"Just how well do you know Marshal Taggart, boy?" asked Lindsey, pulling his shaggy, unkempt eyebrows lower, forming a deep furrow between his dark eyes. An old scar just above his left eye pulled down the eyelid at the corner, giving the eye a perpetual squint. Those same deep-lined, hard eyes narrowed as he said: "Take my word for it. You're gonna know him plenty well when he slaps the bracelets on you and drags you back to get yours."

Lindsey's round, no-necked face was deceptive of the bull-like power in his stout, barrel-chested frame. Legs too short and arms too long distorted the size of his upper half.

"Yup. Taggart'd bust your jaw jus' for looking cross-eyed at 'im. I saw 'im once do just that. Dropped some braggin' drunk feller poppin' off rounds over in The Bull Herd with the flat stock of his Winchester faster than that feller could even draw. Never even knew what hit 'im. That feller woke up with a busted nose right here in my jail, he did. Dried blood was all down the front of his shirt. Taggart probably saved a couple of lives takin' that drunk down and never fired a shot to do it. Walked straight up to 'im and popped him. No fear. No fear."

Lindsey turned back to his magazine and flipped through its pages. "You know, that drunk feller's nose never did set straight."

After a moment, Lindsey absently went on, "And huge hands Taggart's got. Seen 'im once walk over and grab a bridle with his left hand, jerkin' the palomino's head down and collared its dude rider with his right hand. Yanked that dude clean outta the saddle. Did it right out here in the street, broad daylight, I tell you, in front of a crowd o' witnesses, too.

"Takes a strong man to do that—to jerk a horse around like that. Wonder he didn't hurt the horse. Wasn't anybody real worried 'bout the dude he throttled. He was gonna hang anyway."

Lindsey laid down the magazine and reached into an inner vest pocket to pull out a half-filled bag of tobacco. Opening the right-hand drawer of the desk he extracted a dark pipe with a well-chewed stem, filled it, and fired it up.

"Yessiree. Tough as a cob he is," he said between puffs of blue smoke. "Marshal Taggart carried three slugs down low in his back when he brought in those Seller boys that robbed that train up near Crossfork in '73. Wouldn't bother seein' Doc Rogers 'till they was stuffed in a cell, his blood running clean down to his stirrups that day. Hmm! Tough as a cob.

"Another time Taggart—"

"Ya, ya, ya. I heard them stories," said the boy, adding "plenty of times," under his breath as he flopped down onto the cell bunk with a grunt. He lay back, crossed his feet, interlaced his narrow fingers over his chest and studied the oblong square of blue up high on the adobe wall, staring out at the failing light of day. A dog was barking somewhere out on the street. The frequent clop-clop-clop of passing horses earlier had disappeared as traffic slowed in the enveloping blue light of dusk. He reached up to run a fingernail along the rough finish of the wall.

Pangs of hunger wracked his slender frame. "What time you get fed around here, anyway?" he yelled.

"Mrs. Brown'll be 'long with some kind of dinner purty soon, I'm sure, replied Lindsey. "Maybe she'll have some of her deep-dish apple pie for your last meal."

Everyone seemed to think of this Marshal Taggart as a knight errant, doling out his brand of hard case frontier law. The boy began to wonder if he should be afraid of him. He had heard such stories of Taggart's accomplishments nearly his whole life. No one had ever bested Taggart that he could recall hearing about. And, like a wolverine obsessed, no one got away from Taggart once he was on their trail. Now he was coming after the boy. The more he thought about it, and brooded on it, the fear of this Marshal Taggart began to eat away at the boy and get under his skin. Dawning realization came. He really was going to be taken back. His heart beat faster and his mouth got dry. What would Taggart do when he took him back? Panic flooded the youth. In desperation an idea overtook him.

"Hey! Sheriff?"

"Ya."

"You got that gun you took off me?"

"Locked right here in the desk drawer. Why?"

"It's a good gun, isn't it? Worth some money I mean?"

"Probably. Why?"

"How 'bout I let you have it—and you just look the other way and let me ride off tonight. Would that be worth your while?"

Lindsey unlocked the drawer and lifted the gun out. Pulling the big pistol closer he began to look it over. Walnut grips. Good weight. The steel frame felt good in the hand. Big bore. He thumbed back the hammer and spun the cylinder. A well made firearm. Colt .44-caliber 1860 Army model with very little use. Lowering the hammer he sighted down the barrel. He turned it sideways to look at it and ran his thick fingers across the weapon.

Wait a second. He went to get an oil lamp from across the room and brought it back to his desk. Under the bright light he looked at the intricate engraving on the steel body. He squinted down his nose at the inscription on the barrel and started to read—

Suddenly he blurted out: "Where'd you get this gun, boy?"

"What's it matter? I just got it. Ain't it worth somethin'? We got a deal?"

"Deal hell! This is a presentation gun. Did you know that?"

"What's a pres'ta-shun gun?"

"You mean you don't know? You never read the inscription?"

"No," said the boy angrily, adding softly, "I can't read."

Sheriff Lindsey stood, hitched up his belt and, in his most important and teacher-like tone, began: "A presentation gun is given to someone for a reward. No, that's not right. They're given to someone to honor somethin' they've done. Somethin' special. Or services rendered. They are bestowed to recognize a happenin'—or an accomplishment—"

"Like a medal?" the boy blurted out.

"Well, yes," Lindsey went on. "A gun like this is special made. They have special gunsmiths work on 'em, engrave and inscribe 'em and personalize 'em." Lindsey walked closer to the cells and waved the gun toward the youth. A serious tone came into his voice as he said: "A gun like this is maybe one in fifty. Maybe one in twenty-five. You understand what that means, boy?"

"No."

"It means there ain't very many others around like it!"

"Does that make it worth more?"

Lindsey exasperatedly waved his arms in the air. "Value has nothing to do with this, boy. Yes, it's valuable, but it's more valuable to the person it was presented to. By taking this here gun you have stripped the owner of this honor. Of the public recognition of his accomplishment."

After a moment of taking in what the sheriff had explained to him, the boy asked: "What's the inscription say?"

Lindsey took the gun back towards the yellow glow of the lamp. Solemnly he read:

"Presented in honor of the courageous duties performed at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, from General Geo. G. Meade, Commander."

Lindsey sighed and the room grew quiet. He silently reflected upon the gun, carefully wiped the pistol off with the front of his shirt and gently, reverently, placed it back in the lower desk drawer.

"You like that gun, then? It's yours. You gonna let me go? We got a deal?"

"Do I look like an idiot to you, boy? Hell no I ain't gonna let you go. Both you and this here gun are gonna stay right here 'till Marshal Taggart arrives and takes you both back where you belong." He stood straighter and then continued like he was giving a political speech. "When Marshal Taggart wires out a description of who he's after and I wires back that he's now in my jail, ain't hell nor high water gonna stop me from performin' my duty 'till Taggart arrives to get 'em."

A knock at the door interrupted Sheriff Lindsey's monologue. "Who is it?" he shouted out.

"Mrs. Brown. Brought dinner over for you and your prisoner."

The sheriff and his prisoner both ate in silence. The boy greedily attacked the plate handed him, quickly forgetting his attempt to bribe his way out of the cell, and when finished with his meal settled back on his bunk quite satisfied. Sheriff Lindsey had relit his pipe and contented himself with an after-meal smoke, drawing solace from the comforting cloud of blue smoke blanketing his head.

* * *

The night had grown quiet except for the crickets or an occasional whoop echoing up the street from The Bull Herd.

"Sheriff, you think all them stories 'bout Marshal Taggart are true?"

"Well, why wouldn't they be?"

"I don't know," replied the boy. After a pause he continued: "It just seems that some of them stories make him out to be kind of larger than life. A Sir Galahad. Like he's never failed—"

"No, not all of the stories are like that ...."

"I think all he ever cares about doin' is ridin' off so he can go bust up some drunk cowboys an' be some kind of lawman hero."

"Hero? 'S that what you think? Marshal Taggart does what he does to be a hero?"

Lindsey drew in a deep puff of smoke, slowly exhaled, looked down at the creased and worn but comfortable boots on his outstretched feet crossed in front of him and continued. "Listen, son, the frontier is a rough place. A complicated place. There is nothin' easy 'bout livin' out here. Not everything is black or white when it comes to survivin'. And sometimes a man has to go beyond what is necessary to tame this frontier so folks can live here. Men like Taggart are necessary to keep the peace, by fist and by gunfire, and partly by intimidation, too. And if it takes a little hero inflatin' of some stories to get that job done, to intimidate or sway a few on the fence of lawlessness or troublemakin', well so be it."

After a few more puffs Lindsey casually went on. "A couple of fellers didn't get that message and tried to hold up the Cattleman's Savings and Trust one day. Well, the holdup didn't go off as planned. Somebody, namely me, cut down with a scattergun the feller they had left outside holdin' the horses. Blew that feller all over the sidewalk. Made a mess of him. When the rest of the gang came out of the bank and saw what was left of their friend they got jumpy. They thought this would be a simple job, quick and easy with no resistance. The leader, a feller by the name of Simpkins, grabbed a little blonde girl, Sally Miller, from a nearby storefront as a hostage and said they were gonna shoot the little girl, blast her brains all over the street like what had been done to their friend if we didn't let 'em get out of town.

"Wasn't anybody goin' to stand up to 'em and risk Sally's life, so we let 'em ride out."

"That night it came a terrible storm. Rain was comin' down in sheets. But word had gotten to Taggart and he set out after 'em. It rained for a week straight and we thought for sure they had gotten away. Then a tip came in and reached Taggart of where it was thought they were hidin' out a couple of counties away. Finally he caught up to 'em. The gang had holed up in some rancher's barn and was up in the hayloft waitin' for the rain to break. They still had the girl. We was worried what they might be doin' to her.

"Taggart knew they were up in this loft and called out to them but got no answer. He told them who he was and warned them he was comin' up. Still no answer. Taggart then starts a small fire on the dirt floor of the barn, partly to scare 'em into thinkin' that he's gonna burn 'em out, but mostly to dry himself out and warm up from the rain. He waits about an hour, with them fellers knowin' he is right underneath 'em with no means to get away. He listens to the floorboards creakin' above and has a good idea of where each one is keepin' hisself to.

"So finally he starts up the ladder knowin' full well the second his head tops the trap door they'll cut down on 'im. But he had to get that girl back if she was still alive.

"I beat every rung of that ladder rang hollowly like a death knell as his boots slowly, purposefully, made their way up it.

"By the time he got to the top them fellers was so scared and jumpy of Taggart that they let him get the first shot off though the trapdoor. He cleared the door, hit the floor, rolled and fired again, takin' two more of 'em out. In three quick flashes it was over. A fourth man back in a corner gave himself up. And Taggart got Sally and the money back safe."

"Hm," the boy said. "That's just another guts and glory story about Taggart thumpin' some bushwackers. Probably not even true. Just more inflatin' to intimidate folks. I told you he don't really care for folks. All the selfish glory-seekin' bastard wants to do is be some hero."

"Sally Miller still lives here in town," said Lindsey, "although she never talks about the matter. How 'bout I bring her over tomorrow and you can ask her yourself if it's a true story?"

"No time. Taggart'll be here tomorrow to get me, remember?"

* * *

Lindsey became quiet and reflective, still smoking his pipe and deep in thought awaiting the nighttime relief deputy who should arrive by nine. "You know, not all the stories about Taggart have to do with bringin' in some bushwacker."

"'S that so?" belligerently asked the youth. "You could've fooled me."

Lindsey ignored the comment. "You're not old enough to remember it, but 'bout ten year back, Father Murphy came to town and right away got folks excited to help him start buildin' a church. Quickly it startin' goin' up, and a right pretty church, too, with a steeple and all.

"Now some folks, who will remain nameless for this here story, didn't want no Catholic church in our town and was quite outspoken 'bout it, even tryin' to run Father Murphy out of town. But that priest stuck tall and turned the other cheek, stayin' the course to see the church got built.

"When the church was real close to bein' finished so folks could use it, a fire started. A very suspicious fire. We started a bucket brigade but the fire was spreadin' too fast. Father Murphy kept goin' back inside to save the stuff off the altar. Said those crosses and Virgin Marys and things had made it safe all the way overland from St. Joe and he wasn't about to leave 'em now.

"Well, one trip he just didn't come back out. Bein' busy with the buckets and all we didn't notice.

"Marshal Taggart just happened to be in town that night, too. He noticed Father Murphy was missing and started into that inferno to look for him. He was gone a long time but none of the rest of us was brave or foolish enough to go in after Taggart.

"The flames reached up, up, up into the night sky. Smoke filled the street and we was all 'bout sick from fightin' the fire. The church roof was on the verge of comin' down. And if that happened there wasn't nothin' gonna come out of there alive.

"Finally, after what seemed an eternity of us waitin' and watchin' and callin' their names, we could make out Taggart through what was left of the open front double doors. Taggart, with flames all around him, and Father Murphy slung over his shoulder was comin' out. How he ever come out of that hell I'll never know, but he did.

"He carried that priest out, and we got 'em both drug over near Shorty's store. It was then we saw how bad both of 'em were burnt. Taggart's clothing was burnin' and we had to put that out, too."

Lindsey paused for a moment before continuing.

"We buried Father Murphy the next day, out under a dogwood, wrapped in an angel-white shroud and laid him to rest with his crosses and things. Some of the womenfolk sang hymns over him.

"Taggart, as you know, survived, but was laid up a long time convalescin'. Weren't no thoughts of bein' a hero when he did that. It was just somethin' that needed to be done. Burnin' is an awful way to die ...."

"That church would have brought hope an' compassion to weary folks out here an' would have been good for the town. Taggart realized that and I guess that's why he ran into the fire. To try and save somethin' for other folks. Nearly gave his own life, too, tryin' to give for other folks!

"Now you just lay in there and think about that one, boy, before you go callin' my friend, the marshal, a glory-seekin' bastard! By a lot of folks in these here parts, he's a better man than you'll ever hope to be, hero be damned."

* * *

The relief deputy arrived on time and the night passed uneventfully as far as the jail was concerned. The redheaded boy tossed and turned on his bunk, first trying to get comfortable, then trying to find understanding in this Marshal Taggart. Yes, he may have done well by some, but others suffered from his hand, too. It seemed an odd contradiction in the boy's unworldly mind. Did he really do what he did simply to serve others? Or to serve himself? To reinforce his own ego and serve his own needs.

Mrs. Brown came over with breakfast about eight.

"Won't be long now," said Lindsey. "I'd expect the marshal any time."

Soon Lindsey heard the boardwalk echo hollowly under heavy booted feet. The door rattled with a loud knock. "Cyrus! You in there? Cyrus!"

"Sure am. That you Marshal? Let me open the door." A moment later, now face-to-face and shaking hands, the sheriff offered, "Good to see you, Jedediah. Want some coffee?"

"Sure, Cyrus. Black and strong."

"Coming up. You still enjoyin' the job, always livin' on the trail, Jedediah?"

"Wouldn't have it any other way."

The boy could hear them from the cell jocularly carrying on. He sat on the edge of his bunk, elbows on his knees and stared at the floor with apprehension, the weight of worry marring his freckled face. God knew he didn't want to go back. He supposed the marshal was going to ask him a string of questions. What was he going to say?

"Well, I guess you know why I'm here today, Cyrus."

"Sure do."

"Got the boy locked up in the back?"

"Yup. I'll holler for Perkins to get a horse over here so the two of you can get a move on. Daylight's a burnin'."

After the horse was saddled and hitched out front alongside the marshal's dun, Sheriff Lindsey went to open the cell door, first stopping to get a pair of steel bracelets off the wall.

"I think we can do without those today," said Taggart.

"You sure? Think you can handle 'im?" asked Lindsey playfully.

"That's all up to the boy," replied Taggart. "Let's ask him. Think I'm gonna need to cuff you today, boy?"

Eyeing the heavy steel bracelets dangling in Sheriff Lindsey's hands, the boy replied, "No sir. I'll come 'long—peaceful-like."

"That's what I thought," commented Taggart.

The pair moved out the front door of the jail, when Sheriff Lindsey called to Taggart. "Think I got somethin' else here you might want to take along," and handed him the Colt .44 Army revolver.

The marshal took the weapon, looked at it and raised a cocked eyebrow at Lindsey.

"Ya, I figured you'd know who that belonged to. Not many like it in these parts," he added with a wry smile.

* * *

The pair road out of town headed south. After a prolonged silence broken only by the rattle and slap of bridle and stirrups, Marshal Taggart turned to the tassle-headed youth.

"Sheriff Lindsey tell you about me? Tell you I won't tolerate any trouble from a prisoner?"

"Yessir, he did."

"Sooner I get you back and turn you over the better off we'll both be. Then I'll be on my way."

After a while the boy asked: "Them stories 'bout you true?"

"Which stories?"

"Ones the sheriff told me 'bout you bustin' up bankrobbers and saving priests and such, helpin' folks out."

"Most of them. Probably."

They rode with an easy gait across the plains. Much of the morning Taggart looked at the boy trying to figure the kid out. Finally he inquired: "Why'd you do it, boy?"

"Do what?" the youth replied evasively. "Take that gun? I don't know. Seemed the thing to do at the time. Was you really at Gettysburg?"

"No, no, not the gun. Look—your mother's already told me about you acting up and causing trouble. Why'd you run away?"

"Didn't want to go to no school."

"Any school," the marshal corrected, "which is exactly why you should be going. Now what was the real reason you ran away?"

"I thought—I thought maybe you'd come to help some more people, only this time maybe you'd help your own people—if you had to arrest me. Been a long time since ma has seen you. Been a hard time, too. I thought this'd be the only way to get you to come home for a spell, pa."

Looking into his own eyes reflected in the face of the boy, Marshal Taggart shamefully realized the truth in his son's words.

An artist, writer and editor, Tom Roberts is the publisher of Black Dog Books where many volumes carry introductions and historical essays by him. Apart from this he still finds the time to turn out several short stories each year between his cover illustrations for such clients as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

His Western short fiction was recognized with a 2010 award from Rope and Wire.

When not painting or designing, Tom pens articles on illustrators of the past. He is the author of the award winning biography, Alex Raymond: His Life and Art. Some of his nonfiction has appeared in Rip Kirby: The First Modern Detective, Illustration Magazine, Al Williamson: Hidden Lands, and Rough Stuff.

Tom can be contacted at publisher@blackdogbooks.net.

THE WICKED

Edward A. Grainger

From the safety of a tree limb, White Deer had watched Little Raven writhe and squirm under the ferocity of his attackers—fists pummeled the Arapaho teen's head, feet kicked his chest and stomach. Even as dark blood flowed from Little Raven's face, White Deer had stood still, his fingers tight around the wooden handle of his pogamoggan. He'd remained frozen in place, high in the oak tree where Little Raven had told the twelve-year-old to go and stay put when they saw the other older boys coming. If only he'd had the courage to leap out of the tree and take down two of the five and give his friend a fighting chance.

* * *

All two hundred and fifty pounds of Mowser went into each punch, brass knuckles bearing down to the right side of Cash Laramie's face. Then the left. Cash's head pivoted back and forth with every blow, blood and sweat splattering the floor. The last swing landed above his right eye, flinging his head to the side, cords and veins bulging out from his neck.

Mowser strode around to the back of the chair where Cash was restrained and boxed the crown of his captive's head with a one-two rabbit punch. Cash and the chair tumbled forward.

"Still nothing, huh?" Preacher asked.

Mowser shook his head, turning to the stark man in a black suit and white tie.

Preacher sat in a chair in the corner, one leg crossed over the other, tapping a smooth wooden cane in his right hand on the floor. His long, narrow head and hooked nose added to the vulture-like look of his slight frame. Gray hair and etched crow's feet set the man in his late sixties.

As he pulled a small, red leather-bound Bible from his vest pocket and then thumbed through the pages, Preacher spoke to Cash in a slow, nasal drawl. "Mr. Laramie, you would save me a lot of time by telling me where Ross is going. I know he wouldn't have been foolish enough to head back up the Mississippi, but that boat could be anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico by now. I sure would like to know soon. Got to teach Sunday school in twenty minutes. And I'm sure Mowser would appreciate the chance for a good sermon as well."

"Yes, sir, Preacher." A wide smile showed off Mowser's stained, crooked teeth.

Cash Laramie slid his square jaw sideways on the floorboards and stared through swollen eyes at his captors. He spit to clear his mouth of pooling blood, and then tried to loosen the ropes tying his hands behind his back. But they were tight to the chair. He lifted his head for a moment, but then his eyes rolled white as his head slapped down to the floor.

* * *

"You passed out on us, Mr. Laramie. Not good. Not good at all. The more time we spend here, the farther away Ross gets. I do hope you understand I can't let that happen."

Cash sensed he was upright in the chair again. He opened his eyes, grimacing from the pain. Through blurred vision, he made out Preacher still sitting in a chair now just a few feet in front of from him, leaning forward as if studying a specimen. Cash didn't see anyone else in the room. He could smell his main tormentor—Mowser—standing behind him.

"You missed a good service. One of my finest, I think. I read from Job Chapter Two, Verse Four. You know what it says?" Preacher smiled expectantly at Cash, and then went straight faced. "Probably not, huh? It goes, All that a man hath will he give for his life."

Cash heard a match strike. The room lit up in a warm yellow glow.

"Close that curtain, you fool. And put the gas lamp on the floor, then turn it down," Preacher scolded.

"Sure, boss." Cash heard Mowser draw the curtains, and then watched the shadows grow longer and darker on the wall as Mowser turned down the wick of the lamp.

"Sorry, Preacher, I didn't think it would matter. There's never no one on this part of the wharf. Only bums and whores."

"That's just it, you didn't think! It'd only take one curious cop getting his horn blown to mess us up."

Cash mumbled.

"I can't hear you, old man." Preacher got up close to Cash, bent down on one knee, and cranked an ear in Cash's direction. "Are you ready to talk?"

"Wouldn't you like to think so," Cash said, then spit saliva and blood in the man's ear.

Preacher surged up, cussing and wiping the side of his head with the back of his sleeve.

Mowser's hulking frame bounded across the room in two long strides, and he rammed the bottom of his boot into Cash's shin. Cash yelled out and strained against the ropes, pulling them rigid.

"I guess our friend here isn't as badly hurt as he led us to believe." Preacher stamped a foot to Cash's groin and pressed down. "Son, you did a number on my men yesterday. It's admirable how you held off the attackers so Ross and his family could escape. Quite admirable, indeed. Your reputation as a Cheyenne lawman is well-known, but this is 1911, Mr. Laramie. Your time has passed."

Preacher rubbed his finger along his right eyebrow. "I'm betting I could make some money off you." He stared down at his feet, blinking his eyes as he considered this. "But what Ross took from me is a great deal more. Look, he doesn't need to know you betrayed him. Just tell me where they went and I'll let you go."

Cash mustered a small smile through bloodied teeth. "Never, asshole."

Mowser raised a fist and slammed it down on Cash's head, whose world went black again.

* * *

Being the adopted son of Chief Lightning Cloud had its unspoken privileges, and the band of boys had resented White Deer for it. They had warned him many times not to follow them to their secret meeting ground, saying if they ever caught him near the Mighty Oak, they would beat him. He'd begged Little Raven to take him, but his friend refused, not wanting him to get into trouble. One day, he had gotten Little Raven to reluctantly agree, and when his friend tried to protect him from the older boys, Little Raven paid the price. But it didn't end there.

After Little Raven's mother had tended to him, he and his father came by the tipi of White Deer's mother where the Chief presided. Little Raven's father looked firmly at his son while the teen apologized to the Chief and took blame for the entire incident. White Deer sat by silently, scared of his father's punishment. Realizing he was getting off the hook, the youngster's muscles began to relax. After Little Raven had finished, his father stood humbly before the Chief and also apologized for his son's behavior.

However, in the days that followed, White Deer grew ashamed. All the suffering his friend went through was because of him. Only two moons had gone by since he passed into manhood and was honored with his adult name. He should have acted like a warrior by standing up to the older boys, and he should have been a man by admitting his mistake to his father. He vowed never be meek again.

* * *

He came to wondering if he was alone this time. He kept his eyes closed, playing possum while listening for signs of others, trying to figure out a way to free himself. His mind churned. His head pounded.

Then, he heard a rustling at the door. The knob turned. Boots thumped across the floor and stopped in front of his chair.

"Still sleeping?" Mowser jeered.

Cash felt the heat from the behemoth's hand as Mowser touched his right shoulder, giving it a shove from side to side. He remained motionless.

Mowser chuckled as he departed the room. "Rest up, old man. You're gonna' need all your strength for our next round." The door snapped shut.

Old man. The fucker was right. He'd be fifty-six in November. In the old days, he wouldn't have been caught so easily and would have eliminated these rodents by now.

Cash again eyed the shadows cast from the gas lamp behind him. He needed to use what juice he had left in him to get that lamp. He pushed back with the toes of both feet against the floorboards. The chair legs squealed as they dragged across the wooden planks. Cash froze, listening again for any signs of Mowser. Silence. He rocked to the left, lifting the right side of his chair and pressing lightly back, not a whisper of a sound, then rocked to the right and began worming his way backward.

He'd crept back about six or seven feet. His muscles ached, but he knew he was closing in as the circle of light from the gas lamp brightened.

Cash saw the lamp on the floor about a foot to the right. He tipped his chair until he fell down, toppling over the gas lamp, shattering glass across the floor. Gas shot out toward the window and the flame followed. In a whoosh, the curtains went up in a ball of yellow-orange fire and black smoke. He moved quickly, scooping up a piece of broken glass, then pushed away as the blaze raced up the wall and across the ceiling. Cash sawed at the ropes with the glass shard, gashing his hands, until the ropes gave way.

"You son of a bitch!" Mowser yelled from the doorway and then down the hall, "I need help!"

Cash got himself to his feet as Mowser closed in on him. When Mowser was within striking distance, Cash swung his arm in an upper cut, slicing the thug along the chest and neck, and sinking the glass shard deep under the chin into the tongue. Mowser's eyes glazed and his pupils dilated as he gurgled from the blood filling his mouth. Mowser swung his arms wildly, but Cash ducked and sidestepped.

Cash circled around, grabbed the behemoth's revolver tucked in his belt, and gave him a solid kick in the back, propelling Mowser into the flames. The man screamed as his flesh seared. Cash ran for the door, but two henchmen blocked his way. With lightning speed he blasted off two shots, hitting one man in the chest and the other in the head. He vaulted past them, down the hall, and out onto the wharf.

* * *

The hot Louisiana night guaranteed the windows would be open, maybe even a door. Cash circled round to the back of the plantation-style home, darting behind large oak trees draped with Spanish moss. A guard sat at the top of the steps to the portico, sleeping with his head and shoulder against a tall, white column. Cash crept up the steps, Bowie knife in hand, and slit the man's throat. He let the body gently fall, sheathed the knife, and then looked in the open door to the softly lit study. Sure that no one was in the room, he slipped inside and hid behind the floor-length curtain.

A few minutes later, heavy footsteps with long strides bounded into the study, tailed closely by quick-paced, short steps.

"I want to visit my mother in the morning. We have plans to go shopping at the new department store downtown." A woman's voice demanded.

"Take the boy who washes the cars. Have him drive the Rolls," Preacher dismissed.

"Are you still worried about that old gunfighter?"

"I'm not worried, I'm being cautious," he grumbled.

"I still don't understand what he wants with you."

"He's a friend of Ross—"

"Yes, you've said that."

"Why must you always interrupt me!" he raged. "You enjoy your pretty position in this community without ever showing the slightest interest in what I have to do to make your life so damned comfortable. Except when things get sticky ... or you're drunk ... and tonight it's both."

She shrugged. "I don't have to stand for this. I'm leaving for mother's tonight." She snatched the keys from the desk and left.

Preacher settled down in his chair, pulled a large black Bible closer to him, and flipped through some pages. He reached into the upper right drawer, took out a sheet of paper and a pen, and began taking notes.

His nose twitched when the aroma of a burning cigar filled the air. He lifted his head. "Who's there?"

A wisp of white smoke drifted from behind the curtain.

Preacher lunged for the center desk drawer but Cash had his gun ready.

"Raise your hands high. Now!"

Preacher lifted his hands in the air, "This isn't the Old West. There are better ways to handle these situations."

Cash crossed the room and sat in an armchair facing the desk. He rolled the cheroot to the corner of his mouth.

"I don't understand—really don't understand—why you'd risk your life for Ross."

"That verse you read from the good book, what was it about? A man will give all he has to save his life? Well, Little Raven—Ross—practically gave his life to protect me from some troublemakers. That was a long time ago. And I never had the chance to repay him. 'Til now. You certainly don't deserve what you've got. And I'd go through hell and back to make sure you don't harm a hair on him."

Preacher's cheeks burned red as his forehead wrinkled up in anger.

"You know Job Three off the top of your head?" Cash paused, taking the cheroot from his mouth with his free hand and stubbed it out on the desk. "No? Go ahead, read it."

Preacher turned to the section, found the page, and thumbed down for the verse. He reached for his glasses and put them on, looking over the rim of them at Cash before reading aloud.

"There the wicked cease from troubling ..." Cash chimed in unison.

Preacher looked up, puzzled, while Cash leveled the Colt to Preacher's head and triggered a round. Brain and blood painted the curtains in a crimson arc. The gun blast continued vibrating in Cash's ears as he stood, staring at the corpse before him, his muscles relaxing.

"... and there the weary be at rest."

Edward A. Grainger is the pen name of David Cranmer and is a charter member of the Western Fictioneers. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.

DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE

BV Lawson

The goat picked a spot on the rug in front of the guest's chair to take a crap. I glared at Constantine, our Technical Director, who pointed at the fresh steaming pile and then pointed at me. It wasn't my brilliant idea to schedule a dancing goat on the Morning Show. But the good ole Assistant Production Manager—me—was always the one who got to clean up the messes. This one wasn't even as stinky as one of Jack Brewer's clueless self-absorbed interviews.

Oh, the studio audience was eating it up, not literally of course, and I gave a little bow after I de-messed the rug to great applause. I didn't have time to dwell on the little piece of me that had just died inside before Constantine was pushing me out the door for the street part of the show where Jack and co-host Nikki were gearing up for a chat with the celebrity-of-the-day. Naturally, the celebrity would pretend to be a normal guy and shake the hands of adoring fans behind the gray steel barricades.

I could handle this part of the job in my sleep, but the skin on the back of my neck started tingling, and that's when I knew he was here. The creep showed up every single damned day, standing in the same spot at the front of one particular barricade. He wore the same dark glasses and the same gray hoodie, but even with his face mostly shadowed, there was something familiar about him.

The entire time I was on the set outside, he stared at me. I couldn't see his eyes, but it didn't matter. I knew his gaze followed me around. It wasn't for my movie-star good looks, because I'm about as average as they come: age thirty, medium height, medium everything, the type of guy who blends in with the scenery. Like the two hundred and thirty-odd times before—I'd lost count—I ignored the asshole and went about my business.

I knew I needed to work on my poker face when the new camera assistant, Cherie Taylor, asked me what was wrong. I ran my hand through my hair and smiled. "Other than the fact I smell like goat shit and my feet are frozen from having to stand in ice-cold puddles?"

Cherie stared at the forearm I'd exposed when I lifted my hand. "That's an interesting tattoo. Unusual. A red tiger?"

"Youthful indiscretion. My brother and I got matching tattoos when we were fifteen."

"When both of you were fifteen? You're a twin? Is he as obnoxious as you are?" She grinned at me.

"He's dead."

"Oh God, I'm sorry. Foot-in-her-mouth Cherie. That's what my father calls me."

"S'okay. He's been dead awhile." Don't think about it, don't think about it ... too late. Flashes of the sickening crunch, the twisted metal, the fire, all flickered across his mental screen.

Cherie cleared her throat and nodded at the tattoo. "You could have that lasered off."

"I'll think about it."

A voice around the corner called her name. She winced and started to head off, but paused. "I'm thinking about trying that new coffee shop two blocks down. Java Junkie. You could join me when the show's over."

She flushed crimson when I replied, "I've got an appointment later. Maybe some other time."

"Sure thing. Some other time." She scurried away, and for a moment I almost felt bad. At one time I thought I might be able to settle down with a nice girl, start a family, take vacations in Atlantic City by the shore. Cherie was the type of girl I'd pictured in that setup, back then.

Not anymore.

I pushed those thoughts aside and literally counted the minutes until the show would be over and I could wrap things up and leave. Not to go home. I avoided home as much as I could these days. I headed instead for my favorite watering hole where Bernie was on duty and poured me a whiskey on the rocks as I walked in the door.

Bernie looked up at the clock and raised an eyebrow. "You're five minutes late, Fred."

I took the drink and sat in my usual spot at the bar. Usual spot. That made me think of hoodie-guy. "He was there again today, Bernie."

"That weird loser who wears the hoodie and glasses? He just wants to be a star. You know, look at me, I'm on TV, whoopee."

"You're probably right."

I sat there in silence, swirling my glass without taking a sip, and that made Bernie's other eyebrow go up. "Something else going on?"

I chuckled, but to my ears it sounded more like a bleat from that damned goat. "You'll think I'm a nutcase. Genuine loony-bin material."

"Try me."

"I think someone's been following me around."

"You cheat on your taxes again, Fred?"

"I'm serious, Bernie. But that's not all."

"Oh?"

"I think someone's been opening my mail. Not that I get much these days. They seal it all back, but I can tell. The other day when I got home, I could swear my TV remotes weren't in the same place I'd left them that morning. And a photograph I'd left on the table was missing."

Bernie leaned on the bar counter. "Maybe you're just tired. I mean, it's easy to forget where you put things. Just the other day, my Brenda practically had a stroke when she thought she'd lost her cellphone, only to find it in buried in that black hole she calls her purse."

"I can't find the photograph anywhere."

"So who or what is in this photo?"

"Just family. Nothing valuable."

"Okay, so did anything that is valuable go missing?"

I hesitated, thinking of the locked drawer at home. First thing I'd checked, and nothing was taken. "No, nothing else."

"Ah there you see? Why would someone break into your apartment to steal a photo? You just need more sleep, pal." Bernie nodded at my still-full glass. "I'd say you need to cut down on those, but looks like that's not a problem."

I snorted. "Aren't bartenders supposed to be full of good advice?"

Bernie didn't laugh. "Look, maybe you should call the police."

Me call the cops? Oh hell no. I looked at Bernie to see if I'd said that aloud, but he was still looking at me with that one raised eyebrow and a hint of something that smacked of worry. I shook my head. "Nah, you're probably right. Nothing a good eight hours of actual sleep can't cure."

I stayed as long as I dared then headed home to take Bernie's advice. I opened my door cautiously, expecting—what? A ghost thief? A photo fairy? I forced a laugh, whether it was for me or whoever might be inside, I didn't know.

A search through my apartment didn't take long. For once, I was glad my micro-home was the best I could do on an assistant production manager's salary in the Bronx. The drawer was the last thing I checked. I took off the chain with the key that was hanging around my neck and unlocked the drawer. After eyeballing the bills and coins, I was satisfied everything was intact. I didn't trust banks, especially not with this.

I locked it up again and headed to the only other three pieces of furniture I needed: my TV, a small coffee table, and the sofa that served as chair and bed. The remotes were still where I'd left them. They should be—this morning I'd marked around their outlines with yellow chalk on the table.

Just as I was beginning to relax, the Grateful Dead ringtone on my phone made me jump. That would be Alonso. I counted to five and answered. "Yeah, Alonso. What you got?"

"Work, that's what. You know, a job. I sense your heart isn't in your work lately, Freddy boy. And that gives me heartburn."

"Take some Tums with a vodka chaser." I kept my voice light, but every time I heard Alonso's voice, it was the same mix of disgust and loathing that my father's voice had inspired. The best thing about Dad going to Greenview Prison was not having to hear that voice ever again.

"You owe me, you know," Alonso's voice purred. I did know, but it was Alonso who didn't know just how much I owed him and I intended to keep it that way.

Since Ted died, I'd gotten pretty good at survival. And survival meant keeping things from people. Keeping secrets. Doing your job just well enough, not drawing attention to yourself. Just one other bee in the hive, waiting until the other bees grabbed their nectar and left so I could nip over to the hidden flower and guzzle the raw sweetness without sharing. If I bumped into a thorn or two along the way, it was well worth it.

Ted. We'd been so alike, we could almost feel what the other was thinking. That night, that wonderful, horrible night, we'd congratulated ourselves on our cleverness and laughed as we raced down that lonely stretch of Route 219, busting the speed limit at around a hundred, drunk on adrenaline. Ted was driving, but the steering on that old Corvette never did work right, especially in the rain. Neither one of us saw the tree.

It took a few moments for me to realize Alonso was still yakking away on the phone. "It's SOP, Freddy, same as always. You know the drill. I'm counting on you. We can count on you, right Freddy?"

I was glad this wasn't a video phone. Alonso wouldn't have liked the one-finger salute I was giving him. Looked like I was going to be burning the midnight oil again. So much for Bernie's sleep idea. Truth be told, I was getting a little tired of this line of work. I was getting tired of a lot of things. Hell, I was beginning to sound like my favorite Uncle Larry right before he took that .357 Magnum and put it to his head.

I pulled on some jeans and my average-guy shirt and leather jacket and headed out the door, taking time to compliment Mrs. Garson on her window box pansies as I swallowed the inevitable snicker and patted old man Franklin's cockapoo—swallowing another snicker—on the head.

Let the night games begin.

I took my time, playing the average guy taking his average walk down the streets of the Bronx, until it was nice and dark. All that walking made me tired, naturally, so I sat down on a nice bench near Youngman's Deli. I nodded at another man sitting there. He nodded back. After a good ten minutes of nice-weather-Yankees-versus-Mets chitchat, he left. I picked up the bag he'd left under the bench.

I didn't really want to know what was in that bag. All I knew is that New York was filled with doctors and lawyers and Wall Street types who had more money than life. And more pain than money. They'd pay a king's ransom for what was in that little bag, a fact hammered home by the wad of bills being stuffed into my hand as I passed over the goodies to Alonso's favorite "distribution manager." Like it was Avon perfume or something we were dealing.

Alonso had recruited me because he could see the fire smoldering under my skin, the smoke sifting through my pores. "Once an adrenaline junkie, always an adrenaline junkie," he'd said. He wasn't referring to dancing goats. Maybe that's why I'd started taking a bill or two off the wad each time, hoping word wouldn't get back to Alonso. Not that I really needed it, but I needed it. Needed to feel alive, because I was almost out of surprises.

* * *

The next day came too early, but I was at the Good Morning studios at God-thirty-a.m., like always, wishing for a brief second I was a chick who could use under-eye concealer to hide behind. No shitting goat this time, but Mr. Predictable hoodie-guy was there.

Staring at me. Goddamn him.

I went to Cherie, told her I needed to take off twenty minutes early and asked her to cover for me, which I knew she would.

I got my eye on hoodie-guy again just as he was leaving. Time to play like I'm Sam Fucking Spade. If I was going to confront him, I'd have to catch him before he disappeared into the crowd.

Tailing him was easy. He was the only gray hoodie around. He stopped briefly to duck into a bagel shop and I thought I'd been made.

My phone rang. The Grateful Dead. Alonso never called this early. "I talked to Fernandez last night, Freddy-boy. The amount he says he gave you and the amount you put in that envelope for me don't match up. Now why do you think that is?"

My eyes were still glued to the bagel shop. "He musta got it wrong."

"Oh, it's wrong, for sure. And I'll demonstrate to you precisely how wrong it is in person a little later. You should have a nice surprise waiting for you when you get home. Remember Figueroa?"

Yeah, I remembered Figueroa. Didn't like to think about it though. Beat to a bloody pulp that looked more like something in Ling's Butcher Shop than a human. I think they found one of his arms in a dumpster.

Alonso hung up just as Hoodie Guy exited the bagel shop, sans bagel. Since I knew I couldn't go home, not yet, maybe not ever, I followed my target. Doggedly followed my target. Take that, old man Franklin's cockapoo. Hoodie Guy sauntered down 36th Street and turned onto Gemini Avenue, then down an alley.

That's when I lost him. Or so I thought. A sudden movement behind me made me turn and something hard came crashing down on my head. I knew I was on my back because I could see sky overhead, but the clouds were blurs. Everything was a blur.

I felt myself being dragged across a threshold, and the blur-clouds faded into a darkness overhead save for light coming through cracks in the wall. Hoodie Guy stood over me and slowly removed his glasses, his sweatshirt, and then started peeling off bits of his face.

And there standing over me was ... me. Oh God.

"Hello, dear brother. I would say it's nice to see you again, but I'd be lying. You were always the one who was good at lying, weren't you?"

I managed to make my mouth work and whispered, "I saw you die."

"You left me to die. In that burning car, while you grabbed the loot we'd stolen and ran. I crawled away and lay there for hours in pain, wondering when you'd send help. But no one came because you didn't go to get help, did you?"

Ted's laugh sounded as bitter as the bile in my throat tasted. "You remember where the car ended up, Freddy? Down in the stone culvert along Turtle Creek, hidden from the road. A rain put out the fire, so no one saw the car or me. I don't know how I limped out of there, but I did."

"I wouldn't have left you there. Not if I'd known ..."

"You didn't even try to get me out."

"I was scared."

"And I was fucking terrified." He stayed silent for a moment, and then growled, "With Mom dead, Dad in jail, and you on the lam with the loot, I had nowhere to turn. It took a while to track you down."

Even in the dim lighting, I could see Ted's eyes as they looked down at me. They were dark, soulless, loathing. They were my eyes, the eyes I saw every day when I looked in a mirror. "You've been in my apartment."

"I've been studying every bit of your life for the past year. I know where you hang out, I know how you do your job, I know where you buy your clothes. And I know where you keep the money we stole from the convenience store that you never spent." Ted bent down and removed the chain with the key from around my neck.

"I'm going to become you, dear brother. I'm taking over your life."

"They'll find my body. They'll know," I whispered. Whispered? Yell, Freddy, yell. But it wouldn't come out.

Ted walked over to a corner of the room and returned with a can of gasoline. "No, they won't find you. At least, not a body they can identify."

He'd planned this well, I had to hand it to him. I tried to rise up as he started spreading the gasoline around the room, but I couldn't move without the room spinning. I'd never make it to the door. He continued pouring the gas trail all the way up to me and then doused me with it thoroughly.

As he held up the box of matches and started lighting cotton rags, he smiled. "I know all your secrets, dear brother. I know about your side job, too, and your friend Alonso. Now he'll be my best friend, cutting me in on all those sweet deals."

I listened to the sound of the matches being struck, and as the first flames began to flare all around me, I held on to the one last secret that warmed me more than the fire. Ted was in for a helluva surprise back at my apartment.

BV Lawson's short fiction has appeared in close to three dozen publications, including Powder Burn Flash, Plots With Guns, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and the anthologies Pulp Ink 2 and Grimm Tales. She's still gobsmacked over a 2012 Derringer Award for her story "Touch of Death." Her tales featuring Scott Drayco are available on Amazon and other eBook websites, and with any luck, a Drayco novel series will find a publishing home soon. Follow her online at bvlawson.com.

GHOST STORY

Jay Stringer

Moses Lita took another pull on the beer, just to help the pills kick in. He looked out the front window and down into the street where an upturned car was burning. It looked like a three-wheeler, one of those plastic cars that would tip over if they took a corner too fast. The warm September evening was running even hotter than usual.

"Listen, listen." Moses said. "World's ending out there, you over?"

"Nah, bruv." Eric Boswell was younger than Moses. Fifteen, sixteen, somewhere around there. "Sounds like it's just starting. New times, Moses. It's their turn to be scared now."

Moses turned to face Eric, taking in his dark features, his smile, and those young excited eyes. He shook his head. The numbness was already starting to fog his brain. "You're a younger. You think different, think the worlds going to change, like all this will kick something off."

Eric nodded. He was pumped up and ready. "You don't?"

"Nah, bruv." Moses leaned back, easing into his chair, second hand from the Oxfam shop down the road. "It's just another fight."

Eric stood up, "Well I'm off. I want in. Wanna see those cops run, like pigs in a farm, man. Their turn. You over?"

"I get you," Moses said. He nodded and waved lazily, things a bit distant now, the noise outside fading to the background. He let out a long breath. "You go. I'm staying here. My world not changing much."

Eric stood up and shrugged, taking one last look at his stoned friend. The man used to be fierce but now he wanted to miss out on all the fun. He ruffled Moses' hair and left.

Moses leaned his head against the window sill. He could still hear some of it. The fighting, the shouting. Somewhere he heard another boom, like a firework. Then it all dropped away. The drugs wrapped around him, mixed with the beer, and took him to another place. He had a thought as it happened.

I done something wrong.

* * *

"You seen Moses?"

"Guy with a beard? About yay tall? Carries around a shopping list written in stone?"

Aaron Miller stood in the beer garden of his pub. He and his wife had arranged a barbecue for friends and family, though they didn't have much of either left. Children ran around their feet, playing at being Transformers and Thundercats. The adults talked about money. F.H Lloyds had closed down a couple years before, putting most of the town out of work, and it was still what most people talked about. It was that, or the miners, or just the economy in general. Nobody wanted to be the one to mention Thatcher. Most pubs in the town were benefitting from a new generation of unemployed drinkers, but Miller's pub wasn't one of them. People didn't like to drink in it because he was Romani. They called the pub The Tinkers or The Gypo's behind his back. The smell of cooking meat filled the beer garden and the radio was playing that song by Bowie and Jagger, Miller was already sick of hearing it.

Miller was sucking on a cigarette and his wife, Erica, gave him dirty looks as she handed out food from the barbecue. She would normally have been mad at him about smoking, but right then she was too busy being mad about him talking to Ransford Gaines.

"Good to see you still think you're funny," said Gaines. "When the pub goes under, maybe you could try a comedy career. They say it's the new rock 'n' roll."

Miller gave Ransford one of his moody looks, the one that his wife called his Rumblefish after that movie she'd made him sit through. "Pub's not going under." He dropped the cigarette onto the paved floor and stubbed it out beneath his foot. Straight away he regretted it. He would have to pick it up before Erica saw he'd done it. "We're doing fine."

"Bullshit. I know you're struggling. Let me help."

Ransford was a little taller than Miller. He had blonde hair than ran to brown, and the well-defined features that reminded Miller of Paul Newman, a proper actor. He had the permanent tan of someone who could afford regular holidays, not like Miller who would get mistaken for everything from Greek to Indian depending on the person he was talking to. Miller usually looked like he couldn't care less what anybody said to him, Gaines looked like not only did he care, but also that he could kill you for it.

"I'm out, Ran. That was the deal. I did that last thing, you helped me set up here, and we're done."

"Those insurance companies can be a real pain, right?" Gaines lit a second cigarette and offered the pack to Miller, who waved it away. "How many times this place been torched now? Twice?"

"Three times." Miller's tone was quiet, dull. He knew where this was going, and he knew what his answer was going to have to be. There was no way out from under.

"Three?" Gaines pulled a face. "And now the insurance company say 'no.' Now they won't renew. Was a risk taking you on in the first place. Now you're not covered, and the next fire? How do you cope with that?" Gaines went for the soft spot, nodded at Erica, smiling at her while he still talked to Miller through his teeth. "Does she know?"

"No."

"Okay. Tell me this: what would you prefer? That she's pissed at you for taking another job from me, or that she's pissed at you for letting your home burn down without insurance?"

Miller's youngest son, Eoin, ran past kicking a football, already good with it at his feet. He was wearing a Wolves top, a child-sized replica that Ransford had brought with him to the party. Already he was dreaming of wearing the real thing.

"You shouldn't have done that." Miller kicked the ball, sending his son chasing after it out of earshot. "I don't want him going near that place. Football's just for racists and hooligans."

"Wolves need all the fans they can get. Bottom of the third, looks like we'll be in the fourth next year, if the club's still going. My man at the cub says the receivers might be called in."

"You should be offering them money then, not me."

Gaines let him stew in silence for a moment. He waved at his daughter, who was following Eoin around. She was younger, still a toddler, but she was bold around strangers. He smiled once he saw Miller lean back against the wall and kick his heel against the concrete floor. They'd known each other long enough to read the signs.

"So, you seen Moses?"

Moses Lita was new. He'd only started working for Gaines in the last year, ever since he started to muscle in on the drugs trade. He's been running his own operation when Gaines had given him an offer he couldn't refuse. Gaines' offers came in threes: you said 'yes,' you said 'yes' after a broken bone, or you never said anything ever again. Miller was the only person who got to say 'no' to him, on account of things that had passed between them years before.

"I don't talk to Moses," Miller said. "Never trusted him."

"I should have listened to you." Gaines sucked hard on his cigarette. Tilted his head back to Blow out smoke. "He's gone to ground. Apparently he sparked some guy up in Birmingham. One of my guns, too, not that it can be traced back to me. Police are hard on him, and he's not clever enough to dodge them for long."

Miller smiled. Gaines had never been any good at finding people. He had a reputation for hands-on work, but the truth was he got other people to do it for him. Miller's memory flashed for a second, back to the things he'd done for Gaines, for loyalty and money. "And you want me to find him?"

"I ever came to you for brains? No. I know where he is. He's got his head down in Handsworth, using the carnival to stay hidden, but that ends today. We've got to get to him by tomorrow." Gaines raised his right hand and formed a gun with his fingers. "I want you to do the other thing."

Miller pushed off the wall and waved Gaines away, made to walk over to his family. "No way. Not again. You know that."

Gaines caught his arm and pulled him back. It was a quick movement, but others at the party caught it. Now everyone was watching them out of the corners of their eye, trying not to look like they were doing it. Now it was a thing. Gaines leaned in close and spoke quietly. "Listen, if the cops get him, it's not just me he can talk about, is it? You want them turning up here?"

Miller look at Gaines and then at his family. His two boys, Eoin and Noah, arguing now over who should go in goal. Rosie, the baby, asleep in a friends lap. Erica, turning meat and trying not to look like she was keeping an eye on him.

Gaines spoke again before Miller had the chance to think it through any more, "He's had his run, and he's fucked up. It's his time. No body, no evidence, he just needs to vanish. But I want to see him first, see it's done. You do this one more time, and all your problems go away. You won't need insurance. Anytime anything goes wrong I'll be here with a cheque. Hell, you want to, burn the thing down yourself and I'll buy you a house, tell Erica the insurance covered it."

"Last time?" Miller said.

Gaines nodded. "Last time. Then you're out."

* * *

Four in the afternoon the following day, Miller walked down Lozells road, feeling the stares. Just outside of Birmingham city centre, Lozells was deep Rasta territory as far as the newspapers were concerned. Dark skin, big hair, music with a beat. Miller knew few of the people in Lozells had ever seen a real Rasta, but the whites in Birmingham didn't care. They were all the same thing. The reason Miller was drawing stares was nothing to do with the colour of anyone's skin, but because people knew him. They knew who he worked for, and that he didn't belong.

Lozells wasn't Gaines' territory.

Hansworth, Lozells, and Smethwick were carved up between a complex understanding of the Irish, The Yardies, labour unions, and a few new younger gangs, the Watsons and the Meatpackers. Other people could try, but they would get their asses handed to them.

The Handsworth carnival had finished the night before, and there was still the smell of a party in the air. Posters and flags lined the streets in yellow and green, and the people had the easygoing smiles of the relaxed and the partied-out. As rough as the economy had been on the town Miller was living in, it had been worse here. At least back home there had been jobs in the first place. Into the backstreets of Lozells and Handsworth the government had thrown three generations of immigrants, and they'd never thrown work in after them.

As he walked, Miller noticed something else. Police. They were on every street corner. He walked past a parked police car and saw three uniformed officers patting down an angry young man sporting a toppa. His hands were held behind his back and his face was pressed down onto the bonnet of the bar, he was shouting in pain. In the doorways of the shops on either side of the street, Miller could see other men, watching, waiting.

He got one sense: Get out.

He slowed down as he passed the police and one of them gave him the fish eye, looked like he was about to get into Miller's face. He would be a new toy, a different shade of skin to mess with. Miller reminded himself that he had a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and walked on. As he neared Villa Cross, the large junction known to everyone as the 'front line,' he saw the trade was still going on as usual. Just yards aware from where the police were patting down every young man with the wrong type of clothes, the ganja was exchanging hands. On each side of the junction, and in the car park of the nearby Villa Cross pub, he saw men slinking about, the easy gait of the dealers and the anxious shuffle of those not yet hopped up.

If they weren't here to stop the weed, what was going on?

Again he got the sense: Get Out Now.

He crossed the road and ducked into the Acapulco Café. It was a small space, just a counter for food, a few tables, a pool table, and a couple pinball machines. The window was covered in grilled mesh, which helped to hide from the outside view of the people inside as they sat smoking joints and played pool. Everyone stopped for a second as Miller walked in. He knew a couple of these people. Big George at the pool table, always wearing a leather deerstalker, and talking about women with his booming laugh. Irene, behind the counter, never looked like she was working, always looked ready to shout at you for whatever food you dared to ask for. She would have been a fine looking woman if Miller had been looking for someone with about ten years on him and stronger arms. One song on the radio ended and the DJ announced the next one: UB4O. The room went into near revolt, everyone shouting Irene to change it. Miller headed over to the corner where the owner, Chris, was wiping down the table.

"You doing here, man?"

"Maybe I'm here for one of your legendary coffees."

"I own the place and even I don't touch the coffee. Really, you doing here?

"Moses. I was told he's been getting his food in here every day this week."

Chris' face shut down. There hadn't been much of a welcome to begin with, but now there was nothing. He just shrugged and carried on wiping the table long past when it was clean.

Miller took the hint, "Okay. Mind if I ask your customers?"

Chris just shrugged. "Your mouth, man. Your life."

Miller turned back to the pool table where George was playing by himself, sinking ball after ball as a small crowd watched in a haze of smoke. Each time he sank a ball without missing, money changed hands in the crowd.

"You can ask what you want to ask," George's voice boomed out, friendly but with a warning firmness, loud for the audience to hear too, "but then I'll have to swear at ye."

Miller smiled and rocked on his heels for a moment, thinking there was no point in asking his question. He watched as George sank the black to a round of applause, then a small boy ran over to the table to set it back up. Another time, on another day, Miller would probably have challenged George to a game, and almost certainly would have lost, but he didn't want to be hanging around.

He changed the subject by nodding out through the open doorway to where the police had stopped another young man, had him pressed against the wall of the Fairway Furnishings store across the road. "What's going on today?"

George shrugged, almost ignored the question as he busied himself with chalking up his cue. "Nothing that don't happen every day roun' here. They got it in their heads we some kind of criminal masterminds, that they keep finding coke and horse here because we selling it, not taking it."

Miller stayed silent. He knew where the drugs were coming from, and he knew it suited the trade to have the cops think the local gangs were behind it. He nodded a goodbye and left. He had sensed his allotted time was up, and there was no point burning bridges with people by getting into an argument over Moses.

He crossed over to the car park of the Villa Cross pub and turned to look back at the café. The metal grill over the window did its job, and he almost couldn't see the several faces staring at him to see what he did next. He looked around at the buildings. The large bingo hall, once a cinema, that towered over everything on the far side of the road. The church to his left. Houses further along. If Moses was hanging out at the café, he would be nearby. He wouldn't be travelling far.

* * *

Eric Boswell had his face pressed to the bonnet of the police car. Three of them, it took three of the cowards. One of them pinned his arms behind his back while another was patting him down. For what?

"What you want man?"

"Did we ask you a question?"

"No."

One of them leaned in and grabbed Boswell by his dreadlocks, slamming his head down onto the car again. "Then shut up."

Boswell felt his blood rise. Wasn't right, be treating a man like this. He wanted to snap, show them how it should be done, show them not to mess with him. But he didn't. He didn't fight back and he didn't speak again. He took it. He let them frisk him once, twice, a third time. Let one of them whisper in his ear about the colour of his skin.

He saw someone stop beside them on the street out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, saw a man who had ten years on him. His skin was darker then the police, but he didn't look Indian or Pakistani. He looked for a second like he was going to step in, tell the police to leave Boswell alone, but the one of the cops scared him off and he looked away, walked on down the street, his head bowed like a good boy. After a few more pushes and warnings, the cops stepped back and let him go. Boswell flexed his hands and rubbed his wrists, trying to get his feeling back. Again he wanted to step to. Wanted to show them how a man reacts to being treated like an animal. Again, he didn't. He turned and walked away, towards the front line.

He crossed over to the Acapulco. Big George looked up as he walked in, missing his shot. The boys behind him all started to whoop and talk, money trading hands, slapping palms. Chris nodded for Boswell to step over to him, took him to the corner.

"Go get your man, make sure he stays off the streets."

"I'm over, man, all the cops yeah?"

"No." Chris tilted his head slightly, motioning out through the door with a flick of his eyes. "They the least of it tonight. The gypsy in town. If Moses steps out tonight, he'll never have to worry about the police again."

Gypsy. Boswell figured that must have been the dark-skinned guy. He nodded, pretended to Chris that he understand what he'd been talking about, but he hadn't been listening. The blood was too busy rushing in his ears, saying hear me, use me, fight me. He stepped out of the café and looked around, checking for any sign of the gypsy before he turned to head down Heathfield Road.

* * *

Miller hung back in the doorway of Fairway Furnishings and watched the young man in the toppa step back out of the Acapulco. He'd seen him go inside and something had told him this was it. Sometimes he just got a feeling, and he'd learned to roll with it. The young man stepped out again not much more than a minute later, and from the way he looked around Miller knew he'd been told to look for him.

Bingo.

Miller let the guy walk on down the road for a minute or so before he pulled out of the doorway and followed. He stayed on the other side of the road, and always tried to keep a parked car between them, blocking the guys line of sight as he turned back a couple more times. He could have spotted Miller, but he didn't, and soon Miller realised he wasn't looking at him. He was looking back at the cops.

The man crossed over, towards the same side of the road as Miller, and made to turn into Mayfield Road. Miller stepped down into the road, behind a parked red fiat, with his quarry passing only six feet away from him. He counted to twenty then stood up and followed again. The route was leading them back towards Lozells Road. At the junction of Lozells, the same three police were watching people walk by, but this time they didn't bother with either Miller or the man he was following. They both crossed the road and headed down Burbury Street. Miller hung back and bent down to tie his shoe lace, watching as the young man stopped on the other side of the road, about seven doors farther down, and let himself into a red-brick terrace house.

Bingo again.

Miller reached round behind him to feel the solid metal presence of the gun. He hated them. He hated what they made him. But he only needed to use one more, and then he was done. He swallowed a couple of times to clear his suddenly dry throat, and decided to head to the pub. It was too bright for him to do it right now anyway. He needed nightfall. He turned back towards Lozells Road.

* * *

At around 4:45, a police officer noticed a car was double parked at Villa Cross. As he approached the vehicle, he noticed there was no tax disc on display. The officer started to write out a citation for the driver, but the young man behind the wheel was spooked and he ran away from the police and into the Acapulco café.

The officer's attempts to enter the café were met with hostility, and he called for backup from the many nearby officers. As the numbers of police officers at the scene swelled, so did the crowds, mainly angry young locals, who had felt victimised and isolated by the police due to the colour of their skin. Stones were thrown and threats were made.

The officers on the scene called for more back up. So did the locals.

The lid was off.

* * *

Miller sat at the bar of the Bush, a small pub set back from the main roads of Lozells. The violence could be heard as gangs fought running battles with the police, often winning them, in the streets outside.

He sipped at his pint. He'd lost track of how many he'd had.

What had started as just a couple of drinks to pass the time had become a few more drinks to steady his nerves. Now it was a full-blown session to avoid the riots. He heard a muffled explosion, something he would later learn was the first of a handful of firebombs set off after gangs had lured the police into traps in the narrow streets.

His hands shook but it wasn't the violence outside that was causing him trouble.

He set his drink down and looked over the bar, at the mirror opposite that was set behind the bottles of whisky. He was giving himself his full Rumblefish stare. He was not a killer, he told himself. Trouble was, he already knew that wasn't true.

Anymore, he added. I'm not a killer anymore.

His memory flashed to a favour he'd done for Gaines a long time ago. An act that had them locked together ever since, unable to escape the pull of their past.

Once more.

You can do it.

Someone slid onto a stool at the bar next to him but he didn't look up. After a moment of silence, Irene spoke. "You going to ignore me all night?"

Miller looked up, the booze framing the edges of his vision. "Sorry."

Up close she looked a little younger, maybe closer to his age. Or maybe it was the soft focus of alcohol. She leaned closer and picked up his pint, sipping at it before pulling a face and then putting it down on the other side of her, out of Miller's reach.

"You've had enough of that crap," she said.

"Beg to differ." Miller waved at the barman, who picked up the drink and handed it back to him. He tipped it to down the last of the beer, then wiggled the glass in the air to ask for another.

"He's scared you know?" Irene's voice was softer now. Almost pleading. "He knows he's in trouble."

"Yeah."

"Can't you just leave him be?"

The windows of the pub rattled as another explosion sounded off, this one closer. They heard people running past, fighting, shouting. Something bounced off the locked door.

"It's like one of those horror films out there," Miller said. "A zombie film. Though zombies don't run."

"No." Irene shook her head and spoke with sadness. "What we have out there is a ghost story. Ghosts of a community, of other lives, other stories. That's all we have left now."

Miller nodded. He kept nodding for a long time, not sure what he was agreeing with or why. Ghosts. He could identify with that. He was starting to feel like he saw one every time he looked in the mirror. He climbed down of the stool and shuffled over to the door. The barman asked him three times if he was sure before sliding the bolt and letting him out into the evening.

* * *

Miller entered the house through the rear. He climbed up onto the back of the outhouse roof and then in through a bedroom window. The house was silent and cold. If anyone had heard him, they didn't show it. He went room to the room, finding nothing but slum conditions and drug paraphernalia. Pictures of naked women pulled out of magazines and newspapers stuck to walls above mattresses that had no sheets and a variety of interesting stains.

He climbed the stairs to the front bedroom and eased the door open, leading with his gun. Moses was slumped in a ripped chair in the window, His head rested against the window sill, and his hands dangled down at his sides over the armrests.

He looked for all the world like he was sleeping, but he wasn't.

Miller stepped on close and touched the cold skin, the dark features already greyed and cracking with the marble-like appearance of death. There was a light film of drool across his lips and down his chin, leading down to the empty pill bag and half-full bottle of beer in his lap. His vacant eyes stared out at Miller, unblinking. Even in his neutral death mask, Moses seemed to be pleading with Miller.

Whether it was an accident or deliberate didn't matter.

The job was done.

Miller thought back to Irene at the bar. He's scared. Can't you just leave him be.

He slipped the gun back into the waistband of his jeans and touched the cold forehead while he said a silent prayer for the dead. Then he thought, no, he couldn't give Gaines any reason to back out on the deal. He though again of his family, and his promises, and the deal he'd made with Gaines. Appearances were everything, and he needed it to look a certain way when he showed the body to his boss.

He stepped back and pulled out the gun, raising it to point at Moses.

He said another prayer, this time for the ghost he knew he would be seeing next time he looked in the mirror.

Jay Stringer is a novelist, drinker, and knight in shining armchair. OLD GOLD and RUNAWAY TOWN both available from Thomas & Mercer. Represented by Stacia Decker at DMLA.

IT'S COMING

Jen Conley

The homeless people were screaming again.

Mandy sat at the patio table in front of the citronella candle, its long flame fluttering, her stomach tense. She was frightened of the cries, which were occurring more and more these days. She rubbed her ankle—it'd been a tough week at school. Mandy was on the eighth-grade cross country team and her coach had run them hard.

"They're fucking wackos!" Mandy's crazy Aunt Ettie barked. The smell of Ettie's cigarette smoke wafted through the night. The backyard was dark, devoid of any light because Ettie liked it that way. According to her, bright spotlights attracted the homeless.

"It's coming!" she said. "It's coming, you'll see!"

Mandy didn't ask, What's coming? because Ettie'd been saying It's coming for weeks and nobody knew what she was talking about.

After a moment, Mandy heard Ettie toss her beer bottle into the recyclables, a plastic garbage can she kept next to the detached garage, which stood in the right corner of the backyard—a strange set up, but Mandy's parents had gotten a good deal on the house years ago because of the design. Ettie lived in the apartment above the garage.

Mandy heard her aunt open another beer and slurp it.

"They're gonna kill us, Mandy. One of them is gonna kill us!" Ettie paced the yard, her shadow and the glow of her cigarette flicking back and forth like a pendulum.

Mandy shuttered. She wanted to go back inside.

Suddenly, a pathetic long wail bellowed from the woods where the homeless lived in their camp. Mandy looked up, listening. The homeless camp was pretty far away, but still, there were so many people who lived there now, their tent and shack city tripling in the past six months. They wandered around like ghosts, the cop who'd come to Mandy's house in August said.

The wail escalated and escalated. Ettie stopped pacing—her shadow and cigarette glow went still. The cry was joined by another cry, and then a banging, like someone was hitting a drum, but it was probably an overturned bucket. The noise soared and surged until it exploded into a bizarre crescendo and then faded. Mandy bit her nails. She wanted to be inside watching TV with her nine-year-old brother, Liam. The homeless people frightened her, and she sure didn't like hanging out with crazy Aunt Ettie on one of her benders, as her mom called them.

But Mandy had come outside because she and her mom were fighting about Mandy not doing enough around the house, and her mother had banished her daughter to the backyard, a punishment for getting a little mouthy.

"Go sit out back!" she'd said.

Times were tough. Mandy's dad was gone so much these days, working long hours driving around the country delivering hazardous chemicals. He'd been out of a job for over a year and they had to catch up on the mortgage payments. Mandy's mom was grabbing as many shifts as possible at the hospital. Mandy had to pull her weight now. Lord knows they had to support Ettie and her goddamned drinking habit.

"Get a life!" Ettie suddenly shouted. Then she yelled to Mandy: "I can't take this fucking crap. You know?"

"Ettie, keep it down, ok?" Mandy said. "Mom will get mad."Another beer bottle hit the recyclables. "Assholes," Ettie mumbled.

The homeless people were being relocated on November 15th. It was township land they were camped on, and after a year of fighting back and forth—the township against a homeless advocacy group and a church—the township won. "Thank God for fucking Republicans," Janice Benko from next door said to Mandy's mom. "No pity, no remorse, no give-a-shit. I love it."

Mandy's mom, Renee, was not fond of Republican philosophies but she did say she agreed with Janice on this one. Mandy did, too. Sure, some of these people had hit hard times, some were just harmless alcoholics and drug addicts, and some were just there. But a few were convicted child molesters or mad nuts or violent ex-cons. That's what Mandy's mom and Janice were always saying.

Ettie stepped out from the darkness and joined Mandy at the table. The candle illuminated Ettie's face and she appeared gaunt, wide-eyed, and garish—something risen from the grave. From the old photographs Mandy had seen, Ettie once had been pretty but now, at forty-nine, she wasn't. Her skin was yellow, her bottom teeth protruded, and her voice was scratchy like a witch's.

"They're gonna get into this backyard, Mandy, and do something bad. It's coming. Listen."

Mandy did listen and she heard clips of moans and cries and chatter.

Ettie shook her head, all knowing. "It's coming."

This spooked the girl. Sure, yes, of course, the homeless could get to them. But the backyard was secured with a six-foot stockade fence, the kind with pointed tops. Could they get over that?

And Mandy didn't like the way her aunt kept saying this—It's coming. If she meant the homeless were coming to get them, then why not say, They're coming?

Ettie leaned forward, closer to the candle and flame, her ragged hag face glowing wildly. "I seen one of them homeless walking in front of our house the other morning," she whispered in that scratchy voice of hers. "He's got a dog on a rope. I bet that's a child molester."

Mandy swallowed. "Want me to tell Mom?"

Ettie leaned back in the chair and said, "Nooooo. Don't do that, man."

"Why not?"

"'Cause you don't wanna go around accusing people of things they might not be guilty of, ya know? Ya gotta be cool in life, Mandy." Ettie pulled out a cigarette and offered her one. Mandy declined. When she was drinking, Ettie would offer a baby a cigarette.

"Oh, I forgot," Ettie mumbled, lighting up. "The Regulator is up above us, huh?" She pointed to the second floor window, Mandy's mother's room.

Ettie was quiet and then said, "I started smoking at your age. It's good you're a stand-up kid, not running around. You're sticking to your studies, involved in team sports. I wasn't like that."

Mandy wanted to go inside. It was Friday night. She was beat. She wanted to go to bed. And, she was disturbed by all the homeless talk.

"They're all fucking child molesters, I bet," Ettie said, taking a drag on her cigarette. "Or murderers."

The sliding glass door opened and Liam stuck his head out. "Mom says you can come in."

Relieved, Mandy quickly stood up. "Good night, Ettie."

"Yeah, yeah," Ettie said, coughing. "You lock up. Keep your brother and mom safe."

* * *

Ettie's stay with Mandy's family was way past its welcome. Three years was too long to tolerate, and Mandy's father knew that, as well as Mandy's mom Renee, who didn't care if Ettie was her husband's sister.

"I know she's having a hard time, but really, she's got to go!" Renee yelled more than once. Ettie used to live with the sister, Donna, in Old Bridge, but after two years, that ended and she relocated to the apartment over the garage.

Earlier in the week, Renee called Donna and asked her to take Ettie back, but within seconds, Mandy watched her mother's eyes water with tears. Then she saw Renee end the call, place the cell phone on the table, and walk upstairs. She didn't come down for the rest of the night.

* * *

Mandy woke a little after six the next morning, too early for a Saturday. Her mom and brother were still asleep, her father gone, and when she went downstairs to get some cereal, she found that there wasn't any milk. Mandy dressed and went upstairs to grab her wallet. Before she left for the 7-Eleven, she peered through the blinds that covered the slider door and searched the backyard. All was still. The patio table was clear—no ashtray or beer bottles—except for the citronella candle sitting in the center.

Outside in the street, it was gray and damp and a bit chilly, even for September. Mandy walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the somber silence of the early weekend morning. She tried to jog a little, but her ankle was bothering her enough to make her stop. She usually ran on the weekends, even though her coach told her to take one day off a week.

The 7-Eleven faced the highway, its back to Mandy's neighborhood. A patch of trees grew behind the small building. As she approached the store, the man with a dog on a rope—the one Ettie had mentioned—appeared from the trees, stepping in front of her. The man and the dog were both grubby and mangy, and the man wore long camouflage pants and a dark jean jacket, and he carried a small backpack. He spoke softly to the dog and when they reached the front of the store, he wrapped the rope around the bottom part of a pole. Mandy walked by him, catching a whiff of urine and stink.

Inside the store, she quickly grabbed a gallon of milk, steering away from the man who was now making himself a cup of coffee. Mandy paid and left, passing the dog on the rope, who sat obediently under the pay phone.

About ten minutes later, while she was home—her brother and mom still asleep and Ettie in her apartment—the man with the dog on the rope walked by her house. Mandy was sitting on the couch in the living room, eating her bowl of cereal and watching television, when she looked through the front window and there he was—the mangy man with the dog on the rope, both strolling along the road, the man sipping his coffee. Mandy stared at him and noticed he wasn't really old but not really young. Probably in his forties, she decided.

Then the man stopped and stared at Mandy. She quickly turned from the window, faced the television. She sat still, her eyes on the TV commercial for toothpaste, and then another ad for McDonald's. Finally, she gathered enough nerve to slowly turn her head. The man and the dog on the rope were gone.

Soon after this incident, Liam wandered downstairs and asked for a bowl of cereal. Mandy's mom was up next, her pink robe dragging behind her. Mandy made her toast.

"I'm so exhausted," Renee said, sitting at the table. Mandy poured her mother a cup of coffee, then grabbed the gallon of milk out of the refrigerator, a spoon out of the drawer, and placed them on the table, next to the sugar.

She set the toast in front of her mom and sat down. "There's a man with a dog on a rope."

Renee stared at her. "A dog on a rope?"

Mandy nodded. "Yeah, I just saw him. Ettie said she also saw him recently."

Renee closed her eyes, sighed, and rubbed her head. "Ok, just keep away from him. If you see him when I'm not around and you feel nervous, call Janice next door. It's gotta be one of the tent people."

"But Janice isn't home during the day. She works."

Her mother nodded. "Then call one of the other neighbors. I'll leave you a list with their numbers."

"Okay."

Renee picked up her toast and appeared to study it. "Thanks for breakfast, honey. I'm going to try not to nag you so much, because you're a good kid."

Mandy smiled. "Okay."

* * *

In the evening, it rained and Ettie remained in her apartment. Renee was working a four to midnight shift, so Mandy and her brother stayed in the house alone, watching TV, surfing the computer, eating a homemade pizza. Liam loved his sister's pizza. They didn't invite Ettie for dinner because it was Saturday night and Ettie usually got very drunk on Saturday night.

After Liam went to bed at nine-thirty, Mandy went into her mother's room to turn out a small lamp. She walked to the window and peeked through the blinds. The violet glimmering of the television flickered in Ettie's apartment window. Beyond the garage, in the woods, Mandy noticed a few white glows—lights in tents. The church group that brought the homeless food, blankets, and other provisions also brought them battery lamps. Mandy remembered the cop in August standing in front on the porch with her mom and Janice Benko explaining how the tent people were getting their supplies. When he left, Janice was irate. "Goddamn church! We'll never get rid of these vermin. Why would they leave if they're getting everything for free?"

Mandy stared at the glowing tents, wondering which tent the man with the dog on the rope lived in. Perhaps she had been wrong earlier—maybe she'd imagined him staring at her through the window. Maybe he just stopped to rest, or maybe something attracted his attention, something eye-catching—like a bright-red cardinal bird sitting in the tree near the living room window. She wondered if he and the dog were warm. She wondered if he was reading a novel or just staring up at the canvas, listening to the rain patter on the material.

* * *

At midnight, a thunderous pounding woke Mandy. She jumped out of bed and checked on her brother, who was sitting upright, rubbing his eyes. "What's that, Mandy?"

Bang! Bang! Bang! Loud shrieks followed. Mandy ordered Liam to stay in his room and she took off down the stairs, realizing the noise was Ettie.

Mandy unlocked the door and let her aunt in. Ettie was in a frenzy, panicked and shaking, her face shiny with tears, her hair sweaty and unruly. The rain had stopped so she wasn't wet, yet she reeked of alcohol. "They're out there, Mandy. They're coming!"

Mandy didn't know what to say, but she was frightened. "Who's coming?"

Ettie pulled out her box of cigarettes and then put them away. "Them tent people, Mandy. I felt them sniffing around my place. I felt them out there."

Mandy didn't know what to do. "You want me to call the police?"

Ettie said nothing, just looked around, searching the kitchen with her wild eyes. "I can't stay in here, can I?" she asked, pulling out her cigarettes and then putting them away again. "The Regulator won't like that."

"I can call the police," Mandy offered again, trembling, spooked. "Was it the man with the dog on the rope?"

Ettie stared at her and nodded. "Maybe. Maybe."

Just then, Liam appeared in the kitchen. He was crying. Mandy told him to bed.

"I don't want to," Liam said.

Mandy took his hand and walked him to the stairs. "I'll be up in a moment."

"Is Ettie okay? I don't mind if she wants to stay with us tonight."

Mandy shook her head and hugged him. "Go upstairs. I'll be there soon."

The boy slowly climbed the steps, turning around a few times until he reached the top. Mandy waved. "I'll be there in a minute."

When she returned to the kitchen, Mandy found her aunt sitting at the table. "Ettie, do you want something to eat?"

Ettie, who was rail thin, declined.

Mandy sat with her aunt and watched the woman turn the cigarette box over and over. "It's coming, Mandy. You watch."

Ettie sat and sat until she calmed down and grew more lucid, asking Mandy about her cross country meets, where she ran, how well she did. Mandy, who was still scared but feeling better, answered, saying she was not the fastest on her team but she was in the top five. "We compete against all the schools in Ocean County and Monmouth counties."

"I don't know how you do it, hon. I hated to run. Do they still make you do those stupid physical fitness tests every year?"

"Yes."

Ettie clicked her tongue. "Yeah. I was no good at the running like you but I was good at chin ups." Her voice was scratchier than usual. "I used to be real strong back in the day."

At twelve-thirty, Ettie stood up to leave. "Have a nice night, hon." She said stepped out onto the wet porch and lit a cigarette. Mandy switched the porch lamp on and watched her aunt walk away. Ettie waved without turning around, using the hand with the cigarette.

When Mandy returned upstairs, Liam was in her room, curled up in her bed with a teddy-bear Mandy had won at the boardwalk earlier in the summer. "What does she mean, It's coming?" Liam asked. Mandy explained that Ettie'd had a bad dream and she felt like some type of monster was coming to get her. (Mandy and her mother tried very hard to play the homeless people down in front of Liam.) "It was just a dream."

"Can I sleep in here?" he asked.

With Liam beside her, Mandy was almost asleep when her mom arrived home. Renee, who had switched on the bedroom light, wanted to know why Liam was not in his room. Mandy tried to lie, explaining Liam had a nightmare, but he woke up and spilled the whole story about Ettie screaming and how she said there were people outside coming to get her.

Renee's skin went red. She whipped around and tore out of Mandy's room, down the stairs. Both Mandy and Liam leapt up and chased after their mom, racing down the stairs, flying through the kitchen, out the slider, across the yard, stopping in front of Ettie's apartment. Mandy and Liam listened to Renee and Ettie scream at each other. Their voices were loud but muffled because Renee had shut the door. Mandy could only pick up things when they hollered loudly, like, "You keep your BS to yourself, Ettie!" "I fucking hate your guts, Renee!" "I don't give a shit, Ettie!" and so on.

When Renee emerged from the apartment, she slammed the door, muttering "alcoholic lazy freeloading bitch."

Mandy and Liam trailed after her.

"Shut that goddamned slider!" Renee shouted when they were inside the kitchen. She said to her daughter: "Take your brother up to bed and then come down here."

Mandy did as she was told. Liam went to his own room without protesting. "Even though she's mad, I feel better Mom is home, don't you, Mandy?"

"Yeah," she answered reluctantly. Her stomach was twisted up with anxious sickness.

Back in the kitchen, Mandy saw a bottle of whiskey on the counter and her mother standing next to it, sipping from a glass. A Christmas stocking lay near the bottle. Mandy had never seen her mother drink whiskey before.

"What the hell happened tonight?" Renee asked.

Mandy told her exactly what had happened.

Renee finished her glass, poured a little more, drank it, put the glass in the sink, and then put the bottle in a long Christmas stocking. She opened the bottom cabinet where she kept the Tupperware and shoved it in the way back, plastic containers falling over and banging. Then she stood up. "I'm going to bed. Goodnight."

Mandy felt horrible.

* * *

On Tuesday afternoon, Mandy's father returned home for a two-night visit. Renee prepared a nice dinner, and when her husband entered the kitchen—just out of the shower, clean-shaven and dressed in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt—he asked why there weren't five place settings.

"You know, Ettie, she hardly eats," Renee said, placing a large bowl of mashed potatoes on the table.

Mandy's father ignored his wife. "Go get your aunt," he told Mandy.

Outside, Mandy opened her aunt's door. "Ettie," she called up. "Ettie!"

"Hey, hon," Ettie replied. "I'm here!"

Mandy climbed the stairs to the studio apartment. Her parents had taken out a fifteen-thousand dollar home equity loan to renovate the place. The idea was to rent it out, recoup the money to pay off the loan, and then use it as extra income. Fortunately for Ettie, when she was put out of the house in Old Bridge, Mandy's parents had just finished the renovation and Mandy's father insisted they take Ettie in. Originally she had a job—at the 7-Eleven, in fact—but that didn't pay much and it only lasted a year and a half. Ettie blew through what little savings she had on booze and cigarettes until she took to stealing from Renee's purse. Because of this, Mandy's father insisted they give Ettie a fifty-dollar-a week allowance. His wife had fought this fiercely, but honestly, it was the most practical thing to do. Now Renee kept her purse hidden in her bedroom.

"Ettie, do you wanna have dinner with us?" Mandy asked.

Ettie drew on her cigarette. "The Regulator ain't asking, is she?"

"My dad is home."

Ettie, who was standing by the window, turned and grinned. "Sure, why not?"

At the table, Mandy's mother hardly spoke or ate. Ettie chattered on about this and that, sounding completely normal, not once bringing up that It's Coming or the man with the dog on the rope. After dinner, she returned to her apartment, and Mandy's father took Liam out front to play ball. Renee went upstairs to lie down. Mandy cleaned up.

* * *

After school, Mandy's job was to pick up Liam from Joan's house—the sitter. Sometimes she remembered to tell Joan that she'd be late because of a cross country meet, and sometimes she forgot. Although, it didn't really matter.

"I'm always here, sweetie," Joan always said. "You come get your brother whatever time you want."

Liam and Mandy walked the two blocks home. It was Friday and he talked excitedly about how he'd been the only kid in his class to get nominated for the Science Club. "It's a great honor," he said. "I have to stay after school once a week on Thursdays and take the late bus home. Don't forget to tell Joan."

Just as they reached their house, the man with the dog on the rope passed them. He nodded his head and continued on, towards the 7-Eleven, Mandy guessed.

Liam didn't say anything but he stared up at his sister, who shrugged and looked way.

* * *

Liam wanted to demonstrate a science experiment with vinegar and baking soda, so Mandy and he set up the experiment on the patio table. "You are about to observe a reaction of two chemicals," he said authoritatively, holding up the bottle of vinegar and the box of baking soda. "Actually, many people mistake this simple experiment to be one reaction when it's actually two." He wore safety goggles over his eyes. Renee had gone to work.

Ettie emerged from the apartment, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She twirled around in the backyard grass, dancing and singing an old rock song.

Liam pushed his goggles on top of his head and frowned.

Mandy whispered, "You wanna go on the front porch?"

"Okay."

She grabbed the small bottle of vinegar and the little glass her brother was using for his experiment, and Liam picked up the box of baking soda. They went through the house and out to the front porch, where Liam set up his experiment again. He poured the baking soda into the demonstration glass, and just as he was about the pour the vinegar into it, Ettie appeared again.

"What are you two doing?" she asked in her drunken croaky voice.

Mandy put her finger to her lips to signal Liam's concentration.

"I'm cool," Ettie muttered.

Liam poured the vinegar into the glass and suddenly it sizzled and smoked wildly, like a brew in a cauldron. Mandy clapped, Ettie cheered, and Liam beamed.

"A future scientist!" Mandy said, applauding some more.

Then there was a bark. The man with the dog on the rope waved. Ettie stared and Mandy put her hand on Liam's shoulder.

Suddenly, Ettie did something unexpected—she hollered: "Pete! Pete Donner!"

The man with the dog on the rope stopped. Ettie rushed in long leaps across the small front lawn. "Pete!" she cried, holding out her hand when she reached him. He shook it.

At first he said nothing but then called, "Wow! Ettie! Ettie Hewitt. How are you?"

They chatted for a few minutes while Mandy and Liam stood on the porch listening. Finally, Ettie invited the man with the dog on the rope to meet her niece and nephew.

"Shake his hand, boy," Ettie ordered Liam when he tried to just wave.

In a few minutes, the man with the dog on the rope—Pete Donner—was sitting in the back at the patio table drinking a beer while his dog sat at his feet. Liam went inside to watch TV while Mandy remained outside listening to Ettie and Pete talk. They had gone to high school together, although he hadn't quit school like Ettie. Pete had even gone to college.

"Times went bad, though," he said to Ettie and Ettie nodded knowingly.

"As they do," Ettie replied.

Mandy glanced at Pete, who was missing a bottom tooth, had rough greenish tattoos on his knuckles and wore a sparse beard. His eyes were blue. He smelled like piss.

"Life ain't easy, is it?" Ettie asked him.

Pete nodded and bended down to pet his dog. "No, it isn't." His voice was smooth and his words were clear and this bothered Mandy. What bothered Mandy more was the way he looked at her—his gaze was too long. She stood up and went inside to sit with Liam.

* * *

Right away, Mandy told her mother that Ettie had invited the man with the dog on the rope into the backyard. Renee marched out to Ettie's apartment and forbid her to have that man on her property, but it didn't stop Pete Donner and his dog from visiting several more times, always when Renee was working and Mandy's father wasn't home. Mandy usually found them drinking beer and talking at the patio table, the dog at Pete's feet.

"Hey, Honey Bell," he'd say when she poked her head outside. Sometimes he called her Princess and other times, Rosebud. Mandy kept Liam inside, even when he wanted to do his science experiment in the backyard. "Do it in the house," she told him. He declined and said forget it, they were too messy, he didn't want to upset their mom. So he did the experiments on the front porch, Mandy sitting with him, nervous that Pete and his dog on a rope would appear. Liam displayed how craters were made on the moon as he dropped marbles and a thick rock into a tray of flour. "You see, it's not just the size but the velocity and the incoming angle," he explained. "Watch and observe."

* * *

Thursday, it was dark and wet by the time Mandy's bus let her off. It had been raining all day but her cross country meet in Keyport hadn't been cancelled because it hadn't rained there. Mandy was exhausted as she walked quickly to the sitter's house to get Liam.

"He never got off the bus," Joan explained.

Mandy grew panicked. "What? He always gets off the bus."

"It was raining so I figured you weren't running today," Joan said a bit defensively. "I figured you got him from the bus stop. You did that the last time it rained."

Mandy shook her head, confused. "No. He has his Science Club on Thursdays. I told you this. He gets off the late bus on Thursdays."

"Oh, Jesus," Joan cried, realizing her mistake. "When he didn't come to my house, I assumed you got him and I went out to the store for an hour."

Mandy's stomach clenched. Christ, had her brother been kidnapped? Or he was with Pete? She turned and took off, flying through the slick dark streets, choking on her frenzied sobs. When she reached her house, she fumbled with her key before getting it into the key hole.

"Liam! Liam!" Mandy shouted as she burst through the door. She ran upstairs to his room—he wasn't there. She ran downstairs, screaming, "Liam! Liam!" She whipped the slider open and raced outside, across the patio, to the garage, and attempted to open Ettie's door. It was unlocked but stuck. Mandy pushed against it, once, twice, until it fell open and she was able to get through. She raced up the steps. There, she found Liam sitting on the couch next to Pete Donner. Pete was drinking beer and Ettie was on her bed, passed out. Liam jumped up, appearing confused.

"What are you doing?" Mandy demanded from Pete.

"Hey, relax," the man said.

Mandy glared at her little brother. "Come here," she ordered and Liam leapt to her side.

"He was scared," Pete said. "Me and Ettie were hanging out and he came home all freaked out because his sitter was gone and you weren't around. So we said he could hang with us. That's it."

Mandy turned to Liam. "Why didn't you go next door to Janice's?"

Liam shrugged and began to cry. "I don't know," he murmured.

She looked back at Pete. "How long has Ettie been asleep?"

Pete gazed down at his dog and rubbed its chin. "Not long," he said.

Mandy led Liam down the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she called up, her voice shaking: "You—you and your dog should leave now! My mom will be home soon and she doesn't like visitors." Liam went to say something but Mandy put a finger to her mouth. She waited a long moment, waiting for Pete Donner to respond, before she called up again. "Okay?"

Pete appeared at the top of the stairs like a ghost. "Sure thing, Honey Bell."

* * *

Liam insisted that Pete hadn't done anything strange or bad. "But he's weird."

Mandy was worried. She didn't have a specific reason, but she didn't want Pete Donner around anymore. She wracked her brain for something concrete, but he hadn't done anything wrong except come to her house when he wasn't supposed to—and that was more Ettie's fault. Still, he was creepy. Something was off about him, something more than his homelessness and his grungy appearance. It was the way he looked at her with that long gaze, called her Honey Bell or Princess, the way he was sitting so close to Liam when she found them. There was something wrong with him. There had to be.

Renee had told her husband that Pete Donner and his dog on the rope were hanging in the backyard with Ettie, but Mandy's father had brushed the entire thing aside. "Let her have some friends, for Christ's sake." A huge argument followed and her father had thrown the word "Divorce" into the shouting. No, he wasn't going to throw Ettie out. Yes, he knew Ettie was troubled, but he downright refused to let her live on the streets. And goddamn it, he would kick Renee out if she continued to be a selfish bitch about things.

Mandy went to the computer, recalling that August day when the police officer came to the house. He'd said, yes, there were some convicted sex offenders living in the camp. However, he'd explained, all sex offenders, including child molesters, were required to register with the town they lived in and that the police were aware of who these men were. Also, they could be found on the state's sex offender site, so if Renee wanted to, if they saw anyone suspicious hanging around the neighborhood, they could check these guys out themselves.

Mandy glanced down at the keyboard and typed: New Jersey Sex Offenders. Within seconds, the site the cop had been talking about appeared and Mandy clicked the link. After plugging in her zip code, a list of local offenders and their photos popped up. Three lived in the camp behind her house. None were Pete Donner.

Frustrated, she punched in other zip codes of neighboring towns. Nothing. She typed in his name. Nothing. Perhaps he'd been a sex offender in another state. Perhaps he hadn't registered with the police.

Then, a plan formed in Mandy's mind: she would tell Ettie she'd found Pete Donner's name on the sex offender site. If her aunt didn't believe her, she would tell her mother and father the story and her father would forbid Pete Donner from coming around. Mandy knew her father wasn't computer literate, nor was Ettie, so chances were they'd believe her. As for Mandy's mom, who was computer literate, Mandy could come clean and tell her she'd made the whole thing up. Surely her mother would go along with it. And surely her father would choose to protect his children over his sister.

Mandy didn't know that back when he was out of work, he would drink with Ettie.

All in all, it was a weak strategy, but Mandy was going to give a shot. She went out to the apartment and banged on the door until her aunt came down.

"Your friend Pete is a child molester," Mandy said, her voice shaking. "Don't let him come here anymore." Mandy told her she found his name and picture on computer site.

Ettie was wild-eyed, buzzed from alcohol. "He's not a child molester. He's my friend."

Mandy took a deep breath. "Don't bring him around or my dad will get real angry."

"No, he won't."

"Yes, he will," Mandy countered, trying her best to be quick on her feet. "And if you bring Pete Donner around again, my mom will put you out."

"I hate that fucking Regulator!" Ettie slammed the door.

* * *

A few days went by and the plan seemed to work—Pete Donner didn't come by. Mandy's father returned home for a three-day break and things were quiet. After he left, Ettie and Mandy's mother got into an argument up in the apartment about the cigarette butts Ettie kept leaving all over the backyard. The apartment door was open. Mandy stood outside listening. The cigarettes and Ettie's overall laziness were the topic until Ettie yelled, "He ain't no child molester and you can't kick me out."

"What are you talking about? Who?" Renee demanded.

"My friend, Pete."

"He's a child molester?"

"That's what your daughter said. She said she found it on the computer. But it ain't true. Your daughter's a liar. Pete was just being nice to Liam. We were looking out for him when Mandy was off on her school runs and Liam came home without nowhere to go. He was crying, saying his sitter was gone. We took care of the boy. Pete didn't do nothing. And my brother ain't gonna kick me out!"

"When did this happen?"

Suddenly, things grew quiet. Mandy turned and rushed into the house. Liam was sitting on the couch, watching television and Mandy sat down next to him. Renee came inside and within a moment, was standing in front of the TV. She switched it off.

"I need to speak with both of you." She interrogated Liam first, who told her what he'd told Mandy—Pete Donner didn't touch him but he was weird and they were up in Ettie's apartment when she was drinking and she fell asleep and then Mandy burst in and brought him back into the house.

"What do you mean by weird, Liam?"

Liam shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe not weird. Maybe scary."

Mandy faced her brother: "You said 'weird,' Liam."

"I know. But I meant scary."

Renee put her hands on her hips. "How was he scary, Liam?"

"When I asked him about his tattoos on his fingers, he said he used to live in jail."

"Jail?"

"Yeah. He said he was in jail for killing a guy in a fight."

"He told you this?" Renee snapped.

"Yes. That's why I just sat next to him when he told me to. He killed someone and I didn't want to make him mad and make him kill me."

Enraged, Renee faced her daughter. "Why didn't you tell me?"

This was news to Mandy. Liam had never mentioned this part of the story.

"I didn't know he killed someone," Mandy said. "I thought he was a child molester. But he's not. I made that up."

"You made that up?"

"Yeah," she choked out. "Because he scared me and I thought if I told Ettie he was a child molester, she'd make him stay away."

"That was a fucking stupid plan. Ettie doesn't give a shit about anyone but herself."

"I was trying to help."

"So you decided not to inform me about Liam stranded up in Ettie's house next to this creep? Why didn't you let me know immediately?"

"You were at work."

Renee stepped toward her daughter who was sitting on the couch with her head down. "Try again," she sneered, towering over Mandy like a monster. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you call me at work? Why didn't you tell me when I got home from work that night?"

Mandy trembled. "Because—"

"Because why?"

"You know," she stammered. "You—you'd get mad. I tried to handle it."

Renee screamed: "You call letting a murderer come to our house over and over again handling it!"

Mandy began to weep. "I'm sorry, Mom. I'm so sorry. I didn't know he was a murderer."

Abruptly and ferociously, Renee smacked her daughter. Within seconds, Mandy's cheek stung like a terrible burn. Renee stalked away, marching across the living room and through the kitchen. Mandy heard the slider door open and shut, and she guessed her mother was going out to confront Ettie.

Liam began to cry and apologize. "I'm sorry Mandy. I didn't mean for you to get into trouble."

Mandy told him to go up to his room, which he did. Then she went to the kitchen, opened the slider, listened to the screaming up in the apartment for a few seconds, and then closed the slider.

Eventually, Renee returned to the kitchen. She stormed by her daughter without a word, jerked the whiskey out of the Tupperware cabinet, pulled the bottle from the Christmas stocking, and poured herself two drinks before putting it away. "I'm calling the cops."

The same older cop that had come in August arrived at the house within a half-hour. Renee told him the story. He sent two guys out to the camp but Pete Donner had left the tent city. They couldn't do much, anyway, the cop said. "Not if he did nothing."

Later, Mandy found her mom at the table with the whiskey again. Renee apologized. "I never should've hit you." Then she added, "I just hate your Aunt Ettie. I just fucking hate her."

* * *

Ettie remained quietly holed up in her apartment for the next two weeks, not even joining the family for dinner when Mandy's father was home. When she did emerge, it was in the middle of October. November 15th was approaching and the homeless were yelling more and more, especially at night, louder than a strong wind sometimes. On several occasions, Mandy noticed Ettie standing outside, smoking her cigarette and drinking her beer, staring into nowhere.

* * *

One night, about ten, while Mandy watched TV in the living room, Liam asleep upstairs, Renee on her hospital shift, someone pounded on the slider door.

Mandy's heart jumped and she raced to the kitchen. It was Ettie. Mandy let her in.

"It's coming! It's coming tonight!" Ettie screamed.

Mandy sat her down at the kitchen table. Ettie shook and her teeth rattled and she stunk of cigarettes. "You watch, hon. You watch."

After some time, Ettie calmed and she sat quietly, staring. Then, unexpectedly, she let out a breath and rasped: "Your mom has some whiskey around here, doesn't she?"

Mandy shrugged and tried to lie. "No, she doesn't drink that."

Ettie leaned forward, her wild eyes ticking back and forth. "I've run out, you see. They took my beer, them tent people. Just a little. Get me just a taste, sweetie. You know where it is."

The air seemed to fizz out of Mandy's body. Ettie was scaring her. "Don't you have beer?"

Her aunt sucked her teeth. "The Regulator ain't give me my money lately. She's holding it." Suddenly, she seized her niece's wrist. "The bottle is in one of these cabinets, ain't it?"

Mandy swallowed. "I don't know."

Ettie gripped Mandy's arm tightly, squeezing like a clamp. Mandy was shocked by her boney aunt's strength. "You go get it, sweetie."

Mandy went to the Tupperware cabinet. She wrenched out the bottle in the Christmas stocking. Ettie had gotten up and taken a glass out of the dish rack.

Ettie drank three glasses and then she slipped through the slider, into the dark night but not before turning around to whisper, "It's coming."

Mandy closed the door and locked it. Even though most of the whiskey was gone, she dropped the bottle into the Christmas stocking and returned it the Tupperware cabinet. She turned the TV off and went upstairs. Before she went to bed, she stopped in her parents' bedroom and looked through the window. She saw the white glows of the tents and trees rocking in the wind, but she saw no one.

* * *

In the morning, Mandy found there was no milk again. On the counter, she saw her mom's purse—strange, Renee hadn't left it there in two years. Mandy removed five dollars and walked to the 7-Eleven. She was worried she'd see Pete Donner and his dog on the rope, but she didn't. At home, Mandy found her brother Liam in front of the television. He said. "Juice, please." Mandy used the last of the apple juice and when she went to throw the bottle in the recyclable can in the closet, she saw the bottle of whiskey resting at the top, empty.

Mandy gave her brother his juice, then went outside, crossing the patio and making her way to the garage. She tried Ettie's door. It was unlocked but something was blocking it. Mandy pushed and pushed until she got through and there lay Ettie, twisted and bruised, her head matted with dried blood.

Mandy winced from the gore, staring at the body for a long moment, feeling like she should scream or cry, but didn't. Instead, she bent down and placed her hand in front of Ettie's mouth and nose. No breathing.

* * *

The same cop arrived, and although an investigation occurred, it was concluded that Ettie had gotten drunk and tripped down the stairs. A younger police officer wanted to investigate more because he thought maybe someone may had broken in and pushed Ettie down the stairs, but the older cop said, no, it looked about right.

Renee only spent a week cleaning the apartment before she rented it to a nice nurse who worked at the hospital. Mandy noticed her mother was happier than she'd seen her in years. Sometimes Renee even sang along with the radio.

* * *

On November 15th, the homeless and their tent city were moved off township land and no one heard screaming again.

Jen Conley's stories have been published in Thuglit, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, BEAT to a PULP, Shotgun Honey, Out of the Gutter, Big Pulp, Talking River Review, SNM Horror, Shotgun Honey Presents, Protectors, and others. Forthcoming stories will be in Plots With Guns, Thuglit, and Yellow Mama. She's been nominated for a Best of the Web Spinetingler Award, and is one of the new editors at Shotgun Honey. Born and raised in New Jersey, Jen lives in Ocean County where she teaches middle school and writes in her spare time. Visit her at jen-conley.blogspot.com or follow her on twitter, @jenconley45.

TOUGH COP

Charles Boeckman

Ross Grimm was the kind of guy who could bring out a cold sweat all over you by looking at you. I've seen punks get down on their knees and start babbling before he even took his hands out of his pockets. The hoods, big and small, were afraid of Ross. The department was afraid of him because one day he was going to work a suspect over and the guy was going to pass out for keeps and then there'd be hell to pay.

I had been afraid of Ross all my life—and more than ever now, because soon he was going to find out the truth about me and kill me. But that's another story.

He wasn't the right kind of cop. There was something twisted and wrong inside of him. A man shouldn't get such an unholy pleasure out of torturing other men. I looked into his eyes one night when he was giving a punk his treatment. I had to go somewhere and throw up.

This particular little punk hadn't done much. Swiped a portable radio from a shop by cutting the plate glass show window. It wasn't a big, important crime. I couldn't see why Ross was doing that to him just to find where he'd hidden a twenty-nine-fifty portable radio. I got my answer when I looked into Ross's eyes. It wasn't the radio at all. It wasn't the crime. It was the pleasure Ross was getting out of it. Every time the little guy screamed a look of sadistic delight crossed Grimm's face.

I was new in the police department then. It was about the time I met Ross's wife, Moira. I often saw that look in Grimm's eyes in the following months and it never failed to nauseate me.

I'd been on the force about a year when we were assigned to clean up Bragg Street, a particularly tough district. It was down by the tracks. A skid row of honky-tonk joints and bars, it was a happy hunting ground for dope peddlers, pimps and their dolls, undercover gambling, and vice in general.

Not a Saturday night passed without a knifing or holdup. We weren't supposed to eliminate the vice, which was an attraction for tourists, but to clean out the tough characters. We were picking them up on street corners, out of poolrooms, on any charge we could make stick—vagrancy to peddling marijuana.

Ross brought in one of the punks one night and took him in the back room. I knew before they came out the guy would have signed a confession to some petty crime or he'd be dead.

I walked down the headquarters corridor, smoking a cigarette jerkily. There was the cold, slimy feeling of sweat on my face.

Aleck Dickerson, one of the D.A's assistants, came in with a brief case. He saw the look on my face.

"Grimm questioning Meenie Jackson?"

I inhaled what must have been a pound of smoke. "You might call it that."

"We've got a damn writ of habeas corpus. Stirmska's lawyer got it through. Well have to let Jackson go."

Stirmska was the crime and vice boss of Bragg Street. He ran the punks and looked out for their interests. It used to be he could pay off the right people and be let alone, but we had a new city administration now and he had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to his crime domain.

"You haven't gotten here yet," I told Dickerson. "You were held up by traffic. It will take you at least ten minutes. By then it won't make any difference to Jackson."

Dickerson took out his handkerchief, patted his face. He went over to the water cooler and sucked up some ice water. Then he came back nervously. "Grimm has me worried. I don't like his tactics."

"Who does?" I lit another cigarette off the butt of the one I'd sucked down. My hand was shaking. "But he's cleaning up Bragg Street. That's what the D.A. wants, isn't it?"

"I know. But one of these days he's going to go too far. He's going to hit somebody or mark them up and they'll raise a stink."

"He never marks them up," I said through the smoke. "He's an artist. Even a doctor wouldn't know what he's done to them." The sweat on me felt cold.

From the other side of the closed door we heard a couple of muffled thuds and a man's gargled scream. The perspiration came out thicker on my face. My cigarette tasted like scorched paper.

"God," Dickerson murmured. It wasn't blasphemy the way he said it. It was more like a prayer.

I looked at that closed door and I thought that some day Ross Grimm is going to work me over like that and a tortured confession wrung from my lips wasn't going to stop him. Nothing would until I was dead. And then he'd go on pounding me into an unrecognizable pulp. My stomach became a hard knot.

After a few minutes the door opened. Ross came out, rolling his shirt sleeves down over hairy arms. He was breathing hard and his shirt was stained with sweat. He grinned at Dickerson as he buttoned his cuffs. "I've got another one for you to send up the river. A signed confession to possession of marijuana and taking part in an armed robbery. Let's see Stirmska get him out of that." He looked at me with the open contempt and hatred of a strong man for a weakling. "Street, go on home and get some sleep. You look sick."

I glanced past his thick, chunky figure, into the room. The skinny little suspect, Jackson, was lying on the floor where he'd rolled off the chair. Ross was right. I didn't feel so good.

I drove my battered coupe across town to my three room flat. It hadn't taken Ross long to figure out how it was with me. Even before he'd checked back into my Army service record and found out about my dishonorable discharge for cowardice, he knew ...

I had gone through school with Ross Grimm before the war. He knew a lot about me. He remembered the fights I'd run away from—the tales I'd carried to the teachers. He remembered the time I walked off the field in the middle of a football game in a blue funk. He knew about that morning on Okinawa when I huddled cowering and bawling in a foxhole and let a Jap machine gun cut a wounded buddy to little bloody shreds only a few feet away.

Yeah, Ross Grimm knew about me. And knowing, he liked to spread it around to the other guys on the force. I hated him for that, but then I'd hated Ross Grimm for many years for knowing about the weakness in me.

When I walked down the dark hallway to my apartment on the second floor I saw an edge of light around my door. A slow, gathering excitement spread through me. My heart began picking up speed and my breath came harder.

She always affected me like this. After six months the feeling was the same. She was a sickness that tortured and frightened me, but never failed to bring me achingly alive inside. My hand trembled like a man's fingers unbuttoning a woman's blouse as I unlocked the door.

I stood in the doorway, looking at the woman in my apartment. She was sitting in an easy chair, turning the pages of a magazine while she waited for me. She had a drink in one hand and she was sitting cross-wise in the chair with her long, nylon-sheathed legs swinging idly over its arm.

She was Ross Grimm's wife.

She looked up at me and smiled very slowly. She put the drink down and lazily reached up and slipped her fingers under the mane of golden hair, lifting it from the nape of her neck and squeezing it. That way the soft lamp light spilled along the creamy curve of her arm to the inviting lushness of her breasts. She swung her legs off the arm of the chair and the hem of her dress slipped above her round knees. Looking at me that way, with the insolent smile on her lips, she stood up and began walking toward me. Her mouth was going slack at the corners and her eyelids drooped a little.

She wore a simple black nylon dress. The skirt was pleated all the way around and hugged the full, firm thighs of her long legs when she walked. The bodice was cut in a halter style that bared her smooth, symmetrical back and plunged low in front, deep between her large breasts. She had full, prominent cheekbones that shadowed her cheeks under them, smoldering violet eyes and a wide mouth that was always hungry for kisses.

"I thought," I said, my voice thickening, "you weren't coming any more."

She didn't say anything, just kept moving slowly nearer. Her left eyebrow arched slightly and the corner of her mouth quirked upward. It was a quizzical, questioning expression. She stood inches from me, looking up with that expression. Then, languidly, she reached up. Her blood-red fingertips trailed along her creamy throat to her shoulder and pushed one side of her halter off her left shoulder.

She lifted her gorgeous white arms and waited for me with an impatient gesture, she shrugged her right arm loose. The bodice of the dress fell away, baring her to the waist. She wasn't wearing anything under it.

"Moira," I whispered with a clumsy tongue. i

She lifted her gorgeous white arms and waited for me to claim her ...

Later, I lay on the rumpled bed in the other room, staring up at the ceiling, A neon sign across the street kept blinking on and off. It was blood red. It shone through a fire escape outside the window and made a pattern on the dark ceiling of my bedroom, like drops of blood. In me, there was the old sick fear that lived like a parasite on the fibres of my brain, but with it, a kind of exultation. I was always like that after a session with Moira, scared silly and yet laughing at Ross.

Moira came out of the kitchen with a drink in each hand. She was only wearing long silk stockings and black suede ankle strap shoes. I wondered what there was so damn seductive about silk stockings on a naked woman. She gave me my drink and curled up on the bed, propped on one elbow. Her lipstick was smeared and her blond mane had tumbled over one eye. She was damp with perspiration.

"Why don't you leave me alone, you blond witch?" I swore, turning away from her.

"How do you spell that, Jimmy?" she chuckled. "Either way. It fits both ways."

"Yeah, it does. Doesn't it?"

"Ross is going to find out about us," I wiped the sweat off my face. "Sooner or later, he'll find out. You know that, don't you?"

She chuckled again, softly. "Always afraid of Ross. You've been afraid of him all your life, haven't you, Jimmy?"

"Yes." I faced her. "He isn't human. I've seen him work."

She put her drink down. "You don't have anything to be scared of, Jimmy," she said huskily. Her eyes got the sleepy, smoldering look. I recognized the symptoms. Hell, wasn't there any satisfying her? I felt myself sicken with revulsion. Never before had I gotten mixed up in a mess like this. I'd never touched another man's wife. The idea had repulsed me. It affected me that way now, and still I was drawn to her in a way I couldn't fight.

The telephone jangled.

"Hell," she whispered, "don't answer it, Jimmy."

I pushed her naked arms away. I got up and went to the telephone.

Ross Grimm said in his harsh voice, "Street?"

I jumped. My heart thundered. Was he looking for Moira? It was a weird experience, talking to a man with his wife in my bed a few feet away.

"Yeah?" I said through a mouthful of cotton.

His voice was like gravel rattling across a tin roof. "Hell's broke loose on Bragg Street. They just had a killing down there. We got the call a minute ago. I'm driving down there and I want you to go with me. I'll pick you up in about five minutes. Can you be ready?"

I told him I could. Then I hung up.

Moira was propped up on an elbow again. The neon sign spilled blood-red light across her face. She looked evil, depraved ... and so beautiful she turned the desire in me into an animal lust. I dragged my clothes on with shaking fingers.

"What are you doing?"

"I got to leave," I said. "Emergency."

She sat up. She began swearing, her voice rising. "You can't leave now."

"Watch me give a good imitation of it."

She screamed at me like an alley cat. Then she picked up her drink and hurled it across the room at me. I ducked splintering glass and flying ice cubes. I ran to the door, buttoning my shirt.

The ruckus had taken place in a cigar store on the corner of Bragg and Fifth. It was an evil looking, dimly lit hole with a clutter of old magazines and smoking tobacco in the dust-shrouded show windows. A small crowd had gathered around the doorway, mingling and pushing. Grimm shouldered his way through with me on his tail.

Inside, a uniformed beat cop was holding the crowd back. The dead man was over in a corner. He'd been shot while standing in the middle of the room and had crawled in a trail of blood to the corner where he tried to claw his way up to his feet and had died there, half propped up. He reminded me of a wounded rabbit I had once seen crawl into the brush to die.

Grimm took hold of his hair and pushed his head back so the light fell on his face. "You recognize him, Street?"

I looked down at the pasty white countenance with the staring eyes. My stomach squirmed. "Lewis Rosson. A kid that hangs around the poolrooms with Stirmska's crowd. I think he works on Stirmska's coin machines, but we haven't proved anything yet."

Grimm's smile of contempt told me what he thought of methods like that. "The only way to find proof on these Bragg Street punks is to beat it out of them." He turned and walked to the frightened old man behind the counter.

"You here when this happened, Dad?"

The old man looked like a withered leaf. His palsied hands fluttered along the counter top. He bobbed his head and swallowed.

"What happened?" rasped Grimm.

The old man looked from Grimm to me and back to Grimm. A pulse fluttered irregularly under the parchment-like skin of his temple. He looked gray. "They come in. A crowd of 'em. Young guys, mostly," he explained in a quavering voice. "They seemed to be crowding that one—"he jabbed a frightened finger toward the corpse—"pushing him around. Then there was a shot and a scream and they scattered out of here and he was on the floor."

"Recognize any of them?"

"It happened so quick," the old man whined. "I—I don't see so good any more ..."

Grimm closed his hand on the old man's shirt front and shook him. "You've been here long enough to recognize every man, woman and child on Bragg Street. And you see well enough to run a book for Stirmska. I asked you a question. Recognize any of 'em?"

The cigar store owner's false plates rattled. His bulging, rheumy eyes stared at Grimm, fascinated by the look in Grimm's face. "I r-recognized one," he whispered. "Yeah, I recognized him. That one—" he jabbed again, at the victim, "put a knife in him while they were struggling."

"Who was it?"

"Young Tony Murray."

"Was he the one with the gun?"

"I—I don't know."

"Stop stalling." Grimm gave him another shake. "If he got knifed, he must have been the one who pulled the gun and shot. Isn't that so?"

"I—I guess." The old man mopped his face. "Yes, I guess that's so."

"What do you mean, you 'guess'?"

"Well," he swallowed, "I mean, Tony had the gun. Yeah, that's the way it was, 1 guess—I mean," he hurriedly corrected, "that's the way it was. Tony got knifed and he pulled the gun in self defense." He seemed satisfied with the way that sounded, so he repeated it more firmly. "I was standing here and they came in and that one stuck a knife in Tony and Tony grabbed out a gun and shot him and then they all ran."

"I don't guess he ran far. Murray, I mean. With the knife in him like you said."

"No, I don't guess he did."

"Where would you say he ran?"

The old man looked sick. He wiped at his face again. "Tony's sister works at the Silk Stocking bar. Maybe she'd know."

"Yeah," Grimm agreed. "Maybe she would."

The ambulance had pulled up outside the cigar store and the boys were bringing in the stretcher to carry the remains of Lewis Rosson to the morgue. Grimm and I pushed back through the crowd and walked down the street. It was a narrow street filled with dirty gutters and stinking alleys. But at night the blinking neon signs and open bars gave it an illusion of glamour. The sound of hot jazz and a blues piano floated out of the places we passed.

The Silk Stocking boasted a three piece combo and a girl singer, Patty Murray. I had known Patty a long time ago. We went to high school together and we had quite a crush for a while. Then she went off to study voice. She wanted to be an opera singer but I guess she never quite made it. Six months ago I'd heard she was back in town, singing torch songs in a Bragg Street bar. I'd intended to look her up, but had never gotten around to it. I still thought about Patty now and then.

We went into the place and I saw that she had changed. She was grown up now. She was prettier than I remembered, but she still had the sweet, clean look in her eyes. When we came in, she was standing in front of the mike, singing Stormy Weather, backed softly by the piano, drums and guitar.

The band was fair. It wouldn't bowl you over, but it had a good rhythm. Patty had a sweet little voice, but nothing sensational. I could see why she had never made the grade as an opera singer.

We stood at the bar and had a drink while Grimm looked the place over. "He owns the joint," Grimm said, nodding at the piano player, a roly-poly gent with a shiny bald pate fringed by a white halo. "Papa Gentry. He had a saloon on this street when they still hauled beer around with horse teams."

Grimm had his whisky neat. Then we went over to the band dais. He leaned on the piano and looked down at Papa Gentry. "We're looking for a boy named Tony Murray. We wondered if you might have seen him tonight."

"And who might you be?" Gentry inquired politely.

Grimm took out his buzzer and flashed it.

I saw a look of fright cross Patty's face. I went over to her. "Hello, Patty," I said.

She looked up at me. "Jimmy Street," she said. "You've grown up."

"We all grow up after a while."

"You're—on the police force now?"

I wondered if she had ever heard about what happened to me that day on Okinawa. "Yes. A year, now."

She came up to my chin. She had naturally wavy brown hair and nice brown eyes. She looked up at me and she was frightened. I could see it in her face.

Grimm came around the piano and addressed her. "You're Patty Murray?"

"Yes—Yessir."

"Have you any idea where your brother, Tony, is tonight?"

"No. What's the matter?"

Grimm evaded the question. "I think we better go somewhere where we can talk in private."

"My office is back here," Papa Gentry offered. He looked worried. His shiny round pie face looked unhappy. We went back into the office. Papa Gentry sat down in a swivel chair. Patty stood in one corner, her eyes wide and black. Grimm sat on one corner of the desk and leaned toward Papa Gentry. "Gentry, do you know what the penalty for hiding a murderer is?"

I heard a smothered gasp come from Patty. Gentry's face was inscrutable. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know what I'm talking about." He switched his gaze to me. "Street, lock the door." I hesitated, looking at Patty. Grimm's voice was like buckshot pelting the side of a house, "I said, lock the door, Street!" I obeyed.

Grimm leaned closer to Gentry. "Do you know what I saw outside? I saw some drops of blood on the floor around the band dais. Fresh blood. Cut your finger recently, Gentry?"

Sometimes I had to admit that Grimm has some of the talents of a good cop. I hadn't seen the blood stains.

Gentry continued to keep his face blank. "I don't know anything about that. Look here, Lieutenant, you can't come busting into a man's place of business this way without a warrant. You got to have a warrant—"

Grimm hit him. He hit him twice in his roly-poly stomach and Papa Gentry doubled forward, hugging his belly, his eyes bulging as he gasped for breath. Patty screamed.

Sweat popped out across my face. I felt myself getting sick again. I took a step toward Grimm and put my hand on his arm. "Grimm—"

"Yes?" He looked at me. "Did you want something, Street?" He continued to look at me that way.

I stood it for about ten seconds and then I took my hand away. It was a rotten and degrading thing to be afraid of a man like this. I said, "No, I didn't want anything."

Grimm turned back to the pink-faced bar owner. "These are my warrants," he said, shoving his fists under Gentry's gasping mouth. "They get me in a lot of places. They're going to clean this street of scum and two-bit punks like Tony Murray so decent people can be safe here."

Patty's voice suddenly lashed at him. "Then why don't you go to the source of evil on this street, Mr. Brave Cop?" She walked up to him, her face white, hands clenched at her sides. "Why don't you stop picking on the little people and go to the man who's really responsible for the crime in this district, responsible for twisting the lives of young kids who might have gone straight? Why don't you go to Boss Stirmska?" She turned and looked at Gentry. "I can't let you be hurt on account of me, Papa, darling." A tear ran down her cheek. "Come on, Brave Policeman. I'll take you to my brother."

"Patty," Gentry gasped. "Shut up. Don't be a fool."

But Patty Murray went to the door, her shoulders slumped, unlocked it and led us down the hall to a room in the back of the place. Tony Murray was in there, on a cot, holding a blood-soaked bandage to his side. His feverish face was turned to the door when we came in. Fear entered his eyes when he saw Grimm.

Ross Grimm stood looking down at him and a smile came over his face. "Get up, murderer," he said, smiling that way.

Patty went to her brother's side. Tony struggled to a sitting position. Pain brought sweat dripping from his face.

"Get up," Grimm repeated. "We're going to walk down to the station."

"He can't walk," Patty said, a rising note of hysteria in her voice. "He's hurt. Can't you see he can't walk?"

Grimm kept smiling. He took out his heavy service revolver. "Get away from him," he said, smiling. "He can walk. We don't give free rides to murderers. You can walk, can't you, boy?"

Tony Murray got to his feet. He swayed there, his face a staring mask of pain. Grimm waved Gentry and Patty away from him with his gun. "Go on," he whispered, with the frozen smile on his face. "You're doing fine. Take another step, now."

Murray made his feet shuffle. His eyes bulged, staring straight ahead. His face was the color of bread dough. The bandage that he pressed tightly to his side suddenly became red and soggy. Blood dripped through his fingers and ran down to the floor.

"That's the stuff," Grimm smiled. "You're almost to the door. Now you just have to walk out of this place and a couple of blocks down the street to where our car is parked. You can do that fine, can't you, murderer?"

Tony Murray stopped. His lips moved. Then he whispered something so faintly it sounded like paper rustling. "I want to say something. I didn't kill Lewis Rosson. I was there, but I didn't kill him."

Patty choked back a sob. She looked directly at me, her eyes wide and pleading. "Jimmy—" she breathed. She was begging me to stop this inhuman thing. And me, Jimmy Street, I could only stand there and look away from her eyes, furious at this debility in me that made my will something foul and sick.

Tony Murray made it as far as the door. Then he fainted. With a cry, Patty rushed to his side, ignoring Grimm's gun. She didn't ask me for any more help that night ...

A week went by. Tony Murray rallied. He passed the crisis and began mending. We kept a police guard over him in the hospital. The District Attorney's office filed a charge of murder. In a few more days Ross Grimm would have his turn to "question" the boy.

I got drunk and stayed that way. Moira came to my apartment. Every night she came. I was living in hell, but I had to have her. Grimm would find out soon. The man wasn't blind. I drank steadily, wondering when it would be, tonight, this week, next week ...

One night I got a telephone call from Patty Murray. "You must come right away, Jimmy," she said. "I don't know who else to turn to. We can save Tony. I have proof—"

I went to her room. The owner of the cigar store where Tony was knifed and Lewis Rosson was murdered was waiting there with her. The old man looked frightened out of his wits. His palsied hands were almost shaking off the wrists. He looked around the room, wetting his lips. Patty urged him and he began talking.

"Tony didn't kill that feller," he croaked, his false plates clicking. "I was scared. That police feller scared me. And I'm scared of what Boss Stirmska is gonna do to me."

"Please, Mr. Gambino," Patty pleaded, putting her hand over his.

He nodded, patting her knee. "Don't you worry none, Patty, I ain't gonna let that boy go to the chair for a murder he didn't do. I ain't gonna have that on my conscience. I'm gonna tell the truth, just like I told you I would. But I'm sure scared, just the same."

"We'll see that you have police protection," I told him.

"Will you do that, young feller?" he asked eagerly. "Will you keep Boss Stirmska from hurtin' me?" He shook his head, swallowing painfully and rolling his eyes around the room. "He's a bad one, that Boss Stirmska. He'd do somethin' awful to me."

"Are you trying to tell me," I asked, "that Stirmska murdered Lewis Rosson?"

The old man nodded, his face splotched with white. "I was right there. I saw him do it with my two eyes. He came in with that crowd of his hoodlums. He had his gun out, poking it in Lewis Rosson's stomach, callin' him awful names. He said that Lewis Rosson was workin' for him, tendin' to his marble tables and Lewis has been stealin' from them for a year. Stirmska just found out. Rosson took out a knife and started slashin' with it and Tony got hurt. But Tony didn't shoot him. Stirmska, himself, did. I saw it. With my own two eyes, I did."

"Okay." I told Patty to take the old man down to headquarters. Then I got busy on the telephone. First I called toe D.A.'s office and got a warrant for Stirmska. Then I called the chief at headquarters and got a detail of men assigned to help me bring in Stirmska. I was leaving Ross Grimm out of this show completely. This was going to be my baby. For once I was going to steal some of Ross Grimm's glory,

We went down on Bragg Street to where Boss Stirmska had his office in the back of a poolroom, six men besides myself in two prowl cars. There was a big hole in my middle when we walked into his office. Nobody had ever taken Stirmska in before.

He sat behind his desk, looking dapper and sure of himself, preening his nails with a clipper. He had a few strands of brown hair plastered tightly to a shiny scalp.

The uniformed boys covered the place while I told Stirmska that I was taking him in for the murder of Lewis Rosson. I served my warrant on him, adding that we had a witness and after we got through checking his gun against the bullet they dug out of Rosson, he was going away for a long vacation at the State's expense.

His face got mean and he grabbed up his phone and dialed his lawyer. One of his strong arm boys uncoiled himself from a sofa and took a gun out and started waving it around. I felt my knees go watery. But one of the uniformed policemen with me shot him before he could do any damage with his gun. Stirmska looked at his dead punk as if he didn't believe what had happened. He put the phone down and stopped arguing with us. He knew a smart lawyer wasn't going to get him out of this rap.

Later, we were all in the D.A.'s office. Stirmska was swearing and Ross Grimm was sweating. Grimm looked like a big, uncomfortable bull in a pen that had gotten too tight for him.

After disposing of the Stirmska business, Patty Murray filed a complaint against City Detective Ross Grimm for assault against a law-abiding citizen, Papa Gentry, and for forcing his way into a private establishment without a warrant. I backed her up as a witness.

Ross Grimm looked across the room at me. His small eyes were inflamed with hate. He knew without my word, Patty's case wouldn't stand a chance. "I'm going to get you for this, Street," his eyes said. "I'm going to get you." It was a promise.

I went out of the building, sick in my insides and the most alone I had ever felt. It was raining dismally. I went into a bar and had a couple of whisky sours. It was like drinking water. Farther down the street, there was a place that made Singapore Slings strong enough to make a man forget his troubles. Three of them didn't give me any amnesia.

I walked to a lot of other places in the rain and everywhere I went, Ross Grimm's small, hate-inflamed eyes followed me. I saw them in the bottoms of glasses, in the red neon tubes around bar clocks, in the spinning disks on nickelodeons. My shirt was soggy with sweat and the drinks kept sliding around in my wet hands. I couldn't stop thinking about the boy suspect lying in Ross Grimm's office.

Finally, I went home. The whisky wasn't doing anything. Maybe I was drunk. But a little spot in my brain remained cold sober ... the spot that continued to see the face and eyes of Ross Grimm.

A car was parked at the curb in front of my apartment building. Moira's car.

I unlocked my front door, went in and snapped on the light. I walked into the dark bedroom and looked down at the blond woman lying across my bed.

She was sleeping soddenly, drunkenly. She had nothing on except a slip. Her shoes were lying on the floor where she'd kicked them and her dress was thrown across the foot of the bed. An empty fifth was in the tangled bedclothes beside her. She had twisted around and there were a few inches of naked flesh showing between her stocking tops and the hem of her slip.

"Moira ..." I whispered. I shuddered. I reached out to shake her; instead, I lit a cigarette and went over to the window. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and closed my eyes.

After a bit I opened them. I looked through the window, across the rain-denched street and I saw Ross Grimm standing on the corner. He was there, with his trench coat turned up at the collar. He had followed me. The cigarette in his fingers made a little spatter of fire in the gutter when he flipped it away. Then he started across the street. I watched him come, with my guts churning and whimpering animal sounds in my throat.

He got as far as the curb. Then he saw something. Moira's car parked at the corner.

He walked over and looked at it. I forgot how to breathe. He stood there for a long time with his hand on the door. Finally, he opened the door and rolled a window up so the rain wouldn't get the seats wet. He closed the door and looked up at my apartment. The streetlight glow fell across his face.

If any mortal has seen the face of a soul in Hell, I saw it then. He turned with his torture-twisted face and shuffled across the street. I watched him walk that way with his shoulders sagging and his head down. I stood there, watching him until he had disappeared in the rain.

"Moira," I said carefully. I held to the window sill with my fingers. "Moira ..."

The bed springs behind me stirred. I heard her sit up. "Jimmy," she said thickly. "I been waitin' for hours, honey—"

"Moira," I said, "how long has he known? How long has Ross known about us?"

"Huh?" The springs stirred some more. Finally she got up and came over to the window. She started laughing, low in her throat. It was a filthy sound. Her lips twisted with contempt. "He's known for ages. Everybody on the force knows. Get wise, Jimmy. He won't do anything. He's too scared of losing me. I laugh at him about it all the time. I tell him how are you in bed to his face because I like to see how his face gets sick and hear him whine—"

I hit her. I hit her so hard she went tripping back and landed on the floor on her fanny with a little bounce.

Then I went into the bathroom and vomited. I wrenched and gagged with the filth that was in me, but I knew it would take more than this to make me clean.

I knew now why Ross beat up the punks. Why he tortured them. It was me he was beating to a pulp, vicariously. Me and all the other guys who had made his wife. He wanted to kill me so bad the taste of it must have been like sweet honey in his mouth. But he didn't dare lay a finger on me because even greater than his hate of me and his hell of jealousy was the fear of Moira walking out on him. She must have held that threat over him constantly so that he didn't even dare get me killed "accidentally."

And I knew suddenly with shocking clarity why I had really gotten such a kick out of having Moira. It was not Moira as a woman. It was because through her, I had beaten Ross Grimm. Me, Jimmy Street, with a yellow stripe down his back a yard wide—I'd never dared to stand up to Grimm's face. Yet, for six months, I'd beaten him, inside.

I had watched him with his powerful fists and arrogance make men fear and respect him. He was big, strong and courageous, all the things I could never be. And I had stood back, fearful of him, yet laughing at him because I had beaten him by taking his wife. Now I was helping to get him kicked off the force.

Knowing this now, seeing myself, I should have gotten out of there. I should have run across town to a girl with young eyes and clean lips, like maybe Patty Murray. But I would not. Some day, Ross Grimm would reach the end of his rope. A man could take so much hell before he got out his gun and killed people like me and Moira and maybe himself. But until then, I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop this sickness inside me that gloried in a power over a stronger man whom I hated and feared.

I went back into the bedroom. I clasped Moira, my fingers biting into her bare shoulders. She was whimpering, wanting to be comforted because I had hit her. I started laughing. I laughed until the tears ran out of my eyes. Jimmy Street, sniveling coward, wife stealer, was the one man in the world who was bigger than Ross Grimm ...

Growing up during the Great Depression, Charles Boeckman, AKA Charles Beckman, Jr., learned early, that in lean times, self-education was the key to a bright future. So he taught himself saxophone and clarinet, music theory, and arrangement writing. When he discovered that writers got paid for stories, he turned his childhood bent for entertaining the neighborhood kids with ghost stories into a quest for the ultimate life-style as professional, free-lance writer. He did that by studying the great short story writers he had encountered during his voracious reading as he grew up. His ultimate models were Poe, de Maupassant, and Chekhov. From them, learned that the goal of the well-written short story was to create one powerful, emotional effect on the reader. And that is what his stories do, starting with his first sale in 1945.

Boeckman combined his music skills and writing ability in both his life and in his literature. A professional musician and writer of short stories, novels, and non-fiction in real life, he also crafted many of his stories with a musical background. You will find 24 of his vintage, pulp short stories in his anthology of reprints, SUSPENSE, SUSPICION & SHOCKERS. Available on Amazon.

SHUT UP AND KILL ME

Robert J. Randisi

I took a bad beating once, a long time ago. After that I promised I'd never take another one, no matter what. So when I'm faced with a situation where it looks like I'm going to get my ass kicked, I do the ass kicking first.

When the three leg breakers came into my office they had bad intentions. It was written all over their faces. I wasn't about to wait and see if they intended to maim me, or kill me.

I moved first.

But it really started when she walked in earlier that day ...

* * *

She wasn't the cliché blonde who enters the P.I.'s office with heaving breasts and wet lips.

She did have a familiar look in her eyes, the look that says "I've never done this before and I'm scared shitless."

My name's Nick Delvecchio. I've been a P.I. in Brooklyn for more years than I care to remember. A few years ago I reluctantly turned forty and people who know me well say I didn't embrace the big four-O gracefully. In fact, they say I got mean.

Well, why not? The world's getting meaner, isn't it? Or haven't Oklahoma City, 9/11 and Guantanamo Bay been proof enough of that? Not to mention the creation of something called an Amber Alert. Me, I'm just trying to keep in step with the times.

The woman looked at me and licked her thin lips. One hand strayed to her lifeless, lank, brown hair and yanked on it in such a way that it reminded me of people who wear a rubber band around their wrist so they can snap it for a quick reminder.

"Mr. Delvecchio?" she asked.

"Yes, Ma'am, that's me."

"I—you're the private detective, right?"

I restrained myself from telling her, "That's what it says on the door," and simply said, "Yes." See? I start out nice.

She tugged on her hair again.

"I'd like to hire you."

"Have a seat, Miss ...?"

She sat down across from me and said," Oh, well, do I have to tell you my name?"

That's the way this usually works, but I suppose it will depend on what you want me to do and how much you're willing to pay me."

"You mean if I pay enough I don't have to tell you my name?"

"As long as you're not going to ask me to kill somebody."

Her face fell and she yanked on her hair.

"Hey," I said. "I was kidding."

"B-but," she said, "that's exactly what I want you to do."

I sat forward in my chair and put my hands on my desk.

"You want me to kill somebody?"

"Y-yes."

"Who?"

Yank, yank again on her hair, almost viciously and she said, "Me."

* * *

I sat and stared at her for a few moments, then said, "Are you serious?"

"I'm very serious," she said. "I'd do it myself, but I'm too much of a coward."

"Mrs.—Miss—" I stopped, but she still didn't want to give a name. "Ma'am, why would you want to kill yourself?"

"The reasons aren't important to you," she said. "I have money, I can hire it done. That's what I want to do. Will you do it? I have five thousand dollars."

I didn't want to tell her that if you weren't fussy about the level of talent, or how much of a mess got made, you could have ten people killed for that much money.

"No, I won't do it," I said. "I'm not a killer I'm a private detective. Why would you come to me with this, anyway?"

"I have a friend who hired you once, a few months ago. She said you were very good. She gave me your name."

"Did you tell her what you wanted?"

"No, I just told her that I had a problem and needed a professional."

"Well, I'm a professional, but not a killer." Funny, but I couldn't keep myself from feeling insulted.

"I—I'm sorry," she said. "I just thought—well, perhaps you could ... recommend someone?"

"Give you the name of a hit man, you mean?" I asked. "And a phone number? Maybe an address?"

She gave her hair another yank and I swore a few strands came out. She got to her feet quickly.

"I—I'm sorry I bothered you."

She turned and ran out of the office.

My first instinct was to chase her, try to follow her and find out who she was. My second instinct was to write her off as a nut and go back to my day.

I got up and hurried out the door, but I should have gone with my second instinct right away. By the time I got down to the street she was nowhere in sight. You can't always find a cab cruising down Sackett Street, so I walked to each corner to see if maybe she was there, but it was no use.

I had allowed a suicidal woman to walk out of my office and return to her search for a hit man.

Wasn't that mean?

* * *

I went back to my office and sat behind my desk. If I'd been in a better mood that day I might have asked her for her name right away, and pressed the point. Now all I had was the fact that someone I worked for recently had recommended me.

Oddly, enough, I'd been busy of late, but she had also said I was recommended by a woman. I'd had four women as clients in the past month, six in the past two months. I decided to go back the whole two months.

I pulled the files on the six women and called them. Four I got at home. One scolded me for calling her there, where her husband might have answered the phone, and hung up after calling me a shit. Apparently, she was still with her husband even after I confirmed that he was cheating. And she seemed angrier with me than with him. I assumed she wasn't about to recommend my services to anyone.

The three others I found at home listened to my story and said they hadn't recommended me to any girlfriends. One of them reminded me that we were supposed to "get together." I told her I hadn't forgotten, and hung up. I hadn't forgotten, I'd just decided to ignore the invitation, especially since she had an overgrown husband I had proven to be faithful. She, on the other hand, was not above playing around. She just wanted to confirm that she was the only one doing the playing. She was, but not with me.

I had two other women to call, and they had jobs—careers, actually. They had hired me to do some work for their businesses, so they wouldn't mind me calling them at work.

"Bender and Bender," a girl's voice said.

"Mrs. Styles, please."

"Who shall I say is calling?"

"Nick Delvecchio."

"Hold on a moment."

Bender and Bender was a law firm with offices in Borough Hall, where a lot of the legal work in Brooklyn got done. She had hired me to do some background checks on potential employees, as the firm was planning to expand.

When Henrietta Styles came on the phone she was very businesslike. No, she had not recommended me to anyone since I'd worked for her. When I told her why I was calling she said that she did not have any suicidal friends—at least, none that were women. I waited to see if she was kidding, but she was not.

My last chance was a woman named Rita Eiland. She was an assistant manager at a Manhattan advertising company, and had hired me on the recommendation of another lawyer I knew and did occasional jobs for.

"Prescott and Jones," a woman's voice said in my ear.

"I'd like to speak to Rita Eiland, please."

"I'm afraid Miss Eland is not in today."

"Is she at home?" I had the home number, but assumed she'd be at work.

"I—I'm not sure. She called early this morning and said she would not be able to come in because of an emergency. You could try her home ... if you have that number."

"I do," I said.

"Can I take a message, in case you don't get a hold of her?"

"Yes, would you please tell her Nick Delvecchio called. I'd appreciate a call back. I just have one question to ask her."

"Delvecchio," the girl said. "You're the private eye, right?"

"That's right. Did we meet when I was up there?"

"Sort of. I'm the receptionist that pointed the way to her office for you, but we never really, you know, got introduced."

"As I remember," I said, hoping this wasn't going to be a wild shot in the dark, "you're pretty cute."

"Oh, well," I could hear the blush over the phone, "you're not so bad yourself." The blush deepened, I was sure.

"What was your name?"

"Diana."

"Diana, you don't happen to know what the emergency was, do you?"

"Well," her tone dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, "I heard someone say there was a death in her family?"

"Her family?" I asked. "Could it have been the death of a friend?"

"I guess so," she said. "I'm really not sure."

"You've been very helpful, Diana. Thanks so much."

"Oh, well, sure," she said. "Is that ... it?"

It was my own fault. I'd told her she was cute, she expected the next move to be asking her out.

"For now, Diana," I said. "You see, I'm working."

"Oh," she said, as if I'd explained it perfectly, "All right, well ... I'll be here."

"Have a nice day," I said, then cringed at how that sounded.

I hung up and tried Rita Eiland's home phone. No answer. Not even a message. I pulled her file out and checked it, was pleased to see that I did have a cell phone number for her. I tried that. No answer. I hate cell phones. Why do people carry them and then turn them off? This time I was able to leave a message. I asked her to call me as soon as she got my call.

As I hung up I didn't know what else I could do. It was all going to depend on what Rita said, if and when she called back.

I couldn't just stay in my office, though. I still had a couple of other cases I was working on, so until I heard back from Rita I figured I'd get to work.

I opened my bottom drawer and pulled out a disposable cell phone still packed in plastic. I was down to three, I could see, as I pulled the plastic apart. As much as I hated cell phones I knew I needed one occasionally, but rather than buy an expensive phone and pay for somebody's program, I used disposables. Mostly, I used them for outgoing calls, incoming. It was only on occasion I'd give the number out. I'm still a firm believer in offices, and land lines, and answering machines. If I'm not in the office when you call, leave me a message. I'll get back to you.

Can you hear me now?

* * *

I live in Brooklyn, do most of my work in Brooklyn and Manhattan with occasional forays into Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and, God forbid, New Jersey. I don't own a car. I can get everywhere I have to on a bus or train. In a pinch I use a cab. And all the fares I pay don't add up to what I would pay to park a car overnight. But if I need a car I usually rent one.

Okay, so in my old age I'm also getting cheap.

I left the office and walked over to Court Street. I had business on Livingston Street, which was thirteen blocks away. That's an easy walk for me. I like walking. But today I found myself walking a little faster than usual, so by the time I arrived I was out of breath. I knew it was the girl. I was thinking about her, knew I had to find her before she did something stupid. It was putting more urgency in my step.

I put her out of my mind long enough to get the day's work done. She didn't reoccur to me until I was walking back. I fished out my disposable cell and tried Rita Eiland again. Still no answer. I left another message asking her to call me ASAP.

When I got back to the office I started in on some paperwork, until the door opened and the three leg breakers walk in ...

I reached underneath my desk. That's where I keep a spring-loaded baton. I have a gun but it's not always handy and being able to grab a gun at a moment's notice is a good way to get into trouble. So I keep the baton handy.

"You Delvecchio?" one of them asked. He looked like the only one capable of speech. The other two were unibrowed steroid heads.

"That's me."

"You're comin' with us."

"I don't think so."

"I do." He waved his hand at the other two.

The three of them started for me. I pulled out the baton, pointed and hit the button. It extended nineteen inches, and had a blunt end. It shot out quickly, striking one of the cro-magnons squarely on the chin. That's not exactly the way you're supposed to use the thing. I was aiming for his chest, but this worked better. His head snapped back with such force I was surprised it didn't fly off.

I turned and whipped the baton around and swung at one of the other weight lifters. He brought his huge arm up to block it, and I heard his forearm crack. He screamed and pulled the arm tightly to his side.

The third man reached into his jacket and I knew it was time to go. My office is the fifth room of my five-room apartment. There are two doors, one from the hall and the other leading to the rest of my apartment. I ran through that door, slammed it behind me and flipped the lock. There was a shot. A hole appeared in the door. It wouldn't hold for long.

I hit the button on the baton to retract it and ran for the window. I stepped out onto the fire escape and climbed down. At some point I heard the door splinter, but then I was on the ground and running. I waited for more shots, but they didn't come.

What the hell was going on?

* * *

"What kind of self respecting P.I. doesn't have a gun?" Detective Weinstock asked.

"Since when have you respected me?" I asked.

"I said self respecting," he pointed out.

"Anyway. I have a gun, but it wasn't nearby," I said. "If it was you'd be asking me to explain three dead men in my office."

"And the baton?"

"I don't know," I said. "I must've dropped it somewhere. Hopefully, in my apartment."

"Okay, so explain three angry men in your office."

"Well," I said, "they weren't exactly angry when they first walked in."

"You made them angry," he said. "You have a tendency to do that, don't you? Make people angry?"

"They came into my office all pumped up for trouble."

"Did you ask them what they wanted?"

"No."

"Did they actually threaten you?"

"They put a bullet in my door."

"Before or after you attacked them?"

"Before, but—"

"Did you overreact, do ya think?"

Weinstock and I have always had an adversarial. He was now a Detective First Grade on the 78 Precinct Squad, but his once bright star was not as bright, anymore. His attitude about life was a lot closer to mine these days.

"No, I didn't overreact," I said.

"Okay," he said, "I've got their descriptions. We'll check into it, dig that bullet out of your door, but in the meantime why don't you try to figure out who you pissed off?"

I stood up and said, "You're a big help."

"Hey, they could walk in here right now and file a complaint against you. They could say they walked into your office to hire you and you attacked them."

"What about the guy saying, 'You're comin' with us?'" I asked.

"Yeah, you're right, Delvecchio, that would've scared me to death, too."

"I repeat, you're a big help."

"See you around."

I said we were on better terms these days, I didn't say we were friends.

* * *

I was on my way back to my office—figuring the leg breakers were on their way to the hospital—when my cell rang. I'd only given the number to one person since I broke the seal on the plastic.

"Delvecchio."

"Nick, it's Rita Eiland. Sorry I didn't call you back earlier but I've had a bad day. A friend of mine died."

"Died?"

"Well, it looks like she committed suicide."

"Where are you?"

* * *

Her name was Kelly Moller. She lived with her lawyer husband in a million dollar condo on Joralemon Street in the Brooklyn Heights section of Brooklyn. It was not that far from where I lived on Sackett Street, but in terms of quality and value we were miles apart.

I caught a cab, which let me off in front of the building, just down the street from the Grace Church. Well, actually you'd have to go around the corner and take Hicks Street to Grace Ct. to get to the church, but I could see the back of it.

Rita had told me to meet her there. She said the body had been removed, the police were gone, but she was there because she was a close family friend. I told her twenty minutes. But I made it in fifteen. She met me at the door, looking as she had when I first met her—smart, handsome, well dressed. She and Kelly must have been about the same age, early to mid-forties.

"What's going on, Nick?" she asked.

"Where's the family?"

"In the living room. And it's just her husband."

We were in an entry foyer.

"Let's talk here for a minute," I said. "Your friend Kelly came to see me this morning." I described the woman. "Is that her?"

"Wait here."

She left me for a moment, came back with a framed photo of the woman I'd spoken to that morning. Only in the photo her hair wasn't stringy and lank, it was full and lustrous. She was smiling, actually looked pretty. She could have been the woman I had seen in my office, but not only was she from a different day, she appeared to be from a totally different life.

"That her."

"What did she want with you?" She immediately realized how that sounded. "I'm sorry. I meant why did she need a private detective?"

"She said you recommended me."

"I did, but she didn't tell me why she needed someone."

"She tried to hire me to kill her, or to refer her to someone who would do it."

She gaped at me, thunderstruck.

"What?"

"Are you sure she committed suicide?" I asked.

"That's what everyone is saying," Rita said. "Why?"

"She told me she'd never be able to do it herself," I said, "and I believed her."

"You're saying she was murdered?"

"I don't know," I said. "If she did this, she came right home from my office and did it. I don't see her changing her mind that fast. Plus I had three guys come to my office and try to take me someplace against my will."

"And you think that was connected to this?"

"Again, I don't know," I said. "I'm just trying to make sense of Kelly, Rita."

"You better come in and meet her husband," she said.

She led me into the living room, where several people were seated. This part would not be fun.

* * *

"Nick Delvecchio, this is Kelly's husband, Daniel Moller. Dan, Nick is a private detective Kelly tried to hire this morning."

The man stood up from the sofa. He was tall, either side of fifty, about six two, wearing an expensive suit, sporting an equally expensive haircut. Everything about him said money—where he lived, what he wore, and the way he looked at me.

"This morning?" he asked. "Just this morning? Why would she try to hire you, and then kill herself?"

"I don't know the answer to that, sir."

"What did Kelly want to hire you to do?"

"I should probably be telling this to the cops," I said, "but she tried to hire me to kill her."

"What?" her husband spat. "Th-that's preposterous!"

"I agree, sir," I said, "but it's true."

"So, if you had helped her this morning maybe she wouldn't have killed herself this afternoon."

"I told you she tried to hire me to kill her," I said. "What kind of help would you have wanted me to give her?"

"If you'd said something to somebody—" Moller started, but Rita put her hand on his shoulder to stop him.

"Relax, Dan," he said. "Take it easy."

"Nick, maybe Dan has a point." She squeezed his shoulder before removing her hand. "If you had called someone—him, myself—we might have been able to avoid this."

"Rita," I said, as calmly as I could, "she came into my office, asked me to kill her and wouldn't tell me her name. By the time I took her seriously she was gone. I spent all morning trying to figure out who she was. It was only when I spoke to you that I finally found out, and I came right over. How would I possibly have called anyone, least of all you?"

"I see," Rita said.

"Well, all right then," Dan Moller said, "I suppose there's not much more you can do. I thank you for your efforts. If you'll bill my office—"

"Mr. Moller, I've got nothing to bill you for," I said.

"I see. Very well, then ... thank you. I, uh, have to go into the office for awhile."

He turned and walked out of the room.

"He has a home office," Rita explained.

"How did she do it, Rita?"

"Pills."

"Who found her?"

"I did. When the police came Dan and I identified her."

"I'm sorry."

"I was worried about her."

"How'd you get in?"

"I had a key."

"What about he husband? What's his story?" I asked. "Their story? Happy?"

"Not really." She didn't offer any more.

"Who held the purse strings?"

"Well, he held the strings, but it was her money."

"When's the last time you saw her?"

"A couple of days ago."

"How was she?"

"Down," Rita said, "she's been down for some time."

"Depressed?"

"Yes."

"Clinically?"

"I can't answer that."

"Well, has she been prescribed any pills? Was that what she o.d.'d on?"

"I can't answer that, either."

"Then who can?"

"Dan," she said. "He told the police everything."

"Okay."

"Nick, what is it?" she asked. "You don't think—"

"I don't believe in coincidence, Rita," I said. "She comes to my office claming she needs help because she can't kill herself, then she comes back here and does it? And whether she did it or somebody else did it, why did she want to die?"

"I—I don't know."

"Well, I want to find out. Who was the detective assigned?"

"I have his card. Let me get my purse."

"You were here when the cops were?"

"Yes."

"Okay," I said. "Get me that card—but don't tell those guys what you're doing. I don't trust them."

* * *

The 84 Precinct was on Gold Street. The building was the home of local Government, as well. The Brooklyn Borough Hall, the Municipal Building, the Brooklyn House of Detention, NYC Fire Dept. H.Q., the Board of Ed H.Q., Transit Authority H.Q., NYPD "911" building, and the Transit Museum were all inside it's walls.

I stopped at the front desk and asked for Detective Sibel (pronounced "sy-bell" Rita had told me). When the Sergeant asked who wanted to see the detective I showed him my license and said it was about the Moller suicide.

The Sergeant made a call to the squad and then a uniform showed me the way.

Sibel was about five or six years younger than me. We shook hands and he told me he'd heard stories about me when I was on the job, from his brother.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Herb Sibel was your brother?"

"Right, Herb," Sibel said. "You remember him?"

"I do," I said. "He was a bigger psycho than I was, got more complaints to prove it."

Instead of getting insulted he laughed and said, "That's right! You do remember him."

"How's he doing?" I asked.

"Ate his gun a couple of years ago," Sibel said. They kicked him off the job and he couldn't take it. How you doin'?"

I wasn't kicked off the force, I resigned. But I decided not to ruin the bonding roll we were on.

"Ah, you know. Trying to make it as a P.I."

"I hear ya," Sibel said. "What's your connection to the Moller broad?"

I told him the story of how she'd tried to hire me to kill her and I sent her packing.

"Maybe if I'd been a little more, you know, sensitive, this wouldn't have happened."

"Ah, you don't know that," Sibel said. "These kinds of broads are unbalanced. She mighta dunnit anyway."

"You're probably right. Any chance I could view the body?"

"Why you wanna take a look at the stiff?"

"Just for closure," I said, figuring he wouldn't understand. "Might be able to get her out of my head that way."

Sibel shrugged and said, "No skin off my nose. I'll make the call."

"Thanks," I said. "Any doubt it's suicide?"

"Well, if there was you changed that," Sibel said. "I mean, hell, she asked you to kill her. How much more unbalanced could she be?"

"I guess. Okay, thanks, Detectiv—"

"Ray," he said, "Ray Sibel."

"Thanks, Ray. I'm sorry to hear about your brother."

"Ah, whataya gonna do? The job gets in your blood, right?"

"You got that right," I said.

* * *

I went to Kings County Hospital to the morgue. They were ready for me and allowed me to view the body. She was grey, almost deflated looking. An autopsy had not yet been done.

"Is that her?" the morgue attendant asked, as he covered her up again.

"I guess," I said, studying the corpse's face carefully, "that depends on who you mean."

I went back to my office. The cops had been there, had dug the bullet out of the door. They'd left my office door wide open. I closed it and walked around. Nothing was missing. The baton was on the floor in my living room. I took it back to my desk with me. The message light on my phone was blinking the number "1." I pressed Play.

"Mr. Delvecchio, this is Kelly Moller," a shaky voice said. "I need your help. I—I'll call again at five p.m. Please be there."

Interesting. Especially since the time stamp on the message machine indicated that Kelly Moller had called and left me a message after she'd been killed.

I sat at my desk until the phone rang at five. There was nothing else I had to do.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Delvecchio?"

"Yes."

"This is Kelly Moller."

"Yes."

Silence, then she said, "I'm supposed to be dead, right?"

"Right."

"Well, I'm not."

"That's good."

"I'm also not the woman who came to your office this morning, asking for help."

"Okay."

"That woman is dead."

"I know, I saw her in the morgue."

"Look," she said, "I understand you don't know which of us is really Kelly, but the fact remains if you don't help me, I'll be as dead as she is and it won't matter."

"Okay," I said. "Give me your number. I'll call you back on a cell phone, and then you can tell me where you are."

"Do you think your phone is tapped?"

"I'm not taking any chances."

* * *

I met Kelly on the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade, which had a great view of the harbor. I recognized her from the photo Rita had shown me. The girl in the morgue had resembled Kelly, but this girl matched the photo. If the photo was real.

"It's beautiful, here," she said. "Calm."

"You got i.d.?" I asked.

"Yes." She took her wallet from her jacket pocket and showed me her driver's license without looking at me. "You need anything else?"

"No. I'm going to assume you're Kelly. Who's in the morgue?"

"I don't know," she said. "A girl hired to impersonate me."

"For what?"

"I don't know. Maybe just to fool you."

"To make me think you were suicidal," I said, "so that when you showed up dead I could testify to it?"

"Sounds good," she said.

"So you're supposed to be in the morgue."

"But I got away," she said. "They killed her, and then identified her as me."

"So now they still have to kill you?"

"Yes." She turned to face me for the first time. The wind blew hair that was anything but lank. She was a very attractive woman, but the fear in her eyes was damaging her looks. "Can you help me?"

I touched the gun—the one I'd gotten from under the floorboards in my office—and said, "I think so."

* * *

I let her use my cell phone to call Rita, arrange to meet her on the Esplanade.

"Now what?" she asked, when she broke the connection.

"Now one more call," I said, "and we wait."

Rita arrived first. She seemed shocked, but I don't know if it was to see me, or Kelly.

"Kelly?"

"Hello, Rita. I was expecting someone else."

"Who?" She looked at me.

"Maybe the three goons who came to my office," I said.

Rita blinked, didn't ask, "What three men? Or "What are you taking about?"

"I saw the woman in the morgue, Rita," I said. "I know she's not Kelly. And Kelly certainly knows she's not Kelly."

Now she said, "What are you talking about, Nick?"

"Well, here's Kelly, alive and well," I said. "You told me you found the body, and her husband identified her. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that you and Dan killed her. Why? For the money?"

"I was going to divorce Dan," Kelly said. "You bet your life it was for the money. And my friend Rita's been fucking my husband!"

Without warning Kelly lunged at Rita.

"You goddamned bitch! If I hadn't heard the two of you on the phone plotting my murder I'd be in the morgue now instead of that poor girl."

Rita put her hands up to defend herself, and I noticed she had a gun in her right. I grabbed Kelly around the waist and pulled her away.

"Easy does it," I said, turning away and putting Kelly down on her feet. "Time to go to the cops, Rita." I put my hand in my jacket pocket and turned to face Rita.

"Not quite," she said.

She pointed the gun at us and then she waved. Down the block car doors opened and three men got out. They were big.

"They're really mad at you, Nick, for that stunt with the baton. And I'm surprised. I picked you because I didn't think you were that smart. And you, Kelly, why couldn't you just die like you were supposed to? Then Dan wouldn't have needed three goons—"

"Come on, Rita," I said, stepping between her and Kelly. "You see my hand in my jacket pocket, don't you?"

Rita laughed.

"I'm supposed to believe you have a gun? Like some t.v. private eye? Or is that baton in there?"

"Nope," I said, "it's a gun, and I'm not afraid to use it. Are you?"

She licked her lips. I was probably wrong. She hadn't kill anybody. It had to have been Dan Moller.

"Don't move, Nick," she said. "Don't make me—"

"If you're gonna do it," I said, "shut up and kill me, already."

She couldn't pull the trigger. But any one of the approaching men could. Especially the one with the huge bruise on his chin. Or the one with his arm in a cast.

But they were muscle. The third man had the gun, and he was drawing it from the inside of his jacket as he got close.

"You're coming with us," he said.

"Get a new line," I said, and shot him in the knee, right through my jacket. It virtually exploded and he went down, grabbing it with both hands. Blood flowed from between his fingers and the two 'roid brothers stared down at him in shock.

Rita screamed and jumped. I grabbed the gun from her hand with my left hand, drew my gun from my pocket with my right.

Suddenly, there were cops around us, led by Detective Sibel. They grabbed the three men and Rita; Sibel took my gun away from me.

"You promised on the phone you'd have a good story for me, Nick."

"I think I do, Hal," I said. "Meet Kelly Moller."

Robert J. Randisi has been called by Booklist ". . . the last of the pulp writers." He has published in the western, mystery, private eye, horror, science fiction and men's action/adventure genres. All told, he is the author of over 585 books, 50+ short stories, 1 screenplay and the editor of 30 anthologies. He has also edited a Writer's Digest book, WRITING THE PRIVATE EYE NOVEL, and for 7 years was the mystery reviewer for the Orlando Sentinel. In 1982 he founded the Private Eye Writers of America, and created the Shamus Award. In 1985 he co-founded Mystery Scene Magazine and the short-lived American Mystery Award; a couple of years later he was co-founder of the American Crime Writer's League. In 1993 he was awarded a Life Achievement Award at the Southwest Mystery Convention. In 2009 he received the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

His Rat Pack novel, EVERYBODY KILLS SOMEBODY SOMETIME, featuring Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and other members of the infamous Pack, was published in October 2006 and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been optioned for a film, for which he has written the screenplay. His most recent novel in the Rat Pack series is IT WAS A VERY BAD YEAR (Severn House, 2012).

He is the creator and author as "J.R. Roberts" of the Western series "the Gunsmith," which has been published monthly for the past 30 years, and continues to be.

Randisi was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and from 1973 through 1981 he was a civilian employee of the New York City Police Department, working out of the 67th Precinct in Brooklyn. After 41 years in N.Y, he now resides in Clarksville, Mo., an Artisan community of 500 people located right on the Mississippi. He lives and works with writer Marthayn Pelegrimas in a small house that overlooks the Mississippi.

†

Other titles from BEAT to a PULP:

The award-winning first
Hardboiled collection
(available for Kindle)

The Posthumous Man
by Jake Hinkson
(available in print and for Kindle)

BEAT to a PULP: Round Two
(available in print and for Kindle)

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