Blood & Tacos

Issue 2

Summer 2012

Published by Creative Guy Publishing

ISSN 1929-011X

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents:

- Welcome Back!

- End of the Renaissance

- The Xander Pursuit (review)

- Never Say Good Night in Saigon

- Burn In

- SNIPER! Blast Out in Lebanon (review)

- Operation Scorpion Sting

- FROM AMERICAN VIKING TO ZANE: A Brace Godfrey Chrestomathy (review)

- The G-String Gundown

- From The Publisher

Welcome Back!

Welcome back! CGP is very pleased to present another issue of blood and guts, mayhem and … tacos.

By now you’ve had a while to get to know what we’re all about, but if for some reason you missed that stage, feel free to click on the About link above to see where we’re going with all this.

There was a time when paperback racks were full of men’s adventure series. Next to the Louis L’Amours, one could find the adventures of The Executioner, the Destroyer, the Death Merchant, and many more action heroes that were hell-bent on bringing America back from the brink. That time was the 1970s & ’80s. A bygone era filled with wide-eyed innocence and mustaches.

Those stories are back! The quarterly magazine Blood & Tacos is bringing back the action, the fun, and the adventure. Also, the mustaches.

In each issue of Blood & Tacos, some of today’s hottest crime writers will choose an era and create a new pulp hero and deliver a brand-new adventure. Each issue will include 5-6 stories featuring action-packed mayhem written in the style of that bygone era. The stories might not always be politically correct, but whether satire or homage, they will deliver on every page. Fast and fun, action and adventure, Blood & Tacos.

Within these virtual pages, we’ll bring you fiction, reviews, artwork, even a recipe or two, all centering around those halcyon days when most questions could be answered by a pistol-whipping.

So dive into our current issue and enjoy stories by all those authors listed on the snazzy cover. We at Blood & Tacos would like to specifically thank Roxanne, Michael Batty, and all the authors and reviewers for their efforts in helping us bring this ridiculously awesome business to life.

DEAD EYE in: End of the Renaissance

By Guy Rivera

(discovered by Ray Banks)

As RAY BANKS is the definitive authority on the life and work of Guy Rivera, I will defer to him for insight. From the introduction to his monograph, "The Writer, the Man, the ‘Guy’: A Critical Deconstruction of Guillermo Rivera":

"Guillermo ‘Guy’ Rivera (1935–1989) is primarily known as the creator of the Dead Eye series, which started with Dead Eye (1979) and ended with the posthumous Lay Down Your Arms (1990). The series was, as Rivera himself put it, "the sum total of my passions*," and was a sometimes schizophrenic attempt to mix the legends of Zatoichi and Zorro with spaghetti westerns, Italian Mad Max rip-offs and leftist political ideals. A heavy smoker and drinker, Rivera died of congestive heart failure in 1989 in his home town of Agua Prieta, Mexico.

* "In the Zone," interview with Bob Leland in Dangerous Horizons magazine, July 1988.

They were headed for Yuma, six of them in the back of an open truck, another two squeezed into the cab. They’d been travelling for a couple of hours when they saw the young Mexican kicking dirt by the side of the road. The Mexican wore a dark suit, and a pristine white shirt. On his feet were black cowboy boots with silver spurs that jangled every time he dug his toe into the dirt. He carried a white stick in both hands. Behind his sunglasses, his sightless eyes were open and dead in their sockets. He said his name was Victor Cruz, and he was grateful for the ride.

Eduardo, a talkative man with a farmer’s accent, was the one who told Cruz where they were going. There was work in Yuma, he said. They were trying to rebuild, start again. Cruz nodded like he was listening, but all he really heard was an old story badly told. There was no hope in Yuma. There was no hope anywhere.

After a while on the road, Cruz closed his eyes, a force of habit, and felt himself drift, the gentle rocking of the back of the truck like a hand on a cradle.

The workers smelled of stale sweat, even staler mescal and nickel cigars. They chattered about television, the US Army rerun favorites that had the main character’s name in the title—Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett—and then they talked about drinking and gambling and their families. They complained about money, and there was a brief spate of filthy joke one-upmanship, culminating in a long story about a vaquero’s daughter with a snatch like a bucket. The man sitting across from him had too much phlegm in his throat and he breathed heavily. He told a joke about Eduardo’s mother. Eduardo exploded in mock rage. There was laughter, a chorus of jeers and some horseplay—slapping and play-fighting—before Eduardo’s voice cut short and a warm spray hit the side of Cruz’s face.

He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. He felt the air buffet at his right, Eduardo toppling forward into the middle of the truck. The other men panicked. Shouting, moving around, a lot of noise.

They were so loud that Cruz barely heard the second shot.

One of the front tires blew. The truck fishtailed. Cruz hung on. He turned his face upwards. The sun was gone, so they were in the mountains. Which meant there was a sniper up there somewhere and his aim was good. Cruz yelled at the men to jump. He felt hands on him, guiding him to the back of the truck as it careened off the road. Then he leapt, airborne for split-second before he dropped to the ground, kneeled into a roll which he broke by digging his stick into the dirt and hoisting himself upright. He heard the men scatter around him, looking for shelter. He heard them yelling at each other.

Then he heard the other men. They shouted in bad Spanish and better English. They were broad-voiced, professional bullies, the kind of men whose confidence came from the large guns they pointed at small people.

Cruz spat the foul taste out of his mouth and turned. The men continued to yell in a monotone. "Get on the ground, face down, palms flat, mouth to mud, mouth to goddamn mud." He heard the workers do as they were told. He tapped one of them with his white stick as he walked past. They were all on the ground. That was good. It meant they wouldn’t get in the way.

Another shout, rising in pitch. The man shouting at him was keyed up and obviously armed, and there was already too much blood in the air for him to take it easy.

"Get your ass in the dirt, Pedro. Mouth to mud."

Cruz stopped. His left hand moved to the top of his white stick, his thumb pointed up. One man in front of him, over six foot in height, the smell of fresh sweat on him and something else, unnatural, coming in small bursts, punctuated by a wet clicking sound that came from his mouth.

Juicy Fruit.

The gum, accent and psychosis added up to an American, and not a soldier, but Army trained. A merc, then, and a cocky one at that.

He felt a punch in the middle of his back. "You deaf? Down on the ground."

Similar height to Juicy Fruit. He’d shoved with his right hand, which put the gun in his left and made him a southpaw. He heard the scuff of a boot about thirty feet away behind him to his left, at about eight o’clock. A cleared throat belonged to another merc about ten feet behind the Pusher. That was four. Probably at least another two in the pickup that rumbled at one o’clock, no doubt blocking the Mexican truck’s path. This new pickup was a customized Dodge, the chassis hanging low and most likely armored. It was tooled under the hood, a high-horse police interceptor engine with a nitro feed. That kind of customization was a white man’s folly, and one that required money, just like this small private army that surrounded him.

Six of them, maybe more, armed with machine guns and God only knew what else.

Cruz liked those odds. They were interesting.

"Goddamn it," said the Pusher. He scuffed his boot, telegraphed his move to shove another square hand against Cruz’s back.

Cruz dropped, twisted, let the white stick show itself as a shikomizue, separated now into blade and cane, and then he lifted the sword high, hard and tight. He jammed the sword up under Pusher’s ribs and swung him round as he heard the thump of rifle butt to Juicy Fruit’s shoulder. Juicy Fruit unleashed a bark of bullets that tore the scream from Pusher just as quickly as they tore through his back. Cruz leaned in, found Pusher’s sidearm with his free right hand, pulled it upside down and squeezed the trigger with his little finger until he heard Juicy Fruit hit the dirt. He straightened, tossed the sidearm, kicked Pusher from the blade and then dropped to where Pusher’s rifle lay. A rattle of machine gun fire tore up the ground by his knee. Cruz span, pointing the rifle at the source, let rip in a tight arc, round after round punching through flesh, metal and rock before the clip snapped empty. He tossed the rifle, picked up his sword and rose through a blanket of smoke.

Someone behind him, approaching slowly. Cruz waited, played dumb until the sneak was within range, and then swiped a high boot across his face. Spur caught cheek, there was a brief sound of skin flapping like a pennant in a strong wind, and then Cruz lunged with the sword. The sneak grabbed Cruz’s shoulders. Cruz pushed him off and heard him drop.

Breathing hard. Throat dry. Again, waiting.

If there were any alive and well, they’d try to kill him. They always did.

But there was something else. A slow clap that sounded as if it came from the Dodge. Cruz raised his head.

"Very good, Mr. Cruz."

Cruz smelled ozone, heard a crackle off to his right, growing louder.

And then something grabbed him by the heart and the world shattered into nothing.

He awoke to the smell of a woman, the touch of a woman and the voice of a woman telling him to be still. He ignored her, tried to sit up, but someone had replaced his spine with an iron rod and his head with a cement block. He grunted in pain and felt himself weaken. The woman hushed him back to the pillow. She spoke Spanish, she was young and she smelled like the air after it rained. She had a voice that spoke to him from the past, reminded him of girls who were too pretty to talk to, and for a second he felt like drifting off again.

"Where am I?" he said.

"Fort Johnson." She moved a cloth over his forehead. "You are a guest of Captain Glenister."

"Guest?"

"Yes, señor. He looks forward to meeting with you."

Cruz moved away from her. The simper of the "señor," the lightness of her touch and her cowed manner told him she was a whore. She stayed away as he shifted himself upright and gritted the pain away long enough to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. His boots found a stone floor. He tapped the floor with one foot. They’d taken his spurs. He felt the girl move to the end of the bed, heard her dip the cloth in water. He stood slowly and stamped his boots a couple of times, just to hear the echo. He was in a small room, open to a corridor to his left. He went over to the open space and his hands found bars. He breathed out. No spurs, no stick, and a whore to keep him company.

"What’s your name?" he said.

"Rita."

"What is this place, Rita?"

"This is Fort Johnson. This is Captain Glenister’s new settlement."

"A building?"

"A town. Built by us for them."

"Them?"

"The Renaissance Men, señor."

The Renaissance Men. Of course. Back before the Wall, there had been a border, and that border had been patrolled by a group called the Civil Defense Corps. These men and women good and true used to pack high-caliber hunting rifles into their armored trucks and go looking for wetbacks to cap.

Good clean American fun.

When the Wall went up, the corps members lucky enough to have made it to Mexico or the Upper States became Minutemen, Wall walkers. They were cowardly scum to a man, smug and fat and safe behind the scope of their sniper rifles, and Cruz had already burned a few on his travels, but they were saints compared to The Renaissance Men. The Minutemen went home at night; The Renaissance Men continued fighting their good fight and broadcasting their white power propaganda to what was left of the nation. Captain Glenister must have been this chapter’s leader. It wasn’t a name he knew, but he would soon enough. Because Glenister had known his name, and that spelled trouble of a different sort.

"How many of us are there?"

"I do not know, señor. Hundreds, maybe a thousand. The men they keep in barns down by the river, the women in dormitories by the big house. The men work until they fall."

"And the women?"

"We are for play."

He returned to the bed and took Rita’s hand in his own. He touched something rough and raised on the back of her hand. "What’s this?"

"They mark us, señor, they—"

He put a finger to her lips. She breathed warmly against his touch. He leaned in to her. "Tell me everything you know about this place, Rita. And tell me as quickly as you can."

He counted the steps from the cells to what Rita had called the big house. Two armed guards flanked him. They were both taller than him and they didn’t speak much. They smelled of good sleep, old sex and chewing gum.

Rita had spelled it out for him, every last inch of it, so he could almost picture the journey he was on. He’d been in a cell down in an annex to the whores’ dormitory. The cells were rarely used. "The men have cattle prods," she’d said, and if the rebellion was any more serious than that, the offending party would be shot in the head as an example to the others.

Workers, and their lives, were cheap.

The stone corridors led to somewhere warmer and softer, and then outside, where Cruz felt the wind on his face. The wind carried the sound of the workers from down in the valley. It was all mechanical noise. No voices other than the odd shout from one of the guard, who tagged their pep talks with racial slurs.

It was a short walk across open ground to the big house. This was where Glenister and his men stayed. Cruz was taken up four steep wooden steps that led to a porch and the front doors of the big house. The way Rita described it, the place must have resembled something like a plantation house, a huge white palace on a big brown hill. Inside, it was supposed to be decorated with scavenged luxury. The floor under Cruz’s feet was marble and his steps echoed through the large entrance hall as he was led to Glenister’s office.

Captain Troy Glenister was a man who wore his influences on his sleeve. Rita had talked of a room draped with the stars and stripes and hung with paintings of stern men in old-fashioned clothes. Glenister’s chair was leather, large and heavy. It had to be, because Glenister himself was large and heavy. His breathing was labored, but Cruz didn’t take that as a sign the man was weak, just that he was overweight. The clicking sound that came from somewhere near his lap meant that Glenister was playing with Cruz’s shikomizue, sliding the sword from the cane and replacing it.

When he spoke, his voice was thick with butter and low like a Baptist preacher. "I must say, Mr. Cruz, this toothpick of yours is quite the weapon. Doesn’t look like much at first glance, and yet you used it to carve up my boys like they were wet-eared grunts. Even more impressive considering your obvious handicap. You are actually blind, aren’t you?"

Cruz nodded.

"Not so impressive that you couldn’t see a shocker coming, of course." He chuckled. It was a throaty sound. "You’re not the only one around here with a talent for customization."

"It won’t happen again," said Cruz.

"I’m sure it won’t." Another click, louder, Glenister shutting the shikomizue unnecessarily hard. "Perhaps I should have shot you. But the thing is, Mr. Cruz, I’m not a bad man, despite what that little whore may have told you. If I was a bad man, I’d have my boys pop a head every time someone looked weary. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of providing them with the cattle prods." He cleared his throat. "A chain boss don’t blow holes in his own damn gang just because they set it down without permission. Hell, you’d never achieve anything that way. Have one guy dragging six corpses, and besides, I’m well-versed in psychology, Mr. Cruz. I know the beaner mind. If I had my boys use deadly force every time your Pedro pals out there acted uppity, we’d have rivers of blood. A beaner would rather die than work hard, am I right?"

Cruz smiled but said nothing.

"But you buzz the son of a bitch with a thousand volts, he’ll know who holds his balls. And he’ll sure as hell think twice about resisting the yoke again."

"Or he’ll learn to avoid the buzz," said Cruz.

"Nah, your average beaner don’t think like that."

"I do."

"I said average beaner." There was a smile in his voice. "You’re Victor Cruz, boy. You’re the Dead Eye. Ain’t nothing average about you."

"The price," said Cruz.

"You’re goddamn right, the price." There was a wet sound as Glenister rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth. It was the noise of a hedonist. He ate too much, smoked too much, drank too much, and if Cruz didn’t kill him, a venereal disease would.

"How much is it?"

"Six million."

"Old or new?"

"Old."

Getting up there. Add a couple of thousand for every uniform slashed to ribbons, every milk-fed American mouth that bit the dust. It would be a lot more soon enough.

"I don’t see how you’re worth it," said Glenister. "But then I didn’t see the beauty in this here sword stick, either."

"You want me to show you?"

Another throaty laugh. "You’re unarmed and blind, and you don’t know what I have pointed at you."

He did. It was a Colt Anaconda, stainless steel finish and a walnut grip. Rita had remembered the name of the gun because it was the same nickname Glenister gave his dick. The Anaconda held six and because Glenister was lazy, it would be held at hip height as he lounged in his chair. Unless he was a crack shot or incredibly lucky, a sudden movement from Cruz would mean three or four wild panic shots and a throbbing wrist that would make him pause long enough for Cruz to grab his meaty hand, shove the barrel up against his chins and press on his trigger finger until the gun clicked empty.

But that wouldn’t do. That wasn’t the plan.

"You’re calling in the bounty," said Cruz.

"Already done it. They’ll be here Sunday morning."

"I see. In that case, I have a few requests."

"Requests? You don’t get to request nothing, Cruz."

"For six million, they’ll want me pristine. They won’t pay full price for damaged goods. You look after me, you’ll look after your money."

"Six million’s a lot of money, Cruz. I could stand to lose a little bit of it."

"But you don’t want to. You’re a grasping asshole. You’d never forgive yourself if you lost a single dime of that bounty. If I’m the six million dollar man, I refuse to live like a pig."

He didn’t say anything. Cruz guessed he was thinking it over.

Finally Glenister said, "What do you want?"

"I want a room here."

"Very well."

"I want the same meals as you and the guards. Otherwise, I want to be left alone."

"Why?"

"Because I want the whore you sent me. When I’m finished with her, she can go back, but otherwise she’s mine."

"Okay. That’s fine. Was there anything else?"

"No. I’d like to be shown to my room now."

The room was only fit for a blind man. It was comfortable, but according to Rita, every stick of furniture in here was old, dirty and ugly. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he and Rita had privacy to practice. The girl was trustworthy and had already proven herself a quick learner with a good memory. Cruz only hoped that she was as good a teacher as she was a student.

The first night she spent with him, they practiced disarm and destroy techniques designed to bring down the bigger assailant. He concentrated on a few quick and dirty moves—the girls didn’t have time to learn much more than that, and they had to do it right. Everything else would be easy just as long as that first strike hit home. Because tomorrow was Saturday, and that night would be the only clean opportunity they’d have. Saturday night was when the house guards laid down their arms and commenced to drinking and screwing their brains out. Only Glenister and Cruz were allowed to have whores in their own rooms, and so the guards had to stagger across to the dormitory, where, of course, the girls would be waiting for them. Only this time their smiles would be genuine.

Cruz ate his afternoon meal, but refused his dinner. He preferred to stay hungry. It would give him an edge. At eight o’clock, the guard outside his door knocked off for the night. Cruz lit a cigarette. By the time the ash reached the filter, he heard the guards carousing downstairs. According to Rita, they would continue like that for a few hours before they left the big house.

He waited. He heard the guards moving downstairs. Heard footsteps on the marble floor of the hall. Heard the front doors open and close. He saw them in his mind’s eye, moving out across the moon-drenched countryside in a slow zig-zag towards the dormitory. He moved his head, stretched his neck. He saw them bursting through, drunken grins, shoving each other as they picked their favorites and dragged them off to their respective rooms.

Midnight was the agreed time. It was the only time Cruz could hear. On the stroke of midnight, the church clock in the middle of Fort Johnson would chime twelve times. On the first chime, the girls disarmed their johns with a chop to the Adam’s apple, a well-placed fist to the balls, or a pointed hand in the eye. By the third, they had the guards’ sidearms. By the sixth, the guards were dead or incapacitated, and those puritan assholes who had stayed away from temptation would be next as the crackle of gunfire that had originated in the dormitory moved towards the big house.

Cruz stood and opened the door. Rita had gummed the lock so it wouldn’t secure, but until now it would have been suicide to attempt an escape. He moved quickly and silently into the hall. Counted his steps once again, skimming a wall with one hand. He walked with his head down, listening. The rooms were empty on this floor, but there was the sound of laughter and music downstairs. A door opened and the laughter grew louder. Cruz counted three or four. He touched the wall until he found a door and pushed inside as the laughing merc climbed the stairs. Cruz left the door open, disappeared into the shadows. The merc stopped on the landing and then crossed in front of the open door, a breeze and whiff of cheap bourbon like an olfactory tracer. The merc opened a door, closed it. Then Cruz heard the sound of water on water, hitting it from a height.

The merc was taking a leak.

Cruz kicked open the bathroom door. He felt the air shift in front of him and planted the heel of his hand in the merc’s throat. He grabbed a fistful of ear and hair and slammed the merc’s head into the nearest solid object. Something crashed off its fixtures. Cruz grabbed at the merc’s belt, found the cattle prod, and forced it past the merc’s teeth before he flicked the switch. The merc went rigid, there was the smell of burnt hair, and he tumbled backwards into what sounded like a tub where he kicked the sides in an off-beat jig before he passed out.

Cruz returned to the landing just as the front doors opened and the girls rushed into the hall, shouting and screaming. The music jumped in volume as one of the mercs came out to investigate and caught six bullets from four different guns. Cruz moved to the next flight of stairs. He heard Rita’s light step as she raced up to meet him. She was breathing heavily. "It worked, señor! They didn’t stand a chance!"

"There’s another in the bathroom," said Cruz. "I’ll be back. I need to deal with Glenister."

"I’ll take you."

"No. It’s okay."

"You don’t know the way."

He put a hand on her shoulder. It was bare. "Secure the downstairs, Rita."

She opened her mouth to say something, the spit clicking against her tongue, but he turned away before she could speak. He took the stairs that led to the top floor and Captain Troy Glenister’s suite. He followed the smell of sex and the sound of a television tuned to static and opened double doors.

There was movement, but only slight. The sound of silk sheets and a water bed. The hedonist at rest.

"Cruz?" He sounded groggy.

"Fort Johnson, named for Andrew?"

That throaty laugh again. "This is a country for white men and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men …"

"Where are my things, Glenister?"

The water bed made a sickening noise as Glenister moved on it. "He was an idealist who never went to school, and he became the leader of the free world."

"It wasn’t free then."

"And it isn’t now. Who the hell do you think you are, Cruz? You know I could call for a guard—"

"Your men are dead. The whores are in charge. And you have a choice. You can try to squeeze your ass through the bedroom window, pray you don’t break anything when you hit the ground and then run for your life, or you can die right here and now."

Glenister laughed again. It was strained. He moved quickly, or tried to, and Cruz knew the Colt was within reach. He lunged forward, felt the air crack with the first bullet, ring with the second, but the third stayed exactly where it was as Cruz kicked the gun from Glenister’s grip and sent it bouncing across the floor. He grabbed Glenister by what felt like a robe and hauled him across the room. He swung the fat man into the hissing television set, smashing it and raining hot sparks against his skin. Glenister dropped to the carpet and Cruz lost him for a moment.

He straightened up and stood stock still. Listened. Heard the fat man scrabbling on the floor. He was making a noise like a truffle pig. Then Cruz heard him stand and then the squeak of a cabinet door. He pictured another gun, but didn’t move. Glenister was breathing heavily, but he was doing it through a smile.

Cruz heard the click of his shikomizue. Of course he’d kept it. And of course he meant to kill him with his own sword. It was the kind of cheap irony that appealed to men with dull minds. Glenister tried to creep to one side, but his breathing made locating him easy. "You’re a dead man, Cruz. You might have the whores on your side, but I have the whole US Army. I spoke to General Jackson himself, did you know that? Stonewall himself. We’re old friends. Anything happens to me, you’re a marked man. So now you have a choice. You can take those whores and get a few hours’ head start on the United States Bounty Service, or I can kill you now."

Cruz made his choice. Glenister panicked as he lunged. The fat man’s feet shuffled for purchase. Cruz threw a jabbing kick under the fat man’s arms and caught him in the gut. It didn’t move him, but it made him belch air and swing wildly with the sword. Cruz stepped to the side of the swing and the gust of wind it produced, then dipped into its arc and grabbed Glenister’s sweaty forearm with one hand, his bicep with the other and pulled the arm down sharply across his knee. There was a terrific snap and the smell of urine filled the air as Glenister became liquid in Cruz’s grip. Glenister screeched and rolled away, the sword thumping onto the carpet. Cruz dropped to a squat and picked up the sword, following the sound of Glenister as he whimpered and crawled back to the water bed.

"You haven’t … you haven’t won," he said, but his voice was too high-pitched to be confident.

Cruz touched the blade of the shikomizue. It needed sharpening, but it would do for what he had in mind. He heard Glenister scrabble on the carpet.

"You’re still a dead man. Jackson won’t stop. He’ll send more men after you. They’ll find you."

"And they’ll die, just like the last man he sent after me, just like every opportunistic scumbag who thinks he can make his fortune on the backs of the poor. Just like you, Captain Troy Glenister, and all your men. We didn’t draw first blood, but we’ll definitely draw last."

"Yes, you will," said Glenister.

Glenister let out a cackle and rolled to one side. And Cruz realised why the fat man had crawled for the bed rather than the door. He heard the metallic click in Glenister’s hand and prepared to bring the sword down just as the Colt Anaconda roared its resistance.

There was a sudden rush of air, and then it was all over.

Rita was waiting on the landing when Cruz emerged from Glenister’s room. He kicked the sheet-wrapped bundle on the floor in front of her. It made a wet sound. He pointed in its general direction with his stick. In his other hand he held his silver spurs.

"A present," he said. "Something to help get the new regime started."

Her voice remained at the same height, so she must have opened the bundle with her toe. "His head."

He’d expected her to be shocked, to act like a woman, but she hadn’t. He was impressed. "You’ll need it to assert power."

"I didn’t do it."

He smiled. "Yes, you did."

"What about you?"

The smile faded. "There will be men from Mexico City arriving here in a few hours. You need to be ready for them. Tell them what happened, mention my name if they ask, but make it clear that you’re in charge now and that you and the rest of the people here will defend this town with your lives. You have an arsenal, you have resources, and you have a reason. They won’t have the guts to push you. They’ll be outnumbered and outgunned."

"I don’t know."

"You can do it, Rita. You’re the strongest person in this whole town."

She kissed him on the cheek, and he turned into a second kiss that caught him on the mouth. She pressed herself against him. He allowed her for a moment. The warmth and smell were comforting.

"Victor …" she whispered.

"No." He broke the embrace and gestured to the head again. "Take it to your people."

"Thank you."

He nodded. She picked up the head. He listened to her light footsteps on the stairs as she descended and something stumbled in his chest.

He heard a cheer from the women downstairs, then the sound of them running out the front doors and a rising commotion from the valley. Cruz attached his spurs and then tapped down the stairs.

Outside, he heard a mixture of male and female voices, the male outnumbering the female, but the female clearly the ones in control. Above them all was Rita’s voice, confident and charismatic, telling everyone what had happened, and how they didn’t have long to get organized. Cruz listened to her for a few seconds, then pushed his way out through the back of the big house.

Perhaps people really were capable of rebuilding what they had, given the right kind of head start. And perhaps Yuma wouldn’t have been such a dead loss after all, but Cruz doubted that it would be better than what Rita and her people could manage. They’d have to change the name of the town, though. Fort Johnson, the man Glenister had named it for, Glenister himself and the ideas he stood for, they were all dead. They were relics to be buried and forgotten.

That was the message the boys from the Bounty Service would get when they arrived. And if they needed it repeated, well, Victor Cruz—the Dead Eye—planned to do so until that whole damn Wall came down. Until then, he would carry on walking and enjoy the first warmth of dawn on his face.

THE END

Ray Banks shares his birthday with Chuck Barris and Curtis Mayfield and screeched into the world on the same day that Roberto Rossellini took his leave. He has worked as a wedding singer, double-glazing salesman, croupier, dole monkey, and various degrees of disgruntled temp. He writes novels (like the Cal Innes series) and short stories (like this one) and keeps a fairly clean online abode at www.thesaturdayboy.com.

THE PEACEMAKER: The Xander Pursuit

By Sabrina Ogden

"While relaxing at his country estate of Hewesridge, Barrington Hewes-Bradford, one of the world’s richest and most enterprising men, receives word of the explosive situation on Tarrago, site of a number of his business ventures and an important ally of the United States. Sensing the delicacy of the situation, which could lead to an extended war, Hewes-Bradford uses all of his resources, all of his courage, and all of his potency to vanquish the malignant forces!"

While reading The Xander Pursuit, book three in The Peacemaker series by Adam Hamilton, I was reminded of my childhood in the late Seventies when I would role-play Charlie’s Angels with my friends, Stacy and Molly. As you can probably guess, I was always assigned the role of Sabrina Duncan; probably because my name was Sabrina, perhaps because my hair, although blonde, was styled the same way, straight, plain, and boring.

Regardless of how much fun we probably had playing the gun-wielding threesome, I always hated being one of the Angels. Sure, they got to fight the bad guys. But more often than not, they ran around in bikinis and played the kidnap victim needing to be saved by the other Angels. Boring! I was on my tenth assignment for Charlie—my turn to play the part of the kidnapped Angel—when my dislike for that type of role blossomed. And it was the very next day that I started doubling-up my characters by playing the part of Charlie Townsend, as well.

Me? Playing Charlie? Heck yeah! Charlie had it easy. Lounging about—usually near a beach with what I can only assume was scotch on the rocks—Charlie made important decisions and led his team of go-to girls all while receiving the affectionate attention of numerous women. Switching the women for men and replacing the scotch with some Coca-Cola Classic with extra ice, and you’ve got a win-win situation for a girl like me. I mean, really … who wouldn’t want to be Charlie?

Barrington Hughes-Bradford, that’s who!

Having inherited his father’s fortune, Barrington has managed to become the wealthiest man in the world by creating several international companies and serving as Chairman of the Board to pretty much all of them. All while masquerading as a private spy and do-gooder—head of The Peacemaker Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world a safer place. By dispatching his elite crime-fighting squad throughout the world, Barrington has the ability to track down murderers and prevent wars and economic downfalls without being distracted from swooning the ladies and hobnobbing with the wealthy and powerful.

In The Xander Pursuit, Barrington is in the middle of a dinner party when a mysterious caller offers to sell him information regarding a plot to topple Tarrago, a small island that Barrington loaned twenty millions dollars to in the hopes of preventing an economic crisis. Believing the information credible, Barrington and his number-one man, Trask, meet the mysterious caller in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, only to find him DOA.

The mysterious caller and his unfortunate death send Barrington and his crew to Tarrago. In the story you’ll read about a murder, a drowning, another murder, possible love, wine, cocktails, s-e-x, a couple of ladies in distress, and an explosive ending that will leave you questioning whether or not Barrington’s quest for peace isn’t more about protecting his own assets, and if his team of elite crime fighters should consider retirement.

Considering the book’s Prologue murdered a man carrying a briefcase, I was a little shocked to find another dead man by the end of Chapter One, and another dead guy in Chapter Two. Not to mention the dead woman in Chapter Six, and the other dead woman in Chapter Nineteen.

Yeah, I know, there can never be too many murders in a crime novel, right? Usually for me, the bloodier the better. But the deaths in this book happen so quickly I found myself rereading sections just to understand what was happening. And the death of the first woman was so senseless, and her character made to be so helpless that I found myself angry and unbelievably irritated, as her death was caused by the learning-curve of one of Barrington’s "elite" members. Even more frustrating is that that same elite member makes the same mistake later in the book, which, unsurprisingly leads to the death of the woman in Chapter Nineteen. I thought these crime fighters were the best of the best? Yeah, not so much. Or maybe Mr. Hamilton just doesn’t know what the word "elite" means.

And then we have Barrington, or Barry as he likes to be called, burning the midnight oil as he seduces a beautiful woman, meets with financial leaders, and shows off his mariner and astronomy skills while "watching" Trask gather secret intel. Then, just when you’re about to give up on Barrington’s peacemaker ideals and savior-like qualities, he bursts onto the scene with a .50-caliber machine gun attached to his Lear jet (not a euphemism … although that might have made the book more interesting) and sinks the very ship that’s about to bring war to two nations.

That last scene … made me giggle.

But it also reminded me why I liked playing the role of Charlie Townsend so much. Playing the damsel in distress has never been my kind of thing. But playing the role of the character that doesn’t really do anything doesn’t sound like much fun anymore, either. I mean, really. Other than giving out assignments, what did Charlie bring to the team? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

So, flash forward some thirty years or so later when I’ve been given this treasured book to read, and I’m thinking Barrington Hughes-Bradford would have been a pretty fun role to play, too. I mean, really, Barry is James Bond sexy with a ’70s porn–style look. He’s like Charlie Townsend, only his Angels are all men. He’s giving the orders and busting a few moves along the way. Something tells me that even without reading the other books in this series; Barrington Hughes-Bradford always saves the day. In the words of my friend Kari, Barrington is the perfect "man-whore, puppet-master protagonist."

So, if we dump the porn-star looks for a sexy femme fatale style, keep the male Angels, and switch the cocktails to Coca-Cola Classic with extra ice … you’ve got another win-win situation for a girl like me, ’cause I’ve always wanted to be a puppet master. Haven’t you?

WANTED: MALE ANGELS WITH SOLID SIX PACKS (of Coke, that is) *wink wink*

I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this series, but even with its flaws and over-the-top storyline, I found this book in the series rather entertaining, even comical at times. Would I read the other books in the series? Well, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I’m curious …

Sabrina Ogden is a grasshopper by day, wife, mother to two adorable beagles, and a lover of books and dreaming. She spends her free time reading, playing on twitter, and editing for the online web-zine Shotgun Honey. You can find her sharing personal stories and writing book reviews at myfriendscallmekate.com.

A.R.V.N. WAR CHRONICLES: Never Say Good Night in Saigon

By Greg Peppard, Jr., 1st Sgt., US Army (Ret.)

(discovered by Jimmy Callaway)

San Diego, California, is a big military town, and lifelong resident JIMMY CALLAWAY has met many retired soldiers in his time. Greg Peppard, a grizzled former Army sergeant, often frequented the neighborhood convenience store where Callaway worked for a number of years. Over time, a grudging friendship grew out of a shared fondness for Lee Van Cleef movies. It turns out Peppard had more than a few stories published—stories he based on his tours in Vietnam during the final ten years of his military service, from 1963 to 1973. His work never cracked the big men’s adventure market, appearing in such forgettable titles as Man Digest for Men, General Macho, and Highlights for Green Berets. This story is one Peppard never managed to sell before he quit writing altogether and bought a small hardware store.

Mr. Callaway would like to thank Matthew C. Funk and Johnny Shaw for their assistance in restoring this piece to a publishable form.

It was 3 a.m. and the VAA Nightclub was enjoying another quiet evening. The rain pattered its soft staccato on the tin roof, accompanied by the dribble-drop of the leaky patches in the ceiling into old gourds. Mama Tu had gotten the children to sleep around midnight and allowed herself to doze in her chair.

But just as she was nodding off, Yen awoke, fussing in her crib. Mama Tu gripped the worn bamboo arms of her chair and hoisted her tiny, wrinkled form up and over to the infant. It wasn’t just that Yen was the fussiest baby she had seen in all her years, it was that she was the saddest. As if the oddly rounded eyes had glimpsed her future and that of her homeland. It pulled at a place deep inside Mama Tu every time the baby girl looked at her.

Wrapping the child in her blankets, Mama Tu picked her up. As she walked the baby around the room, she sang softly:

But in Saigon, peace never lasted for long. Just as the lines in the baby’s tiny forehead softened into slumber, a big man wearing a burlap sack for a mask kicked in the front door and aimed an AK-47 at Mama Tu. Two others followed, hurriedly closing the door behind them. They were also armed and masked—one an even bigger man, and the other a skinny young woman.

Yen did not rouse from her sleep.

Xuan Loc was forty miles north of MACV, but it took Corporal Mathes nearly an hour to get there. He’d learned to drive on the freeways of Los Angeles, but that was nothing compared to Saigon during rainy season. The greasy rain slid down in lazy sheets. Motor scooters and Renaults slalomed through the traffic, horns bleating and braying. It was a little easier going once outside city limits, and Mathes finally arrived at III Corps and met with Major Le.

"Bonjour, Corporal," said the little major as he returned Mathes’ salute. "And how may I be of service to the United States Army today?"

Mathes frowned. "I’m sorry, sir, didn’t Major Taylor call your office?"

Major Le cleared his throat. "And how may I be of service to the United States Army today?"

Mathes’ frowned deepened, and then it hit him. He retrieved the transfer papers Major Taylor had given him: yesterday’s copy of Le Courrier du Vietnam wrapped around five American twenty-dollar bills.

Major Le took the papers and smiled. "Please follow me, Corporal."

Mathes had been in-country for a year, and he still couldn’t get used to these ARVN officers, their accents more French than Vietnamese. But he saluted properly and followed Le to a group of Quonset huts. Two ARVN privates came to attention on their arrival. They held their M-16s to the side, order arms position. Le barked at them in Vietnamese, and one of the privates opened the padlock on the door.

"Sergeant Tinh!" Le shouted in English. "Front and center!"

In the shadows of the hut, through the drizzly rain in his face, Mathes could see several figures stirring from various positions of confinement. And then through the door came the meanest-looking gook Mathes had ever seen.

Like a lot of Vietnamese, he was a little guy, but he stood as though he were Atlas, as though he held up the world without breaking a sweat. His face looked carved from stone—hooded almond eyes and a scar across his brow gave him a permanent scowl. His wide shoulders strained at the dingy tigerstripe cammies. His biceps bulged at the sleeves. His hands were as cracked and dirty as his combat boots. He blinked at the gray light of day, and his eyes landed on Mathes.

"Got a cigarette, Joe?" he said.

"Sergeant Tinh," Major Le said, "I am temporarily releasing you into the custody of Corporal Mathes. Our American allies have a situation they feel you are well suited to handle. Upon completion of this mission, you are to return at once to serve the remainder of your sentence. Is that clear?"

Tinh grunted. "Mm. Yes, sir."

Le smiled at Mathes. "He is, as you say, all yours, Corporal. Please extend my regards to Major Taylor."

Mathes saluted again, doing his best not to show his dislike for this little ratfuck officer. Tinh caught his eye and winked.

In the jeep, Mathes handed Tinh a pack of Luckies and matches, both wrapped in cellophane. Tinh carefully unwrapped them, poked a nail into the corner of his mouth, and lit it, striking the match with his thumbnail, his hand protecting the flame from the wet.

"Mm," he said, "makes a fine tobacco. Thanks, Joe."

"Mathes."

"Thanks, Mathes."

"Had you in the stockade, huh?"

Tinh raised his eyebrows. "Yep."

"What for?"

Tinh shrugged. "Don’t know. Could be anything. I was drunk."

Mathes grinned as he fought to keep the Jeep in the flooded ruts of the dirt road. When Tinh tried to hand back the smokes, Mathes waved him off.

Major Taylor had gotten bored with lobbing darts at the picture of Henry Cabot Lodge. So now Sergeant Kitchen stood in front of the dartboard, doing his best to stand completely at attention.

"Uh, sir?" he said.

Major Taylor closed one eye, aimed. "Hold it right there." Taylor released the dart and reformed the part in Kitchen’s hair. "Excellent. Yes, Sergeant, what is it?"

"Sir, I don’t mean to, you know…I just don’t understand why this Tinh, sir? Why bring a gook in on American business?"

"Tell me, Sergeant. You’re gunning for the OCS, are you not?"

Kitchen stiffened a bit, allowed a small smile. "Yes, sir."

"Well, one thing I can tell you," Taylor said, flinging another dart. It hit the wall just past Kitchen’s ear. "Explaining yourself to non-coms is not a habit you want to get into."

"Yes, sir."

"On the other hand," Taylor said, "I am bored out of my mind right now. Sergeant, whatever your feelings about this mission, it’s simply not something we can ignore and hope will go away. It calls for action, not advice."

"All due respect, sir, but we’re all pretty bored around here."

"Today, yes, but that will change any minute, if it hasn’t already. That fucking idiot Diem had to go get himself assassinated. And now I hear the reds have made the Gulf of Tonkin into a practice range. If the White House has its way, this war will get hot overnight."

"That’s great news, sir!"

"Yes, well, officially, I applaud your enthusiasm, Sergeant."

"Thank you, sir!"

"Unofficially, I think you are a braying jackass. I may be bored keeping MACV fully stocked with paper clips, but I didn’t join this man’s army to fight phantom commies in canopy jungle. If we go to war, fine, but I see no reason to hurry it along."

"Can’t we get SOG to take care of this, sir? Isn’t this their specialty?"

"Indeed it is, but without a handwritten invitation from LBJ, the only thing the Studies and Observations Group will be studying and observing is as much pussy as they can handle. Which is quite a bit, to hear them tell it." Major Taylor leaned back in his chair and hurled a dart into the drop-tile ceiling. It took its place with four or five others, along with a few sharpened pencils.

"So we go to ARVN," Kitchen said.

"And so we go to ARVN. Let them get what action they can before our Marines come over and hog all the enemy rounds."

"But this Tinh, sir, he’s—he’s not even an officer."

"Don’t be a complete idiot, Sergeant. ARVN’s officers run their army like Sergeant Bilko ran his motor pool. They’ll rob you blind, and then steal your smoked spectacles. The enlisted men are the only ones worth a shit, and Sergeant Son Tinh is better equipped for this sort of thing than even an American officer, present company very much included. Any more questions?"

"No, sir."

"Good. Now, hold perfectly still …"

Mathes burst into the room, and Taylor’s dart landed point-first in Kitchen’s knee. Kitchen bit the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming. Mathes had to clench his own fists to keep from laughing.

"Major Taylor, sir!" Mathes said in loud, shaky voice. Kitchen stared daggers at him. "Reporting with Sergeant Tinh as ordered, sir!"

"Very good. Sergeant Tinh," Taylor said, returning their salute, "I trust all is well in the 18th?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lovely. At ease. Sergeant Tinh, as I’m sure you’re aware, we have quite a situation on our hands."

Mathes glanced at Kitchen, the dart in his knee, sweat beading on his forehead. When Taylor wasn’t looking, Kitchen plucked the dart from his flesh, visibly blanching at the sight of blood on the tip. A strangled giggle escaped from Mathes.

Taylor turned quickly. "Is there something funny, Corporal Mathes?"

"Sir, no, sir!" He kept his eyes on a corner of the ceiling.

"As I was saying, Sergeant Tinh," Taylor said, "we have a situation here and I feel you’re the only man I can turn to."

"Mm. Thank you, sir."

"Yes, well, don’t thank me yet. Tell me, Sergeant, have you ever heard of the Vietnam AmerAsian Nightclub?"

Thuy was trying to think. He allowed his fists to unclench and focused inward, on the formations therein. Once again, he felt serenity and tranquility in his grasp, if only those bastard mongrels would shut the fuck up.

Fists clenched again, Thuy rose from his mat and stomped over to the bastard pen, where the mongrels mewled and whimpered. Father had always told him that he was the most impatient, irresponsible boy he’d ever seen—could never wait for anything, but always late for everything. But even as a young whelp, he could not possibly have made this much noise!

"Quiet!" he shouted, his long mustache trembling past his chin. "You have been fed! There will be no more!"

My poked her head up through the trap door in the far corner. A smudge of dust lay above one thin eyebrow. "Thuy!" she said. "Why do you shout at them? They cannot understand you."

"They will learn!" Thuy said. "Yes, they will learn their true purpose if I have to beat it into them!"

My climbed into the room and shook her dirty slippers off, revealing her delicate feet. As she approached the pen, a troubled look disturbed her features. "Oh," she said, sniffing at the air, "no wonder they’re upset. Don’t you smell that?"

"All I smell is the Yankee blood in these … mutants."

"They need to be changed," My said, retrieving clean diapers from the bureau, some old safety pins from the glass jar atop it. "Go back to your meditations, Thuy. I will change them myself."

"Sergeant Tinh," Taylor said, "as you know, the American military has had a presence in your country for some time, back when your people were fighting the French. Though our government has been careful to stress that we are not here as combat troops, that does not preclude some engagement with the natives. Do you understand?"

"No, sir."

"Right. Well, Sergeant, when men—soldiers—are overseas, it does not take long before they miss the comforts of home."

"Mm. Boom-boom."

Mathes dug his nails into his palms. In nine weeks of Basic, he never cracked once, and here he was going to lose it in front of a Major, a First Sergeant, and an ARVN Sergeant on a top-secret mission. Fuck this country.

"Yes," Taylor said, clearing his throat, "boom-boom. And boom-boom, as history has shown us, leads to children." The Major actually began to redden a bit. "Now, Sergeant, a man cannot simply bring home a child at the end of his tour. The wife and kids might not take well to a new baby brother or sister."

"Bui doi," Tinh said.

"Yes, I believe that’s the native phrase. Not as harsh as the English—"

"Bastards," snarled Sergeant Kitchen.

"Thank you, Sergeant. Now, lest you think all Americans heartless, Sergeant Tinh, there has been a sort of enterprise enacted to look after these children, to try to keep them off the streets."

"Mm. This nightclub."

"Yes. Vietnam AmerAsians is the quaint label our government gave these little bundles of joy. Despite whatever monetary support their fathers see fit to part with, their mothers often must continue to work, as waitresses, bar mistresses—"

"Whores," said Kitchen.

"Sergeant Kitchen, do you want to take over this briefing?"

"Uh, no, sir, I—"

"The VAA Nightclub," Taylor went on, "is the home of an old mama-san who watches over these infants. A Mrs. … what’s the name again, Sergeant Bigmouth?"

Mathes actually whimpered a bit in the back of his throat.

"Tu, sir," Kitchen said. "Mama Tu, the men call her. Sir."

"Yes, and unfortunately, Sergeant Tinh, these children have just last night been kidnapped from under Mama Tu’s watchful eyes."

"How many?" said Tinh.

"Three boys and a girl. We received word that they are being held for ransom at $10,000 apiece. Even if we had the money, which we don’t, there is little doubt these children would not be returned alive."

"Yes, sir. You want me to find these b?i d?i and bring them back alive."

"Can you do it, Sergeant? We need it done quietly and very, very quickly."

"Yes, sir."

Taylor smiled down at him. "Very well. We have picked the right man for this job. Dismissed."

"Sir?"

"Yes, Sergeant Kitchen."

Mathes dared to take his eyes from the ceiling and saw Kitchen glaring at him as he spoke. Glaring and grinning. "Sir, as grateful as I’m sure we all are for Sergeant Tinh’s help, perhaps it would be wise to send one of our men along with him." He paused, and Mathes could have sworn he was about to lick his lips. "In a purely advisory capacity, of course."

My hummed as she tended the cookfire, boiling some milk. A loose strand of hair hung in her face and she brushed it back behind her ear. Thuy felt the foolish yearning for her he’d felt when they were but children. He hurriedly pushed it away. "Woman!" he said. "Where is my supper? Must I wait until these brats are seen to?"

"They’ll be awake soon, Thuy," she said softly. "Even sooner if you don’t keep your voice down."

"This is my home! I’ll speak as I please."

"It was your idea to bring these children here," My said. "Your glorious five-day plan."

"I will not be mocked, woman," Thuy said as he strode towards her. "Not even by you."

Hai ran into the hut. "Sir! The Americans have enlisted Son Tinh, sir! Just as you said they would, sir!" Hai’s broad grin and lazy right eye made him look more like a stupid kid than usual.

Thuy allowed himself a smile. "Excellent news, comrade. Assure Le he will be justly recompensed."

Hai frowned. "Sir…?"

Thuy fetched a weary sigh. "Tell Le he will get boo-koo reward. The weapons have all been cleaned and inspected?"

"Yes, sir!" Hai said, "I inspected them myself."

"Well, I suppose we’ll have to hope for the best anyway."

Hai smiled, but My scowled at Thuy. "Thuy! Hai has done nothing but serve you loyally. Must you be so … so unpleasant?"

Thuy grunted. "Good work, Hai. Go below and tell the men to prepare. We should expect Sergeant Tinh in the next 36 hours. 48 at most."

Hai saluted and hurried down through the trap door.

My smiled after him. "You see—"

Thuy gripped her by the arm and whirled her around. "You will not chide me in front of my troops, woman! Understand?"

"Thuy, you’re hurting me—"

"Do you understand? Answer me!"

My’s eyes flashed, but then she lowered her head. "Yes."

"What?"

My’s lower lip trembled. "Yes, sir."

Thuy released her arm.

The milk began to burn, and the smell of rancid almonds floated on the air. In their pen, the mongrels awoke and began crying.

The Nightclub was a few blocks away, but Tinh insisted they go up to the marketplace, procure themselves some cigarettes and some bac si de. Mathes glared at him. "Hardly the time for a drink, Sarge."

"Always time for a drink, Joe."

"Man, goddammit—my name is Mathes. Corporal Mathes!"

"What’s your first name, Mathes?"

Mathes’ face got redder. "All right, it is Joseph, as a matter of fact. But you didn’t fuckin’ know that!"

"Mm," Tinh said, the corner of his mouth tugging up a fraction. "You don’t like this mission, do you, Mathes?"

"Following some crazy Arvin Christ-knows-where to save a handful of half-gook bastards? The fuck do you think? That sound like a good mission to you, Sarge?"

"No, it don’t," Tinh said. "But it does sound like you need a drink."

Even in the rain, the marketplace was packed, water dripping from the colorful overhangs at each stall. Mathes had never ventured down here, preferring to take his chances on whatever C-rations they had back at MACV. And with good reason, he now saw. Everybody in the marketplace chattered loudly, bickering back and forth. Mathes saw bottles of wine with scorpions in them, fertilized duck eggs eaten with a spoon, and in one lone stall was something called thit cho. Mathes asked Tinh what that was.

"Mm. Dog meat."

Mathes almost puked right there. "Jesus Christ, man!"

"Mm. Big in Hanoi," said Tinh.

Mathes followed in Tinh’s steps. No one seemed to give the big Yankee a second glance, but Mathes couldn’t shake the feeling they were all staring. They arrived at a stall, and Mathes stationed himself in the corner where no one could sneak up on him.

The stall’s owner greeted Tinh with a hearty smile, and Mathes was surprised to see Tinh smile back. They took the next minute to scream at each other in Vietnamese and French.

"Hey, Tinh," Mathes said, "calm down. What’s the problem?"

"We’re haggling. How much money you got, Mathes?"

Mathes shrugged. "I dunno. Fifty bucks."

"Mm. Lemme borrow it, huh?"

"What?"

"You want this mission over with ASAP, right?"

"Well, yeah—"

"Then borrow me fifty bucks."

Mathes reached for his wallet. His eyes popped. "My fuckin’ wallet’s gone! Goddammit, I—"

Tinh held up his wallet. "Gotta watch that, Mathes. Lotsa pickpockets."

Mathes snatched at it, but Tinh removed the cash first before handing it back. Tinh looked at the owner, held up the money.

The owner turned and hollered at the back of the stall. A moment later, a small boy appeared carrying a case of Lucky Strikes. Tinh handed it to Mathes. "Makes a fine tobacco."

Mathes grunted.

Tinh and the owner spoke some more, their raucous Vietnamese giving Mathes a headache. The owner reached under the table and produced an unlabeled bottle. Tinh took it and they yelled at each other some more until the owner handed him another bottle. Tinh handed over Mathes’ cash.

"Let’s go," he said.

In the jeep, Tinh pulled the cork from one of the bottles and took a pull, then another. He handed it to Mathes.

"I’m driving here, man."

"Mm. I know." Tinh pushed the bottle at him.

Mathes took it and glanced down at the milky stuff inside. Looked harmless. How much bite could there be in whiskey made of rice? He put the bottle to his lips and knocked back a quick slug.

Fire immediately spread over his tongue. Mathes jerked the wheel to the left, almost plowing into a scooter. As Mathes corrected the jeep, a cottony feel dripped down his throat, coated his guts. It felt like a thin layer of Fluffernutter in his esophagus.

"Mm," Tinh said. "Good?"

Mathes smiled and nodded.

"Mm. Good."

They found Mama Tu on the porch of the VAA Nightclub, bundled up in her chair, watching the drizzle and smoking a cigarette. She didn’t look any worse for the wear to Mathes, except he’d never seen her scowl quite like that. Could just be that he’d never seen her in the light of day.

Tinh bowed deeply to her and nudged Mathes to do the same. Tinh elbowed Mathes again, and Mathes handed her one of the whiskey bottles.

She leaned forward to take it. "Thankee, Joe."

"Yes, ma’am."

Tinh handed her the other bottle. She said in Vietnamese, "They stuck you with this round-eye?"

"He’s here in an advisory capacity."

Mama Tu laughed. "And who’s going to advise him?" she said, smiling warmly at Mathes. Mathes smiled back. The rain came down harder, but she did not invite them onto the porch.

"Mama Tu," Tinh said, "please tell me what happened."

She pulled on her cigarette. "I was watching the babies. The boys were sleeping, but Yen began crying. She had a nightmare."

"What time?"

"About three. Then this big asshole came stomping in and shoved a gun in my face, said they were taking the babies."

"They?"

"Him and two others. Wearing masks."

"What did they look like? Apart from the masks?"

Mama Tu got up from her chair and went into the house. Mathes looked at Tinh. Tinh watched the door patiently. Mama Tu returned with three glasses and handed them to Tinh. He poured as she lowered herself back into the chair.

Mama Tu said, "Mot hai ba, yo," and they all clinked glasses. Mathes took a sip but saw that they were draining theirs. He held his breath and guzzled his. When he brought the glass down, the rain blurred his eyes. He wiped at them, but they were still blurry.

Mama Tu said, "The leader was big. A scar down his right forearm. The other man was bigger, moved like he didn’t know how his body worked. An idiot. They both had country accents. Farm boys."

"And the third?"

Mama Tu looked at her glass. "A woman. Small, skinny. Very young."

Tinh’s glass shattered in his hand.

Mathes said, "Jesus! What is it?"

Tinh said to Mama Tu, "You knew who they were."

She looked at him. "I know who I wish they weren’t."

Mathes had no idea what to make of Tinh’s expression. Confusion? Fear? Any emotion looked out of place on Tinh, and Mathes wasn’t sure it wasn’t the booze talking. Jesus, these gooks could brew some whiskey.

After a second, Tinh’s normal blank look returned. "Mm. Thank you, Mama Tu."

Mama Tu gestured with her glass. "Thank you, Son Tinh."

Tinh bowed again. Mathes did the same. He followed Tinh to the jeep, pulled his poncho out from under the driver’s seat, and put it on. "Where to?" he said.

"Hell," Sergeant Tinh said. "But we gotta make a stop first."

The rain poured down, but the compound was largely dry. Deep in the jungle thicket, the four huts sat under protection of the green canopy. The creek that ran alongside swelled, but was far from reaching the high banks. My knew this would not last if the rain kept up like this.

She carefully walked across the rickety bridge, her yellow ao dai plastered to her lithe form. She stopped and looked up at the gray sky. She thought she heard a plane, her toes involuntarily curling in her slippers. But it was just her imagination.

At the far end of the bridge, Thuy unpacked the case of MON-50 claymores and handed them to My. He was in unusually high spirits, humming as he worked.

"Darling," she said, "this bridge would collapse under the weight of a large sneeze. Is all this ordinance really necessary?"

Thuy clucked his tongue. "My dear girl, once this war gets properly underway, it’s only the drama anyone will remember. We have to give the fucking Americans a show or we’ll never get rid of them. That’s all they give a shit about: fireworks."

"The Americans? I thought Son Tinh—I thought he was expected?" My frowned up at the sky, as though the gods were listening.

"Same fucking thing, as far as I’m concerned."

"But the tunnels will be manned, there will be ground patrols inside the perimeter. Anyone with even half a brain would never use this old thing in a frontal assault." She batted at the bridge to emphasize her point. It groaned in agreement.

"If this goes like I think it will, no one will cross this bridge until it’s all over. If it’s me, I’ll blow the damn thing myself. If it’s our adversary," he said, pulling the tripwire tight across the mouth of the bridge, "then he’ll do the honors for me."

And then Thuy actually smiled.

"Who the fuck’re these guys again?" Mathes said. He had a terrible itch on his nose, but he didn’t dare scratch.

"Old friends," Tinh said. His hands, like Mathes’, were held high in the air.

The docks on this part of the Saigon River were rotting. Any boats moored were peeling apart at the seams, clinging to buoyancy. As they had approached, they’d seen no signs of life, except for some stray dogs Mathes later realized were rats. The little shipyard looked abandoned apart from the chain link gate, which looked brand new. Mathes had been admiring the action on it, how easily it rolled, when he looked up and there was a pistol in his face.

If the five men holding guns on them were bothered by the rain, they didn’t show it. They stood silent, the rain hammering the hulking wrecks of pontoons and various other boats in the yard. The five gooks were dressed in ratty uniforms pieced together from other armies: a French shirt, a Russian jacket, Chinese hats. The United Nations of Fuck You, Yankee.

"Now what?" Mathes said to Tinh from the corner of his mouth.

A raucous laugh rose from behind the shack in the center of the yard. "What are these vermin we’ve caught?" A voice in Vietnamese. "Too skinny for wharf rats!"

"It’s Son Tinh, you toothless fuck. Call off your dogs."

A tiny man came around the shack, his rusty M-16 as big as he. When he laughed again, Mathes saw his mouth, as black as the ace of clubs. "Gimme one good reason I should help you, Son Tinh!"

"Because if you don’t, Gummy Ba, I’ll rape that toothless hole in your head right here in front of your men."

None of Gummy Ba’s men blinked, but they all racked the slides on their pistols.

"Jesus Christ!" Mathes said. "The fuck you say to them?"

"Ha ha!" Gummy Ba said. "Your ladyfriend is jealous, Son Tinh! Better send her back to Hollywood!"

"You like?" Son Tinh said. "I was going to trade you something else for help, but …"

"What’re you talking about?"

"We need your help to fight Thuy. Now’s your chance to get back at him for making you look like a faggot back in ’55."

Ba pointed the M-16 at Tinh’s face. "Help you? Gimme one goddamn reason!"

"The case of American cigarettes we got in the jeep."

"Yeah, that’s a good one." Gummy Ba lowered his weapon. His men lowered theirs. "Hey, Joe," Ba said to Mathes in English, "you got smokee? Why the fuck you no say?"

An hour before, these gooks held guns on him. Now they were getting him absolutely polluted on rice whiskey and Mu’o'i Bu, the shittiest beer Mathes had ever eagerly guzzled in his life. As the sun went down, they cooked chickens on a spit over an oil drum, a leaky tarp keeping most of the rain off them. The wind whipped rain in at them occasionally, but it wasn’t long before they were too drunk to care.

"The fuck’re these guys again?" Mathes said.

"Các Binh Si Cu," Tinh replied, lighting Mathes’ cigarette.

"The Old Soldiers, Joe!" Gummy Ba shouted in his face. Even past the booze and meat, Gummy Ba’s breath smelled like twice-cooked shit.

"Uh-huh," Mathes said. "Like ARVN?"

"Fuck ARVN!" Gummy Ba said. "Fuck ARVN, fuck the Minh, and fuck fuckin’ Uncle Ho! You like that, Joe?"

"Sure thing." Mathes smiled. Gummy Ba laughed some more and wandered off for another beer. Mathes turned to Tinh. "How do you know these nutjobs, Sarge?"

Tinh took a long pull from his bottle. "Long time ago, there was the Binh Xuyen. Like ARVN, but not as shitty. We were an independent army inside the VNA. Part of it, but we run our own business."

"Used to be you boys’ outfit, huh?"

"Yes, a good outfit. We fight the French, fuck them up good. But they drive us south anyways. Binh Xuyen good soldiers, but better gangsters."

"Gangsters?"

"We fucking owned Saigon, Joe!" Gummy Ba said, loping up to them with a fresh beer in each hand. "We smuggle, run protection, kidnap rich fucks. We owned this town!"

"It’s true," said Tinh. "We kept the Viet Minh and the Red Chinese cocksuckers out of Saigon. But then our leader, our general, Bay Vien, he fuck up."

"He try to take out Diem, Joe! How you like that? The fucking president!"

"He fuck up bad. Have to … what you say? Exile?"

"Exile, yeah."

Gummy Ba puckered his lips and batted his eyelashes. "He go to gay Paree! Become dancing girl! Make boom-boom with boo-koo French soldiers!" And then he laughed from deep in his chest.

"Bay Vien exiled to Paris. Binh Xuyen all over with, far as we’re concerned. I joined ARVN. Ba stayed with his crew."

"What’s left of it," Ba said.

"And Thuy?" Mathes said. "He a part of all that?"

"Mm. He went with Diem. For a time, anyway."

"Fuck Diem," Gummy Ba said with a sneer and sulked off.

"The regular VNA kicked the shit out of us. Ran us out of Saigon, pushed us back into the jungle. Rung Sat. And we kept fighting anyway. Had nothing else to do. One night, middle of a firefight, Thuy was about to slit Ba’s throat until I showed up. We fought, but it was a draw. It was always a draw, since we were kids."

"Kids?"

"Mm. He had a knife, gave me this." Tinh pointed at the scar on his brow. "I took it away from him, though, tried to put it through his heart, but only managed to slice his arm open. And then Ba cold-cocked him and we got the fuck out of there."

"You guys knew each other when you were kids?" Mathes said.

Sergeant Tinh sighed. "Mathes, it’s late. We got a day and a half hump to talk about all that."

"Oh, okay," Mathes said and drained his bottle. Then he spit it all out. "Fuckin’ day and a half?"

It was just over a day’s haul down the Saigon River to the Mekong. Gummy Ba and his crew had a gunboat that had seen its best days in the Big One. There was barely enough room for the eight of them, but they were too wired on booze and impending combat to give a shit.

As they approached Vi Thanh, Ba killed the engines. They left the boat in a meander, the trees creating something like a cave. Mathes had never seen such pitch black before. He longed for the streetlights of the city, any city.

"Let’s go," Sergeant Tinh said.

They humped through the jungle, Mathes weighed down with a heavy pack full of rations. They didn’t plan on being in the jungle for long but, as Ba put it, "Nobody plans to starve to death, Joe. It just happen!"

Tinh, Ba, and his men each had M1 rifles. Ba was armed with his trusty, rusty M-16. And one man, Lang, had an AK.

They had not walked long when Lang, on point, held up a hand. They all stopped. Ba and Tinh whispered in Vietnamese. Ba signaled to Lang. Lang melted into the jungle.

"Now what?" Mathes said.

"Lang’s going on recon," Tinh said. "Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em."

"Where are we? Do we even know where we’re going?"

"Yep."

"Well, how? How do you know where this Thuy is holed up?"

Tinh lit himself a cigarette, the light of the flame cupped in his hands. "Because we grew up here."

Two hours later, Lang was back with the skinny: four huts formed a square in a small clearing two klicks away. Ten men patrolling the grounds. Lights on in one hut, but men in and out of two of the other three. A creek ran along the east of the clearing, spanned by a rickety wooden bridge. Half a klick north of the bridge was a tunnel entrance. There was no way to know how many men were down there, waiting for them.

"Only one way to find out," Tinh said.

As they approached the clearing, the rain tapered off and then stopped altogether.

"Good deal," Mathes whispered.

"Mm," Tinh said, "not so much. We could have used the cover."

"You want cover, Son Tinh?" Gummy Ba said. "We can do that."

And he hurled a grenade towards the clearing.

The bullets whizzed above Mathes’ head as he followed Sergeant Tinh to the tunnel entrance, the yellow trails of the bullets in the air like fireflies. Thuy’s men sounded the charge, but Gummy Ba’s crew remained relatively quiet, their bursts of rifle-fire short and sharp. The answering fire was long and scattered, giving Ba and his men plenty of time to maneuver while the enemy fired wild into the bush.

Mathes felt his throat dry up, nearly closing. He wished for the first time since he’d landed in this soggy nightmare that it’d fucking rain again. He held his service revolver in both hands, covering the Sarge’s back. As they neared the tunnel, one of Thuy’s men popped out like a jack-in-the-box.

Tinh was on him with his KA-BAR in an instant, giving the gook another smile under his chin. The next man out of the tunnel got Tinh’s boot in his face. Mathes heard the man’s nose smash into his own skull, and his K-rations started coming back on him. Tinh stomped the man’s face twice more, just to be sure. "Let’s go."

The tunnel was small, the ceiling so low that even Tinh had to hunch over. Mathes’ knuckles were almost to the ground. There was little light, a low red glow, but Mathes never determined the source. He just stayed on the Sarge’s heels, almost bowling him over each time they came to a cross-tunnel and the Sarge stopped to listen for approaching enemy. Mathes had no idea how long they were down there, time a distant memory, like pussy or joy. The weight of the earth above, the jungle, the foreign men and their foreign war, they all pressed down on Mathes’ head, until he felt like screaming his throat raw.

At the next cross-tunnel, two men approached from their left. Tinh let the first one crawl past, and then jammed his knife into the neck of the second man. He died silently, his windpipe neatly sliced in half, but as his body collapsed to the ground, his buddy turned. He drew in a breath. Mathes raised his pistol.

"No!" Tinh said, but Mathes pulled the trigger and blew the gook’s brains out the back of his hat. The shot deafened them both, and for a second, Mathes wasn’t sure that he hadn’t just shot himself in the head.

Tinh didn’t take the time to explain that Mathes had ruined whatever stealth they’d had. He just worked the strap of the AK off the nearest dead man and took point. He moved dead ahead, heedless of any cross-tunnels.

They turned right, then left, then right again. Tinh caught sight of two more men coming at him from fifty feet away. He put his shoulders up, trying to cover his ears as best he could, and opened fire. The AK tore through both men. Tinh never stopped, stepped right over the bodies in his path. His throbbing ears picked up shouts, but he had no idea where they were coming from. He kept his finger on the trigger.

"Mathes!" he shouted. "Your six!"

Mathes turned and the big gook was on top of him. How they ever fit this boy down in this tunnel was beyond him. He was shirtless, and his brown skin almost glowed. He leered at Mathes as he brought his hands up around the young corporal’s throat. Mathes stared bug-eyed as the boy—he couldn’t be any older than Mathes—strangled him with his massive hands. It took Mathes only a few seconds, though, before he put his Colt .45 under the boy’s chin and painted the ceiling with his brains.

"Jesus," Mathes said, his whisper loud in his skull. "Jesus Christ."

"Mm," said Tinh, "let’s go. And bring your buddy."

Gummy Ba had killed at least eight of Thuy’s men by himself, the jungle his cloak. He almost laughed out loud as Thuy’s men ran around like cocks with no hens. Thuy must have got these faggots wholesale from Hong Kong.

Lang appeared next to where Ba squatted watching the main hut, the soft light of its cookfire in the window. Lang nodded towards it, but Ba shook his head. "This is Tinh’s fight."

In the hut, Thuy sat in the lotus position, his rifle oiled and cleaned at his side. My lay on the floor, her sights on the trapdoor in the corner. The mongrels howled now. Thuy had almost succeeded in shutting out the noise, the screams, the smell of smoke. But then Hai burst in. A thin trail of blood was spattered across his face.

"Sir!" he said, "they’re killing us out there! I don’t know what to do!"

"You can start by shutting the fuck up." Thuy rose. He walked calmly to Hai, the idiot’s lazy eye spinning in uncontrollable circles in its socket. Thuy smiled and then slapped him in the face. "And then you can close the door. We’re expecting our real company any moment now."

Hai did as he was told and then squatted down in the opposite corner from the trapdoor, his rifle in his shaking hands.

Thuy stood in the center of the room, his hands clasped behind his back. The rain outside started up again, a few sprinkles on the roof, and then sheets of rain. The scar on Thuy’s right arm began to itch.

Slowly, so slowly, the trapdoor opened.

My’s whole body tensed, then relaxed.

A hand poked up through the trapdoor. Then the door itself opened all the way.

My fired, just once. The trapdoor slammed shut, and they heard the ladder snap as whoever it was fell back to the tunnel floor. The babies screamed louder.

Hai laughed. He bounced across the room and flung the trapdoor open.

My had time to shout, "Hai!" before a .45 round tore Hai’s face off.

Sergeant Son Tinh rose from out of the tunnel. He fired Mathes’ revolver at My, clipping her in the shoulder. The yellow of her ao dai blossomed a red flower. She fell to the floor with a cry, landing on her narrow bottom.

Tinh faced his brother. "Shall we?" he said to Thuy Tinh.

"We shall."

Corporal Joseph Mathes once saw a Marine, a big black private, smash another Marine’s teeth into a curb outside a bar in Fallbrook. In high school, he saw two greasers get in a knife fight over a girl, watched as one slit the other’s stomach open. The kid’s guts showed, just a little, through the curtain of blood. A bunch of the guys, just six months ago, dragged him to a dogfight in Cholon, and he watched two scrawny mutts fight until one tore the other’s throat out with its teeth.

He’d never seen anything like this.

Tinh dropped Mathes’ pistol, and then carefully removed and laid down the AK strapped to his chest. He tossed the KA-BAR away. It landed point-first in the floor with a thunk. Thuy kicked away his own AK. He lifted his shirt to show no weapons in his belt. Then they both bowed to each other.

Thuy leapt across the room with a yell. Tinh blocked his punch and then bowled him over. Thuy landed on his back, and kicked up, catching Tinh in the chest. Tinh took three steps back as Thuy leapt to his feet in one motion, landed in a crouch, and swept a kick at Tinh’s legs. Tinh jumped, bending his legs at the knees, and then landed knee-first as he delivered a tremendous punch to Thuy’s face. Both men rolled back into a somersault, onto their feet, and back into a crouch. Thuy smiled at his brother. Tinh did not return it.

This time they came at each other simultaneously. Mathes, crouched on top of the tunnel’s ladder, could not make out their individual fists in the flurry of blows that followed. Each man would block, block, block, every third or fourth blow finding its mark. Blood exploded from Thuy’s nose, Tinh’s mouth. Tinh grabbed Thuy’s left arm and pulled it up behind his back. Thuy stomped his instep and elbowed him in the kidney with his free arm.

Tinh whirled back and around. Thuy spun him further, whipping him into the wall. Mathes looked to the woman still staring at her bloody shoulder in disbelief, and then moved his attention to the bamboo pen where the babies were kept. They screamed and howled. But one baby had pulled herself up and was just standing there. Watching.

Thuy pinned Tinh’s throat to the wall and punched him in the breadbasket. As the air rushed out his lungs, Tinh felt Thuy’s hold on his throat tighten. He butted at Thuy’s face, but Thuy shook the blow off and laughed.

"When you get to hell, little brother," Thuy said, "be sure to have the devil build a new wing for all your American friends." And he reached back and drew the short knife he had hidden under his belt.

The baby pointed and said, "Uh-da!"

Mathes said, "Sarge!"

My grabbed the Colt off the floor and fired.

Thuy saw the bullet strike Tinh in the shoulder, but then felt the blood running down his own back and knew it had passed through him first. He immediately released Tinh and turned, and then My fired again, shooting him in the stomach.

Thuy fell to the floor.

Tinh coughed and coughed as Mathes pulled himself out of the trapdoor, kicked the gun out of My’s hand. "Don’t move, lady. We’re taking these kids and we’re getting out of here."

Tinh looked down at his older brother, watched the blood pool on the floor. Thuy smiled. "You might as well kill them now, Son Tinh. Fucking b?i d?i. You know as well as I do what kind of life they’ll have."

"Your blood," Tinh said. "I can smell the Chinese in it."

Thuy laughed, a pathetic wheeze. "Yes, it stinks. You should be used to it by now, though, I would think."

Tinh reached down and pulled the KA-BAR out of the floor. "Say hello to Father for me."

"I will," Thuy said. "Chúc ng? ngon, Son Tinh."

"Good night, Thuy Tinh." Sergeant Tinh cut Thuy’s throat. "You fucking asshole."

Son Tinh focused carefully on My’s shoulder as he bandaged it but could feel her eyes boring into his face. He said, "Does this mean you’ll take me back, little one?"

My laughed. "Not if you were the last bastard in Vietnam, Son Tinh."

"That’s what I thought."

He let that hang in the air. My waited until he’d finished bandaging her up and looked her in the eye. She said, "Once, Thuy Tinh fought with honor for his homeland. But somewhere along the way, he began fighting for himself, and with dishonor. Bringing a knife to a fistfight was the last straw."

"Mm." Son Tinh nodded. "Can I get you anything else, My?"

"Yes," she said. "You can get the fuck out of my house."

Son Tinh gave a sharp whistle. After a few minutes, Gummy Ba returned it, signaling the all-clear. Mathes and Tinh came out, each with two babies in his arms. All of them except little Yen cried and screamed in the rain.

Even with the ringing in his ears and the screaming bastards in his arms, Mathes smiled hugely at Gummy Ba and his men standing at the bridge. "Well, goddamn, boys!" he said. "Mission accomplished, huh? Let’s go home." He stepped onto the bridge and Gummy Ba hauled him back.

"You fucking crazy, Joe?" he said and pointed at the MON-50 poking out from under the bridge, glistening in the rain.

"You want whole place go up?" Ba said.

"Sure he does," Tinh said. "But not tonight."

THE END

Jimmy Callaway lives and works in San Diego, CA. He is the underboss of Criminal Complex and overboss of Attention, Children and Let’s Kill Everybody!

THEY CALL HIM CRUEL: Burn In

By Moses Starkweather

(discovered by Frank Larnerd)

Not all men’s adventure books of the mid-1980s were Reagan-era paranoia combined with liberal doses of gun porn (and borderline actual porn). Some authors used the freedom of the genre to make social commentary and show the grit and grime of the world they themselves lived in. The Cruel series was short-lived but has been cited as an influence on many writers' work, including discoverer FRANK LARNERD.

"Give me your money."

The kid was probably twelve or thirteen, skinny with light brown skin, Puerto Rican or Cuban maybe. He wore a green Dan Marino jersey that was at least two sizes too big and hung nearly halfway down his thighs. Under the kid’s right eye were the remnants of a purple bruise.

He made a stabbing motion with the gun and repeated, "Give me your money."

I had seen the kid earlier that day. He had been in the back of the arcade, hanging out with three older kids I recognized: teenage trash from Staten Island who took the bus across the Verrazano Bridge to sling herb and harass the girls from Fontbonne Academy.

They wore matching black bandannas tied around their legs. In Park Hills they might have been big shit, but to me they just looked like angry assholes hungry to shit on the world.

I had kicked out the oldest kid twice before. Once for dealing dime-bags and the second time for kicking the coin door of a Defender machine. I’d heard someone call him "Sello" once.

I pushed my way through his two friends to where Sello was playing Ghost’n Goblins. They were teenage vultures dressed in red vinyl jackets and leaking zits. Both of them were in their late teens. One looked like Charlie Brown, bald with giant jug ears; the other was bucktoothed and wearing 3-D glasses.

Sello was hunched over, his fingers bouncing from button to button on the game’s control panel. He was an ugly fucker, fat-lipped and greasy looking. A Marlboro dangled from his lips as he cursed at the monitor.

"Goddamn bunch of bullshit! Did you guys see that? I swear this game is fuckin’ broken."

I got close and bumped him with my chest. The game gave out a mournful tone as Sello lost a life.

He flew up, snapping. "Watch it, bitch!"

I leaned in closer and let his eyes take in my 255 pounds. I’m six two, but a foot taller with my mohawk. I flexed my arms and leaned into his face.

"I told you to stay away."

Sello took a step back, giving me a yellow grin.

"It’s fresh. Ask the man."

He nodded behind the counter where my Uncle Milo counted out tokens to two kids in day-glo shirts.

I stepped in closer, so that Sello’s chest touched mine.

"Get the fuck out, before I tear off your face and use it to wipe my ass."

"It’s cool, man." said Sello’s friend with the 3-D glasses.

"It’s not cool," Sello snarled. "The Threats run with Mr. Bread now. Just ’cause you’re built like Hulk Hogan doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. Remember that."

I had heard about Mr. Bread. He was supposed to be a heavy, making a name for himself dealing junk and breaking arms down in Park Hills.

I showed Sello my crazy face.

"Let’s get out of here," Sello said. "This place smells like shit anyway."

When they left, the kid in the Dan Marino jersey hung his head and followed.

Five minutes ’til closing, the kid came back by himself. Not playing anything, just standing off to the side, watching the demo on Bega’s Battle loop over and over.

At eight, I flipped the switch behind the counter, shutting down the games. I let the last few kids duck under the retractable security gate and when I turned, the kid in the Dan Marino jersey had a gun on me.

It was a .38 revolver with a dark metal finish. In the kid’s hand, it looked big and heavy. Good thing my uncle had already gone upstairs. If the kid had pulled a gun on him, Milo might have killed him.

"Here," I said and tugged on the chain attached to my wallet. "I’ve got twenty bucks."

I opened my wallet to show him. When the kid looked, I kicked him in the chest with my combat boot.

The kid flew backward and bounced off a Dig Dug machine, slamming into the floor. Pained sucking sounds came from his throat as he tried to draw in breath. I grabbed the gun off the speckled carpet and jammed it in the studded leather belt I was wearing.

With one arm, I grabbed the kid by his collar and jerked him off the ground so we were eye to eye. His face was panicked as silent tears floated down his cheeks.

"You still want to rob me?"

He shook his head and I set him down. I let him cough and wheeze for a minute until he got his breath back.

"Do you know who I am?"

The kid nodded, "Sello said they call you Cruel."

"He tell you why?"

"He said you pulled off a Russian guy’s toes. Tony T said it was ’cause you broke Jimmy Future’s legs with a shopping cart full of cinderblocks."

I couldn’t help smiling.

"Sello, Tony T? Those your friends? They put you up to this?"

"The Threats," the kid said. "They said it was my initiation."

"Why would you want to join those assholes?"

The kid shrugged, "Protection, I guess."

"They hassle you?"

"Not really. But they’ll kill me when they find out you got their gun."

"What’s your name?"

"Hector."

"Come up stairs for a sec."

I showed Hector to the stairwell that leads to the apartment above the arcade. Inside, Milo was asleep in his La-Z-Boy, a half-eaten TV dinner and several beer cans sat beside him. I tossed a brightly colored afghan over him and switched off the television. I put a finger to my lips and Hector followed me down the hall, past dozens of Milo’s Vietnam photos, to my room.

The kid stood in the door, while I pulled out my earrings and laid them on the desk. I took a moment to fluff up my mohawk and pulled the gun from my belt.

"What’s wrong with it?" Hector asked, nodding at the game cabinet I had in the corner next to my weights.

"Burn in."

"What’s that?"

"Sometimes, if the brightness is set to high, a monitor gets discolored so that you can still see the game even after it’s turned off. Take a look."

Hector approached the arcade machine and gently traced the ghostly maze with a finger.

"How do you fix it?"

"You don’t."

I opened the desk’s top drawer and shook out the bullets into it. Then, I pulled some hollow points from a rectangular box I had hidden behind some socks. One at a time, I squeezed the bullets in the gun’s cylinders. After that, I grabbed my jean jacket and slipped the gun into the inside pocket.

"What are you gonna do?" Hector asked.

I snatched my nunchucks off the bedpost and put them in my back pocket. "I’m gonna give Sello his gun back."

Hector followed me across 99th Street and up two blocks to the bus stop.

While we waited, the kid asked, "What time is it?"

"Eight thirty," I said. "Why? You got some place you need to be?"

Hector shrugged. "It’s my dad. He gets super pissed when I’m late."

"You should have thought about that before you decided to rob me. You can go home. After I talk to Sello."

Ten minutes later we were rolling over the Staten Island Expressway. Hector sat beside me, his refection shimmering in the bus window as he looked out to Gravesend Bay. His image looked ghostly and grim.

I slipped my headphones under my jaw and popped a Misfits cassette into my Walkman. Closing my eyes, I let the music wash over me.

Before Milo came back from ‘Nam and took me in, I lived with the Junkman. It wasn’t a real house, it was a foster house, two double-wides welded together next to a maze of ruined cars. The whole place was surrounded by tall chain-link fences topped with razor wire. It kept people out, and us in.

The Junkman had rules for everything: how to eat, when to use the bathroom, when to sleep. He didn’t allow us to look at him, or speak without being spoken to. If you broke the rules, you sat in the chair.

Stevie was one of the kids I shared a bunk with. He was quiet with hound dog eyes, but really tough. Of all the kids the Junkman kept, Stevie was the only one who never cried. He was the one who taught me how to turn off the pain. On the night I ran away, it was Stevie who called me "Cruel."

Hector and I switched buses on New York Avenue, catching the last bus to Clifton.

"What time is it?" Hector asked as the bus barreled through the evening traffic.

"Maybe nine thirty."

"Man, I got to get home."

We got off the bus at Hylan and walked past the darkened store fronts. The kid didn’t talk. After a few blocks, Hector pointed at a brown six-story apartment complex.

"221. Right up the stairs."

"Wait here."

"I can’t," Hector said. "I got to get home."

I moved the revolver out of the jacket and into my belt. "Alright. But if you’re lying, I’ll come find you."

"I promise. I ain’t lying."

I nodded and watched him disappear down an alley.

Cutting through the parking lot, I noticed a Corvette with a custom New York plate.

It read: BREAD.

Inside the building, the floor was littered with trash. Wrappers, dirty diapers, and spoiled take-out covered every inch. Graffiti marred the walls with wisdom like: "Jamaykan queens can’t tame me" and "If you can’t fuck a 10, fuck five 2's."

I followed the narrow stairwell to the second floor and listened outside of apartment 221. Living with the Junkman had taught me how to walk without making a sound.

Inside, I could hear Pat Benatar howling over laughing voices. I reached up for the bare light bulb that lit the hallway. My fingertips sizzled, but I ignored the pain and unscrewed it. Without the light, it was dark except for the dim glow of street lights beyond the frosted windows. I put the light bulb in my jacket pocket.

I knocked on the door. I didn’t worry about a peep-hole; there wasn’t one.

The apartment door opened a crack. Behind the chain, I could see Charlie Brown’s ugly bald head. The darkened hallway had the same effect as a police lineup; in the dark, I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.

"Who’s there?"

I kicked the door as hard as I could.

The door chain splintered off the wall and the edge of the door flung back, striking Charlie Brown between the eyes. He flopped backward and crumpled on the floor, unconscious.

Sello and the kid with the 3-D glasses sat on a ratty couch. On the coffee table in front of them were bags of white rocks and tall stacks of ones and fives. On my right, the TV showed Pat Benatar shaking around like a hobo with a case of the DTs. I didn’t see Mr. Bread anywhere.

I stepped over Charlie Brown and put a boot on the coffee table.

"I brought your gun back, Sello."

The greasy fuck grinned. "Why don’t you hand it here?"

I kicked over the coffee table, spilling their shit everywhere.

"Why don’t you come and take it?"

Sello brushed himself off and said, "I’m gonna let my man take care of that."

Something smashed into the side of my face. I staggered back, bumping against the TV, making the picture jump. I saw another white blur and pain exploded through my skull. I dropped to my knees. Blood poured down my face and over my eye, but I could still make out who hit me.

He was big, tan and adorned with flashy gold chains. The seams of his expensive track suit strained against his massive shoulders. He was 6’4? and a solid 300 pounds. To me he looked like a Rottweiler with a pompadour.

In his hands was a toilet tank lid.

I said, "It’s nice to see you Stevie," as he hit me again.

When I came to, I was on my knees. My head pounded like a low-rider’s blown speakers. I tried to move but found that my hands had been tied to my ankles behind me. 3-D and Charlie Brown’s hightops were missing their laces, so I figured that’s what they used.

In front of me was the toilet lid, a dark splash of blood smeared one end.

On the couch, Sello and his boys finished stowing their shit in green duffel bags. Stevie sat on the couch’s arm, dabbing at drops of blood on his sleeve with a wet rag. My nunchucks hung around his massive neck; the revolver was stuck in his waistband. Once he noticed I was awake, he threw the rag down.

"I knew we’d meet up someday," Stevie said. "I almost didn’t recognize you. Your hair looks fuckin’ stupid."

I spit a tooth onto the carpet. "Fuck you, Stevie."

"People call me Mr. Bread now."

"Why?" I said. "You fucking the Pillsbury Doughboy?"

Stevie kicked me with his giant Air Jordan and dark spots swam through my vision. I fell on my side and felt the light bulb in my pocket pop.

"They call me Mr. Bread ’cause I make money. This town is mine. See these little pussies? They’re mine, too! That shit you spilled, that was mine. I was gonna turn that rock into six grand. Now I’m gonna take it out of you."

Charlie Brown laughed as Stevie grabbed my Mohawk and pulled me upright. Smiling, he held out his hand to Sello.

"Give me your blade."

Sello passed him the switchblade without a word. Stevie held it up so I could watch it snap open.

"You still like to play?"

He dug the blade’s point into my skin and carved a long line diagonally across my chest. He watched my eyes for any sign of pain. I didn’t show him any; he had taught me too well.

"Damn, Mr. Bread!" 3-D said.

Stevie sliced me again, peeling a large, bloody X on my chest. I didn’t try to move away. I didn’t even blink. I just took the pain and pushed it inside.

When we lived with the Junkman, Stevie was the tattletale. When we were punished, he’d stand to the side and watch us cry. Once he was big enough, he started helping. At first, the Junkman had him do little things: holding down kicking feet or snapping Polaroids.

After a while, the Junkman had Stevie doing all the punishments. That way, the Junkman could sit back and watch.

One day, Stevie showed the Junkman where I hid the sock of loose change I found in the junkers from the yard.

The Junkman said, "You stealing from me?"

I looked at the floor. "No, sir."

"Everything here belongs to me. It might look like trash, but it’s mine."

The Junkman grabbed my face and held it so I was forced to look at him.

"People think you’re trash, but you’re my trash."

He sat on the edge of the bed and took a long drink from his bottle. Stevie sat next to him, smiling. I tried not to look at the barber chair, or the ashtray and its mound of blackened matchsticks.

The Junkman said, "Take down your pants and get in the chair."

I did as he told me. The barber chair’s seat felt cool and sticky against my bare legs. The bed creaked as Stevie got up and stood beside me.

Using the Velcro straps, he tied down my hands and feet. I didn’t fight back. If you fought back, it was always worse.

With the palms of his hands, the Junkman began rubbing his thighs over and over. Stevie lit a match and held it to the wire hanger.

"I’m a kid just like you," I whispered.

Stevie smiled and said, "You’re nothing like me. You’re weak."

I didn’t cry and I didn’t scream. It was like I floated outside myself, taking all my hurt and pain and shoving it down where it couldn’t hurt me anymore.

Still, it was a long time before it was over.

That night, once everyone was asleep, I snuck out into the junkyard. I limped past the towers of flattened cars until I stood by the yard’s rear fence. Beyond it, I could see the trees of Otsego Park sway in the midnight breeze. I sat for a long time, just trying to think. When I decided to go back inside, something hissed at me from the darkness.

Five feet away, half hidden in shadow was a steel run-through trap. Inside were two large brown rats, half-starved with their tiny rib cages showing beneath their fur.

All that pain I had pushed down began to bubble up.

In an hour, I found three more traps around the yard. One was empty but the other two had one rat a piece. It was pretty easy to get them all in the same trap.

I salvaged a box cutter and an empty twelve-gallon bucket from behind the office. A Ford provided its seatbelts. A piece of upholstery from a Chevy’s interior, some rusty nails, and I was ready.

The moon was high in the sky as I set the bucket and rat trap outside the trailer door. I sat on the cinderblock steps and took off my filthy Chuck Taylors. Then, I eased the door open and crept inside.

I was careful not to make a sound.

Once in the bedroom, I carefully tied the Junkman’s feet to the bed’s legs with long strips of seatbelt. I moved to the head of the bed and got his left arm tied down. Circling to the other side, I heard the Junkman cough.

He turned his head and called out into the darkness, "Stevie? Is that you?"

I walked to the side of the bed and the Junkman touched my arm.

"Do you want to sleep with Daddy?"

I grabbed the Junkman’s hand and slipped it into the final loop of seatbelt.

"Hey! Hey!" he shouted.

The bed lurched and creaked as the Junkman struggled. I double-checked my knots, and then took his keys off the dresser. He cursed me as I shut the bedroom door and went into the trailer’s living room.

The rest of the kids were awake and gathered there. Their faces sleepy, their bare legs scarred with angry burns.

"There’s a fire," I said. "We have to get out."

They were scared, but they followed me to the front gate. I took the Junkman’s keys and sprung the lock free.

I said, "Run!" and slung open the gate.

They all ran, except Stevie.

"Where’s Daddy?"

I ignored him and walked back to the trailer. Outside the door, I collected my things and followed the Junkman’s shouts to the bedroom.

He struggled, but I sat on his chest and squeezed the bucket over his head. I had cut a hole in the bottom and nailed the upholstery over it. An X-shaped cut ensured a tight fit; the nails kept it in place.

The Junkman’s voice echoed from inside the bucket. "You little shit! I’ll fucking kill you!"

I ignored him, opened the trap, and dumped the scrambling rats into the bucket. Before any could escape, I slipped on the lid.

After that, I climbed in the barber chair, watched and listened.

Once the Junkman had quit moving, I grabbed the box of matches from the nightstand. I pulled one across the strike strip and watched it flare to life.

I could still hear the rat’s claws scrape against the inside of the plastic bucket, along with their hungry gnawing.

I threw the match on the bed. It burned faster than I thought it would.

When I left the trailer, Stevie was on the steps. He was rubbing the palms of his hands over his thighs. I sat next to him and slipped on my shoes.

He looked up at me, his eyes wet and angry.

"He was my best friend."

I stood up. Flames licked at the trailer’s windows as smoke drifted up into the starless night.

"Fuck him," I said.

As I walked to the gate, Stevie called out me.

"You’re cruel!"

I didn’t look back.

Stevie hadn’t changed. Sure, now he was built like a tank and had seven hundred dollars in gold chains, but behind his eyes, I could still see that little boy.

He leaned down and grabbed my ear.

"I’m gonna make you scream."

I strained against the shoelaces, but it only made the knots pull tighter.

As Stevie scraped the blade through my flesh, my fingers brushed against something smooth on the floor.

I cupped the shard of broken light bulb between my fingers and sawed at the shoe laces. I didn’t scream, not even when Stevie stopped cutting and tore the top of my ear free.

He held it up, admiring it.

I felt the blood as it streamed down my neck and over my chest. The piece of light bulb cut into my fingers, but I kept sawing.

Stevie said, "Doesn’t that hurt, bitch?"

I felt the shoelaces pop loose and said, "What’s that? I didn’t hear you."

He leaned closer and grabbed my other ear.

I slammed my fist into Stevie’s balls as hard as I could.

He staggered back, his mouth hanging open, his hands cupping his nuts. I grabbed the nunchucks off his neck and bolted for the door. My cuts burned and I felt a little faint, but I pushed myself up the stairs. Below me, I heard Stevie shouting and the rumble of pursuing footsteps.

At the top of the stairs, I crashed through a door marked "Roof." The sky had grown dark with gray rippling clouds. In the distance, a universe of lights glowed across the bay. Beneath me was a six-story drop to the parking lot.

"Nowhere to go, asshole!"

I turned around. Stevie had the .38 in his hand. Beside him were 3-D, Charlie Brown, and Sello.

I held up my hands as Stevie pointed the gun at me. He pulled back the hammer and licked his lips.

Hollow points are nasty bullets. They’re designed to explode, spreading like shrapnel, inflicting massive tissue damage.

It helps if you put them in the right gun.

When Stevie pulled the trigger on the .38 there was a loud bang and a flash of flame. He fell to his knees, the fingers he had left dangled by strands of skin.

I twirled the nunchucks like a buzz saw and flung myself at them, inflicting maximum damage.

After a while, my arm got tired.

On the roof around me, Sello and his gang moaned, clutching at broken arms and fractured ribs. Stevie had gotten it worse.

His face was a wheezing red pulp and his limbs all extended at odd, broken angles. I dragged him to the ledge and pulled him up on my shoulders. My cuts roared with pain, but I pressed him over my head and howled.

Stevie fell face-first into his Corvette, crumpling the roof and blasting the glass from the windows.

In the distance, sirens cut through the night. I walked past Sello and his gang and limped down the stairs.

I kept in the shadows and staggered north. At Victory Boulevard, I climbed a fire escape of a clothing warehouse and waited for the next train to rumble past. Twenty minutes later, I was on the other side of the island.

In the morning, Milo picked me up and brought me back to the arcade. He didn’t ask any questions, just sewed up my cuts and made me chicken noodle soup.

I spent a few weeks in bed, until Milo accused me of being a lazy hippy. My ear is fucked up and I’ve got some nice new scars. But honestly, it only makes me look more wicked.

The pigs never came to question me, so I figured Sello and his gang had kept their mouths shut. Besides, they had enough problems with the cops finding shit in their apartment.

I kept expecting to see Hector again. I thought he’d tell me how he had learned to stand on his own and how life was better, but he never came back to the arcade. I had almost forgotten about him, until one Sunday a couple months later, I was on 98th Street grabbing a slice from Rose’s Pizzeria.

Right down the street was Sello’s friend in the 3-D glasses. He saw me and crossed the street, but I followed. After a half a block, he wheeled around and held up his hands.

"Jesus, man. What do you want?"

I said, "Where’s that kid Hector?"

3-D looked down at his shoes, absent-mindedly rubbing at the arm I had broken.

"He’s in ICU at Saint Vincent’s. Can’t talk or move. They say he’s got brain damage."

I grabbed him with both hands and shoved him against the wall.

"Was it Sello? Was it you?"

"It wasn’t us, man! We were trying to help him!" 3-D squeaked. "He fell. Hit his head or something."

"Fell?"

"My homeboy said it was Hector’s old man. Said he’s a total hard ass. My homie told me people heard Hector’s dad screaming at him for coming home late. I know Hector was afraid of his dad. That’s why he wanted to join the Threats. Sello said that if he passed initiation, we would take care of things for him."

I let 3-D go.

He shrugged his shoulders. "The pigs don’t give a shit. Why should they? Just another beaner to them. Hector’s father didn’t even get questioned."

I put a hand over my eyes and pushed the darkness deep into my gut.

"You OK?" 3-D asked.

I had him follow me back to the arcade and told him to wait outside. I threw some duct tape and road flares into a backpack. At the bottom of the stairs, Milo asked where I was going. I told him I was going to do some repairs, fix something that was broke.

When I came outside, 3-D was still waiting.

I asked, "You know where I can find Hector’s dad?"

"Yeah."

"Show me."

THE END

Frank Larnerd is currently a student at West Virginia State University, where he has received multiple awards for fiction and non-fiction. His first anthology as editor, Hills of Fire: Bare-Knuckle Yarns of Appalachia will be released in the fall of 2012 from Woodland Press. Frank lives in Putnam County, West Virginia.

SNIPER! Blast Out in Lebanon

By Matthew C. Funk

Text taken from an interview with Agent "Sniper" by Matthew C. Funk, 2012, at Sniper’s home in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Our decisions can’t change the course of the world.

I used to believe different. I used to accept, as a part of myself essential as a heartbeat or a sinew, that we can change the planet.

Choose door one rather than door two, and kings are torn from the throne. Nations fall. Freedom rings.

Or not. You fail and your failure means the turn of the world shifts.

CIA operatives buy into that faith—that "for want of a nail" pipe dream.

That faith made me capable of surviving Beirut in ’87. It’s what sent me there in the first place.

A black-budget agent for the CIA has to buy into it. It’s not just why you do what you do. It’s who you are: More important than truth. More important than morality. More important than life itself.

You lie, fight, and die for that faith—that perfect promise that global "win or lose" comes down to your decisions.

Then you get old. You watch Al Jazeera English and eat the same Stouffer’s meals you did when you were a kid. You listen to your West Palm Beach condo association argue the same way you listened to Hamas and the PLO leadership argue. You read The New York Times, and the religious hatreds are the same—only the names have changed.

You watch the YouTube generation grow up, enlist, and die by the same roadside bombs.

And you realize:

The world’s turning doesn’t change. All the faith there is can’t change that, no more than faith could make the world flat.

Your decisions have only one effect: life or death.

You kill someone or you don’t. You get killed or you don’t.

You take two fistfuls of the Ativan prescribed under your CIA health care plan and wash it down with a fifth of absinthe. Or you keep turning the pages, reading on through the chapters of your life, even through the story never gets different.

I miss Beirut sometimes. I was Jason Malone then.

Malone knew what he was doing. He was changing the world, one choice at a time.

It was Beirut, 1987.

It may as well have been 2007. Or 1967. Or 7,000 years ago. Beirut doesn’t change much.

Sure, the language on the signs goes from Phoenician to Latin to Arabic to French. And yeah, the roasting meats now turn upright and run on electricity. It’s Christians against Muslims against Jews now.

But in 1500 BC, it was Egyptian Ra-worshippers against Hittite storm-god followers. The aroma of meat roasting on a spit still slathered the air. The language—the first record of Egyptian and Hittite language together; the Amarna letters—was still discussing war.

I was sent to stop a war. The conflict between Druze Christian militia, Israeli hawks and dozens of Islamic extremist groups was on the brink of boiling over. A peacemaker, David Saxon, on a secret mission for the CIA, had been captured.

Nobody knew by who. Or why. Or to what end.

But my handler at the Company knew that if the captors got David Saxon to talk, it would all end badly.

Fingers would be pointed just to prove nobody was backing down. Israel, the Druze Christian militia of Beirut, the Muslim extremists—all would blame each other of trying to mess up the conflict.

I had to find David Saxon before those names got out. I’d save him or kill him, before whole nations had an excuse for epic bloodshed.

Right out the gate to Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, I should have known someone would have to bleed.

Right out the gate, someone took a shot at me.

I allow myself just one drink these nights.

I swirl the ice in the glass and watch it melt, as ice is wont to do. The waves roll in, roll out, and I think.

I think on the inevitability of these things.

I checked into my hotel in Beirut and went to meet an arms dealer, Hammadi. It was part of my cover: I would act as if I had something to offer Hammadi’s clients on all sides of the conflict. They, in turn, could hopefully give me a lead on David Saxon’s whereabouts.

After I checked in, I checked if I had someone on my tail.

If I hadn’t watched my back, I’d have never met the Israeli agent. For all I know, he could have been killed by the Brotherhood of the Green Flag—the Muslim fundamentalists whose compound I went on to find David Saxon at.

If the agent had died, I’d have hooked up with the Green Flag directly instead. I’d have been led into an ambush. I’d have had to fight my way into their compound rather than have Israeli intelligence parachute me into it.

If I’d been ambushed, I could have shot my way out. If the Israeli followed me undetected that night, maybe he’d have killed me.

It all comes down to who took a bullet first.

They named me "Sniper" at the Company because I shot and hit first. If I hadn’t, my name would have ended up as ash in a Langley burn barrel.

But I lived, and so did Israeli intelligence agent Aaron Ben-David. The KGB-connected Green Flag thug who tried to lead me to an unmarked grave, Omar, he died.

And David Saxon lived. I shot my way through a West Beirut militia ambush. I could have shot my way out of an East Beirut Israeli ambush. I broke into the Green Flag’s compound, grabbed Saxon and shot my way out of there too.

Life or death, that’s the only difference. The men trying to kill me were killed first.

Life or death, that’s all that mattered. I lived. David Saxon lived. His peace deal lived.

And in the end, it didn’t matter at all.

At the West Palm Beach condo neighborhood meetings, they call me That Shithead.

I earn it. I argue every proposal. When some blue-hair in a Chanel pantsuit raises a voice of opposition against them and looks to be winning her point, well, I argue against her too.

The men who called me Malone in Beirut are all dead or retired. Either way, the people we were are gone from the Earth.

At Senior Speed Dating, the ladies call me Mr. Mystery.

They do it with a wink or a coy downward look. I look like I keep my secrets and they pick up on that. I use that secretive air to pick them up.

Truth is, I could care less about my secrets. The bearded men and boys in keffiyeh who died to keep those secrets, died to protect a policy that is three generations outdated.

At the Company, they still call me Sniper.

I go to the reunions in Annapolis every five years with all the other code names. There’s always less hair and more skin cancer, but the suits never change. And we drink designer beers and shoot the BBQ-laced breeze about black ops, just like former football stars turned car salesmen would talk about their big plays and how they got laid because of them.

Only, people got laid out in morgues, rather than laid. People who we used to know, who no longer are.

The Middle East still is, and still is at war.

In the valley outside Beirut, Goliaths and Davids still do battle.

In Beirut, Israeli intelligence and Druze militias and Muslim extremists still play the game, only the names have changed.

Their faith continues, but mine’s gone.

Beirut was blown up three times, but it’s still here. America is still here and it is still at war in lands where only the language on the signs change.

I keep turning the pages, but the story is never any different—only the adventure is gone.

Matthew C. Funk is an editor of Needle Magazine, editor of the Genre section of the critically acclaimed zine, FictionDaily, 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 online work indexed on his Web domain and printed work in Needle, Speedloader, Off the Record, Pulp Ink and D*CKED.

BASTARD MERCENARY: Operation Scorpion Sting

By Arch Saxon

(discovered by Andrew Nette)

Arch Saxon’s Bastard Mercenary series, a mainstay of the Australian men’s adventure publisher Nasho Books Ltd., has had a bit of revival recently; a film version is in development. Whether or not the books will come back in print is a different story. Huge thanks go to author and Saxon collector, ANDREW NETTE, for digging up this gem from 1984.

His name was Thong. Thai for gold. But the only thing shining in the weak sunlight that streamed through the cell’s barred window was the glint on the six-inch shiv the lady-boy held in his manicured right hand.

He sliced the air in front of me, shifted his weight from foot to foot. He looked playful, but I could tell he was a professional. The way he held the makeshift blade, to cut not stab. How he kept his distance, stopped me from getting close. Thailand may be known as the "land of smiles," but the only thing the look of glee on his powdered face promised was painful death.

Lefebvre cowered behind the hired killer. Unshaven and dressed in grimy prison fatigues, the Frenchman looked like just another shit-out-of-luck inmate of the Kingdom’s prison system, not the front man for an international Communist-controlled drug syndicate.

Thong made another cutting motion, testing me, gauging my reflexes. He knew he had me at a disadvantage.

I’d spent forty-eight hours in the company of two hundred men crammed into a holding cell barely big enough for fifty. Lefebvre and his bodyguard occupied one of several smaller rooms reserved for prisoners with money.

The only thing to eat had been rice porridge. I hadn’t slept, constantly on guard against the rats that came out at night, not to mention much larger predators. Worst of all, I was unarmed.

"Are you ready to taste my pretty blade, falang?" the lady boy cooed in the local dialect favoured by Thais from the Northeast, the poorest part of the Kingdom.

Thong and I stared at each other, two gladiators about to do battle. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, a sure sign he was on the cheap speed known as yah bah, used by most of the inmates. As if signalling our entrance into the arena, the cacophony of human noise from the surrounding prison reached fever pitch.

"You’ve got one chance," I said in fluent Thai. "Put down the knife, let me have the Frenchman."

Thong put a hand over his mouth, his hot pink nail polish standing out in the drab surroundings, and stifled a high-pitched giggle.

"Don’t fucking flirt, you idiot," hissed Lefebvre in Thai. "Kill him."

The Thai swung the blade savagely, missed me and followed up with a rapid criss-crossing movement. The blade bit into my shoulder, spreading a pool of dark crimson on my prison fatigues.

Emboldened by the sight of blood, Thong came in close, hoping to finish me quickly. He lunged. I careened the upper part of my body to one side as the blade cut the air where my face had been, grabbed his knife hand by the wrist and bent it backwards. It snapped with a sickening crack.

The shiv clattered to the concrete floor as the Thai fell to his knees, clasping the broken appendage to his chest. Lefebvre edged backwards across the floor until his back was pressed hard against the wall. I smiled at him, took Thong’s head in my hands and twisted it sharply.

It was a thing of beauty, the look of raw fear on the Frenchman’s face as I let go of the Thai’s lifeless body and picked up the shiv.

"Who the hell are you?" he said in heavily accented English as I rested the blade under his chin. His breath stank of nam pla, the pungent fish sauce the Thais used to season all their food.

"Name’s Bruce Kelly. Mates call me Boomer. You can call me your worst nightmare."

"Please, I beg you, don’t kill me."

"I’m not going to kill you, Froggie. That is unless you don’t tell me what I need to know."

He nodded vigorously, his pores popping sweat. "Anything."

"Start with the location of Scorpion’s Bangkok headquarters."

"They’ll kill me."

"Well, it looks like you’re shit out of options, because I’ll kill you if you don’t."

"Not like Scorpion’s people you won’t—"

Most people think pain is the most effective interrogation technique. But in my extensive experience, one gets even better results from pain when it’s combined with surprise. Before Lefebvre could finish his sentence, I drew the shiv across his cheek, paused for effect, and then repeated the action on his other cheek.

The Frenchman dabbed his fingers on the wounds, put them in front of his face. His eyes bulged as he looked at the blood.

"It’ll be your ears next, then your nose. I’ll keep going all the way down to your balls."

Five minutes later I had everything I needed. I threw the shiv to one side, stood, and turned to leave. A crowd of prisoners had gathered in the cell doorway: Thais, a Russian who’d beaten a prostitute to death, a couple of gigantic Africans arrested for passport theft.

They parted, wary looks on their faces.

"He’s all yours," I said as I passed.

I could hear Lefebvre’s screams as the guard unlocked the rusty door to the holding cell and let me out.

Three days earlier, I’d been sitting at the bar of the Sunrise Club, the joint I own on Soi Cowboy. A quiet night, monsoonal rain and rumours of another military coup keeping all but the most persistent punters off the streets and out of the bars.

Not that I minded. Hank Williams was on the turntable—there’s no disco in my bar—and I nursed a cold beer. The lull also gave me an opportunity to concentrate on more important matters, like my newest waitress, Lek. She was a fresh-faced little thing from the North with an eye for making a buck in the big city and a firm arse you could bounce a five baht on.

Might have even tried my luck if it weren’t for the fact that I was already exhausted after a day of lovemaking with Elise, a German Lufthansa stewardess who always paid me a visit when she was in town. She moved her body with the finesse of a panzer commander manoeuvring across the Russian steppes.

I was contemplating taking down the "Happy New Year 1981? banner in tinsel slung across the bar when a Western man walked in. He was older than me by at least a decade but still in good shape. His snow-white hair was cut military style and he wore an immaculately pressed tan safari suit. I hope he wasn’t trying to be incognito because he stank of old school spook.

The man glanced around the club and walked towards me. "Bruce Kelly?" he said with a Midwestern American accent as he shook my hand. "My name’s Rex Bannister, I have a proposition for you."

"That’s a turn for the books. It’s usually me doing the propositioning."

He didn’t smile. I drained my beer, burped, and motioned across the bar to Tiger Lily, my bar manager.

"Hey baby, get me another beer. Make sure it’s cold." I looked at Bannister. "Want one?"

He gave me a curt shake of his head. I peeled the tab off the can of beer and took a long drink.

"I was hoping we could talk somewhere in private."

I led Bannister to my office, a small back room that doubled as a change space for the waitresses, sat behind the desk strewn with papers, and swigged my beer.

Bannister sniffed, gave the room a slow one hundred and eighty degree sweep, as if trying to locate the source of an unpleasant odour.

"I hear you’re a veteran," he said, his eyes on the centrefold of Miss April pinned to the wall just above my right shoulder.

"I’ve been around." I re-adjusted the patch on my right eye, the legacy of a Russian-made land mine in central Vietnam in 1969. "You?"

"Korea." He threw me a defiant look. "A real war."

I shrugged and sipped my beer. He might have been a soldier once; now he was just another desk jockey employing others to do the killing. I’d met plenty like him, uptight, church going Langley types. I’d even done some work for one or two of them in the past, which I presumed was where Bannister got my name.

"Let me make it clear, I don’t like you, Kelly. I don’t like your bar, your drinking, and your taste in wall decorations. But you’re supposed to be good at what you do and we need your help."

"Like’s got nothing to do with it, Bannister," I replied between sips. "If I only took jobs from people I liked, I’d be a poor man. Just tell me what you want, and let’s see if we can do business."

Bannister swept a pair of black lacy underwear off the wooden seat in front of the desk, sat, and gave me his best man-to-man look.

"For some time now, the US government agency I work for has been tracking the activities of a highly organised drug syndicate operating in Bangkok."

I put my legs on the desk. "It’s not like Uncle Sam to give a toss about a few hopheads overdosing on cheap junk."

"This outfit is different." Bannister leaned forward. "It’s headed by a former Chinese Communist Red Guard, known only by the code name Scorpion. He’s smart and cunning, got links with the cops, the military and Bangkok’s Sino-Thai elite. Now he’s expanding his operation, making connections with Communist regimes in Laos and Vietnam, opening up new trafficking routes.

"Conventional policing activities don’t work against him, and he’s eliminated every agent we’ve tried to infiltrate into his organisation. Fortunately, we have a new President in the White House, one who understands the threat posed by Communism in all its forms and is prepared to take whatever steps necessary to combat it."

Jesus, what was next, a rendition of the Stars and Stripes? I raised the beer can to my lips and gazed at Bannister.

"Let me guess: that’s where I come in."

"Precisely. Find Scorpion’s Bangkok headquarters and take it off the grid using whatever means necessary. We’ll pay you twenty thousand US dollars, half now, half after the job is complete, plus we’ll bankroll any expenses. Totally off the books, mind you. Maximum deniability."

"That’s a pretty tall order, mate," I drained my beer. "Bangkok’s a big city. Any idea where I would start?"

"Scorpion works through cut-outs. One of these is a Frenchman called Lefebvre. He’s a veteran red, got his start organising dockworkers in Marseilles, spent time in Peking. Like all Europeans, Lefebvre has a weakness. Thai police busted him a couple of nights ago with an underage hooker in a short-time room off Sukhumvit, threw him into the main holding cell of Bangkok’s Klong Prem Prison to await trial.

"Nothing that a bribe in the right place couldn’t usually fix, had Lefebvre’s file not come to the attention of a corrupt but observant police colonel who knew how much he was worth to the reds. And to us. While the Commies negotiate his release, we’ve cut a side deal with the colonel for someone to pose as an inmate and get to him first."

"And you want that someone to be me."

"Correct. Get in there, make contact with Lefebvre and find out what he knows about Scorpion’s operation. Then do what you bastard mercenaries do best."

"And what exactly do you think that is, Bannister?"

"Unleash mayhem."

People like Bannister use the term mercenary as an insult. I wear it as a badge of pride.

I’ve been killing for so long it’s like a second skin. Got my start fighting Communist insurgents in the rubber plantations of Malaya in the late fifties; then I was in the Special Forces in Vietnam. Stayed until the end of the war, didn’t even bother going home to Australia. Now I sell the skills acquired in her majesty’s armed forces to the highest bidder.

I don’t have anything personally against the reds. Capitalist, Communist, I’ll happily kill whoever if the price is right. Christ, the whole stinking world can blow itself up for all I care, as long as I have a cold beer in my hand and get paid in cash before they push the button.

Lefebvre’s information put Scorpion’s base in an old warehouse compound on the banks of the Chao Phraya that runs through Bangkok before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand.

The warehouse was also the headquarters of an aggressive club of body chasers. A lot of Bangkok is still made up of tiny sois or side streets on which most of the city’s residents live their lives. But as the country’s economy has grown, freeways have begun to crisscross the city, and the number of traffic accidents has risen. Without much of an ambulance service, the job of picking over the carnage is left to clubs of young men, often affiliated to Buddhist temples, who prowl the city looking for accidents. Their exploits are depicted in grisly colour photographs of mangled bodies and twisted metal prominently displayed on public notice boards. Thai friends tell me the photos are meant to reinforce the Buddhist precept that all physical matter eventually decays.

Yeah, it’s strange, but no more so than a lot of the shit I’ve seen in Asia. I’ve watched a wizened old shaman possessed by a spirit so strong he could bend a steel bar. In central Vietnam, I’d seen a detachment of hardened Montagnard soldiers refuse to attack a hill they thought was inhabited by evil spirits. Hell, it’s no different to the Dreamtime stories told by my father, an Aboriginal bare-knuckle boxer who’d worked a travelling circus in the Queensland outback and died broke and alcoholic years after my white mother left him and took me with her.

Besides, a gang of body chasers was the perfect cover for Scorpion’s trafficking operation. What better way to move the drugs than through groups of young men who came and went at all hours of the day and night and moved across the city without arousing suspicion?

I thought all this as I stood on the deck of the sampan moored in the middle of the Chao Phraya, before turning my attention to the final weapons check being undertaken by my unit.

Getting to Lefebvre had been a solo mission. Taking down Scorpion’s headquarters required more firepower.

I’d come across O’Connell hiding out in Bangkok after he had killed a high profile Republican commander in Belfast. In addition to his favourite weapon, a World War Two British commando knife, tonight he packed an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun. Compact, able to fire up to six hundred rounds a minute. Fitted with a silencer like all our weapons, it was perfect for the kind of confined space we were about to enter.

Tiger Lily didn’t just tend bar at the Sunrise, she was also a professional killer who’d learned her lethal skills from her father, one of Thailand’s most renowned hit men. That’s saying something in a country where having someone whacked is as acceptable a business practice as phoning a lawyer. She made the last-minute adjustments to her weapon of choice, an M21 semiautomatic sniper rifle, 20 rounds in the magazine, accurate over a remarkable distance.

I picked up my weapon from the deck, a Smith and Wesson M76 submachine gun. Yank Special Forces had used the M76 for covert ops in Vietnam, which is where I’d first come across it. The magazine held 36 soft point rounds, for maximum impact. A six-shot Colt Cobra .38 Special, also loaded with soft points, was in a leather holster strapped to my left ankle.

I had one other surprise for Scorpion. My boomerangs. Dad had taught me how to use them when I was a kid. Holstered in a leather bandolier across my chest, mine were custom-made out of lightweight carbon fibre reinforced plastic, edges inlayed with razor-sharp metal.

The game plan for tonight was simple. Tiger Lily would be stationed at the entrance to deal with unwelcome reinforcements, while O’Connell and I went in and killed everyone we could find. Then we’d lay some Czech Semtex, acquired through O’Connell’s contacts, set the timers, sit back and watch the fireworks.

I cocked the M76, looked at my team of killers. "We all set?"

"Roger, boss," said Tiger Lily.

O’Connell flashed me a mouth of bad Irish dental work. "Aye, nay worries."

The three of us stepped into an inflatable Zodiac tethered to the sampan. I waved to Tiny, the dwarf captain of the sampan, that we were ready. The red dot from the Krong Tip cigarette permanently hanging from his mouth bobbed up and down, indicating we were good to go.

We cut through the black, foul-smelling water, the purr of the Zodiac’s outboard motor smothered by the buzz of traffic in the distance. As we approached, I could see two guards on an old wooden dry dock leading to the warehouse. Tiger Lily dispatched both of them before they even had time to unsling their weapons.

A couple of minutes later, O’Connell and I were over the brick wall surrounding the warehouse and into the compound. A row of vans used to ferry corpses was parked on one side of the main warehouse. The accordion door to the warehouse was open. We entered, our flashlights illuminating a large storeroom full of wooden coffins and other tools of the body chasers’ trade.

Suddenly, the overhead lights bathed us in harsh fluoro. As I adjusted to the light, I saw at least two dozen men—Thais by the look of them, clad in pale blue body chaser uniforms that made them look like hospital orderlies—emerge from behind the neatly stacked coffins. They held an assortment of weapons: knives, machetes, crowbars, nunchakus.

The wave of blue rushed at us, faces snarling like rabid soi dogs. Instinctively, Connelly and I covered each other’s backs and opened fire. Short controlled bursts mowed down the closest members of the pack, but they kept coming, clambering over their fallen comrades to get to us.

I’d been in this situation before, a trench in Vietnam, firing at wave after wave of North Vietnamese regulars, until the barrel of my machine gun had glowed red hot. But ferocity is no match for firepower, and soon O’Connell and I were surrounded by a harvest of corpses.

"Bloody eejits, that was a turkey shoot," said O’Connell as he slit the throat of a wounded body chaser.

"Something tells me that’s just the start." I changed ammo clips. "Stay sharp, mate."

We moved down the only corridor, checking the rooms as we went. More coffins, a makeshift morgue, sleeping quarters. The air stank of disinfectant and we could hear the roar of the crowd from a Thai kickboxing match on a black-and-white TV that had been left on.

A set of stairs descended into a large chamber. O’Connell and I paused on a mezzanine halfway down. It was like stepping into a science fiction film: rows of large stainless steel vats, tubs of chemicals, the hum of machinery. Wires and tubes ran everywhere.

O’Connell whistled. "Now that is a shite load of fucking scrag."

I nodded. With this set up Scorpion could produce enough dope to keep every junkie in the States on cloud nine for a long time.

Two men in white lab coats emerged from behind the machinery. Lab technicians. The one closest had a pistol. His partner, a few feet behind him, raised a beaker of noxious-looking purple liquid above his head, ready to douse us.

I aimed the M70 from my hip and fired. The front of the first technician’s coat exploded in a mass of red blossoms. He stumbled backwards onto his colleague, who dropped the beaker, the contents spilling over his own head and shoulders. I watched with grim fascination as the man writhed on the ground screaming, the purple liquid eating his flesh.

"Okay, enough bloody bullshit." I handed O’Connell blocks of Semtex and timers. "Let’s get this over with."

We walked down the aisle, affixing Semtex to the vats. As O’Connell set his last charge, he turned to me and opened his mouth to speak. Before the Irishman could say anything, the top of his head disappeared in a crimson blur and he crumpled to the floor.

A huge, bald Oriental stepped out from between two vats, stood over O’Connell’s body. He was naked from the waist up, his torso a patchwork of muscle and steel surgically grafted to his skin. His right arm was completely metal and in place of a hand was a ball covered in sharp spikes. Shreds of O’Connell’s skull and tufts of his unmistakable carrot-coloured hair dangled from it.

I hesitated, transfixed by the horrific creature and the red star tattooed on his forehead. Savouring my fear, machine man’s beady eyes narrowed and his face split into a malevolent grin. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

I snapped out of my inaction, raised the M70, fired. The bullets ricocheted off his metal hide. I squeezed the trigger again, heard a succession of metallic clicks. The magazine was empty. Before I could reload, a swipe from machine man’s metal hand twisted the barrel to one side like it was made of cheap plastic. Another swing knocked the gun from my hands.

The monster stepped toward me, raised his deadly appendage. I dodged the blow. The spiked ball missed my head by inches, tore a chunk from the nearest metal vat. Steam hissed angrily from the gash. The Oriental walked through the boiling vapour without flinching. Whatever surgical procedure he’d undergone had obviously robbed him of any sensitivity to pain.

As he walked machine man swung his metal attachment from side to side. Although I easily avoided each blow, I could feel myself tiring, while machine man, powered by an inhuman energy, showed no sign of slowing.

In an effort to lose my attacker and buy a few moments to regroup, I ducked between two steel vats, ran straight into a metal trolley loaded with glass beakers and technical equipment, tripped over it and hurtled forwards.

I don’t know how long I lay stunned on the ground. I heard the crunch of glass underfoot, felt one of my legs latched into a vice-like grip. The Oriental dragged me along the floor like a carcass being delivered to the butcher’s block.

He stopped in front of the damaged vat, released my leg. I waited for the spiked metal ball to reduce me to hamburger like it had O’Connell. Instead, machine man picked me up by the neck and lifted my face towards the jet of steam escaping from the jagged hole in the metal.

I tried to prise his grip off me with both hands, but it was like trying to manipulate concrete. The skin on my face burned as it neared the boiling steam.

"Halt."

The harsh female voice echoed through the laboratory. Machine man let go. I rolled, came up in a combat stance.

A tall, athletic-looking Asian woman stood on the mezzanine above me. She was clad in tight-fitting khaki cheongsam. Her long black hair was tied in a bun underneath a khaki Mao cap.

The Oriental giant stood still, stared at me, an attack dog awaiting his master’s next command.

She threw back her head and laughed. "I can tell what you are thinking, imperialist scum." Her dark eyes narrowed as she looked at me. "You think it is not possible Scorpion is a woman."

I had to give the reds points for cunning. No wonder Bannister and his people had had so little success locating Scorpion. I stared at the creamy white skin of the leg protruding from the split in her dress, the blood red lips, the pistol in the holster nestled in the curve of her hip, as I figured out my next move.

"For decades we have spilt blood in the struggle against capitalism. Then we realised, it would be simpler if we used the West’s own decadent craving for narcotics against itself. In this laboratory are the means to make that plan a reality, as your paymasters will soon realise."

Scorpion looked around the room proudly before returning her gaze to me. "Lefebvre was a fool to lead you here, but you will not live to brag of your discovery."

She barked something in Mandarin. As if a switch had been flicked, the machine man resumed his slow advance towards me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Scorpion lick her lips in anticipation as he swung his metal fist.

I dove. The deadly wrecking ball sailed over my head, struck another vat. This time the metal fist remained lodged in the hole. The Oriental emitted a moist grunting sound as he tugged, a confused expression on his face, but he couldn’t dislodge himself.

Scorpion shrieked in anger, undid the clasp on her holster to reach for her gun. With no time to go for my pistol, I grasped one of my boomerangs and threw. She raised a hand to shield her face. The boomerang struck, severing it clean off at the wrist. Her lips trembled as she stared at the blood spurting from the severed stump.

I quickly switched my gaze to machine man, still straining to free himself. I pulled out the Colt Cobra, held it in both hands, aimed, shot the creature between the eyes just as he was about to rip himself free. Machine man swayed as the hollow point round bounced around his skull. He crashed to the ground with the meat and metallic sound of a car accident.

I raised the pistol to sight the woman, but she was gone. When I reached the spot on the mezzanine where Scorpion had been, all that was left was a delicate female hand in a pool of blood.

At least I’d left her something to remember me by.

I stood on the sampan’s deck, the orange glow from the burning warehouse receding in the distance.

Tiger Lily smiled, handed me a beer. Later, when I was not around to cause her loss of face, I knew she’d light incense and say a prayer for O’Connell at the rickety wooden spirit house on the pavement outside the Sunrise Club.

I pulled on the beer. The glow had almost disappeared beneath the skyline. I turned away and savoured the cool breeze of the headwind against my skin.

O’Connell knew the risks and I didn’t have time to mourn.

I had the rest of my money to collect.

THE END

Andrew Nette is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He is one of the editors of the on-line magazine, Crime Factory. His short fiction has appeared in Crime Factory: The First Shift by New Pulp Press and The One That Got Away, an anthology of crime stories released in 2012 by Australian independent publisher Dark Prints Press. His debut crime novel Ghost Money will be published by Snubnose Press in 2012. His blog, www.pulpcurry.com explores crime film and literature, particularly from Asia and Australia.

FROM AMERICAN VIKING TO ZANE: A Brace Godfrey Chrestomathy

With Commentary by Johnny Shaw

In the summer of 1998, I was fortunate enough to sit down with the immortal "King of the Three-Shots," Brace Godfrey, and talk to him about his life’s work: over six hundred novels published between 1969 and 1988 that comprised more than two hundred individual adventure series. There is no complete bibliography for Godfrey’s work, but I asked him to pick his favorite "Three-Shots."

He presented me with 26 series, using the alphabet as his limitation. "Wrote so damn many, forgot more than I remember," Godfrey told me, "And I ain’t got the time to dick around with this kind of bullshit."**

I, personally, may have included such fan favorites as Mafia Berserker, The Expunger, and Blonde Squad, but I think this list makes a strong case for the wealth of Mr. Godfrey’s imagination.

1. AMERICAN VIKING – Erik Leifson’s family has lived in the United States since before the country existed, the descendants of a Viking expedition in 700 AD. For hundreds of years in rural Maine, Erik’s people remained isolated from the rest of the world. The last of the line, Erik must find a new path, leading him to the chaos of New York City. Ragnarok & Ragnaroll, Midtown in Midgaard, Norse Force.

2. THE BRAIN – After his release from prison for a crime he didn’t commit, super-scientist Quentin Maxwell uses his genius to develop a pair of high-tech boxing gloves. Taking to the streets, he uses his brain to punch the lights out of the criminal organization that framed him. Cerebrawl, A Present for Mandy, The Brain vs. The Brain.

3. CODENAME: BLACK BELT – Ex-stuntman and martial artist Lance Horner is recruited by the CIA to help battle the rise of N.I.N.J.A., an evil cabal hellbent on reclaiming Asian treasures from the American museums that are now their rightful owners. Dojo of Death, Karate Chop Chop Shop, Lady N.I.N.J.A.

4. DINGO (written as Linden Miles) – Some claim that Australian Aborigine Hozzle Adlinga is part dingo. That’s only a legend, but what is true is that he is the best tracker alive, and his often mysterious powers are sought after worldwide. Fair Dinkum, The Boomerang Brigand, Didgeridon’t.

5. THE EXORCISMIST – The Vatican has entrusted Father John "Mac" MacNeish with one vital job: to cast out demons wherever they surface. But the real question is, is he possessed himself? Second to Nun, Satanarchy, A Child’s Garden of Pit Fiends.

6. FIFTEEN WARRIORS – Fighting throughout Europe during World War II, they were known by their fellow soldiers as "The Fifteen Warriors." The Nazis only knew them by one name: Certain Death! Join Sgt. Stone Steel and his men, Rocco Angelino, Mickey O’Herlihy, Olaf Swedenson, Max Dumkowsy, Ivan Crushski, Ching Chang, Cholo Garcia, Abraham Goldbergstein, Chief Flying Bear, Pierre Fageux, Jethro Hickson, Nappy Roosevelt, "Fancy Tommy" Sparkles, and their trained gorilla, Private Gorilla. 500 Divided by 15 Equals Death, The Nazi Princess, Hitler Island.

7. GHETTO FORCE (written as Fillmore Cleveland) – They grew up fighting for survival on the mean streets of Harlem. Now they are the deadliest mercenaries-for-hire in the world. Maldives Jive; A Turkey from Turkey; Phuket, It’s Thailand.

8. HAWKSHAW – When not nursing Old-Fashioneds at his local watering hole, private eye Cain Hawkshaw is usually peeping in windows and following soon-to-be divorcees. But one thing is sure: when Hawkshaw is around, trouble can’t be too far behind. The Delivery Man Usually Knocks Four Times, Triple Indemnity, Body in the Urinal.

9. I, CAVEMAN – Oong feels different than the rest of the cavemen in his tribe. He is smarter and his posture is more upright. His thumbs are fully opposable. He feels like there is some kind of link missing between him and his people. But that’s the kind of thing that takes backseat when saber-tooth tigers and rival tribes threaten. Valley of the Cannibals, Fire of the Dinosaur God, Insectosaurs from the Chasm.

10. JUDGE HAYMAKER – Tired of liberal do-gooder lawyers and seeing guilty men walk, former judge William Haymaker turns his back on the law and fights for justice. God help the criminal who feels the wooden sting of Judge Haymaker’s gavel. Lest Ye Be Judged; The Court of Hard Knocks; All Rise, All Die.

11. KNOCKERS O’MALLEY: LADY COP (written as Lizzy C. Stanton) – Walking a beat in the toughest neighborhood of Chicago, Bernadette "Knockers" O’Malley is just as adept with her revolver as she is with her lipstick. "The hard-nosed, tough-as-nails cop who also has enormous tits!" Busted, Booby Traps, The Cantaloupe Caper.

12. THE LAST OF THE MONSTERNAUTS – Damon Valescu is the last of his kind—a now-dead breed of men that ride monsters and secretly protect the Earth at the gates of the Tri-Dimensional Rift. Riding his faithful monster steed Cthloggoth, Damon will be tested by the horrors of the Plagueworld army. The Tentacled Terror of Taojoka, The Horned Horror of Heklaba, The Anal-Scent-Glanded Abomination of Aviozca.

13. THE MEXICUTIONER (becomes CHINGÓN: THE WORLD’S DEADLIEST MEXICAN) – With his bullwhip Marta and a bandolier full of grenades, Chingón makes his own rules in a world where rules were meant to be exploded. Oaxacalypse, Blood and Tacos, Chihuahua Brouhaha.

14. NUNCHAKU WARRIOR (written as Wang Fang) – subtitled "The Oriental Tornado," this series features the adventures of Ch’ing Ki’an and his efforts to protect his extended family from the seemingly endless gangs that riddle the streets of Hong Kong. The Two Sticks and Connecting Chain of Death, Shrimp Fried Murder, Confucius Say Die.

15. OPERATION: KILLZONE – Mercenary Brand Macklin has traveled the world’s worst hotspots killing those that hate democracy. Now, tired of all the bloodshed, he has retired to the island nation of Bimbatu. Unfortunately, his past won’t let him retire, and neither will the bullets and mortar fire of his enemies. Kill Blood, Dead Kill, Blood Dead.

16. PILE DRIVER – Zeke Heffernan tours the wasteland of the post-apocalyptic Desert Southwest (now known as "The Zone") in his tricked-out dump truck looking for survivors and keeping the banditos of the Raza Uprising at bay. Phoenix Descending; Highway to Purgatory; Break Her, Break Her.

17. THE QUARTERBACK – On Sundays and occasional Mondays, Marl Brock stands behind center, throwing touchdowns for the Iron City Mastodons. But the rest of the time, he’s on the street fighting a one-man war against the Mob and meting out his own brand of vigilante justice. Roughing the Passer, The Hail Mary Killer, The Night of the Male Cheerleader.

18. RAPIER – Killer of men and an all-around ladykiller, "The Private Privateer" pirates his way throughout the seven seas, leaving men scarred and women satisfied in his search for treasure of both the gold and sensual kind. The Tight Fit of Her Scabbard; Mansword of the Swordsman; Rapier, Rapiest.

19. THE SNIPER DOSSIER – Otis Gangley spent his childhood hunting varmint in the Badlands of Oklahoma. Killing and a dead aim are in his blood. But now that he is a proud member of the US Marines, he no longer hunts game, he hunts man. Which is in its own way a game—a game of death. Death at 700 Yards, Death at 800 Yards, Death at 900 Yards.

20. TANK HOWITZER – After a freak accident almost kills ex-astronaut Tank Howitzer, he is rebuilt with a mechanical body on treads and a transistor for a brain. Outfitted with an array of deadly explosive devices that shoot from his fingers and eyes, he rolls from town to town wherever he is needed. Assignment: Helsinki, Assignment: Perth, Assignment: Wisconsin.

21. ULTRAGEDDON – World War V has decimated the world. A ragtag group of survivors tries to rebuild a society in the remnants of Cuyahoga Falls, forced to repel roving gangs of Mutantneers and the constant attacks of the Infected. The End Is the Beginning, The Beginning Is the Middle, Rowdy Dangle for President.

22. VISIGOTH CHRONICLES – The barbarian army of the Visigoths tears a swath of violence through Europe. Punished by the gods for their deeds, the predators become the prey when the Visigoths are haunted by the ghosts of the men they killed and the women they raped, who presumably died afterward. Soon, it is an all-out war with an army of the undead. Death Spirits of the Ostrogoths, Blood Ghosts of Gaul, Corpse Centurions of Colonia.

23. W.E.R.E.W.O.L.F. SQUADRON – What does W.E.R.E.W.O.L.F. stand for? Werewolf Elite Recon Extrahuman Weapons of Lycanthropic Force. Need I say more? Hell, no. Never Cry Monster, The Moon and Six Deaths, V.A.M.P.I.R.E. Strikes Back.

24. X-PATRIOT – Mack Flagg isn’t going to let something as ordinary as death stop him from fighting for the United States of America. Brought back to life through a Native American ritual, Flagg gets a second chance. With his bald eagle spirit guide, he battles the decay of both his body and Western civilization. Love It or Leave It, The Eaglewind Cycle, Marine Corpse.

25. YO-YO ASSASSIN – Written as promotional paperbacks for the Duncan Toys Company (although the shockingly brutal violence doomed the series). Duncan Carrington lived the life of leisure, yachts, and wealth. But when his family is murdered by an international terrorist organization, he uses his money and his only skill to exact revenge one trick at a time. Walking the Death Dog, The Big Sleeper, The Yo-Yo Assassin Meets Tommy Smothers.

26. ZANE – Cast out by his brethren in The Council of Nine, rogue wizard Zane must find his way by working as a celebrity bodyguard in the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. With only his magic gun and magic bullets to protect him, can he survive not just his fans, but his clients? Which Witch?; Abra Cadaver; Presto, Slay-O.

**Considering that Mr. Godfrey was drunk and getting drunker in the back booth of a bar called The Spittoon in Stockton, California, I am positive that he did have time to dick around with my bullshit. He was just being an asshole.

Along with his role as editor of Blood & Tacos, Johnny Shaw is a screenwriter, playwright, and the author of the novel Dove Season: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco. For the last dozen years, Johnny has taught writing, lecturing at both Santa Barbara City College and UC Santa Barbara.

SUNSHINE, STRIPPER ASSASSIN: The G-String Gundown

By Walter Himes

(discovered by Josh Stallings)

Walter Himes spent most of his all-too-brief life in San Quentin for shooting a white man seven times in the face. Besides the seventeen Stripper Assassin tales he put out from behind bars, he also wrote Black Is Black, a manifesto that provoked the prison riots of 1979. That same year, he was found dead in his cell. The official coroner’s report states this was death by suicide, but many still believe a guard killed him over a $30 gambling debt. JOSH STALLINGS discovered this story from 1974 while cleaning out his grandfather’s gun safe.

"Hey boss, somebody sent you a strip-a-gram."

"Send her in."

Sunshine O’Shay trembled as she walked across the marble floor. She never thought she’d be in an honest-to-god mansion and yet here she was. Dressed like a sexy cop, showing as much cleavage as tape and a push-up bra could generate. Over her shoulder she carried a garment bag.

She entered a den that was larger than her entire home. A fat man in his mid-thirties sat in a club chair in the middle of the room. He had on a shiny gold velour track suit. He looked Sunshine up and down twice, slowly examining every inch of her coffee and cream skin. "They sent me a negress. Now that’s a spicy meatball."

"You ready for this?" She was eighteen and fighting to sound so much older. "I hear you been a very bad, bad boy."

"Oh yeah, I been bad, officer. Ha, take me in." He put his wrists out, practically drooling at the thought of what was coming. Pauly stood at the door smirking. Jimmy didn’t need to tell him twice to get the hell out, guard the door in case Gina got home early. Now that would be a massacre. The closing door covered up the sound of the cuffs snapping home.

"Damn girl, that pinches. What are those, real cuffs?"

"Sorry baby." She leaned down, kissing his wrist and giving him a look down her top at her breasts.

"Mmmm, they little, bitty things, but I still love to suck on those dark cherries. I hear the darker the berry …" That was the last thing he ever said. The blast from the twelve-gauge took his face off. He didn’t scream. His wide eyes showed life, but how does one scream when he is missing his lower jaw and most of his throat?

Pauly burst in, gun in hand. He saw his boss fighting for life and a dead stripper at his feet. What the fuck had happened?

Pauly ran to his boss hoping for some whispered information or instruction. As he stepped over the dead stripper, Jimmy’s eyes went huge. He was gurgling, fighting to warn Pauly of something. From the floor the shotgun fired between Pauly’s spread legs. The blow lifted him into the air and dropped him five feet back, blood pouring from his groin.

The bloody stripper stood over Pauly. "Yo cracker, you got any idea why I’m here?"

"No, none, I swear."

Wrong answer. Flame and smoke engulfed Pauly’s head. When it cleared he was nothing but a stain on the carpet.

Sunshine walked to the boss. She pushed his ruined face with the shotgun barrel. "You, I bet you know why I’m here. Huh, smart man? Too bad you can’t tell me." The shotgun rocked and Jimmy became a smear.

Sunshine dropped her blood-splattered cop’s costume. Dropped her bra and g-string. Crossed to the bathroom, where she took a hot shower. She soaped and removed the gore. She even washed the shotgun. She had hoped she would feel better afterwards, what she felt was numb. Clean, she slipped into the starched white maid’s uniform she had carried protected in the garment bag.

Careful to leave by the back door, Sunshine became invisible on the sidewalk. Just another brown-skinned maid heading home. Beverly Hills was full of them. Climbing onto the crosstown bus, she dropped in a dime and took her seat. She’d be back in Compton before they even found the bodies. Maybe she would feel better after the next on her list.

Caesar Cavasos was a big, bald Mexican. He ran Pussycats striptease club in East LA. He also ran the cribs behind it where a man could get his sexual needs serviced for a small price. He was known as an evil man. Now he was a dead man. Crabs crawled in what was left of his skull.

Detective John Stark stood on Santa Monica Beach, looking down at the corpse. "What are you doing so far from East LA, Caesar?"

"Hope you aren’t waiting for him to answer." Leroy Jones was Stark’s partner. Salt and Pepper, the other cops called them, but only behind their backs.

Stark tossed the waterlogged wallet to his partner. Jones let out a slow whistle. "Well, well, looks like Caesar’s having a bad day."

"Any idea who wanted him dead?"

"Shoot, Stark, might as well round up all of East LA. Truth, can’t think of many who wanted him alive."

"What’s in his hand?" Stark knelt down. The dead man’s hand was frozen into a fist. A tuft of glitter shone through his fingers. With a pen he pulled the fingers open . Lifting a round half dollar–sized strip of lamé, a red tassel was attached at the center. He held it up to Jones. "Now all we need to do is find a stripper missing one pasty."

"Case closed."

"What’s up, little soul sister?" Ronnie leaned on his Chevy Bomb by the front door of Pussycats. James Brown’s "The Payback" thumped through the wall. Ronnie bopped his head to the beat. He was cholo cool, khakis and a wife beater, Pendleton top button closed.

"Boss in? I needs to speak to him?" Sunshine wore Chuck Taylors, a pair of hip huggers, and a crop top that showed a healthy amount of skin.

"Ain’t you heard? Found his dead ass in Santa Monica Bay."

"What?"

Ronnie tilted his head toward an unmarked police car. "The man’s inside asking questions. Better skip out if you done it." He kept a straight face for a moment then burst out laughing.

"What? You don’t think I could’ve done it?"

"Chica, you couldn’t kill a rat with a scattergun." He was still laughing to himself as Sunshine entered the club.

The two detectives had taken up residence in Caesar’s office. Stark was openly enjoying the line of dancers that paraded in to speak to them.

"Damn waste of time, for all the information we’s getting." Jones wanted to get rolling, slap around a few stoolies, get to the bottom line. It wasn’t a dancer done this; women poison or stab. They don’t shotgun off a man’s face.

"Only one left, okay with you?"

"Just get to it."

Stark almost spit out his coffee when Sunshine came in. She was that good looking. He eyed his notes and motioned for her to sit, not sure he could speak without stumbling over the words. "Sunshine O’Shay, is that right?"

"Yes sir, that is my name." She focused all her charm at Stark. He was handsome, in cop kind of way, with his long sideburns and thick mustache.

"Call me John."

"Okay, John. You all have any idea who done this?"

"Not yet, but we’ll find the perp, trust me. We always get our man."

"What are you, a couple of Mounties? You Dudley Do-Right?"

Stark was suddenly embarrassed. He searched his notebook like some answer was deep in there. Jones asked if she knew anybody that wanted Otis dead. Her laugh told him what he already knew. The list of folks who wanted the whoremaster dead was long and wide.

"That’ll just about do it." Stark finished writing her address in his notebook. "If you think of anything else, you give me a call." He passed her his card. She leaned over the desk and with her eyes locked on his, she took the pen from his hand and wrote on his notebook.

"That’s my number. You bored Saturday night, say eight, call me. I might be hungry for dinner." As she walked out, she swung her hips just enough to keep his eyes on her.

"What the hell was that?"

"That, Detective Jones, was the famous Stark charm."

"Don’t smell right."

"Jealous?"

"Not in this life, white boy."

Driving back to the LAPD Homicide office, both detectives were thinking about Sunshine, for very different reasons.

King Charles and Ray-Ray sat in King’s office behind the Watts Head Cutter’s barbershop. Guns, drugs, women, King ran the black side of the ghetto. No one so much as got their hair conked without his knowing about it.

"Jimmy G’s dead. Took a gauge to the head."

"No real loss there, King, right?"

"Took out Caesar, same way. The Italian mother-rapers didn’t sanction any hits. I didn’t. So who the hell did it?"

"Could be Jimmy G pissed off some husband? Caesar, that spick been just begging to die for a time now."

"Ray-Ray?"

"Yeah, King?"

"Find out who the hell is killing folks without my say-so."

"It is done."

"Good." After Ray-Ray was gone, King sat back, put his feet up on his desk. He struck a kitchen match and fired up a robusto. Jimmy G, Caesar and he had all come up together. They were the young lions of crime. Hell, they brought about the treaty between the Mexicans, blacks and Italians. They carved up the city and got rich in the process. They all played high school football at Franklin. Senior prom, they all were there. It was when they came together. In many ways, that was the beginning of their triumphant rule.

1955, Compton. Kendra looked in the mirror and liked what she saw. The pink taffeta prom dress was filled out in all the right places. Sure, she wished she had some more breasts, but what she had looked good. She heard the knock at the door. She knew it was Otis, but she hung back. She’d let him sit with her father for a few minutes, let the old man scare him. As long as Otis behaved and didn’t get Pop’s Irish up, he’d fare okay.

"You look more beautiful than Dorothy Dandridge." Otis was driving his Ford.

"I don’t, and keep your eyes on the road."

Dressed in his father’s suit, he was so handsome, it was as if she had never seen him before. He wasn’t big, or strong, he didn’t play ball, but something about his glasses and shy smile on this night was making her feel different in a very good way.

1973, Los Angeles, Homicide Department. Jones hefted a stack of files. "Somewhere in all this mess is an answer."

"Why can’t it be a coincidence?" Stark pulled up his tie.

"I don’t believe in coincidences. Two dirtbags get their heads cleaned with a gauge, two days apart? No, they connected, just can’t see how yet."

"You need me to stick around?"

"Nah, you gots a date with a dancer. Go on. I’m waiting for a call from Smitty in the gang unit."

"Alright, I’ll get with her twice, once just for you Jones."

"Just check her ID first, hate to have to haul you in for staggi."

"She’s over eighteen."

"Maybe just."

"She dances at Pussycats."

"Oh yeah, that’s right, they never ever had an underage stripper."

"Screw you. You’re just bustin’ balls because she went for me." Stark was sure Jones was wrong. Damn, she had to be eighteen. He took his ’67 Firebird, six years old, but still badass. If this didn’t get her panties wet, she was frigid.

Across town Sunshine was slipping into a white go-go dress. She had showered and put on a wig, long and straight, just the way white men liked. She finished her make-up and did a twirl in front of her mother’s bed.

"Baby girl, you look amazing. Your daddy be so proud of you."

"You sure about that, Momma?" Sunshine held a water glass with a straw to her mother’s lips. Her mother was quadriplegic, she had been for Sunshine’s entire life.

"Look at you, darlin’, you are amazing. Yes, he would be proud."

"Do you think he’s watching us?"

"Every moment."

Sunshine kissed her mother and went to wait in the living room. She watched the phone. Begging it to ring. Finally, at a quarter to eight it rang. She had it her hands on the second ring. On a pad she wrote down an address on West Century Blvd. near Inglewood. She, hung up, and hoped her father looked away sometimes.

Stark glided the Firebird to a stop. He splashed on liberal amounts of English Leather. Lifting his lip, he checked his teeth, smoothed his mustache, and was ready. The house was a GI home built for returning soldiers after WWII. The lawn was longer than the neighbors. For a flash Stark saw himself pushing a mower and Sunshine handing him an icy tea. Shook his head and cleared the thought. Love them, leave them, move on. Sunshine opened the door and his resolve was gone. When she took his hand, she could have led him anywhere.

"Momma, this is Detective Stark."

"Um, call me John, Mrs. O’Shay."

"We’ll save first names until we know each other better."

"Fine," he didn’t like her firm, cold eyes. Eyes that looked like they could see through any snow job he wanted to run.

"Detective Stark?"

"Yes ma’am?"

"You take care of my baby girl. You keep her safe out there."

"Don’t worry, I’m packing, I’ll keep her safe."

"There is a bad man wants to–"

"Momma, no." Sunshine silenced her. "Sorry John, she is a worrier. Now good night, Momma, I love you."

Stark waited until they were in the Firebird before he spoke. "Where would you like me to take you? I know a steak joint up on Sunset."

"Older white cop with a younger Black girl? We better stay down here."

"I’m not that much older."

"Relax. I like it."

"You are eighteen, aren’t you?" He tried to sound casual.

"Are you planning to sleep with me? Bit forward, Detective." She stared at him, her face flat of emotion. He stammered and started to blush. She left him hanging then finally let out a laugh. "I’m eighteen, turned a few months back. So if, IF, you get lucky you won’t wind up in the pokey. Now why don’t you take me to Bertha’s Soul Food on West Century. Feed me and we’ll see where the night takes us."

"Sounds good." Stark was glad to have it all out. His face cooled. From the corner of his eye, he saw that she was scanning for a tail. She was subtle, but it was clear she was afraid someone might be following them.

"Sunshine, you know you can trust me, if you’re into some kind of trouble."

"I like you, John, no, really. But I have a past. If you knew …"

"Girl, I, well we all have secrets. I’ve done some stuff I wish I hadn’t."

"My mother can’t work." Sunshine looked out the window. "I was fifteen when she had the accident. We needed money. He said he was a good man and he’d never make me do anything I didn’t want to."

"Who, who hurt you?"

"King Charles. He is a … he will… he gets girls for, you know."

"He’s a pimp."

"Yes. Two months ago I turned eighteen and went legit. I started dancing at Pussycats. I don’t work the cribs, just dance, you have to believe me." Stark passed her a starched white handkerchief. She dabbed at the tears running down her face. She slowed her breathing. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

"I’m sorry, John, really I am. He’s still looking for me. If he finds me, who knows what he might do. I know he’s killed more than one girl. Had one of them drink Drano, another he ODed on smack and pushed her off the San Pedro Bridge. If you want to take me home and forget we never met, I’ll understand."

"Never happen. I got a feeling you are going to change my life. Now let’s get to the eating; I am starving."

Bertha’s was a small house converted into a restaurant in the ’60s, the name spelled out on the roof in ruby neon. With yellow and purple paint, it was anything but subtle. Sunshine ordered chitlins, oxtails and gravy, mac and cheese. Stark teased her about how skinny she was. He ordered the fried chicken, greens, rice and beans. Bertha’s didn’t have a liquor license, but there was a bucket of ice stuffed with bottles of beer under the counter, not for sale. You took them and tipped accordingly.

In between bites Sunshine gave Stark an idyllic picture of her growing up. Her mother and father had been the perfect couple. Dad worked helping to build airplanes in Santa Monica. Her mother had been a nurse. Sunshine wanted to go to college, be a teacher. "That dream died when I took my first trick. And all that destruction because a drunk driver missed a corner. Killed my dad, crippled my mother …. Shoot, here I am crying again. Sorry." She dabbed her eyes, looking down at the handkerchief. "I covered it in eye make-up. Sorry, I’ll wash it."

"Don’t worry about it."

"But I do." Reflected in the glass covering a print on the wall, she saw King Charles enter. He was resplendent in his purple crushed-velvet trench coat and matching slacks. Alligator shoes. A fur-lined fedora. He even carried a gold-handled walking stick. Ray-Ray held the door for him, he was in a simple pinstriped suit and a bowler.

Sunshine waited for them to sit. Then with a clumsy elbow, she dumped a bowl of red beans and rice onto Stark’s lap. "Oh, I’m so sorry!" Jenny May came out from behind the counter with a large white towel and a bottle of club soda.

Sunshine watched the detective disappear into the rest room. Then she was up and moving fast. Straight up to King’s table, she moved the waiter out of the way. "They won’t be staying."

"Who the hell are you?"

"Me? I’m the one knows why your partners got smoked. Now you still want this man standing here while we talk?"

King waved the waiter away angrily, "Get the fuck out of here. When I want food, I’ll come see you."

"Certainly, Mr King." The waiter disappeared, probably checking his underwear.

"Outside." Sunshine stood and walked out. King had to move to keep up.

"Not him." Sunshine pointed at Ray-Ray. "He stays in the restaurant."

"Nope. He goes or I go home."

"Boss, I’ll be a hundred feet away, max." Ray-Ray said, turning away.

"Okay. Keep your damn eyes open and off the waitresses." King watched Sunshine walking toward his Cadillac Brougham. He knew her from some place but couldn’t place her.

Detective Jones was running full lights and sirens. Last he heard, Stark was going to a soul food joint. Somewhere on West Century Blvd. He was with Sunshine and had no idea what he was into. It had taken the guys from the gang unit to piece it all together, but they had. Sunshine was anything but a civilian. She was a combatant. Blowing across Hawthorn he traded paint with a UPS truck. The driver called him a "stupid nigger." Would have upset him, might even have used his .38 to knock out a few of the cracker’s teeth, but his partner was on the line so he kept blasting.

In the Caddy, King looked her over like he was deciding whether or not to eat her. "You a brave, little girl. You know who I am?"

"Yes, I do, Chucky, I do."

"Chucky? No one … not since school … oh mother fu—you are."

"Yes, I am."

King’s mind raced. This girl could have been Kendra nineteen years ago. But Kendra was in a chair, no way she could have …

"Do you know why I’m here?"

"I—we didn’t mean to hurt her. We were just messing around and she stumbled …. Really it was an accident. Ask …

"Who? Jimmy G? He didn’t have any good answers. Caesar begged, told me it was all your idea. He did say my mother was asking for it. Well, he almost said it. Couldn’t finish with his face all over the pier."

King closed his eyes. The night flooded in, drowning out the present.

It was on a deserted road up behind the Griffith observatory. After the prom, they had failed to hook up with any bitches. So King, Jimmy G, and Caesar, they headed up to the overlook, to drink some beer and fuck with some kids.

Kendra had decided on the dance floor that tonight was the night she would give herself to Otis. He was a good man. She loved him like no other. He made her feel shy when he came around.

Otis had been gentle when he unbuttoned her gown. He touched her body like it was precious. She arched her back, pressing her near naked body against his. Their lips met. The kiss wasn’t gentle; it was hungry. He pulled her legs apart. She guided him into her. She screamed his name, told him how much she loved him. He held her close, echoing her words of love. He’d thought she was the one for him since the fourth grade, but now he knew. He really knew. When the release finally came, he let out a howling scream.

That was the sound that attracted the three football players. They ripped the Ford’s door open. The naked couple tumbled out onto the dirt. They circled around them. "Well, well, Otis Four Eyes. How the hell did you get this fine woman into your car?"

"You get her drunk? That it, ese?" Caesar asked.

"Nah, bet he hit her with a shovel."

"Jimmy right about that? He hurt you?" King moved in closer.

Otis stood, facing the bigger man. "Let her go."

"Four Eyes, you giving orders?" King drove his fist into Otis’s gut, doubling him over. On the way down, Caesar hit his face, spraying blood into the dust.

Kendra threw her body over him.

"Kendra, time you was with some real men." She spat up at King. A good glob hung off his chin.

Caesar laughed. "Hey, King you gots some on your chin."

"I know what the hell I have and where. Get that bitch."

Otis whispered, "Now, don’t look back."

And he was up, his fists were full of loose dirt. He threw it in the two nearest faces. He threw wild unfocused punches. One caught Jimmy G off guard; he stumbled back, his nose bleeding. Caesar nailed Otis in the back of the skull with a baseball bat he used as a walking stick. Otis crumpled. King laid his boots into Otis.

Kendra was running around the car to get in the driver’s side. She tripped on a tree root. For a brief moment she thought she was flying. Then she landed hard and tumbled. When she stopped moving, she had lost all feeling below her neck.

King looked at Sunshine sadly. "You killed Caesar and Jimmy G over a mistake? We never meant to hurt your mother."

"But you did mean to kill my father. Nobody beats a man to death by accident." Before he could speak again, she raked his face with her long nails, drawing blood. He yowled and slapped her. Blood came from her lips. She scratched the other side of his face. This time he punched her nose. It flattened in to a bloody pulp. Her blood splattered the windshield.

Sunshine kicked the car door open just as Stark cleared the diner’s door. She fell back screaming, "No, King, don’t shoot me …. No, please. Stark, help."

Stark’s .44 Magnum exploded into the night. He punched two fist-sized holes into the windshield. The first shot took King’s neck out, the second shattered his chest.

The siren filled the air as Jones bounced into the lot. He jumped out shotgun in hand. He searched for a threat, saw none. He leaned into King’s car. "He’s still breathing."

"Get his gun before he plugs you."

"He ain’t got no gun, Stark. Way you hit him he couldn’t move far. No gun. Did you see a gun?"

"Hell yes, I saw a gun. He was trying to kill Sunshine."

Jones moved around the Caddy and helped Sunshine up. "He didn’t have no gun, did he?"

"I’m sure I saw one. Detective Stark wouldn’t have shot him if he didn’t, would he?"

"And that’s how it will have to play. I read the file on your mother’s accident. And what happened to her date. Odd that all three dead men went to that same prom."

"Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?" She gave him a subtle wink.

Jones dropped an untraceable throw-down pistol into the Caddy. Stark would get a commendation for bravery for saving the young woman’s life. Their being on a date would never be mentioned.

Ray-Ray called on Sunshine late one night. He brought her a briefcase. They stood on the front porch like two old friends chatting. "I have to know, Sunshine, what made you believe you could trust me."

"Well Ray-Ray, greed and fear. You wanted King’s empire. And you know if you screwed me, I would find you."

"And what if the cop hadn’t shot King?"

"I would have used the .32 in my jacket pocket. Same one I got pointed at you."

Ray-Ray looked at her hand. It was in her jacket pocket, aiming at him. He started to laugh. "Nothing gets past you."

"Not much."

It wasn’t until she was in her mother’s room that she counted the money in the briefcase: $30,000. Her mother smiled at her. It was done. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, the sleep of the righteous. Sunshine watched her mother sleeping for a time, then slipped from the room.

Thinking it all over, Sunshine finally felt relief. Killing one man is hard. Killing two is near impossible. But after three, it just started to come naturally.

THE END

Beautiful, Naked & Dead, Josh Stallings’ first novel, is garnering great notice from readers and reviewers alike. Its sequel, Out There Bad, has met with equally stunning reviews. He is busy working on the third Moses McGuire crime novel, One More Body. In addition to his fiction, his noir memoir All The Wild Children will be published by Snubnose Press. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Erika, two dogs and a cat named Riddle.

From the Publisher

Well, whether this is your first kick at B&T or you're back for more, thank you. I'm extremely pleased to be bringing you the high calibre pulpy creamy goodness you may have been missing for the last, oh, 40 years or so. Thanks again to Johnny Shaw for agreeing to take on this project, or talking me into it, whichever. And to Roxanne Patruznick for another fantastic cover, and the many authors and reviewers whose work I'm getting to know.

I've been promising Johnny I'd deliver a column or some-such, so look for the impending "Cooking Like a Man" in future issues, and please, if there are any potential reviewers out there interested in some good old fashioned fiction from the day, I've heard Johnny can be enticed to send you a random copy of something fun in exchange for a review - don't be shy, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Speaking of thoughts, if you're enjoying yourself or have suggestions or ideas for what you'd like to see in our digital pages, please help spread the word by posting your thoughts on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, and the authors' (and/or B&T's and/or CGP's) facebook pages and blogs.

Aloha,

Pete S. Allen,

Creative Guy

Table of Contents

Welcome Back!

DEAD EYE in: End of the Renaissance

THE PEACEMAKER: The Xander Pursuit

A.R.V.N. WAR CHRONICLES: Never Say Good Night in Saigon

THEY CALL HIM CRUEL: Burn In

SNIPER! Blast Out in Lebanon

BASTARD MERCENARY: Operation Scorpion Sting

FROM AMERICAN VIKING TO ZANE: A Brace Godfrey Chrestomathy

SUNSHINE, STRIPPER ASSASSIN: The G-String Gundown

From the Publisher