Allan Leverone

POSTCARDS FROM THE APOCALYPSE

For my daughters, Stefanie and Kristin, and my son Craig—you make me prouder than any dad should be—and for my little granddaughter Arianna, always my pal

Special thanks to Neil Jackson for his kick-ass original cover artwork.

Author’s Note

My original intention when it came to putting together this book was to separate the collection into two sections: One for the “horror” stories and one for the “crime” stories. Then, when I started getting into the nuts and bolts of the thing it began to occur to me that doing so wasn’t going to be quite so easy. A lot of my work, especially my short fiction, incorporates elements of both genres within a single story, sometimes within a single paragraph.

So instead I decided just to mix things up, the horror with the noir with the crime with the fantastical. But the fact of the matter is at heart I am a crime writer. In virtually everything I write someone does something bad, usually to someone else who doesn’t deserve it. Often that person gets what’s coming to him (or her) in the end; sometimes he doesn’t, but there is almost always a twist or two along the way. At least that’s what I aim for. You can decide if I’ve succeeded.

The longest stories in this collection are the final two: The “Uncle Brick” novelettes. These are a little lighter reading than most of the other stories you’ll find here and also feature one of my favorite characters—eighty year old Boston PI Brick Callahan. Both tales originally appeared in the outstanding online magazine, Mysterical-E. Uncle Brick’s adventures aren’t over, either. He will tackle his most perplexing case next summer, hopefully in Mysterical-E as well, tentatively titled, “Uncle Brick and the L.A. Ex.”

Finally, I know money doesn’t grow on trees, especially given the economic circumstances of the last few years. I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate you spending your hard-earned money on my work. I hope you enjoy POSTCARDS FROM THE APOCALYPSE, and please believe me when I say I will never take your support for granted.

Allan Leverone

November 6, 2010

Fallout

We start off—appropriately for the title of this collection—with an apocalyptic vision of an unnamed major city laid waste by a horrible act of terrorism. “Fallout” was written as an entry into a flash fiction competition being held by Morpheus Tales Magazine. There were only two requirements to enter: The story had to be related to a disturbing piece of artwork supplied by Morpheus Tales and its length could be no more than one thousand words. “Fallout” won the contest and led off the special Morpheus Tales Flash Fiction Issue, released in October, 2009.

No one comes here any more.

At one time, in the not too distant past, we were one of the biggest attractions in a teeming metropolis filled with attractions—The Empire Circus! That, of course, was before the person carrying the “suitcase nuke” detonated it downtown and obliterated a six square mile area of this, one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

But that’s not even the worst thing. Much worse than the nuclear explosion was the viral weapon that was released at the same time. It’s destroying people from the inside out, causing hideous physical mutations, and no one knows whether the virus is an airborne one or water-borne or exactly how it is being transmitted.

The authorities have no idea whether the bombing was done by a man or a woman because the guilty party was vaporized instantly, the lucky bastard. They don’t know whether it was a foreign or a domestic act of terrorism. Two dozen separate groups hurried to claim responsibility for the act within the first ninety minutes, so it will take the authorities quite some time to whittle down the list and settle on a guilty party.

For us, though, for the “survivors,” the search for the perpetrators is nothing more than an academic exercise; it has no impact on our lives, or what is left of them. Is there any point in assessing blame when radiation poisoning and a lethal bioweapon are killing those of us who remain? When eyes bleed and ears leak yellowish pus and the act of sneezing can break a rib and even something as simple as resting your head in your hands can cause a layer of blistered skin to slough off your face?

Immediately following the initial explosion, as the dying lay screaming in the streets, when it became clear that there was more to the attack than “just” a nuclear blast, the entire island was segregated; quarantined, if you will. Panicked authorities made the decision to save the lives of the many by sacrificing the lives of the few. All of the bridges to the mainland were destroyed, blown to bits by fighter jets screaming over the city. Airports were bombed and tunnels flooded. There was no way in or out. We were alone. Utterly and hopelessly alone.

In the span of just the past few weeks, the scene in the city has become a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest, of people butchering each other for food and water and shelter and clothing even as they suffer the ravages of radiation sickness and viral disease. The entire metropolitan area has become one gigantic freak show.

The irony for those of us who remain is inescapable. People who used to flock through our gates to see the bearded lady or the Joseph the Rat-Faced Boy or any of our other bizarre attractions now see much worse outside their shattered windows on a regular basis. The diseased rats which roam our grounds are becoming bolder and more aggressive by the day. And they are changing as well. I swear I saw one yesterday with two heads. That would have drawn some people to the Empire Circus in the old days!

But now it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

Because no one comes here any more.

Suspicions

One of the coolest new print magazines in the horror/dark fiction world is run by a guy up in my neck of the woods, Tim Deal in New Hampshire. It’s called Shroud Magazine, and I was honored that “Suspicions” was selected for inclusion in Issue #6, June, 2009, the very first nationally-distributed issue of this fast-growing mag. In this little story, a young man begins to fear his landlord might just be the serial killer who has been terrorizing the city for months…

Mark Gardner squinted into the harsh fluorescent light of the police interrogation room and squirmed uncomfortably. He wasn’t used to being the center of attention—didn’t like it one bit, in fact—but the city was in the grip of a year-long serial murder spree and he knew the time had come to speak to someone about his suspicions.

The detectives had suggested the hot, cramped room in order to get away from the chaos of the squad room and assure them of some privacy. Maybe also to make Mark a little uncomfortable. He knew they did those sorts of things; anyone who watched any television knew that.

Mark sat up a little straighter in his chair—a blocky, straight-backed wooden thing no doubt purchased by the city some time around the Lincoln assassination—and tried his best to answer all the questions being directed at him rapid-fire by two detectives, who had placed themselves at opposite corners of the room; also not by accident, Mark figured.

“I’m not sure exactly when I started being concerned that my roommate was into some really… uh… strange things; I would have to say that it just sort of dawned on me gradually.” Mark squinted up at the two detectives, blinking through his thick glasses. The taller, rumpled-looking one slouched in the corner to Mark’s right was older and seemed to be in charge, and he motioned impatiently for Mark to continue.

“I moved into the city about a year or so ago and needed a place to live,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone, so I looked into renting an apartment, but I really need peace and quiet to accomplish my work as an internet researcher and, well, you know how thin the walls are in your typical modern apartment house.”

Mark smiled and waited for an acknowledgement from the two detectives that, yes, they did understand the difficulties of apartment living. When none was forthcoming, he cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “When I saw the advertisement Rich had placed in the newspaper of a room for rent in his house, I checked it out and it was perfect. Quiet neighborhood, close to stores and restaurants, served by public transportation; I just loved it!”

The tall detective made a show of looking at his watch and said, “Yeah, we get it, you liked the house. Like the realtors say, location, location, location. Now, getting back to your concerns about your roommate…”

“Uh, yes,” Mark replied. “My roommate. Sorry about that. I’m not used to this whole police questioning thing, so I might be giving you guys things you don’t really need.”

The shorter, younger detective, the guy standing ramrod-straight in the opposite corner who Mark thought of as second in command, told him, “You’re doing just fine, Mr. Gardner. Now, you were telling us about your roommate?”

Mark ran his hand through his thick brown hair and smiled. He liked Detective Number Two better than Detective Number One. Much friendlier bedside manner, so to speak, plus he was dressed more professionally. Looks count for a lot in the world, as Mark’s mother used to say. “My roommate, yes. Rich. He seemed pretty normal at first, as much as anyone could be considered normal, I guess. Kind of quiet, kept to himself most of the time, but of course, that’s what I was looking for. You could say the same about me, I suppose.

“After a while, though, I started noticing some things that struck me as rather odd. He seemed to have an affinity for dressing all in black, like one of those Goth people you see on the streets, the scary ones who always seem to have a blank look in their eyes, and wear dark makeup, and who paint their fingernails dark colors, even the dudes.”

“There’s no law against dressing in a style you don’t agree with, Mr. Gardner.”

“No, no, of course not,” Mark replied quickly. “But that was just the first thing that struck me. After that I started noticing the unusual, nocturnal hours he was keeping. Not all the time, of course. Rich works the day shift at one of those funky coffeehouse/bookstore places in midtown, so most of the time he would be in his bedroom for the evening by 10:00. Every once in a while, though, I would hear him go out after he said he was retiring for the night. He would leave at like midnight and not return until nearly daybreak.”

The tall detective squinted at Mark. “How would you know this? Wouldn’t you have been asleep at that hour?”

Mark paused a moment and then chuckled. “Wow, that’s a great question. No wonder you’re a detective.”

The tall detective said nothing, just waited for Mark to continue. “The truth is, I’m a very light sleeper and the room I rent from Rich is right at the top of his second-floor landing. There is a loose floorboard at the top of the stairway and whenever anyone goes up or down the stairs it makes an unbelievably loud squeaking noise. I wake up whenever anyone steps on the darned thing.”

“Okay, so your mysterious roommate likes to keep unusual hours. Get to the part where you explain why you think he might be the monster who’s been terrorizing this city for the nearly a year now.” The two detectives were clearly losing patience with Mark, and he knew he had better get to the point if he wanted them to take him seriously.

He again sat up straight in the medieval wooden torture device that doubled as a chair and looked Mr. Lead Detective right in the eyes. “Because I searched his bedroom one day while he was at work, okay? I know I shouldn’t have done it but I did. And I found some stuff that I think you’ll agree was…um…troubling.”

“Some stuff. Such as?”

“Well, such as a thirteen inch hand-held rip saw hidden in the back of Rich’s closet under a pile of laundry. Rich isn’t the kind of guy to do home repairs, officers—“

“Detectives.”

Mark paused, confused. “What?”

“We’re detectives, not officers.”

“Oh, yeah, right, sorry about that. Detectives. Anyway, Rich would have absolutely no legitimate use that I can think of for a saw like the one I found in his closet, and the worst part is, I’m pretty sure the blade had bloodstains on it. It looked like he had tried his best to clean it, but you could still see the stains pretty clearly.”

Mark shivered at the memory as the two detectives shared a knowing glance. One of the grisly details of the killings the police had withheld from the press was that all the victims in the year-long murder spree had had one body part sawed off, always a different one, in all likelihood before being killed. Even veteran homicide detectives were having trouble sleeping as the bodies piled up, a different appendage missing from each one.

The tall detective sat down at the conference table in front of Mark. He was all business, clearly taking Mark seriously, paying full attention. He looked even more rumpled now than he had before, if that was possible. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Gardner?” he asked. “We’re going to be here a while. We’ll need to know everything that you can tell us about your roommate, and then we’re going to want to hear it all again.”

* * *

Mark Gardner awoke with a start, jolted out of a deep sleep by a deafening crash. For a long moment disorientation immobilized him. The entire house rocked on its foundation as the police used some sort of battering ram or perhaps even explosives to smash down Rich’s front door. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and looked at the digital clock on his bedside table, its numbers glowing an unwavering blue in the dark of the night. It was 3:20 a.m.

He arose as the sound of pounding feet and shouted warnings rang through the house. There would be no more sleeping tonight.

* * *

By 6:00 a.m., the search of Rich Sullivan’s home had been completed and Mark was allowed to reenter the house. He had watched from across the street, sipping a coffee, as authorities led his landlord away in handcuffs, oily hair hanging in his eyes. The man was proclaiming his innocence to anyone who would listen in a loud, aggressive voice. No one seemed to be paying any attention to him.

Among the bags of evidence removed by the authorities was undoubtedly the ripsaw Mark had described to detectives earlier in the day, the one hidden under all the dirty laundry in Rich’s closet. It was highly probable the search team had recovered forensic evidence too—hairs from some of the victims, etc. The investigative teams searching for evidence in the gruesome crimes which had been taking place in the city for most of the past year were highly motivated and not likely to miss anything.

Mark felt a little badly that he had been forced to go to the police with his suspicions about Rich, and not just because he would clearly have to find a new place to live now. The guy seemed pleasant enough on the few occasions Mark had taken the time to chat with him, once you got past his black fingernails and odd clothing and lax personal grooming habits.

The thing is, Mark reminded himself, and let’s be honest for a moment here, you have to do whatever it takes to protect yourself, and the goddamned cops were getting a little too close for comfort. Putting the saw under all that dirty laundry in Rich’s bedroom closet was simple enough, and the police wouldn’t think anything about the fact that there were no fingerprints on it; after all, Rich had worked hard cleaning it, right?

But the real killer for poor Rich—pardon the pun—the thing that sealed his fate, would be the strands of hair from Victim Number Three and Victim Number Seven Mark had tossed haphazardly into the closet as well. It was a real shame he had to do it, to Mark they were cherished trophies not easily parted with, but again, sometimes you have to take extraordinary measures to protect yourself in this world. No one else was going to do it for you.

Mark had no doubt whatsoever the police would find the hairs and that they would serve as the final nails in Rich’s painstakingly constructed coffin, or perhaps more appropriately the final gas in Rich’s execution chamber. And as far as those hairs were concerned, Mark consoled himself with the knowledge that he still had plenty of other trophies left to admire in the privacy of his new home, wherever that might end up being. Then, for just a few dollars at an anonymous hardware store in an as-yet unknown new city, he would be able to re-supply himself with a brand-new rip saw and get back down to business with his unusual but highly rewarding hobby.

Mark packed his few meager belongings in a single well-worn suitcase and for the final time walked through what was left of the mahogany front door the police had blown right off its hinges, stepping carefully around the chunks of wood and shards of glass scattered throughout the home’s entryway.

Outside, the sun shone brightly and the birds serenaded Mark as he hailed a passing cab. It was a beautiful spring day. He settled comfortably into the back seat, watching the scenery, smiling all the way to the airport. It was great to be alive.

The Bridal Veil

I grew up in a tiny hamlet in central Massachusetts, and in one of the town’s centuries-old cemeteries was a crypt with a fairly substantial crack in one of its ancient concrete walls. Local legend, at least among us kids, was that if you put your eye to the crack at just the right time on a sunny day, you could see the skeletal remains of the crypt’s occupant, complete with long fingernails and hair growing all the way to the ground. If you’ve ever been a kid you know that getting up the courage to look into this crypt became an important rite of passage for the children in my town. It also serves as the basis for “The Bridal Veil,” which first appeared in the June, 2009 issue of the print magazine, Twisted Dreams.

“Honestly, I don’t know why you think this is going to be scary.” My sister, Cassie Hayes, shrugged her shoulders, a smug look on her pretty face as if to say that her brother and her boyfriend weren’t capable of giving her a fright.

We paused at the entrance to Whispering Pines Cemetery. Whispering Pines—has there ever been a more perfect name for a boneyard than that? We waited a long moment without speaking and finally I said, “If you’re too afraid to go in, Cass, that’s cool, we’ll just go do something else.”

She shot me a glance that was more than a little frightening in its own right. If looks could kill, as the saying goes, I’d have been on my way underground. “Fine, just go,” she snapped, wrinkling her nose like she smelled a dead body or something.

The three of us had agreed to check out the Wentworth gravesite, located almost exactly in the center of Whispering Pines. Legend in our tiny town had it that if you looked through a crack in the door of the gigantic Wentworth crypt at just the right angle, you could see the skeleton of Josiah Wentworth’s long-dead bride.

Josiah had been one of the town’s founders more than two hundred-fifty years ago, and according to the universally accepted local legend, his young wife, Mary, had died of diphtheria within two weeks of their wedding. The story went that Josiah had gone insane with grief, burying Mary in her wedding dress before killing himself. Supposedly, if you looked through that crack in the crypt’s door, you could see Mary, her white lace bridal veil still perfectly preserved, hanging delicately over her skull.

The counterpoint to the tale, and the reason we had never checked it out before, was that the legend also stated in no uncertain terms that anyone who dared view poor Mary Wentworth’s remains would soon suffer a horrible, violent death. No one we knew of had ever tested the legend. Tonight that was going to change.

Cassie and I were about as close as a brother and a sister could be—no surprise there, since we were twins and had been virtually on our own since our mom and dad died in a fiery car crash a couple of years ago—and when she had begun dating Wade Collins I was less than thrilled. He was older than we were by a year and just didn’t seem trustworthy to me. I didn’t like the way he looked at her when he thought nobody was watching and I felt she could do better.

It had been my idea to make this midnight excursion to visit the tomb of Mary Wentworth and when I broached the subject to Cassie, she readily agreed. Wade had seemed much less enthusiastic, but given the fact that my sister was so stoked, he couldn’t very well wimp out without looking like a total wuss.

So there we were, standing at the gates of Whispering Pines Cemetery at a couple of minutes before midnight. When Cassie finally gave the go-ahead after appearing as though she might have changed her mind, we walked right in, climbing over the single heavy chain hanging between the two wrought-iron posts at the only entrance and weaving our way around hundreds of headstones, moving steadily deeper into the massive graveyard.

As we walked, it became clear how Whispering Pines had gotten its name. Although the night had seemed clear and calm on the way over, inside the cemetery the wind seemed to dance through the ancient trees, moaning softly like the gibbering of restless spirits. We had been laughing and joking before arriving at the cemetery, but now a tense silence fell over us like a death shroud.

I led the way, followed by Cassie, with Wade bringing up the rear in a single-file procession. This section of Whispering Pines was the oldest, with barely enough room for us to clear the precariously tilting granite headstones of long-dead and long-forgotten citizens, as we moved steadily toward the Wentworth crypt. We were all jumpy and nervous and I noticed with satisfaction that Wade seemed even shakier than Cassie.

Eventually Mary and Josiah Wentworth’s final resting place materialized out of the inky blackness, the crypt looming above the neighboring gravesites like some absurd monument, perhaps an eighteenth-century version of class distinction, except instead of the rich guy showing off by driving a Beemer or a Lexus, he had constructed a gaudy, oversized building in which to store his remains after his death.

By now our nerves were threatening to get the best of us. I flicked my flashlight up to Cassie’s face and she seemed pale and washed out, although that might have been a trick of the light. A similar look at Wade revealed a horizontal slash of a mouth, his lips pressed together so tightly they were almost invisible. “Get that light out of my eyes,” he snarled.

I went first. It seemed only right; after all, it had been my idea to come out here in the first place. I knelt in front of the crypt’s door and shone my light through the half-inch seam at the hinges, while simultaneously pressing my eyeball against the keyhole-sized crack under the cold iron doorknob. I sucked in a short breath, gasping at what I saw, before leaping backward and falling flat on my back.

Cassie took my place at the door, moving quickly; as if afraid she might lose her nerve if she didn’t go NOW. She repeated the sequence—flashlight at the hinges, eyeball to the door—and screamed in terror before backing away and covering her eyes with her hands. “Hurry up and do it,” she moaned to Wade, “so we can get out of here.”

Barely concealed terror was now plainly evident in the body language of my sister’s boyfriend. It was obvious he didn’t want to look, but he really had no choice. After all, his girlfriend had done it. He reluctantly knelt down in front of the grave of Mary and Josiah Wentworth, long-dead and long-since returned to dust, and when he did I smashed the grapefruit-sized rock I had been holding into the back of his skull with all the force I could muster.

Wade Collins’s crushed skull imploded with a crack! as his body dropped to the damp ground. He groaned once and was still. There was very little blood, surprisingly. While my sister watched closely, I bent behind the Wentworth crypt and lifted up the iron pry bar I had placed there earlier in the day. I used it to force open the door of the crypt—it was heavy and resisted the movement at first, but eventually opened wide enough to permit entrance—and dragged her dead boyfriend’s body into the cold and clammy space. I knew no one would ever think to look for the bastard here; he would never be found.

After tossing him face-down on the ground next to Mary or Josiah—there was no bridal veil to be seen, that part of the tale was completely false, so I couldn’t tell who was who—I hustled back outside and Cassie helped me force the heavy door closed again. When we finished, the ancient crypt looked exactly the same as it had for hundreds of years. Then Cassie and I retraced our steps out of Whispering Pines for the last time.

Sure, that stupid myth about Mary Wentworth and the bridal veil was nothing more than a bunch of crap, but it made for the perfect excuse to lure Collins to his date with destiny. He had been beating Cassie regularly and lately the abuse had begun escalating out of control until she was certain he would soon kill her. After she had come to me, half-crazed with fear and pain, we developed the plan we executed tonight. As it turned out, the only part of the silly Wentworth legend that turned out to be true was the part about someone dying a violent death.

Ironic, I know.

I felt kind of bad about forcing Josiah Wentworth to share his eternal resting place with a scumbag like Wade Collins, but, hey—it’s not like he was about to complain. He’s been dead for two hundred years, and there was plenty of room inside that gigantic crypt anyway. What difference would one more body make, really?

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

Fiction publications, especially online magazines, come and go with an unfortunate regularity that would make a Swiss watch-maker proud. One of the shortest-lived efforts was called TREI Literary Magazine. A grand total of one issue was published before the ‘zine died. “Regrets, I’ve Had a Few” was accepted for the inaugural and final edition of TREI, in September, 2008. In this story, a man haunted by a decades-old tragedy meets a stranger in a bar with a tale frighteningly similar to his own. I’m proud to say this tale was selected as one of five finalists for the 2009 Derringer Award for Best Short Story.

The man sat at the bar, downing ice-cold Budweiser. It was always Budweiser, although it was not always ice cold. That part depended upon how busy the Lucky Leprechaun was on any particular day and how often the bar’s owner, Ted, was able to rotate the stock.

The man wasn’t sure why he always ordered Budweiser, other than the fact that you could get it just about anywhere. Availability was an important consideration when you drank as much and as often as the man did. After all, he wasn’t always going to be near the Lucky Leprechaun when he felt the compulsion to slam down a beer or twenty. The man felt the King of Beers was about as close to a sure thing as you were liable to get in this world, so he stuck with it whenever he could.

He did, however, try to do his drinking at the Lucky Leprechaun when possible. He knew the lay of the land, so to speak, and since his one-room efficiency apartment was only half a block away, it was almost impossible to get lost, no matter how much he drank or how late at night he stumbled home.

Also an important consideration.

Plus which, the man liked it here, at least as much as he was capable of liking anything anywhere anymore. The regulars all knew him, and Ted wasn’t averse to opening up early for the man if he happened to be there anyway, cleaning and stocking and whatnot.

Today was a pretty typical day for the man. He had slept late and woken up hung over. His morning had consisted of dry toast and black coffee with a thin coating of grounds settling to the bottom of the cup, then quiz shows and soap operas on television while waiting for the postman to get around to delivering his welfare check.

Three o’clock found the man glued to his usual barstool, drinking the usual ice-cold Budweiser and doing the usual pensive thinking. That was the major drawback to drinking—all the goddamned thinking that went along with it. Drinking and thinking. Sounded like a game show, one that he’d probably be pretty good at, come to think of it.

On the jukebox, Frank Sinatra serenaded the nearly-empty bar, bragging to anyone who would listen about doing it his way. The man made sure to bring extra money for the juke when he was going to be at the Lucky Leprechaun, and Sinatra was the man’s artist of choice. Every day was the same for him, Bud and Sinatra; a natural combination as far as he was concerned.

It hadn’t always been like this for the man. Once upon a time, a long time ago, the man had been a sober, law-abiding, nine-to-five regular guy. An actuary, actually. In fact, that was how he used to introduce himself at parties and corporate functions in his old life. “I’m Jim Robertson, insurance guy. An actuary, actually.” This little exercise in witty wordplay would invariably earn Jim those polite chuckles total strangers reserved for other total strangers when an honest reaction would be considered inappropriate.

The man, Jim Robertson, had also had a family once upon a time: a wife, Elizabeth, not beautiful or ugly but stunningly average, and one child—a daughter named Jenny. Jenny, once upon a time, had been the apple of her father’s eye. She was bright, beautiful and athletic; incredibly, inexplicably, world-class athletic.

But all of this, of course, had been a long time ago, and in a different life. Because more than twenty years ago, a lifetime ago, the incident that Jim Robertson had come to think of as “The Thing” had happened. Robertson knew it was stupid to compartmentalize a life-changing event with its own snappy little title, like it was some Grade B horror movie or something, but it was the only way he had ever found to deal with it, that’s all. Well, that and the Budweiser, of course.

Anyway, after “The Thing,” Jim Robertson had simply ceased to exist. With astonishing quickness, Jim lost everything: job, money, family, self-respect. It all disappeared down a toilet flushed clean with Budweiser.

No longer an actuary, actually, Jim Robertson became simply the man who lived in a one-room apartment on the questionable side of the tracks, the side he would never even have considered visiting in his previous incarnation, slowly drinking himself to death at the Lucky Leprechaun. He was alone, utterly and completely alone, unless of course you included Frank Sinatra in the equation, which Jim certainly did.

One thing that made the man’s life just the tiniest bit bearable, the only thing if he was going to be honest with himself, was chatting up strangers who entered the Lucky Leprechaun and comparing miseries with them. Jim had discovered long ago that just about everyone drinking at the time of day he drank had miseries of their own. Some of them even rivaled his.

Today he had struck up a conversation with one such stranger. He was probably older than Jim but looked younger. Years of constant drinking will age you, Jim Robertson could testify to that, but the bright side was that the more you drank the less you cared about things like how you looked, anyway.

This particular stranger had walked past the Leprechaun’s entrance, pausing momentarily in front of the blinking neon four-leaf clover mounted in the middle of the big picture window that gave the drinkers a view of the world outside; the world that was humming along just fine without them. The stranger appeared to hold a short debate with himself, finally winning the argument, or perhaps losing it. He had then turned around and strutted into the tavern like he was the mayor or something.

Striking up a conversation was easy, since the only people in the whole place at this early hour were the stranger, the man who used to be Jim Robertson, and Ted. Jim bought the stranger a beer and immediately began mining for miseries. He primed the pump by giving the stranger a quick rundown of his own fall from grace. He offered no specifics—he quite frankly didn’t like talking about himself—just provided the stranger a quick recap of the lowlights of his life, then waited for him to reciprocate. After all, he reasoned, he would have to reciprocate; it was only good bar etiquette.

As it turned out, though, the stranger didn’t feel he had any miseries to share. He had a good job, a beautiful wife, a happy family. A lot like the old Jim Robertson, in fact. The only reason he was even in this part of town, he said in a vaguely condescending tone of voice that was not lost in Jim, was because he had had travel to his good-for-nothing brother-in-law’s apartment to collect some money the creep had owed him for months.

The man who used to be Jim Robertson was disappointed, to say the least. He had wasted a whole beer on this guy and gotten nothing in return. In the background of the bar, Sinatra continued to sing about doing things his way. “Come on,” he said, “there must be something. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

The stranger hesitated just the barest fraction of a split-second and the man knew he had him. Everyone had a misery or two, everyone, even the happiest of people; it was just a matter of getting them to share. Finally the stranger said, “Ah, what the hell. You want to know the worst thing I’ve ever done?”

The man who used to be Jim Robertson nodded, and the stranger said, “Okay, since you seem to find it so important, how’s this grab you? I’m driving home one day, must be close to twenty years ago now, and I had stopped for a few pops after work. You know, just to relax and unwind.

“Anyway, I come around a corner, it’s not even that far from here in fact, I’m almost home for God’s sake, I come around a corner and wham! Some stupid chick’s running along the side of the road, she’s right there in the road, I had nowhere to go and I hit her! Sure, I was a little drunk and maybe driving too close to the shoulder—okay, technically I was on the shoulder—but good Christ I never saw her!

“So I stop the car to see if she’s okay, but of course she’s not okay, none of what’s left of her is okay. She’s dead, in fact, but here’s the unbelievable part, the part I have never been able to understand: no one is around! Not one single, solitary witness! So do what anyone would do; I jump back in my car and finish the drive home, suddenly stone-cold sober. There was nothing I could do for that chick anyway, right?

“I’ll tell you this, though, and it’s amazing how it happens—you want to sober up fast, run someone over in your car. Works every time.”

The stranger paused for a moment to take a drink of his beer and the man who used to be Jim Robertson watched him steadily. Jim finally glanced down at the scarred wooden table before taking a sip of his own beer, now almost empty. He waited for the stranger to continue.

“I know what you’re thinking, I can see it in your eyes,” the stranger said defensively. “I left her there; how could I just leave her there? But here’s the thing, friend. She was dead, there was nothing I could do for her, not a goddamned thing. I still had a family to support. What would be the point of my life getting ruined too, you know?

“I found out later this stupid chick was kind of a local hero, she was some Olympic gymnast or something. Won a medal, silver, I think it was, but it’s been so long I can’t exactly remember for sure.

“I’ve never told anyone that story, not even my wife, not even when she saw the damage to the car and asked what the hell had happened. She still thinks I hit a deer. But you wanted to know the worst thing I ever did, so there you go.” The stranger sat back, seemingly winded, or maybe just amazed he had actually told someone his story after twenty years. He took a long swallow and drained his mug, leaving a thin trace of foam running down the inside of the glass and pooling on the bottom.

The man who used to be Jim Robertson had listened without interrupting once. Now he shook his head in mute agreement that that had been one stupid chick. He bought the stranger another beer before abruptly leaving, apologizing but saying he was late for an urgent appointment. He realized how ridiculous that sounded but didn’t care.

Jim hurriedly walked the six blocks to where he kept his car stored in a long-term parking garage. It was a 1984 Lincoln Town Car, a huge, gas-guzzling land-yacht, and it was the only thing he still had left from his former life. He turned the key and the big engine rumbled to life as he had known it would. He drove slowly and carefully out of the garage and to his destination. It would not do to get pulled over for DUI now, of all times. This truly was an urgent appointment.

When the man who used to be Jim Robertson reached his destination, he pulled neatly to the curb and waited. He hoped against hope he was not too late. The car sat idling patiently, its finish marred by the decades it had spent mostly sitting in storage. The once-gleaming black paint job now looked gray and pitted, but the engine ran like a Swiss watch, and that was all the man cared about.

A few minutes later, the door to the Lucky Leprechaun opened and into the dwindling late-afternoon sunshine walked the stranger. Fast-food wrappers and other trash on the sidewalk swirled around the stranger’s feet as the late-fall winds whipped and gusted. The stranger pulled his collar up against the cold.

The man who used to be Jim Robertson slammed the accelerator to the floor and the big car shot across the street to the sound of squealing tires and screaming witnesses.

The stranger never had a chance. Jim Robertson’s big Lincoln hit him doing forty and drove him into the brick front wall of the Lucky Leprechaun like a nail gun shooting a spike through a sheet of cardboard. Thick black smoke poured from the car’s engine. The stranger disappeared, crushed to death somewhere amidst the wreckage of smashed brick wall, twisted automotive sheet metal, billowing smoke and gushing radiator fluid.

The police arrived just five minutes later, and when they did they found the man who used to be Jim Robertson, still sitting in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln, listening to music and waiting patiently for them. Frank Sinatra serenaded him from the car’s tape deck, and in his hands he held Jenny’s 1984 Olympic Silver medal. He turned it over and over in his hands as he hummed along with Frank.

The Road to Olathe

Another online magazine no longer with us is Crime and Suspense. I especially miss this webzine because its editor, Tony Burton, offered me my very first short story acceptance, for the July, 2007 issue. There was no pay involved, but that didn’t lessen the excitement I felt at seeing my creation take its place among those of some other very talented crime fiction writers. “The Road to Olathe” tells of a fictional encounter in depression-era Kansas between a family on the verge of losing their farm and a stranger passing through, who isn’t exactly what—or who—he appears to be. This story went on to be featured in a C&S anthology of ten of Burton’s favorite stories culled from the magazine’s 2007 issues titled TEN FOR TEN, released in July, 2008.

This here’s a story I’ve never told anyone, mostly on account of I didn’t really think anybody’d believe it. Hell, I was married to my beautiful Mae, My Little Mae-Flower, for fifty-seven years, and I never even told her this. Why? Because I knew just how unlikely it would sound.

The thing is, though, I’ve been on this here earth for eighty-seven years now and I’ve discovered that the older you get, the less attention people pay to anything you say anyway. So maybe I chose now to tell my story simply because I’m longing for a little attention, but whatever the reason, I swear on my Mae-Flower’s grave that every word is true and accurate.

Memory is a strange thing. You don’t have to take my word for it, just wait until you get to be my age and see if you don’t agree. Look at my situation— sometimes I forget what I ate for breakfast before I even get to lunch. That in itself ain’t so bad, though. At least I never get tired of the meals they serve day after day in this place. Everybody else complains to high heaven about the food here, they say it’s boring and bland, but me? Nosirree, every breakfast, lunch and dinner is a new and delightful treat as far as I’m concerned.

That said, I have a perfect recollection of the incident I’m going to relate (I know, I should stop telling you I’m going to tell you and just get on with it. All things in good time, though. I’m just glad to have a little company). Even though this thing I’m going to tell you about happened close to three-quarters of a century ago, it may as well have been yesterday, it’s that clear in my mind.

You see, I grew up in a little farming community in Kansas during the Great Depression, and let me tell you, if there’s a bigger misnomer than calling it the “Great” Depression, I can’t imagine what it might be. The Horrible Depression, sure, I could live with that, or maybe the Dirt-Poor Hardscrabble Try To Stay Alive Depression, that would cover it too, but Great Depression? No sir, not the way I remember it.

Kansas in the 1930’s was right smack in the middle of what they called the Dust Bowl, on account of the heat and lack of rain making it darn near impossible to grow a crop of anythin’ but dust. You prob’ly recall learning about the Dust Bowl in school, but if you grew up in it, like I did, I guarantee you never forgot what it was like to try and take a deep breath of fresh air and get nothin’ but hot, dry wind and dirt about choking you to death.

Anyway, that was the situation in the spring of 1934. I was fourteen years old, young and strong, working next to my daddy every day in the fields, trying to grow enough wheat so’s we could make some money and maybe have something to eat besides potatoes for dinner once in a while. Farms in them days weren’t like they are now, where everythin’s computerized and all the equipment looks like the space shuttle or somethin’, all shiny and fancy-looking.

Back in them days, the whole family worked in the fields, even little Dorothy, my younger sister, who in 1934 would have been just seven years old. Didn’t matter, she was out there pullin’ weeds while daddy and I were plowing the fields, planting wheat, or watering the crops whenever we were able.

Seemed like every day was the same in the spring and summer of 1934. We would watch the sun rise from the barn or the fields, work all day in the brutal heat, and then watch the sun set again before calling it a day. None of that bothered us, though, that’s just the way it was—if you expected to eat, you expected to have to work.

Now here’s where it starts to get interestin’. One day in, oh, I guess it was prob’ly the middle of May or so, a fine Ford automobile come motoring along the road toward Olathe. Well, we didn’t get much traffic along the narrow, rutted dirt track that ran beside our farmhouse, unless you counted the horses and pickup trucks that would pass by once or twice a day carrying supplies to the general store, so naturally we all stopped what we was doing to watch it go by.

Next thing we know, danged if it didn’t turn right into the dooryard and pull up in front of the house! No one we knew even owned an automobile, exceptin’ for one of my daddy’s distant cousins, who lived outside Chicago and made his money deliverin’ moonshine whiskey to speakeasies—clubs that didn’t even officially exist, if you catch my meanin’.

Naturally, by this time we was all mighty curious, so the whole entire family started toward the house to see what the visitor wanted. We weren’t worried about being robbed or anything, hell, we had nothin’ any self-respectin’ thief would want anyway.

Out of the Ford jumped a young man, travelin’ alone, kind of a handsome fella in a rugged-looking way. He was around thirty years of age, give or take a year or two either way, with dark, wavy hair and a ropy, sorta muscular look about him. He started across the field to meet us and promptly stepped in a rut and down he went like a sack of potatoes. That little scene struck me as funny, bein’ fourteen and all, but I could see my daddy was a little worried for the stranger. Here our visitor had hurt himself and we hadn’t even met him yet!

Well, I was the youngest, except for Dorothy of course and I could outrun her with one foot tied behind my back, so I dashed up to the stranger before the rest of my family was even close. I was breathin’ kinda heavy and the fella says, “Whoa there, son, don’t never run like that less there’s somebody chasin’ ya. There ain’t nobody chasin’ ya, is there?”

I remember I broke out into a wide grin and said, “No sir, nobody’s chasin’ me.”

“Then slow down and help me up,” he answered, giving me an arm to pull him up with.

By this time my daddy’d joined us, and helped steady the man as he wobbled, gingerly putting just a little weight on his right foot and then immediately lifting it again, wincing in pain.

“I hope that ankle ain’t broke,” Daddy volunteered. “My wife does some nursin’, she’ll have a look at it and hopefully fix you right up. Let’s get him inside,” he told me, and we stood on either side of the young man, supporting his weight as we walked him into the house.

Once we got our visitor comfortable in the kitchen, injured leg propped on the table, Mama rolled up his pant leg and started poking and prodding the limb, which was already swelling and turning interesting shades of purple. The stranger seemed oblivious to the pain it must have been causing. He chuckled and told us, “All I wanted to do was make sure I was on the road to Olathe, and here I’ve gone and disrupted your whole family’s routine.”

At that I snickered. “Mister, it’s prob’ly 120 degrees in that wheat field. You didn’t disrupt a thing as far as I’m concerned.”

My daddy pushed his straw hat back on his head. “Nah,” he said. “It won’t be 120 for at least another couple of hours. We’ll be back out there long before then.”

The visitor laughed at my expression and my daddy asked him, “What brings you to Olathe, mister…”

“JD,” he said. “My friends call me JD, and I must say I count you fine folks as friends already. The hospitality you’re showing me is something I won’t soon forget.”

“JD it is, then,” answered Daddy. “My name is Hiram, and this here nurse is my wife Lucy. You’ve met Stephen and Dorothy already,” he finished, indicating me and my sister.

The stranger nodded to us all. “To answer your question Hiram, I’m due in Olathe next week on business and I decided to drive up a little early and get the lay of the land, so to speak. You know, enjoy a little fresh air.”

“What sort of work do you do, JD?”

“I deal in paper goods.”

By this time Mama had finished her inspection of JD’s injured ankle, telling him it appeared to be no worse than a mild sprain, and that he should stay off it for a day or two and then he’d be right as rain.

Daddy spoke up immediately, telling him, “We’d love to have you stay with us until you’re feeling well enough to drive, JD. We’ve got a spare bedroom you’re welcome to use. I’m afraid we can’t offer much in the way of entertainment, but there’s plenty of food and Lucy’s cooking is the finest in the county.”

Mama beamed and JD answered, “I’m much obliged, Hiram. That would be wonderful, as long as it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” answered my daddy. “It’s the least we can do.” He helped our guest to his room while Dorothy and I started back out to the fields, the excitement over for now.

That evening we received our second visitor of the day. The First National Bank in Olathe held the mortgage on our farm and the bank’s president, Elmer Dressler, had scheduled a meeting with Mama and Daddy for eight o’clock. I know that sounds strange in this day and age, a bank president coming to someone’s home for a meeting, but that’s how it was done back in those days, especially with farmers. People workin’ a farm couldn’t be expected to give up half a day just to travel into town for a meetin’, so it was common for the meetin’ to come to them.

JD was resting in his room, no doubt recovering from overstuffing himself on Mama’s turkey dinner, when Mr. Dressler knocked on the front door promptly at eight o’clock. Dorothy and I were shooed out of the sitting room when Mama ushered the bank president in, but that farmhouse was old and drafty and I could hear every word.

At the age of fourteen I wasn’t too interested in the boring affairs of adults, particularly my folks, but something in the strained tone of voice Daddy was using when he greeted Mr. Dressler got my attention and held it.

After the small talk that was considered a necessity back in those days was dispensed with, Mr. Dressler got right to the point. “Hiram, I’ve known you folks forever it seems like, and it hurts to have to tell you this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to foreclose on the farm. I went to bat for you with the board, but there is simply no way you will be able to make enough money this year from the wheat to meet your four thousand dollar obligation.”

Now, I was just a simple country kid. I quit school after the fifth grade to work on the farm, but that don’t make me stupid. Maybe I didn’t understand all the big words, like “foreclose” and “obligation,” but I knew bad news when I heard it. My daddy knew it, too. He responded by asking for a little more time, and Mr. Dressler told him the board’s decision was final, that Mama and Daddy had had all the time they were going to get.

After that, voices got raised and feelins got hurt. Mr. Dressler ended up storming out of the house with his tie askew, a sheaf of papers sticking haphazardly out of his fine leather briefcase, which he had obviously slammed shut in a hurry. Mama and Daddy huddled in the sitting room for the rest of the evening, sending Dorothy and me to bed and talking in low tones.

The next morning at breakfast, Daddy was still pale and Mama had been crying, you could tell. Everythin’ else was the same as ever, though. We ate breakfast way before sunrise and we still had chores to attend to. Neither Mama nor Daddy volunteered any information to us kids on what had happened during the meeting with Mr. Dressler, but I had a pretty good idea anyway. Like I said, I’m a simple guy, not a stupid one.

JD came down the stairs while we was eating and joined us. “Hiram,” he said, “as you know the walls are pretty thin in a lot of these old farmhouses.”

My daddy held up a hand, stopping JD. “Please accept my apology for interrupting your rest last night. I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand with Mr. Dressler like they did.”

“No, no,” JD exclaimed. “That’s not my meanin’. I’ve done farming in my life when I was a youngster, not much older than your handsome son is right now, in fact. Potatoes, it was, in my case, not wheat, but farmin’ is farmin’. I wanted to tell you that I understand your plight and I don’t think you should concern yourselves too much with what that banker fella said last night.”

A rueful smile crossed Daddy’s face and he said, “This ain’t the first time we’ve had to ask Mr. Dressler for an extension, but I’m afraid the bank has run out of patience this time.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” answered JD. “I’m just tryin’ to say that you shouldn’t be too worried about it. I have a feelin’ things are going to change for your family very soon.” He winked at Mama and grinned at Daddy, while they glanced at each other in confusion.

JD just nodded, almost as if to himself, and kept talking. “Yeah,” he said, “it’ll take them bankers a few weeks to get their paperwork together and all. By then, I’m sure everything will be all straightened out for you folks.” He spoke in an offhand manner, like we was discussin’ the weather forecast, not the fact that we were about to be evicted from the farm our family had worked for generations.

Daddy looked dubious but was too polite to call JD on his outlandish statement. I knew what Daddy was thinkin’ and he was right. Nothing was going to change over the next couple of weeks. Even if we could harvest the wheat and sell it, which we couldn’t, it was way too early in the season for that, we still wouldn’t be able to raise the four thousand dollars that Mr. Dressler had told my daddy and mama we owed the bank.

JD kept right on going, not seeming to notice the black mood which had settled over the kitchen. Great Depression, indeed. He finished his breakfast, draining his coffee cup at the exact moment he took his last bite of eggs, and said, “My ankle is feelin’ much better already. Lucy, I don’t know how you managed it, but in addition to bein’ the finest cook in the county, you are without a doubt also the best nurse. I’m goin’ to take my leave of you folks this mornin’ and continue my business trip. Lord knows I’ve imposed enough already.”

Well, Mama and Daddy tried to convince JD to spend at least one more day resting his injury, but his mind was made up and he would not be swayed. As we were heading outside to begin the day’s labors, JD walked to his Ford, limping only slightly, and slid behind the wheel. He fired up the engine and drove off toward Olathe, a cloud of dust trailing behind the car, waving goodbye as he went. We never saw him again.

The following week we started to understand what that mysterious stranger had meant when he said our fortunes were going to change. It had been eight days since we had said goodbye to JD and he had become just a memory. I finished my breakfast that mornin’ and walked outside toward the barn when I tripped over something propped against the back screen door. I stumbled but didn’t fall. It was still dark so I couldn’t immediately tell what it was that had almost caused me to take a header right off the porch.

I lifted the object and carried it inside. By the light of the kitchen I could see it was a fancy leather briefcase, a lot like the one Mr. Dressler had been carrying when he had paid us the visit last week. Taped to the front was a note folded neatly inside a plain white envelope.

I laid the case on the kitchen table and Daddy looked at it curiously. For a moment I thought he was just going to sit there staring at it, but then without a word he slit open the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. Written in careful block letters was the following:

I TOLD YOU I UNDERSTAND THE PLIGHT OF FARMERS. I’M SORRY I DIDN’T HAVE THE CASH WITH ME LAST WEEK, BUT AS YOU CAN SEE I’VE RECENTLY COME INTO A BIT OF MONEY, AND I WANTED TO REIMBURSE YOU FOR THE $4,000 IN MEDICAL SERVICES RENDERED. THANKS AGAIN FOR YOUR HOSPITALITY. JD.

All activity came to a stop in the kitchen as everyone stared at the briefcase. To break the shocked silence, Mama turned on the radio as Daddy slowly raised the cover of the unlocked briefcase. Inside were stacks of cash, neatly banded. It was more money than I had ever seen in one place, and probl’y more than Mama and Daddy had ever seen, too.

The silence in the kitchen was broken by the sound of a news report on the radio—a “special bulletin,” they called it:

“To repeat,” the announcer said. “The First National Bank of Olathe, Kansas was robbed late yesterday afternoon by the notorious John Dillinger and his gang. Bank employees said Dillinger and his ruthless conspirators entered the bank just before closing time, armed with automatic weapons. Gang members held their Tommy Guns on bank staff and customers as Dillinger leapt over the counter and filled cloth sacks with cash from the teller drawers, before forcing bank president Elmer Dressler to open the bank’s vault. The outlaw and his gang then emptied the vault of cash as well before making their escape. Police gave chase but quickly lost the desperadoes as they covered their escape in a hail of gunfire.

“Sources say as much as $30,000 in cash may have been taken, most of it untraceable. Anyone with any information regarding this blatant act of thievery is urged to contact the Olathe Police Department or the FBI at their earliest convenience. We will continue our coverage of this story as more information becomes available. We now return you to your regular programming.”

Mama’s face was ghost-white as she clicked off the radio, swatting at the on/off knob three times in a panic before finally connecting. Daddy stared at the fancy leather briefcase with his mouth hanging open. The money lay stacked in the case, crisp and fresh and emerald-green.

Family Ties

In early 2010 a brand-new print magazine was launched called Needle: A Magazine of Noir. The inaugural issue contained stories from heavy hitters like Dave Zeltserman and Hilary Davidson and shortly after the launch, in May of 2010, editor Steve Weddle held a noir flash fiction contest to raise awareness of his new project. The only requirement, besides that the story be no longer than 750 words, was that a needle must be featured somewhere in the story. “Family Ties” was my entry, and it tells the story of a man sent to prison whose family cuts off all contact with him as a result. All, that is, except for one family member…

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather lately. He took the needle back in ’87, put to death for killing a cop during a botched bank heist. Gramps was a wheelman, one of the best they say, back in a time when banks were still legitimate targets for enterprising young men with a criminal bent.

The disastrous job took place in 1964 and went sideways almost from the beginning. It was an inside job and as you know, or maybe you don’t, that type of job is only as good as the information provided. In Gramps’s case, that information was so bad it might as well have been a set-up.

The thing that I can’t get out of my mind, and the reason I keep thinking about a guy who’s been dead nearly a quarter-century, is what he said when I asked him why he didn’t just take off, drive away, save his own ass when he saw everything going to shit inside that bank. “Because, kiddo,” he told me, “sometimes you just have to do what needs to be done.”

I was only a boy when he told me that, and I didn’t really get where he was coming from. To be honest, I didn’t understand it at all. To me, he was just a stupid old man who had fucked his life up for no good goddamned reason. He told me he had meant to fire in the air just to give his crew a fighting chance to make it to the car, but instead had tagged a blueshirt right in the chest.

Bang.

Dead.

Capital murder. Game over.

My family disowned the old man, one final kick in the teeth for a guy who had lived a hardscrabble life because he knew no other way. He managed to put my dad through Penn Law, though, before he got sent up, and the ungrateful fuck demonstrated his appreciation by turning his back on the old guy.

I didn’t turn my back, although the rest of the family had no idea of that. I was fascinated by the old bastard, and went to see him on death row every couple of months, whenever I could get the time off work to travel. Once, during a visit, he told me where I could get my hands on one of his old guns, a Colt .38 revolver. “It’s in mint condition,” he said with a wink and a smile, “hardly ever used.”

I stared at him. “What the hell am I going to do with a pistol?”

“You never know,” he said. “There might come a day when you have to do what needs to be done, too. Your father, bless his soul, never had it in him to do what needs to be done, but I have a feeling maybe that particular trait skips a generation, like male pattern baldness or something.” He ran his hand over his head and winked again.

Now I thought he was crazy as well as stupid, but damned if I didn’t find myself picking up the Colt anyway. A buddy from the old days had been holding it for him and the old man was right on target about the gun—it was oiled and lovingly maintained and impressively deadly to hold. I had no reason to own it, certainly no intention of ever using it. That was twenty-five years ago.

I stashed it in a safe-deposit box and told no one. Every couple of months I took it out, cleaned and oiled it, and replaced it, still telling no one, still with no clear idea why the hell I was bothering.

Then I found out about my wife and my best friend.

Marilyn and Bobby. The two people I was closest to in the whole world.

A four year affair, the entire thing laid out in sordid detail on the computer, courtesy of a password she didn’t know I knew. Illicit weekends in cheap motels when I thought she was working, X-rated electronic love notes passed back and forth right under my nose, romps in our bed while I was away, the whole nine clichéd fucking yards.

And they don’t know that I know.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about Gramps, and I think he might have been right; maybe he wasn’t quite the stupid old bastard I thought he was. I think maybe I will be able to do what needs to be done. I’m going to the bank this afternoon, gonna make a little trip to the safe-deposit box I rented so many years ago.

Then I guess we’ll find out.

PussyKat

Nobody’s perfect; we all know that. But some people just refuse to show even a minimal amount of respect for a dangerous situation. And when there’s a brutal killer roaming the streets, a level of respect way above minimal is called for. Especially when that killer is… well… different from everyone else in some important ways. “PussyKat” appeared in the online magazine House of Horror’s June, 2009 issue as well as their year-end anthology released in December, 2009 titled, appropriately enough, HOUSE OF HORROR BEST OF 2009.

The television was blaring much too loudly out in the living room as Walter Roberts dressed for work. He knew the volume was too high because he could hear it quite clearly in the bedroom, even through the closed door. Walter pictured Lorraine sitting transfixed in front of the local news as had become her habit of late, absorbing with rapt attention all the latest information on the terrifying murder spree currently ravaging the city.

“Authorities remain baffled as another victim was discovered this morning on the lower East Side.” Walter pulled on his trousers and listened to the breaking news report. He could hear every word as clearly as if he were seated on the couch next to her out in the living room. He wondered how she could stand it.

“As with all of the other cases, the murdered man was discovered alone inside a locked home, with no sign of forced entry. Details are sketchy at this point, but it seems likely that this latest victim, George Miller, was torn apart like all the others in the frightening series of killings that have gripped the city.” Walter buttoned his shirt, shaking his head in disgust at the image rising unbidden inside his head.

He pulled on his socks and shoes and walked slowly out of the bedroom as the breathless television news report concluded, “Authorities are urging anyone with information regarding this or any of the other murders to call local law enforcement immediately. If you have seen or heard anything you believe might be of value, please come forward and help bring this string of gruesome attacks to a close.”

Walter watched Lorraine closely as he entered the living room. She was staring unblinkingly at the television; he wondered if she even noticed he had joined her. Her face was pale and her lips ghostly white. His wife had become fixated on the ghastly killing spree, convinced she and Walter were going to be the unknown assailant’s next victims. The murders were all she could talk about.

Over and over he had tried to reassure her that the two of them did not fit the pattern the killer had established: all of the victims thus far had been men, all had been discovered alone inside otherwise empty, locked houses, their bodies mutilated, skin shredded off their bones in long bloody strips. Not one woman had been found murdered yet, but Lorraine would not listen to reason and Walter was starting to believe that his wife would soon suffer some sort of debilitating breakdown caused by obsessing over the tragedies.

He sat next to her on the couch and placed a hand gently on her knee. She jumped and flinched. Terror blossomed in her eyes.

“Watching all of this overly sensational news coverage is not healthy for you, Lorraine,” he said quietly, stating the obvious.

She moaned. “But how could someone do these awful things, and how are they getting into the houses of the victims, and how can we be sure we won’t be next?”

Walter placed a finger on her lips to quiet her. “I was thinking, perhaps this would be a good time for you to go visit your mother for a few days. You know, get out of the city and forget about all this for a while.”

“Just me? But… what about you?”

“I’ll be fine. I certainly won’t be opening up the front door and inviting some crazed maniac inside so he can butcher me in my own home…” A gasp of terror escaped Lorraine’s lips and Walter stopped speaking. “Sorry, dear,” he said, and he knew he had her.

* * *

As he cruised the red light district, Walter wondered what it was, exactly, that so terrified Lorraine regarding the ongoing mystery in the city. Sure, people were getting killed and at an alarming rate, but the metropolitan area was enormous, with hundreds of thousands of residents. Statistically, the odds of ending up dead at the hands of the person—or perhaps the thing—stalking the city were miniscule. As far as he was concerned, the whole issue wasn’t even worth wasting his time worrying about.

With Lorraine shipped off to her dried-up old hag of a mother’s house for the next week or so, Walter felt he could finally begin to relax and breathe again. It was not easy constantly walking on eggshells around his wife, worrying that with her deteriorating mental condition she might at any moment burst into tears or start ranting and raving about protecting themselves from brutal murderers, fearing every shadow in every corner and cringing in terror at every creak in the night as their old house settled on its foundation.

He had herded her onto the train this morning with the promise that he would check in by telephone every couple of days with any new information about the strange situation in the city as it became available. It stuck in his craw that he had to make this concession, but, really, he knew it was the only way Lorraine would agree to leave. And he knew she absolutely had to leave, for his sanity if not for her own.

Now, rolling slowly through the grimy streets of the red light district in his grimy little car, gazing with undisguised lust through his grimy little eyes at the streetwalkers who seemed to populate every corner, Walter felt he owed it to himself to cut loose a little. After all, he had been forced to deal with Lorraine’s paranoid delusions for far too long; it was time to enjoy a little relaxation.

Butterflies fluttered in his stomach. Even though he had made a habit of visiting the “other” side of the tracks every now and then over the three decades of his marriage, he had never gotten so jaded that he didn’t still experience that nervous clenching feeling in his belly as he examined the merchandise, trying to decide which hooker of the many he ran his hungry eyes over he was going to bring home this time.

He turned the corner onto Washington Street and spied a petite, long-legged beauty with shaggy tawny hair gliding along the sidewalk, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings. She was encased in a tight, form-fitting black leather bodysuit and moved with an almost feline grace, languid and sensual, apparently unaware of the double-takes she was causing and of the lingering stares of men and women alike.

Walter pulled to the curb, ignoring the honking horns of the angry drivers he had cut off, watching the young woman, spellbound. She walked directly to his car—were his intentions that obvious?—and he was again reminded of the graceful movements of a cat, a panther perhaps, slinking smoothly and quietly through the jungle as it stalked its’ prey.

“Hey there, big boy” she purred, her voice husky and smoky, and Walter knew that she was the one.

He reached across the passenger’s seat and opened the door, and the girl slid into his car with an economy of motion that was breathtaking. Slowly he pulled away from the curb, barely able to concentrate on the relatively simple task of merging into the sluggish flow of traffic.

“I’m Kat,” she said.

* * *

Walter held the front door for Kat as they entered the house, and then followed her into the living area. His eyes were glued to her body as she walked ahead of him, her every curve accentuated by the bodysuit swish-swishing in time with her graceful steps. Something about her beautiful head of hair caught his attention as she moved down the hallway. It seemed longer, thicker than it had been when he spotted her on the sidewalk as he drove slowly past, but of course that was impossible. It had only been a few minutes.

Seeming to sense his eyes tracking her, she turned with a hint of a smile on her face. Her wide green eyes wore a look of amusement, tinged perhaps with barely concealed contempt. “Where’s the missus?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your wife, Walter; where is she?”

“How did you know—I mean… uh… what makes you think I’m married?”

“You mean, besides the clearly defined strip of white skin on the third finger of your left hand?”

Without thinking, Walter self-consciously covered his left hand with his right. “Oh, yeah, right. Uh, she’s away for a few days,” he mumbled, knowing he should not feel embarrassed or self-conscious in front of a hooker but discovering he did.

“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t care about your personal situation,” she drawled softly, tossing her purse onto the living room table and managing to sound superior and dismissive at the same time. “It’s completely irrelevant to what is going to happen here tonight.” She swiveled her head and peered at Walter with eyes that seemed to glow softly in the dimming early-evening light.

A sudden, visceral feeling of dread wormed its way through Walter’s bowels. Her words should have ignited his desire—after all, that was the whole point of cruising the red light district and selecting Kat, wasn’t it?—but the utter lack of inflection in her voice chilled him. She sounded almost dead; like she was saying only what she knew was expected of her. And those eyes! Obviously the glow in them was a trick of the light, of course it was, but for a second there…

“Gotta use your restroom, honey,” she said in her soft but commanding voice, slinking with feline grace into the downstairs lavatory and closing the door with a thud. Walter shivered and thought about the news reports Lorraine had been watching incessantly; the accounts of the brutal, bloody murders that had drawn a pall over the city.

For a moment there he had honestly feared for his life, but of course that was patently ridiculous. Kat was tiny; if she was five feet, two inches tall he would eat his hat. There was no possible way that petite little hooker was going to do any damage to him; not at six-two. He probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. Even though he was rapidly approaching sixty years of age, Walter knew he had nothing to fear from his houseguest. He tried to chuckle at the lunacy of his mounting fear and the attempt died in his suddenly dry and scratchy throat.

In the bathroom, Kat was changing her clothes, she must be, because Walter could hear her moving around. But how could that be? She had tossed her purse on the table, it was right next to him, and there were certainly no pockets in her leather outfit big enough to store a change of clothes, of that Walter was certain. I should know, he thought, I spent enough time staring at that catsuit.

The racket in the downstairs bathroom continued. In fact, if anything, it seemed to be growing louder and more out of control. Was something wrong with Kat? Was she sick? Suffering from convulsions? Good Christ, what if she died in his house? How in the hell would he ever explain that to Lorraine?

Walter crept to the closed door as quietly as he could and listened. He thought he could hear furtive scratching, almost as if some small animal was trapped in his bathroom, which of course was impossible. He had seen Kat disappear into the room just ninety seconds ago, and he certainly didn’t own any pets. They were smelly and needy and messy and he refused to have them in his house—There! There it was! The scratching noise again, and this time it was joined by what sounded like a soft panting. What the—?

“Kat? Are you all right?” Walter’s voice was shaking and realized he had been holding his breath as he listened at the door.

Silence

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The panting and scratching continued unabated.

“What the hell is going on in there?”

Nothing.

“Goddammit, I want to know right now what the hell you’re up to! You can’t just come into my home and destroy things!”

No answer.

“Kat, you answer me right now or I’m coming in there in about five seconds, and you don’t want that, believe me!” By now, Walter was furious as well as terrified. Whatever was happening in that bathroom was not normal and was definitely not what he had envisioned when he picked up this clearly insane Kat person.

Still no response, but now Walter was convinced the panting coming from the bathroom was louder than it had been just seconds ago. He had a sudden, vivid vision of something otherworldly poised just inches away, on the other side of the door, ear pressed up against the oak surface just as his was. Startled by the thought, he jumped back, smashing into the hallway wall and bruising his lower back.

A roaring noise filled Walter’s ears. His panic was now complete. He was panting just as hard as whatever lurked on the other side of the bathroom door. He wondered if he was having a stroke and pictured Lorraine rushing home because he wasn’t answering the phone and finding him lying face down on the hallway floor.

“SAY SOMETHING,” he screamed, and when he received no response, as he knew he would not, Walter grabbed the brass bathroom doorknob and flung the door open and froze, staring in open-mouthed horror at a five-foot tall leopard crouched on the floor in full stalking mode. The feral beast was completely motionless, glaring at him with eerily intelligent eyes.

Wide green eyes.

Kat’s wide green eyes.

A scream bubbled up from Walter’s throat; it exploded out of his mouth at a volume he hadn’t known he was capable of producing. The big cat’s tongue lolled out of its’ huge mouth as it panted, staring at Walter with—and this was impossible, but this whole goddamned horrifying thing was impossible, so why not?—mocking green eyes.

Then it struck, springing at Walter with deadly grace, its razor-sharp claws extended. Its front paws landed squarely on his chest, knocking him to the floor and shattering his glasses as his head smashed off the tile. Their now-bent frames skittered into the kitchen.

Walter screamed again, but only for half a second. The sound was silenced as the huge cat ripped his throat out, sending blood squirting majestically down the hallway, splattering onto the hardwood floor in random delicate patterns.

The gigantic paws ripped down Walter’s body, tearing off long strips of skin as he kicked and bucked, wildly at first, then not so enthusiastically, then not at all. His now-unseeing eyes stared up at the hallway ceiling, where, incredibly, a splash of his blood had formed a passable imitation of a bulls-eye.

It was over in a matter of seconds, although it probably seemed much longer to Walter. The big leopard stood next to the dead body, staring at it as if assessing the damage, before stalking purposefully back into the bathroom.

Seconds later Kat exited, picking her way daintily around the hideously disfigured body of her latest victim, careful not to step in any of the blood and leave a footprint that might be traced. Her tawny hair flowed behind her as she moved through the living room and lifted her purse delicately off the coffee table, then walked out the front door. She double-checked to be sure it was locked from the inside before pulling it firmly closed behind her. After all, you couldn’t be too careful. The city was a dangerous place.

Finally she turned and strutted unseen down the street, moving with her unusual feline gait toward the red light district and anonymity.

Heart and Sole

There’s no such thing as the perfect crime, although that fact doesn’t ever seem to stop people from trying to commit it. But if you have an air-tight alibi, if you’re hundreds of miles away in front of dozens of witnesses when your spouse dies, and she dies of natural causes anyway, doesn’t that seem to come pretty close to qualifying as the perfect crime? That’s the premise of “Heart and Sole,” which began its existence as a three thousand word short story told in the third-person perspective. After I finished writing it, I thought it would be perfect for a charity anthology being put together by Shroud Publishing called NORTHERN HAUNTS, benefiting cancer research. The only problem was the publisher wanted flash-fiction stories of 750 words or less, told from the first person perspective. I went back to the drawing board and reworked the story and I believe the result was a stronger story than the original. NORTHERN HAUNTS was released in January, 2009.

I hadn’t always wanted to kill my wife. There was a time when we were quite the happy couple, of that I am certain, even if I can’t put my finger on exactly when that time was. Everything changed, though, after Debra moved in next door.

Debra Janet Morgan was her name, and she was everything Marion was not. Deb was young and beautiful, while Marion was older and plain. She was funny and outgoing and socially graceful, Marion being quiet and shy and clumsy. After starting my affair with the alluring young beauty, it became patently obvious that my wife and I no longer had a future together.

Debra was newly single, living off the support payments of her bond-trader ex-husband, who was slaving away down in Boston’s financial district. She had nothing to do and wasn’t one to spend her days lazing around the house; at least not by herself and not fully clothed.

After we had hooked up, I began to obsess over the fantasy of arranging Marion’s permanent removal from the otherwise happy picture of Debra and me. Divorce was out of the question—my salary as a postal supervisor would not to be enough to hold Debra’s attention for long. It was absolutely imperative that I inherit Marion’s trust fund; the one established by her rich daddy years ago that would disappear forever if I divorced his little girl.

Being cautious by nature, I considered and then discarded numerous methods of disposal before settling on the perfect plan. It was foolproof—I would be hundreds of miles away when poor unfortunate Marion took her final breath!

An avid distance runner, Debra had struck up an odd friendship with my Marion, despite our affair. They ran together constantly, a situation I was never comfortable with until I figured out how to use it to my advantage. I managed to wrangle a business trip to Philadelphia on the very day of the local 5K Fun Run, which Deb and Marion were planning on competing in together.

The morning of the race, I awoke while Marion was still sleeping and packed a bag for my two-day trip. Before walking out to the garage, I sprinkled a dose of specially customized powder lightly over the soles of Marion’s running shoes.

The mixture was composed of ordinary talcum powder laced with arsenic, which my research had informed me is water-soluble. Shortly after starting the race, Marion’s entire body, including her feet, would begin to sweat in the warm weather. The perspiration would then soak through her light socks, mix with my deadly concoction, and be absorbed through her open pores into her bloodstream.

Marion would suffer greatly for a short time, unfortunately, but before rescue personnel or anyone else would be able to react, she would succumb, leaving Debra and I free to get on with our lives. I would avoid any suspicion, being nowhere near the scene of the tragedy. I congratulated myself on planning the perfect crime as I boarded my flight at Logan Airport.

Later, as the plane began its’ descent into Philly, I realized the starting time for the Fun Run was approaching and decided to give Marion a call. Sure, I had to eliminate her, but that didn’t mean I felt good about it.

She surprised me by answering her cell on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hello, Marion; ready for the race?”

“Oh, hi honey, not exactly. You wouldn’t believe what that silly goose Debra did!”

I checked my impatience and asked, “What did she do?” After all, this was the last time I would ever have to listen to her ramble on.

“The crazy girl drove all the way down here before realizing she had forgotten her running shoes!”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, but I solved the problem. I lent her mine. She was much more excited about the race than me, anyway.”

My heart stuttered and I shouted, “What? Where’s Debra now?” Annoyed passengers glared at me.

“I have no idea,” she replied. “We got separated in the crowd, but I’ll find her after the race. Enjoy your trip, honey; I’ll be waiting when you get back.”

Independence Day

As someone who is rapidly approaching middle age—I’m 51 and some people would say I’ve already left middle age in the dust—I often marvel at how much things have changed since I was a kid. Personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, HDTV, frozen pizza that’s actually edible, all of these things have been developed over my lifetime. I began to wonder what it would be like to walk out of prison after serving, say, a forty year stretch. How could you even begin to adjust to the changes in the world? This story is the result, about a man sent away for murder who wants nothing more than to reunite with the girl he left behind so long ago. “Independence Day” first appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of Crime and Suspense and I’m very proud to say was a finalist for a 2009 Derringer Award for Best Short Story.

Chris Milton’s personal Independence Day started out like any other. A bland prison breakfast followed by some quiet reading time, an hour of exercising in the yard, another bland prison lunch, and then a trip to the courthouse in his cheap, well-worn suit. He had been to so many pointless parole hearings over the last several decades that they all seemed to run together in his mind. He certainly didn’t expect this one to be any different.

Right from the start, though, this one was different. The warden of the Concord Penitentiary, who had been there almost as long as Chris had, spoke on his behalf, something he had never done before, saying, “Mr. Milton has been a model prisoner all these years and has earned a second chance to make something out of his life.”

Next up was the superintendent of the prison motor pool, testifying as to how much money Chris had saved the taxpayers of the great state of New Hampshire with his automotive maintenance skills. “Our vehicles are lasting forty percent longer, and are worth twenty percent more at the end of their useful lives, than they were before Mr. Milton started working with them. Frankly, I hate to lose him, but I believe he will be able to make a significant contribution to society in the job he has waiting for him at Caulfield’s Garage in his home town of Compton if his parole is approved.”

Chris could feel his threadbare shirt sticking to his skin where it pressed against the hard-backed wooden chair as he started to sweat. He had never so much as sniffed a successful parole hearing before, and he could scarcely believe this stroke of good fortune as he sensed the tide turning his way. He knew it was still touch-and-go as to whether the board would approve his parole – they were extremely reluctant to release convicted murderers back into society in this law-and-order state, even if the circumstances of the murder conviction were somewhat muddled, as was the case with Chris.

* * *

The sun beat down on Reservoir Road, thick and heavy and unrelenting in the summer of 1968. More than a mile away, at the far end of the road, the brand-new red brick reservoir maintenance building shimmered in the heat radiating off the newly-paved blacktop. Kids lined the mile-long route in groups of two and three, anxious to participate, if only vicariously, in the excitement and danger of illegal street racing on the arrow-straight access road.

Out of a car radio blared the Beach Boys, sounding tinny and strangely high-pitched, singing in harmony about a little deuce coupe, as the DJ announced breathlessly that Jan and Dean would be up next, right after a short break. “Be sure to keep the dial right here for our rock and roll special, running through the entire 1968 Independence Day holiday!”

At the makeshift starting line, Nikki Littlefield pleaded with her older brother to be allowed to race. “I know I just got my license, but I can do this, please Jimmy, let me try.” Heads turned and every male eye checked out the long, tanned legs, petite body and jet-black hair of the girl causing the commotion.

“Forget it,” Jimmy Littlefield answered gruffly, but out of the gathering crowd walked Chris Milton, eighteen, long-haired, trouble in engineer boots. “She can drive my car,” he said with a smirk, staring down Jimmy Littlefield and his small group of clean-cut Compton friends.

Jimmy started to argue but Chris cut him off. “I told you, punk, she could drive my car. She has a license and I have a car and that’s the end of it, so do yourself a favor and shut your freakin’ mouth.” Jimmy reddened with anger but stopped talking.

Chris turned and faced Nikki. “You know how to drive a stick?”

“Does a fish know how to swim?”

The response was so unexpected, Chris flashed a wide grin in spite of himself. “Let’s go then; see if we can drum up somebody with the guts to take you on.”

* * *

Chris Milton hadn’t pulled the trigger on anyone, although it was true that he had carried a loaded revolver into the bank forty years ago on the day that would change his life forever. Chris had never intended to use the weapon; it was strictly for show—to frighten the bank employees into compliance—and to give him a fighting chance if the cops showed up before he could make his escape.

Everything had gone smoothly, though, inside the bank. He herded everyone into the back, customers and employees alike, forced the manager to open the safe, and loaded his canvas duffel bag to the brim with cash and bearer bonds. The whole operation had taken maybe five minutes, max, and then he had rushed out the front door of the bank and into the blazing sunshine, feeling the sticky heat envelope him like he was stepping into a sauna.

Nikki had been sitting at the corner of Main Street and Broadway as planned, the big engine in the stolen Plymouth rumbling softly as the car waited patiently at the curb. With Nikki driving and the engine tuned perfectly by Chris, there was no way the cops could ever catch them.

* * *

Jake Vaillancourt was next up on the starting line in his customized Charger, all red paint and shiny chrome and hundreds of horsepower. Jake hadn’t been defeated at Reservoir Road in almost a year; it had gotten to the point where nobody even wanted to take him on—why bother? He piped up and said, sure, he’d be glad to race against Nikki, he didn’t mind kicking a girl’s ass.

For just a second, Chris regretted telling Nikki she could race his car. He had only done it to make that wuss Jimmy Littlefield stop yapping. Okay, maybe he had also done it to get an in with Jimmy’s cute little sister. The fact that her bigshot judge father was going to freak out if he ever discovered she had been hanging out with the likes of him was nothing more than sweet icing on a very delicious cake.

But racing Jake Vaillancourt? That was a different story altogether. Chris had been there the last time Jake lost a race at Reservoir Road—Jake had been so angry he had put Beetle McDonough in the hospital after the race. Oh well, he thought, too late to back out now.

Chris watched Nikki as she familiarized herself with the Barracuda. The car was midnight blue, nothing flashy but it was fast—Chris and his brother Joe had made sure of that. “This is a beauty,” she said.

Chris grinned. “Detroit steel, baby.”

Nikki laughed and said, “Okay, I’m ready to go.”

“Let’s go then,” Chris answered.

“Aren’t you getting out?”

“Hell, no,” Chris answered. “I told you you could race my car, but you ain’t racing it by yourself.” He knew the extra weight of his nearly two hundred pounds would almost certainly guarantee a loss, even if they hadn’t been racing someone as good as Jake Vaillancourt, but he had volunteered his car to get close to Nikki Littlefield and he wasn’t backing out now.

The cars lined up next to each other, Jake splitting the air with his noisy Charger, revving the engine ceaselessly, trying to intimidate Nikki, who was letting the Barracuda’s engine burble softly, waiting for the starting signal.

Carrie Johnson, who was rumored to have slept with every single Reservoir Road driver, stood between the two cars, ten feet in front of them, and flashed her arm down with the red bandanna and the race was on—for about ten seconds. After that it was all Nikki Littlefield. She smoked Jake Vaillancourt by three car lengths; roughly the Reservoir Road equivalent of winning the Indy 500 by lapping the rest of the field three times.

Chris was stunned. Nikki drove that car like it was a part of her. The Hurst shifter meshed cleaner than Chris had ever seen it do; Nikki was butter-smooth and babied the car even though she got more out of it than either of the Milton brothers ever had.

After the race, Jake Vaillancourt glowered at Nikki and Chris but punched nobody; he just reversed course in front of the maintenance building and screeched back up Reservoir Road, turning right onto Turkey Ridge Road and slinking back to town.

* * *

Chris had sprinted out of the bank and dived into the passenger seat; a wide grin plastered on his face as he tossed the heavy duffel into the massive back seat. “Go, go, go!” he had shouted, as Nik had wheeled the car away into the street, headed for freedom. That was when it had all gone to hell.

Chris found out later that one of the tellers had tripped a silent alarm while he had been busy moving everyone into the rear of the bank. The cops were on their way before he had even begun to load up his bag, and in a town the size of Coatesville, they didn’t have all that far to go.

Nikki pulled the car away from the curb, turning onto Broadway and accelerating smoothly, with the intention of making for the Interstate five miles away and disappearing. The cops were right behind them, though, and opened fire. First the right rear tire, then a fraction of a second later the left, and the stolen Fury III was suddenly and irrevocably crippled.

* * *

After that first street race, Nikki and Chris were together practically every minute of every day. It was a wonder her father didn’t find out, but he was busy with his circuit court judging and all. Nikki raced that Barracuda more than Chris did, driving it like a jockey rides a thoroughbred, coaxing more out of that car than Chris or anyone else could believe. She beat everyone; she was the best driver Compton had ever seen.

So it was a simple thing, then, to convince her to drive the car for Chris when he decided to hit the bank in Coatesville, fifteen miles and a world away from Compton. Coatesville was a thriving little hamlet hard by Lake Winnipesaukee, benefiting from the tourist trade money that came nowhere near Compton, which boasted only dying saw mills and one struggling shoe factory for industry.

For her part, Nikki was in search of adventure—racing at Reservoir Road had opened up a thrill-seeking side to her personality that she had never before known existed. When Chris broached the subject of knocking over Coatesville’s only bank in early July, she was on board immediately; he made it sound so simple and she saw it as a chance to prove her love to Chris and also to drive fast with stakes even higher than those at Reservoir Road.

July 3, 1968, just before the Independence Day holiday, was the date Chris selected to hit the bank. He said it symbolized his and Nikki’s independence from her father and everyone else trying to hold them down, but in reality was he just bored and sick of Compton and looking for some action and an adrenaline fix.

Sitting outside the bank in the stolen Plymouth Fury III, sixty feet down the curbside from the front entrance where Chris had disappeared just a few minutes before, Nikki was not the slightest bit nervous. The day was hot and humid, a real scorcher, and almost nobody was on the street. The few people that were out moved in slow-motion, like they were fighting their way through molasses.

Occasionally a car would drive slowly past, motoring toward some unknown destination, but the road was practically clear. Nikki began to feel drowsy. She wished Chris would hurry up; she was starting to feel a little exposed, even though there were no cops around.

She checked the rear view of the stolen Plymouth they were using as a getaway car and saw Chris burst out the front entrance of the bank at a dead run. The heavy door smashed back into the wall and shattered, glass glittering a thousand different colors in the sun behind him as he sprinted to the car, the heavy canvas duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

He tossed the bag into the rear and dived headlong into the passenger seat next to Nikki, shouting, “Go, go, go!” She accelerated smoothly onto Broadway, the Fury feeling sluggish and boxy under her command compared to the ‘Cuda, but she had it performing magnificently anyway.

* * *

The murder charge resulted from someone being hit by one of the bullets the police unleashed on Nikki and Chris in their aborted escape attempt. The way the cops had been spraying their weapons all over the place, Chris was frankly surprised only one person had been hit. Thank God the streets had been almost deserted.

In addition to the murder rap, Nikki’s father made sure Chris went down for kidnapping, too. That was total bullshit, Nikki had been driving the getaway car for chrissakes, but her dad was a circuit court judge, one of the highest rollers in town, and Chris’s dad was a drunken bum, one of the lowest scumbags in the same town, so it was going to be whatever her father said it was, and he said it was a kidnapping.

That day had been Chris’s last as a free man. July 3, 1968. The day before Independence Day.

Chris spoke just a few words in front of the parole board. He assured the members of the board that he had no intention of causing anyone any trouble, ever again. “I was young and stupid back then, and I’ve regretted my actions of that day ever since. All I want to do is be with my girl again, and if I get that, I’ll have everything I’ve ever needed.”

The board approved Chris’s parole, and a few weeks later, forty years to the day after the disastrous robbery attempt, he walked out Concord’s front gate a free man. July 3, 2008. Chris Milton’s Independence Day.

Chris was scheduled to start his new job as automotive technician at Caulfield’s Garage after the Fourth of July holiday, but that was the furthest thing from his mind as he contemplated life on the outside after forty long years. He had been telling the truth when he told the parole board all he wanted was to be with his girl, and that was what he was going to do. Tonight.

The Barracuda still ran like a top, even though it was now nearly half a century old. Chris had left the car in the care of his brother, who was nearly as good a mechanic as he had been. He had known it would run like a Swiss watch and it did.

He sat in the driver’s seat, hands on the molded plastic steering wheel, and listened to the steady burbling of the big V8. He couldn’t wait to be with Nikki again after so many years, and was glad the reunion was going to take place at Reservoir Road. That mile-long stretch of blacktop was the scene of his happiest memories in a childhood that hadn’t had many.

Chris passed the time by driving over to Coatesville and moving slowly through town, marveling at the fast-food joints, the mammoth houses people lived in now, and the banks; all the banks! When he had been a kid, there was just the one he had tried to rob, the Coatesville Trust. Now it seemed a bank was on practically every corner. Was there really that much more money in the world now than there had been forty years ago?

When he turned back toward Compton, making the familiar left on to Reservoir Road, Chris felt all the memories rushing back—the thrill of illegal street-racing, the excitement he had felt the night Nikki blew the doors off Jake Vaillancourt and his tricked-out Charger. She had earned the grudging respect that night of all the old-time racers in the area, who felt that a girl, especially a sixteen year-old girl with the ink barely dry on her license, had no place in street racing.

Chris knew he was early for his reunion with Nikki, but he had nowhere else to go and was so excited to finally see her again that he would have gone stir-crazy just sitting around his hot, tiny apartment above Caulfield’s Garage anyway, so what was the harm?

The cicadas chirped languidly in the muggy July night as the sun disappeared behind the trees, sliding slowly toward the horizon. Reservoir Road was deserted, which was unusual, but Chris supposed everyone was down by the lake waiting for the fireworks to start. Chris didn’t care about fireworks; he had seen enough of them when the police were shooting at him and Nikki, forty years earlier.

It was time. Nikki would be waiting for him at the end of Reservoir Road, where the high chain-link fence separated the road from the brick reservoir maintenance building. He gunned the engine, listening to the throaty roar he loved so much. Joe had done a great job keeping the car drivable.

* * *

Suddenly three cruisers screeched around the corner behind the Coatesville Trust at nearly full speed, sirens blaring and red lights flashing. They were gaining steadily, but as Nikki performed her automobile magic, turning sharply onto Main Street, they began to fall back. She knew she could outrun them, even in the piece of shit Plymouth.

Chris began to laugh raucously and Nikki joined in. “Independence Day!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as the cops opened fire thirty feet behind them.

Nikki risked a quick glance across the front seat at Chris, her eyes shining with excitement. The Plymouth was approaching eighty miles per, rocketing out of Coatesville. “I love you!” she screamed. The roar of the wind buffeting them through the open windows was deafening.

Chris opened his mouth to answer her; to tell her that he loved her too, that he would always love her, and as he did a bullet smashed through the rear window and Nikki’s head exploded in a stew of bright red blood and grey brain matter, splattering all over the windshield and he screamed and the now driverless car careened out of control, crossing Main Street, slowing but still moving at a high rate of speed. The Plymouth mowed down a row of rhododendrons and then came to a gentle stop in front of a dentist’s office.

Chris continued to scream as the cops surrounded the stalled Fury III with their guns drawn. There was blood everywhere; so much blood; and Nikki was gone, her lifeless body thrown up against the dashboard, wedged between the steering wheel and the driver’s side door. The relentless July heat poured through the open windows and Chris raised his hands in surrender.

* * *

He slammed the transmission into first gear and laid rubber in all four, screaming down Reservoir Road like he had done it every night for the past forty years, instead of just dreaming about it. Nikki had been a much better driver, no doubt about that, she had been the best, which was why he had enlisted her to drive for him on that long-ago day, but he was no slouch either.

A hundred yards from the chain-link, exactly the spot where it was time to begin braking. He could wait another twenty and screech to a stop with the nose of the car kissing the fence if he chose; he knew he could, he had done exactly that many times.

The engine whined, the trees whipped past in a blur, the hot July wind ruffled Chris’s hair as it sang a song of redemption to him through the open windows. He hit the chain-link fence doing one-forty, metal screeching on metal for the barest fraction of a second, then he was through. The car bucked and rocked on its frame but barely slowed. “Detroit steel, baby,” he thought, as the Barracuda slammed into the faded red brick maintenance building still doing one-thirty-five.

The car exploded in a ball of flame, blowing a ten-foot hole in the old building. Chris had never meant for Nikki to be killed by the damned cops as she drove the car away from that bank; he had wished himself into her place every single day since. She was just a kid when she died, sixteen years old and newly licensed, but she could drive like no other, and she loved Chris, so he had had no problem whatsoever convincing her to be his wheelman that day.

The cops said she never knew what hit her when the bullet had come in through the rear window and splattered her brains all over Chris, but he had wondered about that for forty years. How did they know? Who knew what it felt like to die?

Now he would find out. He would be with Nikki forever, just like he told the parole board geezers he wanted to be. Stillness descended over the crash scene as thick black smoke billowed up out of the ruined building, rising over the ancient pine trees surrounding Reservoir Road, reaching for the sky and freedom. It was July 3. Independence Day.

The Waiting

A cool new print magazine launched in the spring of 2010, a snub-nosed Saturday Night Special of a mag called Needle: A Magazine of Noir. This creation featured nothing but noir short fiction. No book or movie reviews, no opinion pieces, nothing to take your focus away from hard-hitting, sometimes brutal noir fiction. The minute I saw Issue #1 I knew I had to get a story into Needle. I would move heaven and earth if necessary; that’s how impressed I was with the quality of the thing. Fortunately for me, being scrawny as a string bean, I didn’t have to move heaven OR earth. I just had to submit “The Waiting.” This story first appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Needle; A Magazine of Noir.

There’s am old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song in which Tom claims, “The waiting is the hardest part.” The first time I heard those lyrics I wondered whether maybe Tom had worked on a few scores before hitting it big in the music business, because he hit the nail right on the head with that one. The waiting really is the hardest part in any criminal enterprise.

This time was no different, except maybe it was worse than usual. We were holed up inside one of those cheap no-tell motels, where cheap wood paneling covers the walls and everything is literally bolted to the room—television, clock, remote, everything—and we were passing the time uneasily by trying to cheat each other at cards. On the TV, which had to be twenty years old if it was a day, a baseball game was playing, one group of millionaires kicking the crap out of another group of millionaires. Nobody paid any attention to it but nobody turned it off, either.

We had added a chick to the crew to replace Stupid Tommy Mitchell when he got tossed back into the can on a parole violation, and everything just felt awkward. Different or something. Stupid Tommy probably couldn’t spell the word “irony,” he really was pretty dumb, but he could’ve had his picture in the dictionary next to the word after getting busted for drunk driving while celebrating our latest score.

Our wheelman going down on a DUI beef. See what I mean? Irony.

Anyway, the leader of our little band of criminal misfits and malcontents was a guy named Gary Newton—“G,” we called him—and no sooner had the cops shoved Tommy into a cell than this hot young babe came out of nowhere to take Tommy’s place. It was almost like it had been planned out or something, that’s how fast G found her, and it should have been the first clue to anyone paying attention that something was wrong. But of course no one was; attention to detail is not any of these guys’ strong suit.

Bobby Sturgis and I pissed and moaned to G as soon as we found out he had taken on a girl, but Bobby’s objections vanished the second he got a good look at her, just as I had known they would. The girl was average height, but that was the only average thing about her. Glossy jet-black hair hung to just below her shoulders, Hollywood starlet hair, and it framed a face that would inspire jealously in an angel.

Her body was perfect, and yes, I know what you’re thinking: There’s no such thing as a perfect body, but take it from me, this chick was perfect. And she knew how to dress to accentuate that perfection, too. Tight jeans, tight shirts, short tight skirts and dresses. You get the picture?

Bobby sure did. The minute he laid eyes on her he morphed into some stupid horny kid, losing what few brain cells he had, and just like that I became the only one who had a problem with our new addition. Not that it would have mattered. G was the guy who made all the decisions for this crew, but at least with Bobby on my side it would have been two against one; or, I suppose, two against two if you included Gina’s vote.

With me as the only holdout my objections became a moot point, as I had known they would. Gina became an official member of the crew and it was only a matter of time before she took on the moniker “G2.” It was like Gary suddenly had his very own Mini-Me. He loved the nickname but it pissed off Bobby to no end.

The first time the guys saw her drive she eliminated whatever lingering doubts anyone might have had about adding her to the team. She was better than Stupid Tommy from the get-go, and Tommy was no slouch as a driver. It was pretty much the only thing he was good at, but I always figured, hell, if you’re fortunate enough to be outstanding at even one thing in this world, you’re better off than most people. Driving was Stupid Tommy’s thing.

Driving drunk he sucked at, though, which explained why he was now cooling his heels inside a jail cell. I had known if I bought him enough Jameson he’d eventually get busted and he came through like a champ, thereby opening up a spot on the crew for Gina.

But G2 was a better driver than Stupid Tommy on the best day he ever had, everyone could see that the minute she goosed that old GTO on the Southeast Expressway. It was Tommy’s car I suppose, technically, but with him in the can, what the hell was he going to do with it? So we appropriated his ride. It was what Tommy would have wanted if anyone had bothered to ask him, not that anyone did.

Gina raced that Goat like nobody’s business, blowing the doors off the few vehicles out on the highway at 3:00 a.m. like they weren’t even there. During the day, that section of pavement becomes one long, skinny parking lot, known to locals as the “Southeast Distressway,” thanks to the near-constant jam-up of cars and trucks. It’s been called that for as long as I can remember, but at this time of the night the interstate was so empty you could practically see tumbleweeds blowing down the middle, which was why we picked it for the test run.

Oh sure, it was possible a Statie could have been patrolling, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Although you might have guessed from looking at her body that Gina was born for sex, it became crystal clear the moment she got behind the wheel that she was born to drive. There was no way one lonely State Trooper would ever have had the juice to keep up with Gina, much less force her to the side of the road.

After her impressive debut behind the wheel, I made a show of reluctantly accepting her onto the team. I didn’t want to appear too eager, although, like I said, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wasn’t the one making the decisions; my job description was to do what was necessary, to act as sort of a jack of all trades, and if that doesn’t sound clear enough to you, then you’ve never been part of a crew.

Next we pulled a job just to see how Gina would perform under pressure. This heist was something a little different for us, a little riskier than our typical job. Gary had been tipped off to an arms transaction taking place down on the waterfront, a little four a.m. guns-for-money deal, so we crashed the party. It was relatively small-time as these things go, and it was perfect for our purposes. We grabbed the cash, leaving the weapons behind. What the hell were we going to do with six crates of AK47’s?

Then we tied up the monkeys and dumped them next to an old warehouse like the suckers they were, and G2 got us out of there pretty as you please. It was smooth and simple and everything went off without a hitch.

After that it was like Gina had been with us forever, which made me happy in a way because I was now no longer the new kid in school. Every crew I’ve ever been a part of has a pecking order, and it’s usually based on seniority. That was the case here and I had gotten damned tired of having to do all the scut work just because I had only been around for six months.

* * *

After the stealing the cash from the gunrunners, we decided to cut out for a while, head down to the Florida Panhandle while Stupid Tommy finished his stretch. Gary had some connections down there and he figured we could run some profitable jobs while working on our tans during what was sure to be a long, cold winter in Boston. Plus, those arms dealers are some crazy motherfuckers, so everyone kind of agreed in an unspoken way that it might be a good idea to vacate for a while until things cooled down.

But before leaving, we decided to do one more job. It was a simple one with very little risk, and potentially very lucrative, a combination no self-respecting crew in the world could pass up. It was also a job G2 had come up with, which should have been another warning that something was maybe not quite right, but of course everyone was so dazzled by Gina’s smoking hot body and world-class driving skills that no one said a thing. New kid in town, and all that.

Gina Petralli worked a day job as personal assistant to some bigshot exec at Atlantic Insurance down in the financial district. The guy had it bad for her, not that you could really blame him. Everyone had it bad for Gina. Anyway, she had been fooling around with him for months and by now had him set up perfectly. He thought he was stringing her along, telling her he was going to leave his wife for her, treating her like a sap, and the whole time she was playing him like a fucking Stradivarius.

According to G2, the guy had installed a huge wall safe—get this—behind a painting in his bedroom. Again, I know what you’re thinking, because it was my first thought, too: that no one actually constructs a safe behind a picture in his house; it’s a total cliché, but Gina swore that’s what this guy had done. And she said this safe was filled with the best kinds of liquid assets: cash, jewelry, bearer bonds and the like. So naturally, we decided to relieve the guy of his treasure before hitting I-95 for Florida. Why wouldn’t we? I mean if we didn’t, it was only a matter of time before someone else did, right?

The night of the job, the rest of us waited while Gina worked. Her plan was simple. Go out to dinner, let Romeo wine and dine her like he always did before returning home to get sweaty, and then convince him to share the combination to his ridiculous safe and rob his ass blind. She would make sure the guy had plenty to drink and then, when he was good and worked up, she was going to strip him down and stick a gun in his ear. He would give up the combination and immediately afterward his valuables, and that would be that.

It seemed like a workable plan, and one which would not require any help from the rest of the crew, which explained why we were sitting around a piece of shit motel with our thumbs up our asses while G2 did all the heavy lifting. The only question was whether she actually had the stones to pull a piece on her boyfriend, and on that question opinions were split.

“Have you seen her eyes? There’s not a spark of life in them; they’re like shark’s eyes for chrissakes. She can do it; she’s one cold bitch.” Gary weighed in first on the subject, offering up his opinion with more than a little admiration in his voice. His words impressed me, since I had had the exact same thought about Gina’s eyes, but the wisdom of his insight was lessened by the fact he had his index finger buried to the first knuckle up his nose while he talked, rooting around like a plumber clearing a drain.

Bobby laughed. It sounded oily, if that was possible. “I wouldn’t know about her eyes,” he said. “I’ve never quite managed to make it all the way to her face when I’m looking at her. Man, the things I could do with that body. I’d make her squeal like a pig in heat.” He scratched his ass and then sniffed his finger.

Gary barked out a cruel laugh. It sounded like a car backfiring out on Industrial Drive. “You and Gina? Dream on, dumbass. The only way you could ever get your filthy paws on a chick like her is if she was dead. And even then you’d probably manage to scare her away.”

Bobby’s grin died on his face and his beady eyes narrowed as he stared unblinkingly at Gary. He spoke softly. “Watch your mouth, motherfucker. You talk big, but I don’t see you scoring with anyone like Gina, either. You’re lucky that fucking crack whore Deanna from the strip club lets you dip your wick in her, and she’s barely one step above a walking skeleton.”

Gary leapt to his feet, his rickety wooden chair crashing to the ancient, cracked and pitted linoleum floor behind him. He began walking slowly toward Bobby, who lay propped up against a pillow on one of the two ratty twin beds. Bobby’s eyes were slits as he watched Gary approach. He didn’t move a muscle.

I played hockey in high school and one of the few things I have left from those days is a beat-up old equipment bag that I take with me wherever I go. It’s falling apart at the seams and has seen better days—it’s a lot like me in that regard—but it’s mine and I always try to keep it close. Right now, it was on the floor at my feet looking like the world’s rattiest nylon and leather puppy dog.

I reached down and unzipped it, not taking my eyes off Gary and Bobby. Bobby’s mouth had twisted into an ugly sneer. He knew he had gotten under Gary’s skin with the comment about Deanna and seemed proud of himself. He was right though. Deanna did look like a walking skeleton. I figured the fact that a skank like her could earn a living stripping at The Little Devilz was a testament to just how scummy most guys are, especially when you add alcohol to the mix.

I rummaged around in my bag and found what I was looking for at the bottom, under a spare pair of jeans and my favorite Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. I immediately felt better. The Glock 21 radiated power and felt reassuring in my hands. I wondered whether the two squabbling idiots would notice me lift it onto the card table, but I needn’t have worried. They only had eyes for each other.

By now Gary had maneuvered himself right in front of Bobby, who still hadn’t moved on the bed. I thought that was a terrible move on Bobby’s part, strategically speaking. He didn’t want to show any fear, but he had also left himself at a huge disadvantage for when the trouble started, which was now inevitable. Stevie Wonder could see these two were going to get into it.

“At least I’m getting some, you fucking fairy.” Gary’s lips were pulled back from his teeth, showing off a set of yellow choppers that were eventually going to be a real windfall for some lucky dental hygienist. If he lived that long. “Instead of dreaming big with a chick like Gina, why don’t you just stick to the skin mags you keep under your bed in your mama’s house?”

I reached down again and retrieved the sound suppressor from my bag. It was long and cylindrical, sort of delicate-looking, in direct counterpoint to the massive solidity of the Glock. The buffoons on the other side of the room still paid no attention to me as I screwed the two items together. It only took a few seconds and I was done.

It had finally occurred to Bobby that he was going to be at a serious disadvantage once the Main Event started, which looked as though it would be kicking off any second now. I shook my head—And Tommy was the one they called stupid. Bobby tried to rectify the situation by easing up to a sitting position. The sneer had never left his face, although most of the confidence behind it seemed to have vanished.

Gary spit on him and then reached down and pulled a combat knife from his boot at the same time Bobby was snaking his hand under the pillow where, presumably, he had his own weapon stashed. Outside I could hear the distinctive throaty rumble of the Goat’s rebuilt V8 as Gina eased into the parking spot on the other side of the dirty plate-glass window. I couldn’t see her because the curtains were drawn, which was just as well, considering what was about to go down in here.

Gary displayed the knife for Bobby’s admiration, holding it inches in front of his face. I had to admit it was impressive. Six inch blade, serrated on the back edge, black matte carbon-fiber handle. The dim light glittered and danced off the silver. Bobby eased his hand out from behind the pillow, clutching his own knife. It was less impressive but equally deadly.

This was going to get ugly. Not to mention messy and noisy. The first two things—ugly and messy—I didn’t care about, but noise would be unacceptable. I wasn’t about to spend the next twenty years in the can because of these two clowns. I slapped the magazine into the gun’s handle and that got their attention. Two heads swiveled and turned with identical questioning expressions, as if only now realizing I was even in the room with them.

Gina’s key scratched at the doorknob as I fired twice, quickly. The suppressor did its job admirably. I knew it would. The sound of the two shots was barely louder than the scratching of key in lock. I put a bullet in Gary’s head and then one in Bobby’s before he had even had a chance to react. I’m not the best shot in the world but it was easy, despite the fact I was across the room; the fucking cheap-ass motel room couldn’t have been more than twelve feet wide.

Two bodies slumped simultaneously as the door swung wide and Gina pranced into the room. Gary dropped to the floor next to Bobby, who simply fell back onto his pillow like he had made a snap decision to take a nice, long nap. Gina’s eyes were sparkling as I disassembled my weapon and dropped the components back into my bag and I knew right away her heist had been successful.

The whole argument about whether Gina had what it took to pull a gun on the fat-cat insurance guy was patently ridiculous, and I had barely been able to suppress a laugh when the two now-dead losers were discussing the matter. The only question in my mind had been whether she would have the self-control not to ice him when she had the chance. Of course, I had known Gina Petralli a lot longer than they had.

You see, Gina and I were a couple. We’d been together since way back in high school, even longer than I had owned my ratty equipment bag, and that was saying something. She got the job at Atlantic Insurance on her own, just about the same time I was hooking up with the Two Stooges lying dead in the motel room. As soon as she told me how that stupid fat-cat was shooting his mouth off about his fancy safe and all of the valuable stuff inside it, we decided it would just be wrong to head down to Florida without liberating it.

Gina said the way the guy talked, there had to be at least sixty grand worth of loot inside that safe, and that we would be idiots to share that kind of score with Gary and Bobby. The plan had never been to kill them, though. I was just going to cuff them to their beds and then ease off in the GTO with Gina to parts unknown, but once they started acting like a couple of rutting bulls, I couldn’t let them ruin everything by making a lot of unnecessary noise and bringing the cops down here.

Gina glanced at the two dead guys without a word. Gary had said she was a cold bitch; he had no fucking idea. She was hopped up on adrenaline and practically floated around the room without her feet touching the floor. “It was even better than we had hoped!” she said excitedly. “I bet there’s more than sixty thousand dollars worth of stuff! I stowed it in the trunk of the car.”

She looked again at the two former members of our crew, smiling slightly at the matching holes in their foreheads. “Why’d ya kill them?” she asked, more curious than repulsed.

“They were idiots. Besides, what the hell do we need them for?”

Gina thought about it for a second and nodded her approval. Then she bent down over each one in turn, rifling trough their wallets and taking their cash, then sliding each man’s watch off his wrist. She really was one cold bitch. She saw me watching her and said, “What? They won’t be needing this stuff anymore.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic, but at the same time I could feel things beginning to slip away. The longer we stayed here the more likely we were to get caught in a cheap motel room with two rapidly cooling bodies. “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” I finally said.

Gina smiled as I climbed over the bodies. “Yeah, it’s time to scoot.”

I reached for the handle of the dented and rusted door and froze as I felt the barrel of Gina’s gun caress my right cheek. It was a tiny thing, a Walther P22, a girlie gun, but it could scramble your brains impressively, especially if fired while pressed against your skull. “What’s this?” I asked.

I could hear the amusement in G2’s voice as she answered. “I think you put it best just a minute ago. What the hell do I need you for?”

Due Consideration

One day a few years ago, shortly after she got her driver’s license, my daughter was driving home from her best friend’s house and nearly got T-boned by a passing car at a dangerous intersection not far from our home. After I made sure she was okay and mentioned once or twice—or maybe a dozen times—that it’s a good idea to look both ways three or four times before accelerating through that particular intersection, I began to think about what my reaction might have been if she had not been fortunate enough to escape with just a scare. “Due Consideration” was the result, and appeared in the March/April 2009 issue of Crime and Suspense.

I think I should make something very clear right up front: I’m not in any way trying to justify what I’ve done. It was wrong in the eyes of the law and no doubt also in the eyes of God, who after all sent His only son to remind us to turn the other cheek when slapped. And it’s not like I acted rashly, either. I have made it my habit in life to think things through and take action only after giving due consideration to the consequences of my decisions.

The legal ramifications I’m not especially concerned about; the authorities can do whatever they want to me, I’ve got nothing in particular to live for anyway now that Katie’s gone. I must admit, though, the whole God issue has me a bit worried. Suffering eternal agony burning in the flames of Hell doesn’t sound at all like how I want to spend my afterlife, but I’ll do it if I have to, and not utter one word of complaint.

Not one word.

* * *

My Katie was in many ways nothing more or less than the typical teenager. She was smart and pretty, with beautiful laughing eyes and a quick wit to match. She never went through those horrible awkward years that I remember so well from when I was growing up, a fact made more miraculous thanks to the way her mother simply up and left us one night while Katie and I were both fast asleep.

She was four at the time. I was clueless. We were both devastated. Joanna got up in the middle of the night, packed all her clothes and personal items in a big duffel bag, tossed the bag into the trunk of our car, and motored on out of town, stopping just long enough at the bank to clean out our meager savings account before moving on to whatever new adventures awaited her in whatever new place she ended up.

The woman I had married so long ago and had thought I knew so well made off with pretty much everything—or that was my assumption at the time—but in the long run I came to realize that the only thing I had ever had worth holding on to was that beautiful little girl, so fortunate to look like her mother and even more fortunate that she didn’t think like her.

Despite the circumstances of our abandonment, or perhaps because of them, Katie and I grew as close as is possible for a father and daughter making their way alone in the world. I stayed up all night at her bedside when she was sick with chicken pox. I drove her to every soccer practice and game, every math club meeting, attended every dance recital and school play and parent-teacher conference and was glad to do it.

While guys I worked with were playing golf and hanging out at the local sports bar watching football and ogling waitresses half their age, I was cooking and cleaning and doing laundry and going over multiplication tables and talking to my Katie, always talking. I was blessed to be able to watch my baby grow up into a beautiful, confident young woman anxious and ready to take on the world.

Then I bought her a car.

It was nothing much really, just a boxy little three year old two-door sedan with a dented left front fender that got good gas mileage and sported a neon yellow paint job all her friends were jealous of, but by her reaction you would have thought I had bought her a fire engine red Ferrari. Katie immediately fell in love with the thing, using it to buzz around town, hanging out with her friends and driving back and forth to school.

The night she died was a typical midsummer New Hampshire evening, clear and warm and utterly unremarkable but for the horror that followed. Low humidity. Light breeze. Nothing to suggest she would get T-boned by a drunken asshole in a decrepit pickup truck as she was crossing a desolate county two-lane on her way home from a night spent watching movies at her best friend Hilary’s house.

I found out my little girl had been in an auto accident when a somber-looking young sheriff’s deputy rang my doorbell just before midnight and changed my life forever.

“She’s alive,” he said, “but you need to get to the hospital immediately.” The poor kid had to raise his voice in order for me to hear the end of the sentence, because before the words were even out of his mouth I was sprinting to my car in bare feet, cutting them to ribbons on my driveway as I ran. I didn’t even notice and I certainly didn’t care.

* * *

The doctors allowed me to see her for a few precious minutes after she came out of surgery. If I hadn’t known it was her, I might not have recognized my little Katie. Half her head was shaved and bandaged where they had sewn up a deep gash in her skull, her pelvis was fractured, her legs broken, and she had suffered a severe concussion from serious head trauma. The swelling of her brain inside her skull was what worried the surgeons the most and for good reason. Shortly after speaking with me, Katie lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered.

During the short time she was conscious she was able to relate exactly what had happened during the final car ride of her much-too-short life. As she stopped and checked both directions for crossing traffic at the intersection, the only vehicle which was a factor had been the pickup truck, approaching from off her right, passing the empty Baptist church, directional flashing, indicating the driver was planning a right turn.

Katie started across Route 28, discovering too late that the truck wasn’t slowing to turn; it was in fact speeding, going much too fast, racing almost out of control. She realized a split-second too late that the driver had simply forgotten to turn the directional off after making his last turn.

My daughter hesitated for a split second and then hit the gas hard in an attempt to make it through the intersection—her only option at that point—but the pickup never slowed, never even swerved. It just plowed straight into Katie’s car, driving the little yellow vehicle into a utility pole which snapped in half from the violence of the impact. The pole then smashed down on the roof, crushing it and trapping my injured daughter inside.

She lay in semi-conscious agony inside the ruined car for twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived and rescue personnel cut her out of the mangled mess of sheet metal. She said she was vaguely aware of the man who had hit her walking around his truck examining the damage. He never so much as looked into her car; never checked to see if she was all right or even if she was still alive.

As she finished relating the story, in obvious pain and tiring rapidly, I hugged my baby and told her I loved her, and that I would be right there, sitting next to her bed when she awoke. She never did.

* * *

I found out later that the driver of the other vehicle in the accident that took Katie’s life, the pickup with the continuously flashing turn signal, was none other than the son of our local sheriff, a young man who had been in trouble with the law on numerous occasions but had always been spared any serious consequences from his actions thanks to his father’s influence. That explained why he never received as much as a traffic citation on the night he ended my little girl’s life.

A few weeks after the accident, I received an anonymous letter in the mail from one of the sheriff’s deputies who had been on duty that night. He couldn’t come forward publicly, he said, or he would suffer the wrath of his boss and probably lose his job, but he thought I should know that on the night in question, Pete Malone, the sheriff’s son, had been drinking and twelve empty beer cans had been found scattered throughout his truck.

There were no skid marks on the road leading up to the accident site, which corroborated Katie’s recollection that the truck never slowed. The officer concluded the letter by saying he was terribly sorry, but he knew nothing whatsoever was going to be done to Malone. The man would once again suffer no consequences for his reckless and this time deadly actions.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, that letter from the anonymous sheriff’s deputy constituted my life. I chewed on it like a dog worrying a bone. It was the first thing I looked at when I got up in the morning and the last thing I studied before I went to bed. I memorized it. I could recite it forward and backward. It was all I thought about.

After two weeks I knew what I had to do. I went to see Pete Malone.

* * *

When he opened the dented and rusting metal front door to his rundown trailer and saw me standing on his tiny landing, the look on his face was that of a guy who has accidentally bitten into a lemon. It was quite obvious he knew who I was, and equally clear he didn’t want to see me. “What do you want?” he asked, as if sharing a few minutes of his precious time with the man whose child he had killed was asking too much.

“I’m not here to cause you any trouble, Mr. Malone,” I told him. “I just wanted to hear from you in your own words what happened that night.”

He shot me a look of utter scorn. His mud-brown eyes were huge and aggressive. “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. That stupid chick pulled right out in front of me. The whole damned thing was her fault and I ended up losing my truck because of that dumb bitch.” He grinned, his thin lips parting to reveal a mouth filled with stained and yellowing teeth. “Maybe you should have spent a little more time teaching her to drive.”

I kept my temper. I had to. I needed to know. “Were you drinking that night, Mr. Malone?”

His grin turned to a snarl. “Drinking? Where did you hear that?” he demanded.

“That’s not an answer. Were you?”

“Screw you,” he shot back. “That accident was her fault and you’ll never prove otherwise.”

I bent my head and sighed, scuffing my foot on the spongy rotting pine of the man’s front deck. My neck felt hot from the relentless sun and I wondered absently whether it was getting burned. The overwhelming sense of sorrow and hopelessness I had felt for weeks began to be replaced by something else. “I have one more question, Mr. Malone, then I’ll go away and leave you alone—“

“You’re good and damned right you will or I’ll call the cops,” he interrupted, making a show of looking at his watch as if he were late for a pressing appointment. The filthy and torn t-shirt he was wearing suggested otherwise.

“Was your turn signal on when you ran my daughter into that telephone pole?” I asked. “Did you forget to turn it off in your drunken haze?” My fury was building and I knew I was pushing my luck.

He coughed and spat something slimy and unidentifiable past my leg onto the punky wood at my feet. There was barely enough room on the deck for the two of us. “Get offa my property. You’re lucky I don’t sue your ass for a new truck.”

Somehow I was able to control my temper. To this day I don’t know how I managed it. I turned without another word and walked off his porch and back to my car. I had found out what I needed to know.

* * *

After that I made it my business to watch Pete Malone’s trailer for most of every day until I learned his routine, which wasn’t exactly complicated. Get up around noon, slouch around the house, go out drinking in the evening, come home around midnight or later, get up and do it all over again the next day. If he had a job I couldn’t discern what it might be.

* * *

Ten days after my little encounter with Malone, I was sitting in my usual surveillance spot, across the street and down the road from his house. I had experimented with varying my location once or twice, but gave up when I realized Pete Malone wasn’t in the habit of paying the least bit of attention to his surroundings. I probably could have unfolded a lawn chair next to his front door and as long as he didn’t have to walk around me to get to his rental car, gone completely unnoticed by him.

On this particular night, at precisely 7:30 in the evening, right on time as usual, Malone walked down his rickety steps and slid behind the wheel of the rental car he was driving while searching for another dilapidated fifteen year old pickup truck to replace the one he had destroyed when he crushed my daughter like a mouse in a trap and ended her life so prematurely.

Ironically, the rental was a vehicle remarkably similar to my Katie’s car. Small, utilitarian, mostly featureless. I knew he didn’t have auto insurance and I was surprised the man could even afford to rent that little piece of shit, considering his apparent employment situation, or lack thereof.

Malone fired up the engine and drove to the end of the rutted and dusty access road upon which his trailer sat. He flicked on his turn signal as he approached the entrance to the county road and when he did, the entire vehicle disappeared in a blinding burst of orange flame and shrieking sheet metal. Three separate explosions, the last one igniting the fuel vapors in his gas tank, incinerated Malone in the little car instantly. I could feel the concussion from the blasts even way down the road where I was parked.

Pete Malone probably never knew what hit him, but I like to think in the last milliseconds of his life that he realized why he was dying and maybe even who had killed him.

The previous night, while my daughter’s killer slept, I had rigged his piece of crap rental with homemade explosives. It was simple, really. I wired them together and ran a lead to the right turn signal at the front of the car. I smashed the plastic lens, exposing the bulb, soldered the lead to the brass base, and ran the wire under the frame to my three bombs—IED’s, I believe the popular term is—which I duct-taped to the undercarriage of the vehicle.

The whole project took maybe twenty minutes. It really is true what they say; you can do anything with duct tape, just as you can find anything on the Internet, instructions for building lethal explosive devices included.

I assumed, correctly as it turns out, that in his haste to get to the local watering hole and wet his whistle, Malone would never notice the broken lens, and even if he did, he wouldn’t investigate. His truck, after all, hadn’t exactly been a model of preventive maintenance.

After the explosions, which I’m proud to say must have gotten the attention of at least a few of Malone’s neighbors, I sat thinking. I watched the fire burn for a moment, hot and bright, as it greedily consumed his vehicle, then started my car and drove slowly away.

* * *

Now I sit in my empty home wondering how long it will take for the police to arrive. I’m pretty confident I didn’t leave behind any evidence directly implicating myself, but I’m sure the authorities will come to the obvious conclusion pretty quickly that I am the prime suspect in what was clearly a planned event. Even with the intense heat the fire generated they will no doubt discover evidence of my homemade explosives. They are very good at investigating when they actually choose to do so.

If I am interrogated I won’t deny what I’ve done. As I said previously, the authorities don’t concern me. I gave due consideration to my actions before taking them and I am prepared to deal with the resulting consequences. Besides, my Katie is gone and she’s not coming back, so what happens to me is irrelevant now.

As I mentioned earlier, though, the issue of my eternal future is a more pressing concern.

But I figure when my time for judgment comes, I can make a fairly compelling argument for my actions if I’m allowed by the Big Guy to speak on my own behalf. Sure, the Good Book says to turn the other cheek, but there’s also a pretty substantial nugget in there about an eye for an eye.

Finally, and correct me if I’m wrong, but somewhere in that big old book of wisdom is a passage that concludes, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

Right?

Well, not this time it wasn’t. This time, I beat Him to it.

Devotion

A couple of years ago, Black Hound ran a bit of an untraditional February contest. The idea was to come up with a flash fiction story combining the typical elements of Valentine’s Day with the darker elements of, well, dark fiction. The upper word limit on this particular contest was a mere 750 words. “Devotion” appeared in February 2009 and did pretty well in the contest, finishing second.

February 14, 2009

My Dearest Valentine,

I have known since the very moment I first laid eyes on you that we were meant to be together. I don’t feel it is an exaggeration to say that our chance meeting those few weeks ago has become the highlight of my existence. Perhaps it has even begun to define my existence. I think about you all day every day and then, when I finally manage to fall asleep, I dream tortured dreams of you at night.

To think that our destinies were entirely dependent upon the vagaries of chance, my love! It brings me to my knees when I realize that had I been just a few seconds later entering the doorway of that quaint little coffee shop I would have missed you entirely as you were exiting. Knowing you as I do now, my darling, I tremble at the mere thought of the treasures I would have missed out on had the fates not thrown us together that afternoon—your shining blue eyes, your full, trembling lips, your lithe and sensuous body.

Every great couple faces challenges to their destiny, my sweet Valentine, obstacles to be overcome, and of course we are no exception. Do not fret over this, my darling! I have come to accept and forgive your initial concern regarding my advances; your reluctance to commit yourself fully to our burgeoning relationship. In fact, your shy hesitation served only to fuel my desire even more than I had ever dreamed possible!

Others less intuitive than I claimed they saw terror in your eyes when you looked at me, but I knew better. The poets say the eyes are the windows to the soul, do they not, my love? As such, I alone knew the truth, because I alone could see into your soul. I alone am your soul-mate! I alone could see that the emotion those other unfeeling fools mistook as terror was in fact respect and admiration, and—dare I say it?—Love!

The blessed knowledge that I have succeeded in winning the heart of the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world is the one thing that will sustain me, my dearest love, during those seemingly unbearable and interminable hours when we must of necessity be apart. Because even though destiny threw us into each others arms and showed the world we were meant to spend eternity together, I cannot hold you close to me every moment of every day.

But now we will never truly be apart, will we my darling? For I stole your heart, didn’t I? Despite the cruel and misguided efforts of all those ordinary people to whom romance and true love mean nothing, the people who were determined to keep us apart (As if that were even possible!), I was able to take your heart, wasn’t I?

You knew all along that your heart would one day be mine, didn’t you my love? I offer this solemn promise: that I will hold it close to my own, darling, forever. I will treat it with the utmost reverence. I pray that though you now sleep the eternal sleep, somehow you are aware of the enormity of my regret that I must utilize an ordinary glass jar as the receptacle for such a divine organ; such a perfect example of our lasting commitment to one another.

If nothing else, though, we may now rejoice in the knowledge that your heart will be near me always and forever. And that is what we both wanted, isn’t it my darling Valentine?

Yours in Eternity,

Your Loving Valentine

The Wheels on the Bus

We’ve all seen the reports we aren’t quite sure we can believe, of people who possess the ability to move items using only their minds. It’s a hard thing to wrap our minds around and a hard thing to believe unless we see the proof with our own eyes. Now imagine you are the mother of a four year old child who appears to possess this ability. But you can’t tell anyone, not even your husband, because a child with telekinesis is the least of your problems… “The Wheels on the Bus” first appeared in the print anthology MAUSOLEUM MEMOIRS, released in December 2009.

“Mommy, mommy, I want the salt!” Jonathan Weingarten slapped his tiny four year old hands on the kitchen table as if to punctuate his demand. The resulting noise was surprisingly loud, reverberating through the kitchen and causing the boy’s mother to jump. Of course, she jumped a lot lately.

Deborah Weingarten responded sharply. “That’s enough, Jon! I told you once already I’ll bring you the salt when I’m done picking up. Now, eat your breakfast and try to exercise a little patience.” She was almost finished cleaning the stove after cooking the boy’s favorite meal—scrambled eggs and toast—and wanted to get everything straightened up before crossing the kitchen to hand the salt shaker to her son.

She watched and waited as the towheaded blonde bundle of energy scrunched his face up as if preparing to scream bloody murder. But he didn’t scream bloody murder. He didn’t do anything at all, in fact. He just sat on his booster chair with his face scrunched up, staring with fierce concentration at the offending salt shaker, which at the moment sat innocently across the table, far out of reach of the little boy.

“Here it comes,” she mumbled under her breath, not even realizing she was talking to herself. Right on cue, the salt shaker began quivering, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more violently, as if the world’s tiniest earthquake was taking place under just that one isolated portion of the kitchen table. Then the salt shaker moved. It moved in fits and starts initially, before sliding smoothly across the table’s surface, gathering speed as it went, finally stopping in Jonathan’s tiny outstretched fist.

He turned his head to smile at his mother, his face lighting up like a Fourth of July fireworks display. “I got it!” he exclaimed, as Deborah Weingarten rubbed her arms against the sudden chill she was experiencing. She winced at the pain from the bruises on her arms but continued rubbing them anyway.

This wasn’t the first time she had seen her son move small objects with his mind, he had picked up the “talent” after the family moved into this damned old (haunted) house, but every time he did it she had a hard time convincing herself that what she had seen was real after it ended. What did they call it? Teleportation? No. Telekinesis? Maybe. Yes, telekinesis sounded right.

She wondered—not for the first time—if she should tell someone about this special gift her son had lately begun manifesting, then almost laughed out loud. Tell someone, indeed. That was a joke - who could she tell? She didn’t have any close friends; Mark didn’t allow them. His standard answer when she said she wanted to get out once in a while was that she should be so busy taking care of their huge (creepy) house and their little boy that she shouldn’t have time for friends; at least not if she was caring for her family properly.

She had to concede that he had a point there. This house, which had stood empty for nearly two decades after the previous owner killed himself inside it, was so monumentally enormous that it took almost every waking second of her day just to keep the damned thing clean. Why Mark had picked this big white elephant to buy eluded Deborah, but of course he hadn’t consulted her before buying it; he never asked her opinion on anything.

And telling Mark was definitely out of the question. You would think that her husband would be her first option, the obvious person to confide in, but he was rarely home, working seventy to eighty hours a week managing mutual funds. Even when he was there, Deb’s main goal was to steer clear of him and hope she didn’t inadvertently set him off and suffer a beating like the one he had inflicted on her last week which resulted in her current colorful collection of extensive bruises on both forearms.

At first she had thought her left arm was broken; that was how hard he struck her with the metal softball bat he liked to use when he felt she needed punishing. Mark called his bat “The Persuader,” but she just called it painful and humiliating. Fortunately, the swelling had gone down after about three days and she was gradually regaining the full use of both arms, but they were still extremely tender. Her left arm resembled the color of the late-afternoon sky just before a violent thunderstorm. That was quite fitting, Deborah thought.

Deb’s main concern during these violent assaults was for the well-being of little Jonathan. She didn’t believe her husband would actually go so far as to injure him physically, but when Mark administered her beatings he wasn’t even discreet enough to send the little boy to his room most of the time. The four year old was forced to endure the sights and sounds of his mommy being manhandled and she feared the unseen but very real damage it was doing to his psyche.

Every awful episode played out in largely the same way. When the beating started, Jonathan would hurry to his tiny rocking chair, the one molded out of plastic to look like a green cartoon turtle superhero, and sit in front of the television while his favorite DVD played a collection of children’s songs. The wheels on the bus go round and round… Smack, as Mark delivered a blow with the softball bat… round and round, round and round… a scream of pain and anguish from Deb… The wheels on the bus go round and round… a lamp falling off a table as she crashed into it… All through the town.

To Deb, the most frightening thing about these episodes, even worse than the physical damage that she suffered, was the way the little boy’s eyes would glaze over, becoming blank and vacant as he tried to ignore the horrifying scene being played out again and again in the formal dining room under the massive cut-glass chandelier Mark had overpaid for. His head would loll back on the chair as he stared up at the ceiling, or maybe at an imaginary friend, or maybe at nothing at all, Deb wasn’t really sure. All she knew for certain was that he steadfastly refused to talk to her about it.

She knew the day was rapidly approaching when she would have to take Jonathan and escape, just leave Mark and this awful (haunted) house behind. The problem was, she had no idea how she would manage it. Everything was in her husband’s name—the credit cards, the cars, the savings accounts and investments, everything. He had all the money, all the connections, all the standing in the community, all the power. She was trapped, but she knew somehow she had to figure out some way to protect her innocent little boy, despite her growing realization that she could not even protect herself.

Across the kitchen, Jonathan was enjoying his eggs, spreading them all over his face and occasionally even getting some into his mouth. Deb watched him eat through eyes filled with tears.

* * *

That night was even worse than usual. Normally after a beating like the one Mark had inflicted last week, Deborah was able to enjoy a short respite from the terror. Her husband would be overcome with guilt and remorse and for a period of anywhere from a couple of weeks to even a couple of months would treat her, if not gently, at least without any outright hostility or physical intimidation.

Not this time, though. The air in the old house was thick with the scent of impending trouble again already. Deb felt she could almost reach out and touch the malevolence. Something had gone badly at work, something Mark was not the least bit interested in discussing with Deb. But a storm was brewing inside her husband. She had known him long enough to be able to recognize the warning signs, much like some seasoned weather observers can sense an oncoming electrical storm just by sniffing the air.

Jonathan, of course, was totally oblivious. He babbled at his father, describing a butterfly he had seen during a walk he had taken that afternoon with his mommy. “It was brown and yellow and it flyed in every direction!” He excitedly began running around the dining room, flapping his arms like butterfly wings in a manic demonstration of the insect’s flight path.

Mark said nothing, just sat in his seat glowering at Deborah, who was nearly in a panic trying to get dinner on the table before the impending explosion ripped through the house. She had misjudged how long it would take to cook the chicken, and now she knew what was coming, could sense it, could practically feel the onset of violence. All he needed was an excuse, and she had provided him with a ready-made reason to get angry, had served it up to him like a ball on a tee, just waiting for him to smash it out of the park, literally in this case.

“Is there a chance, any chance at all, that we might be able to eat dinner before that little rugrat is ready for COLLEGE?” The question had started out soft, Mark’s words almost imperceptible across the length of the kitchen, but by the end he was screaming at Deb, dark eyes flashing, fist slamming on the table and making the dinner dishes rattle with a discordant crash!

She cringed, knowing she was making a mistake, knowing that her fearful reaction would only set him off more, but she just couldn’t help it. “It’s ready now, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s ready now, I swear it’s ready now, I’m sorry.” The words tumbled out of her in a rush of fear and panic.

Out of the corner of her eyes she saw Jonathan begin his trek, head down, into the living room as Mark advanced upon her like an avenging angel. She heard the child’s DVD start up, heard the wheels of the bus begin to turn, rolling through a world where little boys didn’t have to watch their mothers get assaulted by the very people who were supposed to love and protect them, a world where mommies didn’t have to wear long-sleeved blouses in July to hide the bruising inflicted by daddies, a world where life was cozy and happy and safe and normal.

Mark wound up and shoved Deb hard. She lost her balance and fell back, arms pinwheeling, an ugly purple bruise appearing as if by magic on her lower back where she smashed it against the corner of the stove. Her ears rang as he clapped his hands over them and then hit her in the face. She fell into the dining room, landing in a heap, trying to protect her ribs from his vicious kicks, once, twice, three times.

He kicked her in the head and her consciousness began to waver, little black spots blossoming around the edges of her vision and then growing larger and threatening to overwhelm her, and Deb thought for just a moment that this was it—this was going to be the time he killed her. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? Black despair flooded her heart, not for herself but for her only son. Who would care for Jonathan? Who would teach him right from wrong? Who would make him understand his mommy had loved him and tried her best to protect him?

From where she lay in the corner of the dining room, sprawled on the floor and unable to stand, Deb looked through the open entryway into the den at her beloved son. He was once again staring up at the ceiling, entranced by whatever it was he saw during these moments of extreme stress.

“TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN!” Mark screamed as the wheels on the bus started turning again on Jonathan’s DVD. He turned on his heel and started across the room toward the little boy, lost in his rage. As he did, Deb saw the enormous chandelier hanging in the middle of the room begin shaking on its own, almost as if a small earthquake was taking place over just that one spot in the ceiling. It was almost imperceptible at first, a musical jingling sound as the crystal orbs bounced against each other. Mark didn’t notice.

Jonathan continued staring upward, a look of intense concentration framing his tiny face, and plaster began to break away from around the cast iron plate that kept the chandelier bolted securely into the ceiling, falling like snowflakes in July on and around the angry man.

For the first time, Mark looked up and took notice of the strange occurrence taking place over his head. By now the chandelier was swaying violently back and forth, rattling and screeching as plaster continued to fall. Time seemed to stop as the abusive man stared in slack-jawed amazement at the unlikely sight taking place directly above him.

After just that moment’s hesitation he seemed to recognize that he might be in danger and he started to move, taking one giant step toward the corner of the room and the prone body of his wife. As he did, the chandelier let go, tearing loose from the ceiling with an impossibly loud roar, plaster and wood and cast iron and cut glass crashing down in a screaming symphony of destruction.

He almost made it. Two feet farther and the massive lighting fixture would have slammed harmlessly to the floor. Instead, Mark Weingarten took the full force of the falling chandelier, smashing him to the floor like a rag doll, slicing off the top of his head in an instant and spraying blood in a near-perfect circle on to the gleaming oak floor.

Deborah struggled to her knees, hair hanging in sweaty strings around her face as she spit up blood, adding a little of her own to the rapidly growing pool around her now-dead husband’s body. She wondered absently how many of her ribs Mark had broken when he was kicking her.

Glass from the ruined chandelier crunched and tinkled under Jonathan’s sneakers as he ran across the room to his mother. She tried to tell him not to go near his father’s body but discovered she couldn’t manage to form the words. She was tired, so tired.

Jonathan stopped in front of Deb and kneeled on the floor, not even seeming to notice the devastation in the room. “I did it, mommy! I did it! It’s okay now. Daddy was really mad but now the mad man will never bother us again, mommy.”

Deb reached out with a shaking hand and pulled her son close, brushing shards of the deadly glass off his jeans from where he had kneeled in front of her and hugging him fiercely. Blood sprang instantly from her hands and agonizing pain from her broken ribs ripped through her as she held him but she barely noticed and didn’t care. Tears rolled down her cheeks; tears for what she had lost and what she had gained and what her son would never have.

“That’s right, baby,” she said. “That’s right. The madman will never bother us again.”

Dead and Buried

The first time I ever heard Nickleback’s song, “Follow You Home,” the inspiration for “Dead and Buried” popped into my head almost fully formed, and all I had to do was write the story down. In the song lyrics, a guy is so enamored of a young lady that he won’t stay away from her, no matter what horrible punishments she inflicts on him. He’s a stalker, in other words. My story, though, is a little different. Imagine a wife anxious enough to get rid of her husband that she orchestrates his murder. Everything goes according to plan, except the hapless victim just won’t… stay… dead. It can turn into a real problem, as you might imagine. “Dead and Buried” first appeared at the very cool website, A Twist of Noir, in October, 2010.

The moon’s dirty grey light struggled to penetrate the ground fog as it swirled and twisted, illuminating the forest weakly, like an old-time black and white television show. In an isolated clearing, a man knelt at the edge of a freshly-dug three-foot-deep hole, hands fastened behind his back with nylon cord, damp earth crusting the knees of his blue jeans. The man was still but keenly observant, seeming to acknowledge the hopelessness of his situation. He knelt and waited.

The hole—the gravesite—had been constructed roughly six feet long and three feet wide, the approximate dimensions of its prospective tenant. The earth excavated to form this makeshift resting place was piled neatly at one end, conveniently located for its return trip.

Behind the soon-to-be victim a second man paced, agitated and clearly nervous. He sucked on a cigarette and held a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum Model 60 revolver in one hand and a shiny Easton aluminum baseball bat in the other. The silvery reflection of the moon’s light offered a jarring contrast to the monochromatic dimness casting the rest of the scene.

The man with the dirt on his knees waited patiently, warily eyeing the nervous man next to him as he paced back and forth. He was not anxious to hurry things along; he was perfectly happy to let the other man deal with his inner demons for as long as necessary. Every breath he took was one more than he had expected to get after being forced to the ground by the handgun barrel pressed to the back of his head.

Finally he spoke. “Why the baseball bat? Planning to sandwich a little batting practice between putting a bullet in my head and moving in with my suddenly available wife?”

The man with the gun and the bat stopped pacing for a moment. He almost seemed to have forgotten his victim was even there. He licked his lips nervously. “No bullets,” he said. “I’m going to do you with the bat instead.”

“I hope you don’t mind me asking the obvious question, but why?”

“I’m not stupid. A bullet lodged in your head can be traced back to the gun it was fired from and used as evidence if you’re body is ever discovered; not that it will be. The baseball bat will be buried in a different location as soon as this is over, and will never be seen again.”

The man kneeling at the edge of his own grave considered this information and then nodded. “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought—or Maura has—although from my perspective I have to tell you that a home run swing to the side of the head sounds much more painful than taking one in the hat from that cannon you’re holding.”

“Sorry about that,” answered the man holding the weapons. “I know it’s not ideal, but I’ve got to do what’s best for me.”

“Clearly. You do understand I’m going to make you pay for this, right?”

A soft, high-pitched squeal erupted from somewhere in the back of the agitated man’s throat and he turned and raised his bat and swung from the heels, connecting with the other man’s head. A wet noise that sounded nothing like a bat hitting a ball exploded into the heavy night air and the man with the dirt on his knees tumbled slowly, almost gracefully, into the bottom of the shallow pit.

The other man dropped his bat like it contained an electric charge and puked into the grave, neatly extinguishing his cigarette with the acidy yellow contents of his stomach. He dropped to his knees and reached down and yanked his victim’s wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. He then produced a pocket knife and sliced the cord holding the dead man’s hands together, rose unsteadily, and staggered through the silence of the killing field back to his car.

Tossing the incriminating bat and length of cord into the back seat for later disposal, the man grabbed his shovel and steeled himself for one more trip into the forest, this time to toss the pile of dirt over his victim and hide the evidence of his treachery forever.

* * *

Maura Stapleton pulled her Mercedes into the driveway of the home she shared with Vince Gower, talking on her cell phone and driving much too fast, as usual. She slowed just enough to squeeze under the garage door still rumbling up on its tracks, then screeched to a stop in the middle of the stall.

It had been ten long months since Vince completed their nasty business—at her insistence—and Maura, for one, had never been happier. Her marriage to Jim Stapleton had been a sham, at least from her perspective, and she had finally prevailed upon Vince to dispose of her pain-in-the-ass husband once and for all.

She would have been free of Jim months earlier if Vince, the man with whom she had been having an affair practically since saying “I do” six years ago, hadn’t been such a frigging wuss. Maura kept pounding into Vince’s thick skull the fact that the only way the two of them would be able to live together in a comfortable manner would be for Jim to disappear. Permanently. The sooner the better. Eventually he had come to see things her way, as she had known he would.

Coming into the marriage, everything had been Jim’s: The business, the cars, the investments, even the house, which was much too big and ostentatious for the two of them, but which Maura loved because it trumpeted to the world in no uncertain terms her new status.

Divorcing Jim would never work, Maura had explained to Vince, because then the prick would get to keep virtually all of the stuff—those goodies which she loved so much and which, to her astonishment, she had discovered Jim didn’t seem to care that much about. She had foolishly agreed to a very restrictive pre-nup before marrying Jim Stapleton and then regretted it almost instantly.

Now, with Jim missing, she and Vince were already almost one year into the seven year wait required by law before ownership of everything reverted to Maura. In the meantime, if Jim wasn’t found—which of course he wouldn’t be—as his wife, she retained the use of everything; it just wouldn’t legally belong to her for six more years.

Maura stepped out of her car and grabbed the shopping bags out of the tiny back seat, struggling to carry her three purchases and not spill her large iced coffee. She loved shopping and considered it a travesty if she went more than two days without buying a new outfit and of course some sexy lingerie for Vince’s benefit. He was everything she needed in a man: handsome, strong, great in the sack, not overly bright, and easy to control.

She stepped into the kitchen and took exactly two steps—elapsed time, maybe one second—to notice something was very wrong, and by then it was already too late. Seated in the middle of the kitchen, secured to a heavy pine chair that was part of the six thousand dollar kitchen set she had purchased to celebrate her husband’s disappearance, was Vince Gower.

He shook his head violently but silently, any attempt at warning Maura muffled by a rag stuffed into his mouth and secured with twine wrapped tightly around the back of his skull. His wrists were tied behind him, his ankles lashed to the legs of the chair. Thick brown hair tumbled down his forehead, tangled and sweaty, obscuring his eyes.

Maura froze for the barest fraction of a second as her brain attempted to process this unexpected scenario. Then the gears engaged and she turned in a panic to double-back; to flee the house via the garage, to exit the way she had just entered. She screamed as she ran straight into the solid—and very much alive—Jim Stapleton.

Her shopping bags fell to the floor, followed immediately by the iced coffee, splashing everywhere and destroying a brand-new, four hundred dollar Donna Karan dress. Maura didn’t notice or care. Her entire universe consisted of the impassive face of her dead husband as he held her in a vice grip, staring down at her with hard grey eyes.

* * *

Jim couldn’t have planned it any better. Maura walked through the door, preoccupied only with herself, as usual. He had known she would make it all the way into the kitchen before the sight of her bound and gagged boyfriend would register. In fact, he had half expected her to waltz right on by and into the living room without noticing him at all.

He stationed himself behind the basement entrance when he heard the big garage door rumbling down on its tracks, having purposely placed Vince in as obvious a location as possible. Then, with Maura frozen in shock at the sight of her immobilized lover—she looked literally like a deer caught in the headlights; until now, Jim had not realized how accurate that expression could be—he simply stepped behind her and waited for her to bolt. Which she had done, right on cue. Now he held her tightly by her forearms while her panicked eyes regarded him as if she was seeing a ghost, which, Jim supposed, in a way she was.

Finally he spoke, when it became clear Maura was unable to form an intelligible sentence. “Hi, honey, I’m home. Did you miss me?”

“You’re…you’re dead,” she gasped.

“Well, yes and no. There’s ‘dead’ and there’s ‘not exactly.’ Care for an explanation?”

Maura Stapleton nodded in mute terror. Her eyes were enormous. She had not taken them off her husband since nearly running him over in her aborted escape attempt.

Jim took his wife by the elbow and guided her gently to another kitchen chair, which he placed directly opposite Vince’s. Easing her into the seat, Jim fastened a long plastic zip-tie around her right ankle, which he secured to the leg of the heavy wooden chair. He did nothing to her hands; he wanted them free.

“So. Isn’t this cozy,” Jim said with a smile. He reached behind Vince’s head and pulled the twine securing the gag free, and as soon as he did, the words began tumbling out of the frantic man’s mouth. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry,” spittle rolling down his chin as he faced his lover, now seated just three feet away, staring at him with murder in her eyes.

“You fucking pussy. You told me you did it; you said he was dead,” she whispered, the words measured and soft but clear as gunshots in the sudden tense stillness of the kitchen.

“He was, and then he wasn’t. I mean, I thought he was but he really wasn’t,” the distraught man babbled, clearly more afraid of the petite blonde woman lashed to a chair in front of him than he was of her husband, newly resurrected and holding a gun on them both.

Maura Stapleton’s eyes bored holes into her lover’s, and then she shook her pretty head scornfully and turned to look at Jim. “I didn’t have any idea he was going to attack you last summer,” she purred. “I don’t blame you for being angry, but holding me against my will doesn’t make any sense. I had nothing to do with what happened.”

Vince Gower made a sound of incredulous disbelief, his jaw hanging half open. He began protesting but the words died in his mouth when Jim trained the Smith and Wesson on him. It was the very same weapon Vince had used to force him to his knees over an earthen grave less than one year ago.

“Little did I realize,” Jim said conversationally, his gun aimed at Vince but his words aimed at his wife, “when you said you needed a gun for self-defense, that it would get so much use. It certainly has been well worth the money I paid.”

Now Maura began to speak, eyes flashing, but she stopped just as quickly as Vince had when Jim swung the weapon her way. “I’m going to keep the floor for a while,” he said. “Is that okay with everyone?”

No one answered and Jim nodded pleasantly. “I thought so. Here’s the thing,” he continued, smiling down at his wife while his eyes glittered, grey and flinty and cold. The contrast was chilling. “I had a long chat with Sexy Rexy here before you arrived—“

“His name is Vince,” his wife interrupted, her mouth turned down in a pout. “You know that.”

“Of course it is. Sorry. Anyway, Sexy Rexy told me a story much different than yours while we were chatting, awaiting your arrival. He says killing me was all your idea, that you wanted the house and the cars and the business, and that you told him the only way to get it, thanks to that pesky pre-nup, was to kill me and make sure I was never found. You would have to wait awhile, of course, before everything was legally transferred into your name, but even during that time you would still have control over everything. Is that about the size of it? Have I left anything out?”

Maura began protesting loudly, leaning forward in her chair and pointing an accusing finger at Vince, who cowered away from her, before Jim silenced her again, this time by shoving the barrel of the gun under her chin, hard. “I believe him,” he whispered fiercely. “He had no reason to want me dead and he’s not bright enough to come up with that scheme on his own. He had been banging you for years, I was aware of it from the very beginning, and nothing much was going to change for him whether I was alive or dead. You, on the other hand,” he pushed the gun barrel harder against her throat until she began to gag, “had everything to gain and you’re smart as a whip and cold as ice to boot.”

“You would never shoot me,” she said as he eased the pressure of the pistol off her throat. “You love me too much.” Her face was ashen but her voice was strong and steady and filled with conviction.

Jim smiled. “You know, you’re right about that,” he said, pocketing the gun and sitting in his own chair, spinning it around and straddling it with his chin resting on his arms, interlocked over the top of the chair-back. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about this whole messy situation and I came to the same conclusion months ago.”

“What the hell happened out in those woods, anyway?” Maura asked Vince, again staring hard at him.

“I hit him with everything I had,” he answered quietly, his voice shaking, “but when I returned from my car with the shovel to fill in the hole, he was gone. I didn’t realize he was still alive after I hit him. Somehow he crawled away in the ten minutes it took me to go to my car and back. I don’t know how he managed it, but he didn’t die.”

“Obviously. And you didn’t think to tell me this?” Maura’s eyes blazed and her face flushed in anger, her play for Jim forgotten. “You didn’t think the fact that my husband was still alive and not laying at the bottom of a shallow grave was important enough to clue me in on? It slipped your mind, maybe?”

Vince seemed to shrink back into the chair. His fear of the tiny woman was palpable. “I figured there was no way he could make it out of the woods alive. We were miles from anywhere, so if he crawled a few hundred yards and then died, what difference would it make? I knew you’d be furious if you found out, and he was going to die either way, so, really, why say anything?”

“Yes, what difference would it make?” Jim said dryly. “When I saw you swing the bat I had the presence of mind to snap my head to the side at the moment of impact, so, although you still split my head open, I never lost consciousness. As soon you went back for your shovel I crawled out of the hole. I still don’t quite know how.

“I was injured badly, suffering from a fractured skull and bleeding from the head, but I walked for what felt like an eternity and finally exited the forest on Route 42, where I got lucky for the second time that night. A couple of kids driving west on their way back to college picked me up, and I was able to disguise the extent of my injuries, thanks to the darkness and the fact that they were drunk off their asses.

“I rode with them for hours, finally allowing them to take me to a hospital somewhere off Interstate 90 in western New York State. They dropped me off at the emergency room door and left. I had no identification, you made sure of that,” he said, nodding at Vince, “so I feigned amnesia. It wasn’t difficult; I was badly injured and my temperature was so high by the time I stumbled into that hospital that I was hallucinating. But I forced myself to do it. And do you know why?”

Maura and Vince looked at each other without speaking. Jim leaned forward until his face was inches from the man who had hit him over the head in a desolate forest and left him to die. “Come on, big guy,” he said slowly, enunciating each syllable in a voice that would cut glass. “You’re not even trying. Why do you suppose I put myself through the agony of walking out of the forest and then suffering for seven hours in a car with a fractured skull, when I could have died at any moment? Why?”

Vince looked at him with terror in his eyes, while Maura observed the exchange with an air of detachment. She could have been watching a political debate on television. Jim finally continued, “I put up with that pain and agony for one reason, and one reason only. When you had me on my knees, preparing to finish me off with a goddamn baseball bat, I told you something, and I meant it. Do you remember what I said to you, Rexy?”

Vince was pushing against his chair-back with all his might, unable to move the heavy piece of furniture even an inch although not for a lack of trying. His head thrashed side to side. Jim couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t remember what he had said that night or because he did. The silence lingered, Vince shaking his head but afraid to speak; Maura sitting quietly, clearly hoping Jim would expend his rage on her sap of a boyfriend and spare her.

When it became clear Vince either would not or could not answer, Jim spoke. “I told you that you were going to pay for what you were about to do to me, and tonight I’ve come to collect.”

Tears cut tracks down Vince Gower’s face, transforming it from handsome and proud into something sad and pathetic. Jim stood and stretched his back, wincing as it cracked and snapped. “Anyway,” he said, turning his attention to his wife, who looked less than pleased with this turn of events, “let’s wrap this up, shall we? It’s getting late and it’s almost show time. Just to satisfy your curiosity about how I managed to come back from the dead, I had been stashing money away for a long time after discovering your true nature. I guess to say ‘some money’ would not be doing the amount justice. It was a lot of money, very liquid, and very easily accessed.

“I knew you had been sleeping with Sexy Rexy here for years and would eventually figure out a way to take everything from me, and while I really don’t give a damn about all our stuff, I had no desire to live like a pauper forever, either. So I slowly stashed plenty of cash where I could get at it easily—it’s not hard to do when you have a friend or two in the right places—and after I recovered sufficiently in the New York hospital, I simply walked out the front door and disappeared.

“No one knew who I was, so officially, I didn’t exist as far as the authorities were concerned. I made my way back to this area to collect my money and then left again to start a new life while I considered the question of what to do about you two. I finally made up my mind, so here I am.” He smiled at his two captives. Maura looked less sure of herself, but still not overly concerned.

Jim pulled the Smith and Wesson out from behind his back, where he had slipped it under the waistband of his jeans while he was talking. He held it in his gloved hands. “And you’re right about one thing,” he said softly to Maura. “I could never shoot you. I actually still love you, God help me, so killing you is out of the question, but I’m sure you can agree that the situation as it currently stands is untenable. So you’re going to kill Sexy Rexy.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’re going to take this pistol and shoot your lover in the head, and then you’re going to be arrested for murder and spend the rest of your miserable, greedy, grasping life in prison. Not the perfect solution, I’ll admit, but it’s the best I could come up with under the circumstances.”

Vince Gower’s tears were now mixing with snot, the whole mess running down his chin as he whimpered. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Maura said, “You’re crazy. Why would the police think I killed Vince?”

“Well, let’s see,” he replied, checking off the reasons on his fingers. “Your pistol, the one registered to you and stored in this home, is used to murder your boyfriend, who I suppose you could say is also stored in this home. Your fingerprints will be the only ones on the gun, and poor Vince’s blood will be on your hands, as will blowback residue. Sounds like an open-and-shut case to me.”

“I’ll tell them you did it; that you came back and killed Vince in a fit of jealousy—“

Jim burst out laughing. “About that,” he said, still chuckling. “I don’t exist any more, remember? In fact, if I had to make a wager, I’d be willing to bet that the police will begin looking for me again, all right. They’ll be searching for my body, figuring since you killed poor, pathetic Vince here that you probably offed me last year, too.”

Horror blossomed in Maura’s eyes as she considered his words. “You don’t have to do this,” she babbled. “We can kill him together, bury the body. I’ll say you were lost and had amnesia and you suddenly regained your memory and we’re back together and—“

Jim leaned over, cocking the pistol. In one smooth motion, he grabbed Maura’s right hand, wrapping it around the butt of the weapon and forcing her finger through the trigger guard. Vince screamed and Jim guided Maura’s hand toward the target and they pulled the trigger together and the gun roared and Vince’s head exploded, splattering blood and bone and hair and gore all over the back wall of the kitchen.

Maura sat motionless, in shock, her beautiful face white but her hand steady, suddenly holding the weapon all by herself. Jim pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and sliced the zip tie securing his wife’s ankle to the kitchen chair, stuffing it into his pocket. He stood and walked toward the door.

He heard the audible click and sighed, then turned to face Maura one last time. “The reason you can’t shoot me is that I made certain the gun contained only one bullet. It’s useless now, unless you need a paperweight. I’ll place an anonymous call to the authorities when I get a little ways down the street. Run if you want, but you won’t get far.”

Jim turned back to the door and placed his gloved hand on the knob. Without looking at his wife he said, “Good luck, kiddo. Have a nice life.”

Dance Hall Drug

This is perhaps the darkest, nastiest story I have written to date. In fact, the editor of the dark fiction magazine that ended up printing it called it “a nasty piece of work” in her acceptance letter. I’m pretty sure she meant that as a compliment; I took it that way, in any event. “Dance Hall Drug” deals with abuse, both physical and mental, as well as betrayal and revenge and madness, and first appeared in the Autumn, 2010 issue of Dark Valentine. It has been nominated, by the very same editor who complimented me on its nastiness, for a 2011 Pushcart Prize.

The music seemed impossibly loud to Carrie Carstens; it assaulted her ears, attacking from all directions as she paid her five dollar cover and descended the steps into the heavy air of the crowded club. She always convinced herself she was prepared for the high-energy techno-pop crap and the high-energy people who listened to it before she left her apartment, and yet inevitably she was caught off-guard when she actually entered the superheated, subtly erotic atmosphere of one of the city’s many dance clubs.

Shy and retiring by nature, Carrie didn’t haunt these places because she loved the music or the social aspect or even because she wanted to get laid. Carrie visited the clubs because she had to. She had no choice. It was a compulsion.

Tonight she had selected “Klub Elektro,” a crowded zoo complete with the pulse-pounding bass beat of the synthetic music she had come to despise, the typical glass/mirror/aluminum décor she had come to despise as well, and the typically eclectic clientele she didn’t feel any affection for, either.

Carrie eased down the steps (three of them, carpeted, have to remember that if she found who she was looking for—she wouldn’t want him to trip going out the door and draw unwanted attention), and across the crowded floor, zig-zagging around tables and chairs and patrons all the way to the bar. She smiled at the young female bartender with the bright purple streak running through her spiky blonde hair and ordered a drink. Club soda, of course. Nothing stronger. Getting drunk would prove counterproductive if she happened to luck out and find the dude.

The chick behind the bar appraised her openly as she handed her the drink, exuding sensuality, running her eyes up and down Carrie’s body and wetting her lips lasciviously with her tongue. It was obvious what she was after, Stevie Wonder could have seen it, but Carrie wasn’t interested.

She accepted her drink with a smile, tipped the bartender well, as always, and sipped slowly as she made her way toward the rear of the club. She always headed to the back when she was hunting. Standing against the wall, Carrie pretended to enjoy the music like everyone else while her eyes surveyed the crowded club, concentrating especially hard on the dance floor. She figured the dance floor would be where her target would make a move on his unsuspecting female victim if he was here.

Carrie Carstens would much rather have been home asleep in bed than listening to music she could barely tolerate in the middle of the night, wedged in among people she didn’t know, looking for someone she was unlikely to find, but again—she had no choice. She had suffered through the dream once more last night and it had been a doozey. Of course, it was always a doozey, because it was always the same.

Some nights the dream ended earlier than others; it all depended upon the amount of time it took for Carrie to wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, shaking and begging for mercy, but the dream itself always took the same form. The man looming above her, his hand clamped over her mouth so she could not scream and could barely breathe. The man ripping her clothing off, tugging her panties down her legs, roughly, over her hips and off, forcing her legs apart and lowering his disgusting body onto and then into hers. The man doing vile, nasty things to her; things that made her literally sick to her stomach to think about, even now, years later.

So Carrie didn’t have any choice; not really. She had to enter these places, these plastic, artificial techno-rock dance club places. She didn’t care about the music; didn’t care about anything, really, she just wanted to watch the crowd. Because Carrie Carstens clung to the hope that one of these days against all odds she would get lucky and find the man who had done those horrible things to her.

She was certain she would eventually find him. She had to. She had a score to settle.

Halfway through her second drink—another club soda, of course—Carrie caught a glimpse of a young man who made her skin crawl and her stomach clench in instinctive fear and immediately she knew. The terrifying visceral reaction made it clear. This might be the guy. Tall, close-cropped brown hair, snappy dresser. Good with the ladies. Great dancer. She felt a jolt of panicky electricity surge through her body as she jostled her way through the shifting crowd for a closer look. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

Her drink sloshed over the sides of the glass; she didn’t care. Men and women glared at her as she elbowed her way past and she didn’t care about that either. She had to get a better look at the tall guy with the close-cropped brown hair, because if it was who she thought it was—

Carrie’s breath caught in her throat. Her eyes widened. Her stomach tried to evacuate its contents but she choked down the nausea, swallowing hard.

It was the guy.

* * *

The room was dank and stuffy and the man—his name was Burton Daniels and he was a twenty-three year old investment banker trainee with a high-powered firm uptown—began to stir in his chair. Carrie waited patiently for him to awaken. He would have one hell of a massive headache when he finally came around, but otherwise would be fine, relatively speaking.

At least for the time being.

While she waited for Daniels to regain consciousness, Carrie thought about tonight and how she would finally lay the past to rest. The man would never haunt her dreams again. She would finally be able to sleep. She could stop haunting those disgusting clubs with the disgusting people who looked at her in ways that made her skin crawl. She could stay home.

It had been even easier to lure him away from the club than she had expected. Carrie slinked up to him on the dance floor, rubbing her body against his by way of introduction—curvy parts against curvy parts—ensuring she had his full and undivided attention. She had worn a platinum blonde wig, cut in a style completely unlike her own, so there was no way Burton Daniels would ever recognize her, she had been sure of that.

And he hadn’t. Plus, it had been quite a long time since he forced himself upon her, doing all those horrible things to her; he probably had forgotten all about it, but she most certainly had not.

After getting him interested—it was so easy to do—Carrie had taken control of the situation immediately, grabbing Burton Daniels’s hand and pulling him to the relative privacy of a back corner table, miraculously empty, as soon as the song ended. What song it was, she had no idea. They all sounded alike to her anyway, so what did it matter?

Carrie had purred and pouted and postured and batted her eyes, oozing slinky sexuality and pretending to hang on Daniels’s every word, something she knew men loved; they were so self-involved and egomaniacal, impressed with their own perceived importance. She knew she could ensure his interest by feigning undivided attention to whatever senseless drivel came out of his mouth.

She asked him his name and what he did for a living and then oohed and ahhed over his answers, as if she thought being an investment banker trainee was the coolest thing ever instead of what it really was—a lame attempt by a perverted weasel to gain acceptance in the real world by his ability to make a lot of money.

From there it had been simple. She closed the deal by pretending to be drunk and easy and horny; ready to go someplace “private and cozy.” Before they left, however, Carrie insisted on buying Burton Daniels one last drink, which she purchased from the same purple-headed bartender, who again came on to her while she waited, again without saying a word—at least not out loud—and again without any luck.

Burton Daniels had waited at the table in the back corner of the club while Carrie got his drink, undoubtedly congratulating himself on being the luckiest fucking scumbag in a gigantic room full of fucking scumbags, and undoubtedly passed the time waiting for his drink by picturing the nasty, vile things he was going to do to this beautiful, hot-to-trot young thing who had been smart enough to choose him to take home over all the other men in the meat market.

After buying the drink, as she made her way back to her prey—Carrie couldn’t help but picture him as a fish thrashing about on the hook she had so masterfully baited—she had dropped a couple of roofies into the glass, where they had fizzed for a moment and then disappeared as she stirred with her finger. Two tabs was probably overdoing it, considering the slightness of Burton Daniels’ physique, but Carrie was not inclined to be particularly merciful, considering his sins of so long ago.

She rushed him through his spiked drink and then hurried him around the dance floor and out the door of Klub Elektro—no problem navigating the three carpeted steps to the doorway, her mind was sober and crystal-clear—with the truthful and utterly sincere promise of a night he would never forget. She wanted to be sure he was safely packed away in her little car before the full effect of the drugs worked their way through his system.

It had all gone off without a hitch, as she had known that it would.

A prolonged groan behind her told Carrie that Burton Daniels would soon be regaining consciousness—finally—and then the main event could begin. The inside of the aluminum storage unit, lit by the soft glow of a battery-powered portable lantern, thrummed with the sound of heavy rain pounding the roof. The effect was almost hypnotic, and Carrie found herself remembering bits and pieces of the horror Burton Daniels had inflicted upon her so many years ago.

Visions of utter, unrelenting terror flashed through her memory, unwanted and unstoppable: The sour smell of Daniels as he forced himself upon her, sodomized her, humiliated her, damaged her, transforming her from a sweet, trusting young girl into the obsessed, single-minded vengeance-seeker she had become. Tonight at last it would all end. She had finally caught up with him and would extract the pound of flesh, so to speak, she had dreamt about for so long.

“Wh—where am I? Who the hell are you?” The question was whispered hesitantly but might as well have been shouted. Burton Daniels had finally awakened. Carrie smiled and turned to face the man who had ruined her.

“You’re in a place where we have complete privacy. Isn’t that nice?”

Daniels was strapped into some sort of customized rig that looked a bit like a dentist’s chair. Sturdy leather straps, one firmly fastened at each wrist and one at each elbow, along with a similar strap wound around the man’s neck—placed loosely enough so that he could breathe normally, tightly enough so that he was forced to hold his head more or less motionless or risk choking himself to death—held his upper body captive while allowing him close to a full range of motion with his head.

Similar straps around the man’s knees and ankles immobilized his lower body, naked from the waist down. Carrie watched with something resembling amusement as he desperately tested the bindings, flexing his arms and legs and bucking in the chair until he realized he was cutting off his air supply by doing so. The confusion in his face began to be replaced by a clear sense of horror. He was trapped and he knew it.

Carrie reached up and pulled off her blonde wig, releasing her mane of auburn hair. It tumbled down to her shoulders. “Remember me now?”

Daniels shook his head vigorously, choking himself and spluttering as he did so. “N-no, I don’t remember you! What the hell are you doing? Are you fucking crazy?”

Carrie Carstens’ eyes hardened. “After everything you did to me, you’re going to sit there and tell me you don’t even remember me?”

“What are you talking about, ya crazy bitch? We just met a couple of hours ago!”

“I’m not talking about tonight. You raped me and destroyed my life ten years ago, and I’ve been looking for you ever since. I knew I’d find you eventually. And now that I have, I plan on making sure that you pay for what you did to me.”

“I never raped anybody,” the man shouted, panicked. “Ten years ago I was thirteen, for chrissakes! You’ve got the wrong guy, I never hurt anybody, just let me go and we’ll pretend this never happened, please just let me go…”

Carrie watched in smug satisfaction as the words tumbled out of the mouth of the man who had broken her. She let him go on and on, begging until he finally realized it would do no good. Of course he would deny his actions; he was a rapist, was it such a stretch to imagine he would be a liar, too?

By the time he finished, red-faced and panting, Carrie had begun readying the next phase of her vengeance. She lifted a circular saw from a table in the corner of the storage room and used four C-clamps to fasten it securely it to a complicated system of steel rods positioned directly above the modified dentist’s chair holding Burton Daniels. When she finished, the saw hung inches above his waist, suspended in the air and angled inward, the blade glittering in the soft light, razor-sharp and deadly.

He had been so busy begging to be released and claiming that she had the wrong man (Yeah, right, sure, did he really think she could forget his miserable face for one goddamned second?) that he didn’t seem to notice what she was doing until she had finished. Now he looked at the positioning of the electric power tool, at his own nakedness, at the thick acoustic insulation lining the walls of his prison, and his eyes bulged in mushrooming terror.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, even though by now it had to have been obvious.

Carrie said nothing, preferring to let him wallow in his fear like she had wallowed in hers for so long.

Then he screamed. Burton Daniels, investment banker trainee and one-time rapist, let loose a bellow that was something between a cry for help and a plea for mercy. He screamed loud and long, the leather strap around his neck preventing him from putting much body language into it, but still, Carrie thought, managing a pretty impressive effort, nevertheless.

Carrie let him do it. She wasn’t worried about anyone hearing and coming to investigate. For one thing, she had rented a storage unit in this location specifically for its isolation. For another, it was now three-thirty a.m. and she felt confident she was the only person awake within a three mile radius. Finally, Carrie had spent considerable time and effort, not to mention money, outfitting this little room with the highest-quality acoustic insulation she could get her hands on, and lots of it.

A cop could be standing right outside with his ear pressed to the door and he would never hear a thing. Carrie knew that for a fact. She had tested the effectiveness of her modifications by blaring a stereo at full volume—some rap shit—and standing on the other side of the door, listening hard. She had heard nothing, not so much as a single bass thump or Eminem whine.

So she didn’t bother trying to deter Burton Daniels from his fruitless attempt at attracting the attention of a potential rescuer. She well knew what it was like to scream until your throat was raw and you couldn’t catch your breath. That might be the only thing she had in common with Burton Daniels, now that she thought about it.

Eventually he recognized that all the yelling was getting him nowhere, or maybe he just exhausted himself. In either case, he abruptly stopped screaming and stared at Carrie, tears streaming down his formerly handsome face, now red and blotchy and ugly, his true nature showing through. “This is insane,” he said, his voice hoarse and scratchy. “I swear I don’t know you. I swear. Please.”

Carrie ignored his pathetic attempt at gaining her sympathy. Where had his sympathy been when she cried herself to sleep only to scream herself awake, night after night after agonizing night, for years and years on end?

She walked to an electrical outlet built into the side wall and plugged in the circular saw, then returned to her captive and pressed the red trigger on the handle. The saw buzzed to life. She forced the trigger open with the plastic lock—great idea, very handy—so her finger wouldn’t get tired. The saw whirred quietly, the sound drowned out by the renewed emphatic screaming of Burton Daniels. He may have been a rapist and a liar but he had one hell of a strong let of lungs.

Taking three steps and placing herself directly in front of her tormentor’s disbelieving eyes, Carrie Carstens began undressing, performing an erotic striptease for an audience of one. It was a small audience, but a captive one, she thought. Inches above Daniels’s waist, the electric saw hummed on smoothly, ready and willing to perform the task for which it was designed.

Carrie saw a terrible understanding dawn in the man’s eyes as she undulated in front of him, slowly unbuttoning her blouse and letting it fall to the floor. She had practiced endlessly at home in her tiny apartment until she was the rival of any exotic dancer in the city, hoping against hope she would someday be able to use her newfound talent on the one person for whom she had learned it. Tonight was the night.

She unsnapped her skintight jeans and slid the zipper down, pushing them over her hips. They fell down her legs as Burton Daniels squeezed his eyes closed with a ferocity that would have been comical under different circumstances, but Carrie was prepared for that.

Smiling widely now, eyes burning with a lust that had nothing to do with sex, Carrie moved to Burton Daniels and began kissing his naked belly, inches from the saw, repulsed by him but determined to force his arousal. The breeze generated by the blade blew her hair into the man’s face. And it worked. It worked. Burton Daniels began getting aroused.

Carrie continued until the last possible moment, licking and kissing, then deftly stepped away, grabbing her blouse off the floor and moving to the door of the storage unit, yanking up her jeans and zipping them as she went. She shrugged into her blouse as Burton Daniels continued to scream, now in agony as well as terror. Blood spurted in great arcs across the room in time with the beating of the man’s heart as the electric saw finally had something to slice.

She stood at the doorway drinking the scene in, determined not to miss a moment of the retribution she had waited so long to extract. Daniels’ screaming continued unabated, his shouts becoming more and more frantic and unintelligible, before eventually blacking out, whether from blood loss or simply from fear and shock Carrie did not know, nor did she care. Not long after he lost consciousness, Burton Daniels died from the blood loss and Carrie knew she was finally free.

Stepping quietly out the entrance to her little storage unit, Carrie pulled the door closed and triple-locked it, checking and then re-checking to be sure no one could get inside. When she was satisfied that her fortress was secure, she crossed the cool, damp parking lot to her waiting car and drove home, anxious to enjoy her first evening of truly nightmare-free rest in years.

She left the cleanup for tomorrow. Carrie Carstens was exhausted.

* * *

Again the nightmare came and when it did it was the same; it was always the same. The man entered her little-girl’s bedroom in the pitch-black stillness of the night and she pretended to be asleep, hoping against all odds and the man’s past history that he would go away; that he would for once just leave her alone and go away. But of course he didn’t. He never did.

He crossed the room to where she lay, her breathing slow and controlled in her desperate effort to convince him she was sleeping. He pulled the covers off of her and began fondling her, infecting her with his sickness once again, as he did nearly every night.

He smelled of alcohol and sweat and hopelessness and every time he abused her he swore it would be the last. She begged and pleaded to be left alone—“Daddy, how can you hurt me?”—but it was to no avail, as the twisted man continued to satisfy his twisted desires. It would never end. She awoke screaming and screaming and screaming.

* * *

Tonight it was “Circlez,” the dance club with the absurd little round tables surrounding the dance floor. Carrie checked her purse one last time to be sure she had her supply of roofies placed squarely on top of her other necessities for easy access. She smiled sweetly at the bouncer, paid her cover charge and entered the club.

Everyone watched her, and why wouldn’t they? Dressed tonight in a form-fitting blue mini-dress, Carrie knew she had already been successful in attracting the attention of every man watching, which of course meant every man. As she purchased her club soda and slinked to her customary spot in the back of the club, she could hear bits and snatches of conversation. Nearly everyone was discussing the rash of disappearances—young men all over the city were vanishing, never to be seen again.

Carrie wasn’t worried about that, though. She felt totally safe. She sipped her drink and watched the crowd, hoping against hope that she might catch a glimpse of the face which haunted her dreams; the man who had done all those horrible things to her. She knew she would eventually find him. She had a score to settle.

Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills

A few months after I started writing short fiction in earnest, my wife, who is an early reader of just about all of my work whether she wants to be or not, informed me that most of my stuff was just too damned dark. It didn’t surprise me; we’re a study in contrasts most of the time anyway—she’s an optimist and I’m… not. She looks on the bright side of things and I… don’t. She tries to see the good in even the worst people and I… well, you know. But I thought about it and realized she had a point. My fiction—especially my short fiction—does tend to be pretty bleak at times, and while I wouldn’t want it any other way, I took her words as sort of a challenge. Why couldn’t I write something a little more light-hearted while still remaining true to what I love—crime fiction? I gave it a shot and the result was one of my favorite characters—the eighty year old Boston PI, Brick Callahan. “Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills” first appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Mysterical-E and I’m proud to say was a 2010 Derringer Award Finalist for Best Novelette.

“Retire!” roared my Uncle Brick. “Why in the hell would I want to retire?” Heads turned and restaurant patrons swiveled in their seats to see where the disturbance was coming from. It occurred to me that perhaps broaching a sensitive subject like suggesting my uncle sell his detective agency right in the middle of lunch at a high-end joint like The Old Man and the Seafood may not have been the smartest idea I ever had.

The thing you have to understand about my Uncle Brick is, his volume control is directly related to his excitement level, and right now, his excitement level was pretty darned high, what with my bumbling retirement suggestion and all. Oops. My bad. Oh well, I thought, in for a penny and all that, I have no choice now but to press on.

“Listen, Uncle Brick,” I continued. “I’m not trying to push you out the door or anything, but don’t you think you’ve earned the opportunity to relax? You’re on the north side of eighty now, and you should be spending your days enjoying yourself; you know, doing things you want to do, rather than things you have to do.”

I silently congratulated myself on my smooth recovery when Brick surprised me again. “Listen, Mister Smart-Ass College Boy, what makes you think I’m not already doing what I want to do when I come to work every day?”

My uncle is nothing if not relentless. The man makes a bulldog look like the world’s wimpiest canine. Sure, I went to college; graduated, too, but that was over twenty years ago! I’m 42 years old, for crying out loud, but you would think from listening to Uncle Brick that I had just entered the workforce yesterday.

“And don’t think for a second that I don’t realize what you’re really saying here.” Uh-oh. My finely tuned senses were telling me—once again, too late—that I had unwittingly wandered into more dangerous territory. “What you’re trying to say,” my uncle continued, “is that I only have a few years left” (A few years? I was thinking more like a few weeks. After all, the guy was eighty, for crying out loud!), “if not a few weeks,” (Wow, this guy was good) “so I had better enjoy the precious little time I have left, am I right?” His eyes locked on to mine.

Brick isn’t just my uncle’s name, it is also the perfect description for him. His body is thick and muscular, even at the age of eighty, and his head is square like, well, like a brick, with steel-gray buzz-cut hair sprouting from the top of his head. Think Broderick Crawford in “Highway Patrol,” only tougher and scarier.

I might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (Hell, my ex-wife would tell you I don’t even belong in the drawer at all; she would say that butter knives could kick my sorry ass, sharpness-wise. That, however, is another story entirely), but I’m bright enough to know when it’s time to beat a hasty retreat, and I decided now was as good a time as any to raise the white flag with my uncle.

I lifted my hands, palms out, in front of my red face in the universal gesture that says, “Please stop schooling me in front of everyone, this is getting embarrassing.” My uncle swallowed the last of his lobster bisque with the smug look of a man who has just vanquished an unworthy foe without really even trying.

“Listen, Uncle Brick,” I said earnestly, trying to recover some tiny shred of dignity. “I’m worried about you; that’s all. Now that my dad’s dead and you’ve had to take over the agency all by yourself, it just seems like it might be too much. Hell, it would be a challenge for a younger man, never mind someone with as much, uh, life experience as you have.” I was in full retreat and beyond congratulating myself for anything by now, but I hoped that he might at least try to see my point.

All the other restaurant-goers had finally stopped staring and turned their attention back to their own meals. I hoped the conversation hadn’t looked as one-sided to them as it had felt to me, but I doubted it.

My uncle dabbed gently at the side of his mouth with a napkin and said, “I know you’re worried. Believe me, I’m well aware how much effort goes into running a detective agency, I’ve been doing it for darn near a half-century now. And since your dad got killed, it really has been a lot of work. But I’ll share a little secret with you: showing up at that office every day is what keeps me going. When you get to be my age, you need a pretty compelling reason to continue getting out of bed in the morning, and Callahan Investigations is mine.”

I sat back in my chair, amazed. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t seen my uncle in years, decades even, but the little speech he had just finished reflected a level of, shall we say, sensitivity that I wasn’t aware this rough, tough, bigger-than-life character was capable of. And I had to concede, if only to myself, that he did have a point. He certainly had a lot more experience at being a private detective than I did.

But I hadn’t come all the way back east just to provide free entertainment to a restaurant full of people. I had a proposition for Uncle Brick and I was damned well going to propose it. The entertainment thing was just a little bonus, I supposed.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, hoping what I was about to say didn’t set off another round of verbal butt-kicking. “You know I got divorced from Allison last year, and there’s not really anything keeping me in L.A. anymore, so I was thinking…”

Brick was looking at me with a funny little half-grin on his curiously expressive face, and he interrupted me, shaking his head and chuckling. “Sometimes you remind me so much of your old man it’s downright scary. So tell me, what were you thinking, junior?”

I took a deep breath and jumped into the pool with both feet. I figured the water was as warm as it was going to get. “I want to move here permanently and come to work with you. If you aren’t interested in retirement, then I’d like to take my dad’s place at the agency.” There, I had said it. I sat back and waited for Brick to return fire.

The waitress brought our check and my uncle sat perfectly still, saying nothing until I had picked it up. “You want to join me at the agency? What the hell do I need with a middle-aged accountant who has no experience in detective work? Or in any form of law enforcement, for that matter?”

I knew coming into this lunch meeting I would be asked that very question. I had given it a lot of thought and I still had no answer ready. In point of fact, I knew he was right. Why should he let me work for him? Why did I even want to? Why was he controlling the conversation when I was the one with the proposition? And how much should I leave for a tip, since he obviously wasn’t about to do it?

I had told myself on the airplane that I needed to keep an eye on the old guy so he didn’t get hurt. With my dad gone there was no one left to watch out for him. I could see now, though, that that was a load of bull. My uncle might be eighty years old, but he hadn’t lost a step, either physically or mentally. I should just pack my stuff and go home; Brick didn’t need me; that much was clear.

I looked up and he was staring at me, patiently waiting for an answer to his question. I squirmed in my chair, more uncomfortable than I wanted to admit. “I don’t honestly know, Uncle Brick. I had convinced myself that you needed me, but I think it just might be the opposite. I’ve been spinning my wheels since the divorce and I need to make a new start. I’d like to make it with you.”

He smiled. His next question caught me off guard. I was starting to get used to it. “You planning on picking up the check whenever we eat out?”

“I think I can handle that,” I said.

He reached across the table and shook my hand with one big, beefy paw. “Then you’re hired. For your first assignment, make sure you don’t stiff this cute little gal on the tip. I’d like to be able to eat here again sometime.”

Just like that, I was a private eye. Unlicensed, of course, but my uncle said we could take care of that some time in the future. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, given his age, but I didn’t worry too much about it, either.

* * *

I sat with my feet planted on my desk, leaning back in my chair and munching a tuna salad sandwich. It was becoming abundantly clear that when my uncle had said he was planning on eating at a classy place like The Old Man and the Seafood again, he didn’t mean in this lifetime.

It had been three days since I had been hired, and the closest we had gotten to a real meal in a sit-down restaurant was when we took a shortcut through the kitchen of some fancy-schmancy Italian joint on the way to Beekman’s Deli. I thought the manager might be a little perturbed to see us trooping through his kitchen, but he just waved hello to Brick as we passed on by. Everyone in the city seemed to know my uncle, at least by sight.

I was beginning to wonder why all private detectives didn’t weigh 350 pounds. All we did was eat. In my three days, not one single, solitary customer had entered the office, unless you counted the guy who dropped off our new telephone book or the scruffy-looking character who only came in because he was searching for “Layla,” a dubious-looking lady of indeterminate age who spent her days hanging around on the streetcorner by the entrance to Callahan Investigations but at that moment was on her lunch break.

When I mentioned my boredom to my uncle, he just smiled. “That’s the way it works, junior,” he said. “When it rains it pours, and when it snows it blows.” He must have seen the look of bewilderment on my face, because he took pity on me and told me, “Take my word for it, human nature being what it is, we’ll get business eventually. You can always count on people doing stuff to each other that requires our skills. Or at least my skills. In the meantime, how’s your crossword puzzle coming?”

It was Sudoku, but I didn’t bother correcting my uncle, and as it turned out I didn’t have time to answer his question anyway, because no sooner had he stopped talking than a beautiful, shapely brunette walked into Callahan Investigations. She was tall and slim, anywhere from late-twenties to early-forties—It was impossible to narrow it down any more than that—decked out in a form-fitting, knee-length maroon summer dress, and she walked in like she owned the building, which, for all I knew, maybe she did.

Also, she was crying. Tears ran down her face in great rivulets, twin streaks of dark eyeliner making her look like the worlds saddest but sexiest circus clown.

The woman’s grief didn’t stop her from sizing up the employment hierarchy, though. She took one look at me, still frozen in place with my feet on my desk, mouth half-open from surprise, and immediately turned to address Brick. My uncle, of course, was already on his feet, pulling out a chair and sweeping our visitor into it.

“I need to speak with Mr. Callahan,” she sniffled, swiping at her eyes with a tissue.

“Well then, you’ve come to the right place,” answered Uncle Brick. “This place is positively dripping with Callahans. In fact, until you entered, there was no one in here besides Callahans.”

She paused for just a beat, then continued, slowly getting her sobbing under control. “It’s my husband,” she said.

Brick nodded sympathetically. “It always is.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. He’s dead and I’m certain he was murdered.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Brick said, “but what makes you think he was murdered?”

“Because he knew he was in danger. He is…” the woman paused and sobbed again, dabbing at her dazzling eyes with a tissue and only serving to smear more eyeliner around them. “I’m sorry, he was an accountant, and he told me he had stumbled on to something he wasn’t supposed to see. I believe it was that something that got him killed.”

“You should go to the police, Ms…”

“Billingsley,” she answered. “Margaret Billingsley. Call me Maggie, everyone does.”

Brick handed Maggie Billingsley a glass of water he had hurriedly drawn while she was introducing herself. She accepted it gratefully and continued, “I’m sorry, I’m not being clear. I’ve talked to the police, but they are of the opinion Robert’s death was accidental. I don’t have any proof that he was even in any danger, all I have is what he told me, and the police are completely disregarding that. This is why I need to speak with Mr. Callahan.”

Brick smiled. “Like I said, you already are speaking to Mr. Callahan. Two Mr. Callahans, in fact.”

She shook her head. “No, I need to talk with the other Mr. Callahan. I believe his name was Dennis.”

My uncle and I shared a look. “I’m sorry, but Dennis Callahan is no longer with us,” Brick told her.”

“Well, what agency does he work for now? Robert told me he had given proof of his situation to Dennis Callahan of Callahan Investigations, and that if anything happened to him, I should go see Mr. Callahan immediately.”

My uncle knelt in front of the grieving woman and gently took her hand. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. Dennis Callahan is dead, Ms. Billingsley.”

The woman stared at Brick as comprehension dawned in her eyes. “Oh, my,” she said. “What do I do now?”

* * *

“I don’t get it,” I remarked. “Wouldn’t he have said something to you?” It was two hours since we had been visited by Maggie Billingsley. Brick and I had escorted the beautiful widow to her car after promising to find whatever it was her husband had entrusted to my father’s care.

“Not necessarily,” Brick answered. “He may not have had a chance to. I was out of town working on another case at the time. Then he went and got himself shot, and that was that.”

The only sound was a barely audible whoosh…whoosh…whoosh as the wood-tone ceiling fan gently circulated the air in the stuffy office. Brick was lost in his thoughts and I in mine.

“Well, where would he have hidden it?” I asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? We don’t even know what we’re looking for. A photograph or tape-recording would seem to be the most likely possibilities, but who can say for sure?”

My uncle chewed thoughtfully on the end of a pencil and I made a mental note to buy my own pencils. “It seems to me that we need to start by digging through Denny’s things and seeing what turns up.” He looked at me through eyes narrowed with concern. “Do you think you can handle that, son?”

I was standing even before he had finished the question. “Let’s go,” I said.

* * *

My father and I were not particularly close—how could we be when I had lived three thousand miles away for the past ten years?—but I had been in town for two weeks now and I still hadn’t gotten around to going through his things. This would be the perfect opportunity, though. Brick and I were in search of a clue and I knew that was something Dad would have appreciated were he still residing on the north side of the grass.

After Dad had been killed my uncle moved all his belongings to a storage unit, one of those aluminum boxy-looking shed things that you rent by the month. He knew I would eventually get around to sorting through all the stuff and figured leasing one of those places would be cheaper than continuing to pay the rent on Dad’s empty apartment. Had he known I was going to come to Boston to stay I could have moved right into Dad’s old place, but I’m glad he didn’t. I think there would have been too many ghosts there for me to be comfortable anyway.

We rolled up to the storage unit in Brick’s silver Mercedes. Something had been eating at me the whole ride over and I decided now was as good a time as any to voice my concern. “Uh, what if Dad hid whatever it is we’re looking for in his old apartment and it’s still there?”

It sounded like a perfectly reasonable question to me, intelligent even, but Brick seemed to find it the funniest thing he had heard all day. “Well, sonny,” he told me, trying but failing to keep the laughter out of his voice, “that’s why they invented breaking and entering.”

It was a warm day and it felt brutally hot with the sun beating down on that big metal storage unit. The unrelenting sun quickly turned it into a giant oven. After two hours we had worked our way through roughly half of my dad’s belongings and all we had to show for it were two empty bottles of Gatorade and a purple bruise on my forehead that looked remarkably like Lake Huron. The bruise I earned when I stood up too quickly and lost a brief but violent conflict with a metal support beam on the inside of what I was beginning to think of as an oversized coffin.

“Here’s a stupid thought. Maybe we’re looking for something Dad left on his computer.”

“Nah,” Brick answered with a dismissive wave. “He wouldn’t have put anything sensitive on a computer. It’s too easy to hack into the damn things. Hell, we’ve got thirteen year-old kids breaking into DOD computers just for the fun of it, whole new classes of criminals using the internet to steal money and identities. No, Denny was too smart to leave anything important enough to kill for on his computer.”

For another hour we kept at it, as the sun moved around to the front of the storage building, abandoning any pretense of subtlety and attacking us head-on. We riffled through the pages of books, opened letters and looked in envelopes, dug through trouser pockets. Still nothing. I found an MP3 player and decided to keep it. At least the day wasn’t a total loss. I figured my dad wouldn’t mind; the only music he was listening to these days was being played by angels on harps.

“Hey, junior.” My uncle startled me out of my reverie and I jumped. I glanced over and found him staring at me with the look of a teacher trying to get through to his dimmest, most hopeless student. “What did you just put in your pocket?”

“It’s an MP3 player,” I told him, happy I could finally be the expert on something. “You can play music on it.”

“You can play music on it,” he mimicked me in a falsetto voice. I hated it when he did that. He knew I hated it, of course, which was why he did it. “Do you ever recall your father listening to music? Ever?”

I shook my head. “Well, no,” I said, “but then again I’ve been gone for a while.”

“I realize I’m the old fart here,” he said, “but isn’t an MP3 player nothing more than a portable computer hard drive?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I realize how dumb it makes me look that I still didn’t see what he was driving at, but in my defense, it was hot and I was tired.

“And what could you do with a portable hard drive that looks like an MP3 player?” my uncle asked, in a tone filled with false patience.

The other shoe finally dropped. “You can put sensitive information on it and keep it with you, and no one would be the wiser,” I answered, happy that I had caught on. Better late than never, after all.

Uncle Brick straightened up, looking a lot livelier than I felt. “I think we’re done here for today,” he told me, and moved straight to his Mercedes, where he sat in air-conditioned comfort while I tossed all my dad’s stuff back into the giant oven and locked it up.

When I finally finished, dropping into the blessedly cool car and complaining about his untimely retreat, he simply said, “eighty,” pointing to himself, and “forty-two,” pointing to me. I shut my mouth and let him drive us back to the office.

* * *

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Brick and I were knocking back a couple of beers and looking at his twenty-one inch, flat screen computer monitor. For an eighty year old, self-proclaimed “fossil,” my uncle sure had some fancy equipment in the office. Right now, that fancy equipment was showing us the information my dad had been holding for Robert Billingsley, presumably while he tried to decide how to handle the situation the man had gotten himself into.

Glowing on the monitor were two sets of financial records for the accounting firm of Higgins and Dawes, Billingsley’s employer. Or at least they had been his employer, until poor Mr. Billingsley found himself staring up at the underside of a cement truck. One set of records, no doubt the one H&D kept available for public consumption, showed a healthy, thriving business. The other set, which was the accurate one and the discovery of which had gotten Billingsley killed, revealed a company teetering on the verge of utter financial devastation thanks to the looting of the firm, presumably by either Mr. Higgins or Mr. Dawes.

Clearly Dad hadn’t realized how desperate the looter would be when he realized his treachery had been discovered; otherwise he would have taken more immediate action. Then, of course, he had received a lead shower supplied by one or more unknown assailants, and just like that, the financial shenanigans of Higgins or Dawes became the least of his concerns.

Uncle Brick theorized that the guilty party or parties at H&D had found out Billingsley was on to them. Perhaps the accountant had confronted them himself, not realizing the extent of the danger he was in. They weren’t aware that Billingsley had managed to smuggle out proof, so they killed him. Shortly after that, Dad was dead himself. If Maggie Billingsley hadn’t come to us with her suspicions, or should I say her certainty, that foul play was involved in the death of her husband, no one would ever have been the wiser.

The obvious question now, so obvious in fact that even I could see it, was how should we proceed?

* * *

The following morning, bright and early, Brick and I found ourselves headed uptown to the accounting firm of Higgins and Dawes, where Robert Billingsley had labored for the past seven years. We were dressed in suits and ties, and I couldn’t help appreciating the irony of the fact that had I quit accounting to become a private investigator and my first case was taking me to—where else?—an accounting firm. I could almost hear Allison snickering from three thousand miles away.

“Shouldn’t we have some sort of plan?” I asked Brick as we walked along the busy sidewalks of Boston’s financial district. All around us, thousands of people hurried to their places of employment, preparing to move billions of dollars of mostly electronic money around the world, making decisions that would directly affect the lives of thousands or maybe even millions of people.

“We do have a plan.”

“Really. And what would the plan be, exactly?”

“We ask Mr. Dawes if he killed Robert Billingsley because Billingsley discovered Dawes has been embezzling money from his own company.”

“Small talk doesn’t work for you, does it?”

My uncle laughed and I took that as a sign I should go ahead and ask my next question, since he had been so forthcoming in sharing the intricacies of the plan and all. “I understand the thief had to have been one of the top guys, since the embezzlement is so far-reaching and complete, but what makes you so sure it’s Dawes and not Higgins? Or maybe they’re in on it together.”

Uncle Brick looked sideways at me, not even slowing his pace as he answered. “George Higgins has been dead for over ten years, which in my long experience makes for one damned near unshakeable alibi.”

“Ah.” I nodded sagely. “I’m going to stop asking questions now. If you don’t mind, maybe you should lead the interrogation when we arrive at Dawes’s office.”

“If you insist,” my uncle agreed, and it’s lucky he did, because I was so winded from the pace he was setting that it was going to be at least thirty minutes after our arrival before I would be able to speak without panting like a lovesick hound dog anyway.

We turned into the massive building housing the offices of Higgins and Dawes. It was constructed of concrete, glass and steel and like most of the construction in this four hundred year old city, reached for the sky to make the most out of the cramped land mass Boston was built on. I sometimes thought it would be a miracle if the whole city didn’t one day just sink into the ocean from the weight of all the buildings and people. I supposed if New York was still above water, Boston would probably be okay for a while yet.

The offices we were looking for were located on the ninth floor, a fact Brick seemed to know without even looking at the directory located in the lobby. He strode to the bank of elevators, me dutifully following behind and trying to catch my breath, and we stepped into the first available car.

Walking into the reception area of Higgins and Dawes was like stepping into the very definition of opulence. Plush, dark green carpeting complemented the wood tones in the waiting area, with thick leather easy chairs encircling the large, airy room. Lighting was provided by a huge crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The whole thing felt a little like a set from the old TV series, “The Love Boat.” I half expected Captain Steubing or perhaps Julie to walk around the corner at any moment.

I whispered to Brick, “Maybe all the money went to pay for that big light.”

He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher and strolled to the receptionist’s desk. I worked for a pretty high-powered firm when I was in L.A. and I don’t think even the founding partners had desks as big as the one the tiny, platinum-blonde receptionist was sitting behind. The whole scene created a slightly unreal effect, like I was looking at a living, breathing Dali painting or something.

My uncle was at his most courtly as he approached the desk and told the young woman, “Please tell Mr. Dawes that some friends from Callahan Investigations are here to see him.”

She picked up the phone and passed the message as requested, presumably to Harold Dawes, then seemed to be doing a lot of listening. Her expression became more and more sour as she got an earful from the person on the other end of the line. The young woman looked up and before she could say anything, Brick said, “To answer your next question, no, we do not have an appointment, but I’m certain he will want to make time in his busy schedule for us. Just advise him that we’re from Callahan Investigations and we’re here regarding Robert Billingsley and a certain item he left in our care prior to his untimely demise.”

After passing that portion of the message, Blondie listened a little longer and then said, “There are two of them.” I assumed this was meant for Dawes’ ears, since Brick and I already knew there were two of us.

It was clear the petite blonde receptionist had had more than enough of Brick and me by now, but after another minute or so, she hung up, smiled gamely at us, and said, “Mr. Dawes will see you now.”

As we followed her down the hall to Dawes’ inner sanctum, two thoughts struck me. First, I could see that not all of Blondie’s attributes involved answering the telephone and directing customer traffic—she was dressed to impress and had the body to do it. Second, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of customer traffic to direct besides the two of us, and we hadn’t even had an appointment.

We were led into a spacious, elegantly appointed office that made the waiting area we had just left look positively shabby. Seated behind a shiny mahogany desk the approximate size of the old Boston Garden was a portly man who appeared to be in his mid-sixties, complete with white hair and three-piece suit. A gold watch-chain hung from the man’s vest pocket. He looked like the guy from the old “Monopoly” board game. I wondered what he could have been doing that was so important he resisted seeing us, since there didn’t appear to be a single item on the desk in front of him.

The man rose at our entrance and extended his hand to my uncle and then to me. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m Harold Dawes. Please accept my condolences on the tragic loss of Dennis Callahan. Now, how can I help you today?”

Blondie exited the room, pulling the door closed behind her. It seemed more a matter of form than necessity, since as near as I could tell, there was not a soul in the entire office suite besides the four of us.

Brick got right to the point. “I think your man Billingsley was a bit more creative than you may have given him credit for. When your people killed him they weren’t able to locate the evidence he had taken of your creative bookkeeping, or perhaps they didn’t realize he had given it to my brother for safekeeping.”

Dawes sat for a long moment. He appeared to be taken aback by my uncle’s direct approach. Almost as if to himself he muttered, “Oh, they realized it all right.”

Finally he clasped his hands together and looked up at my uncle. “We’re going to do what we have to do; I believe your brother found that out already. And what makes you think we’re done looking?”

He didn’t even attempt to deny that he was involved in killing my father! To say I was shocked at the man’s tacit admittance of guilt not just in Billingsley’s murder but in my father’s as well would be an understatement, but Brick didn’t seem fazed in the least. He smiled at Harold Dawes. “Why don’t I save us both a lot of time and energy, and put my cards on the table?”

Dawes looked back impassively. “Yes, why don’t you?”

“My concern,” Brick told him, “is for the well-being of the young lady who hired us. Please believe me when I tell you Mrs. Billingsley has no idea where the evidence that got her husband killed is or even what it is. I would like to propose the following: You leave Mrs. Billingsley alone to get on with what’s left of her life, and we will not pursue your firm regarding the dual books you have employed for the past several years.”

Dawes stared at Brick for a long moment. “Who else knows about this evidence, Mr. Callahan?”

My uncle looked incredulously at the portly man, and then burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “If I say no one, are you planning on murdering my nephew and me right here in your office?”

“Since we’re being so candid with one another, I haven’t decided what to do about you yet,” the man replied. He was starting to look more and more menacing to me, but what did I know, it was my first week on the job.

Uncle Brick finally stopped laughing, wiping tears from his eyes and shaking a little as he tried to suppress another fit of chuckles. I could see the fact that Brick was refusing to take Harold Dawes seriously was really starting to get under the man’s skin. Given what we had just learned about him, I wasn’t convinced this was the best approach, but it was Brick’s show; he was the one with the P.I. license and all the experience. I just thought it would be nice if I could get a little experience, too, before I got killed.

At last Brick was able to speak. “You should know, Mr. Dawes, that if something, oh, shall we say, untoward happens to either my nephew or me, the evidence of your ongoing financial gymnastics will be forwarded immediately to the Boston Police Department. This evidence is in the hands of someone I trust implicitly, and no, it’s not anyone you will be able to guess. So I strongly suggest you take our offer. Leave Mrs. Billingsley alone, and Callahan Investigations will leave you alone.”

Dawes’s eyes were smoldering as Brick rose suddenly and marched out of the office. Since I had nothing to say which could add to his little performance, and sitting alone in a room with the man who had murdered my father was more than a little awkward, I thought it might be a good time to take my leave, too.

We walked out of the skyscraper and into the blazing Boston sunshine. Once again I had trouble keeping up with my uncle, and it was beginning to get a little embarrassing. I mean, he was almost twice my age! I scrambled to his side and said, “You didn’t give that hard drive to anyone for safekeeping, did you?”

“Hell, no,” he replied. “I don’t know anyone I would want to involve in this mess…”

“Besides me,” I reminded him.

“Well, yes,” he said, “but you don’t count, because you asked in.”

“True enough. And this is a lot more interesting than helping rich clients hide money from the IRS.”

“Less dangerous, too,” Brick added.

“Did you think it was a little strange,” I asked him, “that the office was as empty as a graveyard?”

Brick stopped in his tracks and looked at me with, I thought, grudging admiration. Or maybe the sun was in his eyes, I’m not really sure. “I’m impressed,” he said. “That’s an actual observation of a detail, one that could have a bearing on this case. Very well done.”

I gave my best Aw Shucks grin and said, “You had already noticed that, hadn’t you?”

“Sure,” he answered. “But don’t forget, I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. Plus, I have a slight advantage. I know a little more about the accounting firm of Higgins and Dawes than you do.”

“Care to share?”

“Certainly, my boy. But let’s wait until we get back to the office, shall we? You almost stepped off the curb right in front of a cab just now. I’m planning on seeing your dad again some day at that big detective agency in the sky, and he won’t have many good things to say to me if I let you get squashed wandering around the streets of Boston.”

* * *

Since it wasn’t even lunch time yet, we decided on iced tea instead of beer to cool off with after our cross-town adventure. “So tell me,” I said, wiping the sweat out of my eyes and loosening my tie, “why was that office so quiet this morning?”

Brick took a big swig of his tea and sighed in satisfaction. He sized me up and said, “Have you ever heard of Jimmy Kilpatrick?”

“Of course,” I told him. “I haven’t been gone that long. Kilpatrick runs maybe the most ruthless gang in the entire city since Whitey Bulger skipped town. The cops haven’t put him away yet?”

“No,” my uncle told me, “and there’s a reason for that. ‘Jimmy Kills’ is not just ruthless, he’s smart and ruthless, and that makes him extremely dangerous. But here’s the point: The reason the offices of Higgins and Dawes were so quiet this morning is because the agency has only one major client. Would you care to guess who that is?”

“Jimmy Kilpatrick,” I said as a finger of icy dread worked its way into my gut. “Oh my God, Dad was killed by Jimmy Kilpatrick?”

“Not exactly,” my uncle said. “You’re on the right track, but slow down a little. Harold Dawes has been doing creative bookkeeping for the last several years, skimming money from a firm whose only major client is one of the biggest crime lords on the eastern seaboard. Essentially, Dawes has been stealing from…”

“Jimmy Kilpatrick,” I finished, once again feeling stupid that it took me so long to tumble to something Brick had figured out hours ago, maybe days ago. “So Dawes killed not just Billingsley, but also Dad, just to cover his tracks with Kilpatrick?”

“Exactly.”

“But, but,” I sputtered, sloshing iced tea over the rim of my glass and suddenly wishing I had stayed in L.A. So what if Allison had gotten just about everything we had built together in the divorce agreement, at least the weather was good. At least out there I didn’t have to face the ugly side of life every day when I went to work, like my father and uncle did.

I tried to get myself under control and speak calmly. “Uncle Brick, you told Dawes we’d leave him alone, but that doesn’t work for me and it shouldn’t for you, either. He has to pay for what he did to my father, to your own brother!”

“Slow down, sonny. He’s going to pay, don’t you worry about that.”

“But you told him we wouldn’t pursue him.”

“That’s exactly right, and the reason I said that is because our first obligation is to our client. You remember our client? I assume you do, since you were staring so hard at her in the office I was beginning to think you were going to propose to her on the spot.”

I felt my face redden. Sure, I had stared at her, but I didn’t think I had been that obvious. And besides, what was I supposed to do? She was beautiful, sexy and vulnerable. And I’ve been divorced for, heck, months now.

My uncle let me squirm for a moment and then took pity on me. “Ah, so you do remember her. Well, junior, she’s the only good guy besides us involved in this thing who is still alive. As much as I want to get Harold Dawes, we have to be smart, if only to protect Mrs. Billingsley. If Dawes felt too threatened, he wouldn’t hesitate to take her out, then follow up with us, just to be thorough.”

“Okay,” I agreed grudgingly. “Where do we go from here?”

“We call Mrs. Billingsley and set up a meeting.”

Now that I had heard the plan, I couldn’t help agreeing it was a good one. I didn’t quite follow where Brick was going, but I thought seeing Maggie Billingsley again was definitely a step in the right direction.

* * *

This time, when our client walked through the door and into the offices of Callahan Investigations, I was ready for her, so there was no repeat of the mouth half-open, feet stuck on the desk foolishness she caught me with on her first visit. And I only ogled a moment. I’m sure she didn’t even notice.

For today’s meeting, Maggie Billingsley was dressed in a pair of white jeans and matching white sweater. I wondered about the wisdom of wearing a sweater in the summer in Boston, then decided the last thing the woman needed was fashion advice from a guy who dresses out of the Lieutenant Columbo Collection. She looked like an angel, and that was all that mattered, at least as far as I was concerned.

I was determined not to let Uncle Brick get the jump on me this time, so as soon as I saw the office door swinging open, I was on my feet, sliding a chair around for her to sit in. She swept in, sat gratefully, and faced Brick’s desk. “My,” she said, “you work fast. I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“There was no reason to waste time,” Brick answered. “You were right about your husband getting killed because of things he discovered. I want to assure you that you are in no danger and that the persons responsible for Robert’s death will be punished. It might not happen as quickly as we would like, but it will happen.”

“Was it someone where he worked? Was Robert killed by a coworker? How could someone do that?”

Brick, as he had the last time Maggie Billingsley had visited the office, once again knelt before her and gently took her hand. I wished it were me, but since I had no idea what my uncle was going to say to reassure her, decided it was best to sit this one out. “Please believe me when I tell you it is in your best interest not to know any more than you presently do. As I said, you are completely safe, but if I were to tell you everything you want to know, it is entirely possible you could be in as much danger as Robert was, and I think it’s safe to say he wouldn’t want that.”

Sitting back on his heels, my uncle smiled warmly at Mrs. Billingsley and continued. “The time will come when we can share everything with you, and when that day comes, rest assured that my nephew and I will call you and set up an appointment at your earliest possible convenience to fill you in. Until then, try to put the circumstances of Robert’s death behind you, if you can, and know that he died loving you and wanting to protect you.”

Once again I was stunned at the sensitivity my uncle was capable of expressing when he chose to. Maggie Billingsley thanked us—okay, mostly she thanked my uncle—then rose and glided out of the office.

“All right,” I said to Brick. “We’ve taken care of the Maggie problem. She seemed satisfied that we will bring her husband’s killer to justice. So…” I waited for him to start explaining the plan, but no explanation was forthcoming, so I soldiered on. “So, how are we going to punish Robert Billingsley’s killer, and more importantly, to me at least, how are we going to punish Dad’s?”

“We’re going to pay a little visit to Jimmy Kills.”

* * *

To say that Jimmy Kilpatrick lived in a palatial estate would do the place a grave injustice. His home was located in the Wellesley Hills, a tony suburb west of Boston where even the maids and housekeepers seem to drive Beemers and Audis. The only difference is that the working folks’ luxury sedans are two or three years old, rather than brand new.

Jimmy Kills’ house was nestled among a grove of birch trees, set at the back of a lot roughly the size of the town I grew up in. To reach it, we had to wind our way up a driveway that seemed to be about three miles long.

We did this, of course, only after we answered a series of questions at the base of the driveway asked by some goon talking to us through a loudspeaker hookup that reminded me of the old contraptions you used to have to hang on your car’s window at the drive-in so you could hear the movie.

The goon, whose voice sounded like a tinny version of Andy Kaufman playing Latka Gravas on the old show, “Taxi,” was reluctant to buzz us in, but eventually did so after being threatened by Brick. My uncle told the poor dolt that Jimmy Kills would eat the guy’s heart for breakfast the next day if Jimmy found out we were turned away, after he heard what we had to say.

That seemed to do the trick, because the next thing I knew, the massive cast-iron gate was swinging open. We swept past it in Brick’s Mercedes and I turned to watch the gate clang shut behind us. “Uh, what makes you so sure Jimmy Kills won’t eat our hearts for breakfast?” I nervously asked my uncle.

“Nothing, really. Just a clean conscience and a sunny disposition,” he answered. “Plus, it’s closer to dinner time than breakfast.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “So there’s no pressure then.” I knew we were in trouble when my uncle was starting to make sense.

We finally arrived at Kilpatrick’s house after a long drive through a heavily wooded area. We burst out of the primeval forest onto what looked like the eighteenth fairway at Augusta National. I mean, Jimmy Kills’ place was immaculate. The lawn was emerald-green, and the walkway leading from Jimmy’s cobblestone driveway up to the front door of his southern-style mansion was swept so clean you could eat off of it. I didn’t see any groundskeepers, but I had no trouble picturing them cutting the grass in three-piece suits and spit-shined wingtips.

Brick parked his car at the top of the circular driveway and as we approached the front door, it swung open and a butler wearing a shoulder holster with a weapon conspicuously displayed ushered us in. I wondered briefly how many guns had been trained on us as we had walked from the car to the house before deciding I didn’t really want to know.

I’m not sure what I expected Jimmy Kilpatrick to look like, but the man who strode across the living room and into the foyer to greet us looked more like a retired professional athlete—maybe a pro golfer or tennis player—than a cold-blooded mob kingpin. He was dressed in a crisp blue golf shirt and tan slacks, his steel-gray hair swept back from a tanned forehead.

My uncle’s real name, the name his parents hung on him when he was born, is Brian Richard Callahan. He absolutely hated the name Brian, for reasons which mystify me but are very real to him, so from a very young age, he started going by B. Richard Callahan. That moniker got reduced to B. Rick, and from there it was only a matter of time before people started calling him Brick. The name fits him like the glove should have fit O.J., and Brick is the only thing I’ve ever heard him called. Until today.

Jimmy Kilpatrick grabbed Brick’s hand and shook it enthusiastically, telling him, “Brian, I was so sorry to hear about your brother.”

I took half a step back, ready for a classic Brick Callahan explosion. It’s not an exaggeration to say that nobody calls my uncle Brian. I’m sure that when he gets to the pearly gates, St. Peter will contemplate calling him Brian, then decide the hell with it and follow the path of least resistance and use Brick, like everybody else.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when my uncle squared up his shoulders and simply accepted the words of sympathy from Jimmy Kilpatrick. Unlike when we met Harold Dawes, Kilpatrick’s words seemed sincere and well-intentioned.

Jimmy Kills continued, “Obviously, your agency and my organization are not always on the same side of the fence, legally speaking, but I had the pleasure of dealing with Dennis Callahan on more than one occasion, and I always found him to be a gentleman of honor and integrity. Even though I didn’t often see eye to eye with him, I respected him and I felt he respected me as well. His passing is truly a tragedy.”

Kilpatrick then led us into a small sitting room, where three settings of tea and coffee sat waiting on a sterling silver serving tray, steam curling into the air out of the delicate porcelain cups. He indicated we should sit, and played the perfect host, preparing our drinks before sitting himself.

Finally Kilpatrick sat and took a sip of his tea. “My man who operates the front gate is not easy to intimidate. Please accept my congratulations on browbeating him, although you should know I almost never eat heart for breakfast. For dinner, sometimes, but never breakfast.”

My uncle laughed like we were sharing jokes with David Letterman. I thought, and not for the first time, that Brick Callahan was either the bravest or most foolhardy man I had ever met. He said, “I’m sorry for intruding on your day, Mr. Kilpatrick, especially at home, but when you see what I have to show you, you will be glad you agreed to see us.”

“And what do you have to show me?”

Brick reached into his breast pocket, handing the bogus MP3 player to Jimmy Kilpatrick. “If you would connect that to your computer, Mr. Kilpatrick, you will see that one of your employees has been a very bad boy.”

Jimmy Kills reached under the table on which the tea and coffee was set, pulling out a laptop computer. While we waited for it to boot up, the mobster and my uncle traded small talk about various members of the community, both on the law enforcement and criminal side of the fence, that they both knew. They had a surprisingly large number of people in common.

When the computer was ready, Kilpatrick connected the seemingly innocent music player to a USB port. A few seconds later, he was studying the data on the screen like a Hollywood actor learning his lines. Gradually his face hardened as what he was reading began to dawn on him.

He reached under the table again, pulling out a calculator. My uncle said, “I can save you the trouble. I’m sure you’ll want to double-check my numbers, but when you do you’ll discover that Mr. Dawes has skimmed almost two million dollars off your account over the past several years.”

The mobster sat in silent contemplation. All of a sudden he looked a lot less like a retired golfer and a lot more like a ruthless crime figure. Finally he spoke, asking, “How did you get this and why did you bring it here?”

My uncle answered, “There was an accountant working for Dawes by the name of Robert Billingsley who discovered this double-bookkeeping quite by accident. When he confronted Harold Dawes he was murdered for his trouble, but not before giving this evidence to my brother for safe keeping. Dawes found out and killed Dennis too, but was unable to locate the hard drive.

“My nephew and I are looking for a little justice, both for Mr. Billingsley’s wife Maggie, who brought the entire affair to our attention, and for my brother. If we involve the police, I fear Mrs. Billingsley will become a target—the wheels of justice move so slowly sometimes, and I think Dawes would take her out just for spite. Also, the only direct evidence we have was his admission of guilt to us and that would simply be our word against his.”

Jimmy Kills absorbed this information as an uncomfortable silence descended over the room. My coffee was getting cold and I could feel what I had drunk sitting in my stomach like acid. At last he composed himself and rose, extending a hand to Brick and then to me. “I would like to thank you for bringing this to my attention,” he said. “You can rest assured justice will be served. Again, please accept my condolences on the passing of Dennis Callahan.”

As he finished speaking, the sitting room door swung smoothly open, and the butler with the sidearm escorted us through the house and out to Brick’s car. How he knew the exact moment to enter I have no idea. He stood watching us as we drove out the way we had come in. As we reentered the thickly forested area between the house and the street, I turned around in my seat and saw Jeeves standing stock-still, staring impassively into the distance until we were out of sight.

I found myself shaking a little. Brick looked like he was out for a leisurely drive.

* * *

It must have been a week or so later when we heard the news we had been waiting for. Brick and I were hanging around in the offices of Callahan Investigations. He was explaining to me the basics of tailing a subject without being discovered for probably the tenth time because I was having a little trouble mastering it. I know, it sounds simple, I used to think so, too, but you try following someone, keeping them in sight at all times while remaining unseen yourself. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Anyway, while we were talking the television was on in the background, tuned to a local news report. The breathless blonde anchor was describing how, for the second time in less than a month, an employee of Higgins and Dawes, a local accounting firm, had been run down by a cement truck.

“In this morning’s accident,” she told us, “the victim was the firm’s owner and CEO himself, Harold Dawes. Police spokesman Greg Lemillo tells Action News that an emergency inspection of the brakes on all city construction vehicles is under way after this latest tragedy, which appears unrelated to the one three weeks ago that killed another Higgins and Dawes employee, accountant Robert Billingsley. Stay tuned to Action News for the latest developments in this and all the stories we are following for you.”

The report was accompanied by a video feed of the accident scene, which of course showed nothing more than a nondescript city cement mixer parked at the side of a busy road, emergency beacons busily flashing. This visual warning was too little, too late for Mr. Dawes, of course, but made for a colorful addition to the live report and was thus included. It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn the truck looked a little off-kilter, tilted a bit like it was parked on top of something. Or someone.

My uncle and I fell silent, neither of us speaking until the report ended. The irony of Jimmy Kills using the same method to dispose of Harold Dawes that Dawes had used on Robert Billingsley contained, I thought, a certain poetic justice, in an Old Testament, eye for an eye sort of way.

After the blonde newsbabe had finished the story, Brick reached for the telephone and handed it over to me. “I’ll bite,” I said. “Who am I calling?”

“Why, Maggie Billingsley, of course,” he replied. “Or would you rather I set up the appointment?”

I pictured the willowy brunette with the long legs and the tight white sweater and the story we could now tell her. “I’ll handle this one,” I told Brick.

He nodded and smiled. “I thought you might.”

Uncle Brick and the Little Devilz

I had so much fun writing the first Uncle Brick story that I knew immediately I would make the characters into a series. A few months later I started writing “Uncle Brick and the Little Devilz,” an adventure featuring a teenage runaway, kidnapping, murder and strippers. This story first appeared at Mysterical-E exactly one year after the first, in the Summer, 2010 issue. I hope you enjoy it.

Have you ever wondered how many revolutions a ceiling fan makes on the low setting as it pushes the stifling summer air around an un-air conditioned second floor office? In Boston? In July? I hadn’t, either, until I started working in my uncle’s Boston-based PI firm, Callahan Investigations.

A little background: My Uncle Brick Callahan operated the agency for decades with my father Dennis, while I went off to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune—okay, mostly fortune—as an accountant. Then my wife divorced me, taking most of my money and all of my business, and my father managed to get himself murdered thanks to an investigation gone horribly wrong.

I returned to Boston, ostensibly to keep an eye on my now-eighty year old uncle but really because,

A) I had nowhere else to go,

B) Boston is three thousand miles away from LA and my ex-wife, and

C) I was determined to solve my dad’s murder.

It turned out my Uncle Brick needed absolutely no one to keep an eye on him, certainly not me, but he did agree to allow me to work with him in the agency until I could get back on my feet. Oh yeah, and we were able to solve my dad’s murder, turning the tables on the upwardly mobile mobster who killed him. That cold son of a bitch is in the ground now.

I can’t say evening the score on my father’s behalf made me feel any better about losing him, but the sense of satisfaction I got from seeing Harold Dawes get what he deserved was one sweet reward, despite the fact that I nearly ended up face down in the dirt myself, and on my very first case, no less.

By the way, the answer is about one hundred. Our ceiling fan makes roughly one hundred revolutions per minute on the low setting. Yours might be different.

The point, though, and believe it or not there is one, is that I had never gained a true appreciation for the meaning of the word “boredom” until I took the job working with my uncle. After wrapping up the investigation of my dad’s murder we had been sitting around the office playing sports trivia—which Uncle Brick always won because he asked questions from the 1940’s and ‘50’s—while waiting for another case to come along.

I had begun to doubt it was ever going to happen. In my own private version of hell, we were going to sit around the Callahan Investigations offices, asking each other stupid sports questions day after day, until eventually the bank would come knocking and repossess all our furniture and office equipment and we would find ourselves shooed unceremoniously out into the street. That would be bad enough in LA, but Boston gets cold in the winter!

“How can you just sit there?” I finally asked. “Aren’t you even a little bit antsy?”

“Why should I be?” Brick answered without taking his eyes off the Globe sports page. The Sox had just lost their fourth series in a row and Brick was certain he was going to get the call to manage the team any day now. “Waiting for a case to come walking through the door is nothing, kiddo. If you think this is tough, you should try sitting in a car with a faulty heater outside a seedy motel for three hours in the middle of a February snowstorm waiting for some dope to finish screwing his bimbo so you can obtain photographic evidence of his infidelity for his wife. Now that’ll make you antsy, let me tell you.

“Hang in there, kid, a case will come along eventually, they always do.”

Right on cue, the door to our second floor office opened, squealing in protest, reminding me I had told Brick I would oil the hinges. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We had been pretty busy, after all.

An older lady with a full head of snow-white hair—think Barbara Bush; the wife of George Senior, not the party-girl presidential daughter—peeked hesitantly inside as if worried she might be interrupting an important meeting or something. She had obviously never been in our office before; important meetings here were few and far between. She seemed unconvinced of her location, despite the fact CALLAHAN INVESTIGATIONS was prominently displayed on the frosted, pebbled window of the office door.

Instantly, Brick was on his feet, striding toward the woman with a welcoming smile as though he had been anxiously awaiting her arrival for the last few hours, rather than picking his teeth, which was how he had actually been spending his time. The newspaper he had been engrossed in simply vanished. I had no idea how he did that.

I finally got to my feet as Brick pulled the door open completely, ushering the woman inside with a courtly grace I knew I could never master if I lived to be two hundred. I felt like the class dullard.

“Welcome to Callahan Investigations,” Brick smiled, leading the woman across the office to a comfortable leather couch. She sat and began wringing her hands nervously. “I’m Brick Callahan,” my uncle continued, “and this young man is my nephew. How may we be of service to you, Miss—?”

Tears welled up in Barbara Bush’s eyes. She seemed mere seconds away from a breakdown. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Where are my manners? My name is Lillian Saunders.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms Saunders—“

“Mrs., please.”

“Very well, Mrs. Saunders, how can Callahan Investigations help you?”

“It’s my husband, Martin. He’s dead.” The dam broke and the tears which had been threatening to let loose rolled down the distraught woman’s face as a great wrenching sob shook her body. Uncle Brick produced a tissue, from where I had no idea, handing it to the grateful woman and waiting for her to compose herself enough to continue. Finally she did.

“He was found on a sidewalk in Chinatown next to an old apartment building. They… they say he got drunk and leaped from the roof.”

“And you don’t believe he killed himself.” Brick phrased it as a statement, not a question.

“That’s right; I most certainly do not. He wasn’t drinking and he had no reason that I know of even to be in Chinatown.”

Lillian Saunders continued, pausing every now and then to blow her nose and wipe her eyes. She adopted a look of grim determination, which she maintained until she had slogged through to the end of her narrative.

Her dead husband had been a highly successful real estate lawyer in the process of downsizing his business; spooling it down to a three-day-a-week enterprise in order to semi-retire while still retaining the ability to earn an income. According to Lillian, Martin came home from work three days ago, ate dinner, and then immediately went back out, telling his wife only that he needed to do a favor for his longtime secretary, whose daughter had found herself in some sort of unspecified trouble.

Martin refused to divulge any further information to his wife. “He didn’t want to worry me,” she said tearfully, before blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. “It was the last time I saw him alive.”

“But you’re certain he wasn’t drinking.”

“Of course I’m certain!”

Brick was quiet for a short time, clearly deep in thought. I, too, was quiet, not so much because I was deep in thought but because I hadn’t a clue what to say. Finally my uncle asked, “Had you noticed any change in Martin’s demeanor recently?”

She nodded. “Yes, as a matter of fact I had. He was much happier. The police claim he was despondent over the downturn in his business and that’s why he jumped off that building, but that’s just a bunch of bunk. He was thrilled to be cutting back his workload. He wanted to spend more time with me and the grandkids. Martin was murdered, Mr. Callahan, and I wish to hire you to prove it.”

Brick nodded. “We will take your case, Mrs. Saunders. I don’t know whether Martin was the victim of foul play or not, but I will be happy to look into the matter for you. Now, about our fee—“

“I have plenty of money,” the brand-new widow replied, “and I would be more than happy to spend it all, if that’s what it takes, to find out what happened to my Martin, and to bring his murderers to justice.”

“I don’t think bankrupting you will be necessary,” Brick answered. “Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful?”

“Only this,” she said, handing a small white object to my uncle. “The police returned it with Martin’s things when they closed the case following their so-called investigation. I’ve never seen it before, and can only assume he picked it up while he was out and about on the night he was killed.”

Brick glanced at it for just a moment before handing it to me and escorting the distraught woman to the door. I examined it as he offered his assurances that we would get to the bottom of the matter, and sooner rather than later. The object was an ordinary matchbook, plain white, and on the front was emblazoned the words, The Little Devilz. The “i” in “Devilz” was printed to resemble a pitchfork, and holding the pitchfork was a cartoon devil, horns sprouting from his head, leering madly at the world.

The rest of the matchbook was entirely unadorned, front and back. It was plainly a cheap promotional item, undoubtedly manufactured by the thousands, and I had no idea what use it might be to us. I stuck it in my pocket as Brick returned.

“Let’s take a drive,” was all he said.

* * *

The murdered man’s secretary was named Madge Simpson, and I couldn’t help but picture the blue-haired mother from the long-running animated television show with the same last name as we navigated the busy city streets. Brick drove, as always.

You might think an eighty year old man would be overmatched mixing it up with Boston’s notoriously aggressive drivers, but not Uncle Brick. His driving style, if you could call it that, was to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, changing lanes seemingly at random, squeezing his silver Mercedes into spaces that seemed much too small for a Matchbox toy, much less a real, eighty thousand dollar automobile. When he drove, he left in his wake a nearly-continuous cacophony of angry honking horns, with a full slate of shaking fists and protruding middle fingers tossed in for good measure. He seemed blissfully unaware.

We pulled into a tiny driveway outside a small, single-family home in Revere, a gritty blue-collar city located just north of Boston, not far from Logan Airport. The pavement was rutted and cracked, badly in need of repair, a clear testament to a down economy and a family with more pressing monetary priorities than a repaved driveway. The intense heat struck like a fist as we exited the air-conditioned car and walked to the front door. The neighborhood seemed deserted and the heavy air felt moist and dirty and somehow ominous.

Madge Simpson opened the door, looking nothing like I had pictured. She was short and squat, close-cropped auburn hair framing a wide, remarkably unlined face. My uncle introduced us, telling her we were investigating the death of her boss and she smiled, the act more a display of dogged determination than genuine good humor. She was clearly stressed, working hard to hold herself together.

Mrs. Simpson invited us into her shabby but squeaky-clean living room and we took seats around a butcher-block style coffee table, Brick sitting in an overstuffed easy chair and me taking a seat next to the frazzled woman on the couch. Without waiting for a question, she exclaimed, “I feel so guilty about poor Mr. Saunders. Whatever happened to him was all my fault!”

I waited for my uncle to take the lead in questioning Mrs. Simpson. I figured his half-century of experience in private investigations probably trumped my half-month. “Mr. Saunders’ widow,” Brick began, “is convinced her husband did not commit suicide. She said he left home immediately after dinner last Friday night to handle some sort of business for you involving your daughter, is that right?”

“That’s exactly right. And you want to know what he was doing.”

“It would seem to be the key to unraveling this mystery, wouldn’t you agree?”

The woman sighed, the sound deep and heartfelt, her despondence clear. “Of course,” she answered, and then was silent for a moment.

“It’s just that I didn’t know where else to turn” she finally continued. “I went to the police about my situation first and they did nothing, so I simply asked Mr. Saunders if, what with his legal background and all, he might take a look into the matter himself. You know, maybe throw his lawyerly weight around a little.”

Brick smiled politely and nodded, as if this cleared everything up in his mind. I had no idea what the woman was talking about and I assumed neither did Brick, but I had learned a long time ago you could never be too sure with Brick Callahan.

“I see. And what matter would that be?” Phew. My uncle was as confused as I was; he was just better at hiding it. I hoped that once I developed a little experience in this mystifying world of private investigations, I would be better able to roll with the punches, too. At least these punches were figurative ones rather than literal. So far.

“It’s my daughter, Phoebe,” she said to Brick. “You see, she’s only fifteen and she’s turned into quite a handful. She’s a good girl, really, but she’s at such a difficult age. Anyway, Phoebe and I have been fighting recently and, well, she ran away a couple of weeks ago. I recently discovered she has been hired as a dancer at one of those… those awful… adult entertainment places.”

“Your fifteen year old daughter is a stripper?”

I couldn’t help it; I blurted it out before my brain even realized what my traitorous mouth was saying. I mean, in fairness to me, that was the last thing I had expected to hear. Brick shot me a look like I had just set my hair on fire and he couldn’t wait to douse it with gasoline.

He apologized to the woman before I could even react while I made a mental note not to say another word until we were back in the safety of the office. Judging from the look on Brick’s face I thought even that might be pushing my luck.

“What my nephew was trying in his unique way to say, Mrs. Simpson, is that there are laws in place to prevent such things from happening to an underage girl. I believe you said you informed the police?”

“Yes, of course, that was the first thing I did! But like I told you before, that was a total waste of time. They conducted what they called an “investigation” in just a few hours, claiming she was completely unknown to the management of the club. But I know a lot of people in this town, Mr. Callahan, I grew up here and have lived here my whole life, and I have it on very reliable information that she is in fact working there. I just want my daughter back…”

It looked as though we were going to be dealing with a weeping woman for the second time in a matter of a couple of hours, but to her credit, Mrs. Simpson somehow pulled herself together at the last moment and managed to continue the conversation. “The name of the club is—“

“The Little Devilz.”

“Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

Brick ignored the question. “So following the inaction of the police you went to Mr. Saunders and asked him to threaten legal action?”

“Well, yes and no. I don’t care about taking legal action; I just want my little girl back. I asked him to make it clear to the vultures running that… that snakepit that if they continued to employ underage dancers—Phoebe in particular—we would take them to court, file lawsuits, basically make their lives miserable until they came to their senses.”

Once again Brick nodded like it was all starting to fall into place. I had a feeling it really was for him this time, because I was starting to get the picture, too. It was a dirty and frightening picture, involving an aging real estate lawyer in over his head against some very, very dangerous people. After my little performance of a few minutes ago, though, I decided now would not be the time to inject myself into the conversation, so I put what I hoped was a look of sage wisdom on my face and waited for my uncle to continue.

Instead, he rose to his feet, clasping Madge Simpson’s hands in his own and smiling warmly at her. “Please try not to feel guilty about what happened to Mr. Saunders,” he told her. “No mother can be faulted for wanting to rescue her child from the clutches of these people. You were not responsible for the death of your employer; the people who killed him were responsible.”

She breathed in sharply. “So you really believe he was murdered?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am, I do.”

* * *

“You must have had trouble retaining clients in your accounting business if you were as reckless with your mouth after inspecting their financial records as you were back there inside Mrs. Simpson’s home.” I had known Uncle Brick was going to bring up my little misstep, and I didn’t have to wait long. We hadn’t even gotten as far as the Sumner Tunnel yet. My uncle raised his voice to make himself heard above the angry honks of frustrated drivers and the accompanying squeals of their protesting brakes as Brick forced himself into the line of cars moving sluggishly through the toll booths.

“I’m sorry about that, Uncle Brick. It’s just that of all the things I thought might come out of that poor woman’s mouth, her fifteen year old daughter stripping for money was pretty much last on the list. How is that even possible? Why would a club risk being shut down by the authorities for hiring such a young girl in the first place?”

“Excellent question, my boy. And I accept your apology, by the way. I was taken a bit by surprise myself. But to answer your question, The Little Devilz isn’t risking anything. Or at least they weren’t until they graduated from sleazy hiring practices to premeditated murder.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You would have no way of knowing this, having spent the last decade-plus on the West Coast laundering the finances of the rich and famous, but the management of The Little Devilz has had the local authorities in their pocket practically since the first day they opened their doors.”

A middle-aged man in a battered green Toyota pickup screamed an impressive—not to mention creative—string of profanities through his driver’s side window at Brick, who ignored him as though he didn’t exist. The guy seemed to forget in his fury that his window was closed, smacking his forehead and raising a red welt, which, unsurprisingly, seemed to further anger him. “They’ve been permitted to operate with impunity,” Brick continued. “If I had to venture a guess, I would say Phoebe Simpson is not the first underage dancer to have taken their stage. It’s going to be up to us to make sure she is the last.”

“But how can we possibly manage that if even the police refuse to take action?”

We burst out of the Sumner Tunnel and into the steamy afternoon sun, Brick traveling much too fast as usual. He made the right and left turns toward Government Center with one hand on the wheel as he turned to face me, seemingly paying no attention to the traffic, of which there was a lot. I was suddenly sorry I had not waited until we were back at the office to ask my question.

“It’s one thing,” Brick said, “to grease a few palms and convince the authorities to look the other way regarding your hiring practices—as repugnant as they are—or the ages of the customers you allow through your door. It’s another issue entirely, though, to take a man to the top of an apartment building and toss him off simply because he is asking too many questions. This the police cannot ignore.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that. So what do we do?”

“Simple. We convince the responsible party to admit he’s a murderer.”

* * *

Sure, it sounded simple when Brick said it. What self-respecting scumbag wouldn’t want to admit to a private investigator that he had committed an act of cold-blooded murder this past week?

We were lounging in the office eating a late lunch and planning strategy, which is another way of saying that I was eating and waiting for Brick to tell me what we were going to do. He had been quiet for a while now, thinking hard, and I could see he had pretty much settled upon a course of action. What that course of action might be, I couldn’t guess.

Finally I could no longer stand the suspense and got up the nerve to ask. “I realize it’s probably patently obvious to anyone who’s not a trained accountant, but how in the world are we going to convince the killer to implicate himself in front of us?”

He smiled and reached into his top desk drawer, pulling out a small voice-activated digital recorder and holding it up for my inspection. “I’m going to place this in my shirt pocket and then I’m going to ask him.”

“I know you’re the professional and everything, so don’t take this the wrong way. But as plans go, doesn’t that strike you as, oh I don’t know, a little thin, not to mention dangerous?”

“Well, there’s no need to unnecessarily complicate matters, and over the course of eight-plus decades on this earth I’ve discovered the best way to get the answer to a question is to ask it.”

“But don’t you think that even if you can somehow get the killer to admit his actions, he might find the recorder?”

“I certainly hope so.”

I must have looked completely flummoxed—I know I felt that way—and Brick finally took pity on me, explaining the plan in a way that almost made sense. He would enter The Little Devilz, make a nuisance of himself in precisely the manner we assumed Martin Saunders had done, and wait for the goon who had killed him to take similar action against Brick.

My uncle explained that once the thug confiscated the recorder hidden in his shirt he would feel free to implicate himself, knowing his words would never see the light of day. “After all,” Brick reasoned, “if he’s going to throw me off a building and then destroy the only evidence implicating him, he has nothing to fear, and thus no reason not to talk freely.”

“Aren’t you forgetting a couple of important details?”

“Hmm. I don’t think so. Like what?”

“Like the fact that you will be dead and the bad guy will be in possession of the critical piece of evidence against him?”

Brick stared at me and grinned and I suddenly got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Hearing it out loud didn’t make me feel any better.

“That’s where you come in, sonny.”

* * *

I sat at in a corner in The Little Devilz, having arrived early so that I could secure a table which would allow me the most complete observation of the enormous room. Every now and then I sipped from an eight dollar ginger ale, wishing it was sour mash but figuring it might be a good idea to keep my wits about me.

The Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol my uncle had given me sat heavy and portentous in the leather shoulder holster under my jacket as I sweated rivers around it. He had slapped a magazine filled with rounds into the handle, explaining the basics of its operation before carefully engaging the safety and handing it to me hesitantly like he feared I might blow his head off or something. I felt completely exposed, like everyone in the place was watching me, although I knew that was nothing more than rampant paranoia on my part.

On the stage, a succession of young women, all gorgeous but tired-looking and old beyond their years, danced lethargically to music with a thumping bass track that poured from the enormous sound system. Each one flounced out from behind an enormous velvet curtain to an introduction by an artificially enthusiastic DJ worthy of a Celtics playoff game, shaking her assets for a few frenetic minutes before being replaced by another girl cut from the same sexy but hardened mold.

I wondered what the odds were one of them was Phoebe Simpson. I hadn’t heard the announcer use that name, but all of the girls went by aliases like “Skye” or “Silky” or “Angel” so how would I know? The irony of a girl using the name “Angel” at a place called The Little Devilz was not lost on me and I wondered if it was done intentionally; like calling a fat guy “slim.”

Probably not. Nobody seemed to have much of a sense of humor here; you could practically smell the loneliness and desperation wafting through the smoky air; a mood projected by the dancers and the customers alike.

A young woman dressed in the skimpiest red devil outfit I had ever seen came along and smiled at me. Red satin horns protruded from her auburn hair and she carried a plastic pitchfork along with a small round tray of drinks. “May I freshen you up, sir?”

I returned her smile. “Thanks, but this is as fresh as it gets for me.”

She did a lousy job of hiding her disappointment and I could almost see her mentally revising downward her estimate of the night’s tip income. Ah, what the hell. Easy come, easy go. “On second thought,” I said as she turned to go, “I will have another ginger ale, thank you.”

Her face lit up like a little girl’s on Christmas morning and I felt an incredible sense of sadness for her as she scurried off to fill the order. Allison and I had never had any children—thank God, that was something we had done right in a marriage that was mostly wrong—but I tried to imagine how I would feel knowing my daughter was slinging drinks to horny men in a strip club and I found myself hoping Brick would hurry up and get here and do his thing; this place was more depressing than I had ever imagined possible.

On the stage the girls twirled and pranced and showed strangers parts of their anatomy that most people reserve for the privacy of their bedrooms, pretending to get off on their time under the harsh glare of the spotlight, and finally, off to my right, my uncle strolled through the front door and into the semi-dark club. He was dressed garishly in a powder-blue suit with wide avocado tie straight out of the seventies; an outfit that would ensure he was noticed immediately.

He paid the cover to the goon at the door and walked straight across the big room to the bar, calling one of the bartenders over and asking him a question I couldn’t hear. The man looked at him for a moment in undisguised amusement, as if trying to decide whether Brick was serious, and then shrugged and pointed to a closed door located at the far end of a shadowy hallway to the left of the stage.

Brick skirted the front of the stage looking, as always, like he hadn’t a care in the world. I couldn’t say for sure, it was too dark and he was too far away, but I would have sworn he flashed a smile and a wink to the chick currently grinding and making creative use of the stripper pole a few feet away. Knowing Brick, she was probably a friend, or at least a friend of a friend. He rounded the stage, no one paying the slightest attention to him except me, and disappeared down the hallway.

This was my cue to leave. We had scouted the building earlier and I knew there was a single service entrance leading out the back of the club. It seemed unlikely the designated muscle would lead the potential murder victim out to his death through the front of the club in front of dozens of potential witnesses, even if their attention was on other things, so my job, for now, was to get to Brick’s car and stake out that rear entryway.

* * *

It didn’t take long, which was ideal for me because thinking about the role I was supposed to play in this little adventure was making me feel a little like I did on my wedding day. I was nervous and shaking and hoping I would be able to perform. I hoped this turned out better than my marriage, for Brick’s sake as well as my own.

I had been seated in the Mercedes for maybe ten minutes, parked in a darkened corner of a used car lot under a huge maple tree which left me a clear and unobstructed view of the strip club’s service entrance next door. The moon was full but the shadows thrown by the tree’s bulk enveloped Brick’s car like a gossamer blanket.

The door to the service entrance swung open and my uncle exited the club, followed by an almost comically large man pressing the barrel of a handgun into his back. Held in Brick’s hand was an object I assumed was a bottle of liquor—cheap whiskey, probably; he had said they would likely make him drink some and then spill the rest all over him to make it look like he got drunk and depressed and decided to end it all—where had I heard that before?—and I found myself wishing he could toss it to me so I could slam down a slug or two myself.

The large man with the gun opened the passenger side door of an inconspicuous-looking Chevy Caprice and Brick bent down and entered, sliding across to the driver’s side, while the other guy followed him in and closed the car door. The brake lights flashed once and then the car was moving, creeping along the side of the club to the street and turning toward downtown.

I started Brick’s Mercedes and followed, wondering if I would ever see him again alive.

* * *

When I started doing this job, oh, way back, let’s see, must be three weeks ago now, I was inept at tailing people, either on foot or in a vehicle. It’s something that seems like it should be easy but isn’t, at least for me. I might as well have tapped them on the shoulder or held up a flashing neon sign saying, “Hey, you, I’m following you! Yes, that’s right, you!”

I shared my concerns on this score with Brick after he told me our plan—the one I had had no input on. I told him I was afraid I would tip off the man kidnapping him and get him killed. Predictably, he told me not to worry about it. “You need to learn how to relax. The guy is going to be amped; getting himself mentally prepared to push me off a building. He’s not going to be worried about an eighty year old man, especially once I make sure he finds the recorder.

“It’s human nature, junior, he’ll figure he got the drop on the dimwit old man trying to put one over on him and he’ll let his guard down. Trust me.”

I wasn’t convinced, but what could I do? It was too late now to worry about it, anyway.

The Mercedes hugged the road as I concentrated on maintaining a three to four vehicle interval behind the big Caprice. The farther we drove, the more I became convinced we were heading to the same building in Chinatown where Martin Saunders had met his untimely demise last week. In fact, I became so certain this was the case that when we got close, I pulled to the curb right around the corner from said building and watched as the Caprice did the same directly in front of the entrance.

The level of arrogance of the people running The Little Devilz was astonishing. Did they really expect anyone to believe two separate people who had never met would each decide, within a matter of days, to end their lives in precisely the same manner, by throwing themselves off precisely the same roof?

Apparently that was exactly what they expected, because there was my uncle, marching up the sidewalk to the front door, head held high, engaging his presumptive killer in a conversation about what I could not imagine. Hopefully he was getting the evidence we would need to put these people away if we somehow managed to survive, a prospect which I was beginning to think was remote.

The man with the gun reached around Uncle Brick and slipped a key card into a lock, pulling the front door of the apartment building open and shoving Brick inside. The odd-looking pair disappeared inside and I reluctantly climbed out of Brick’s Mercedes, noting with appreciation how solid and reassuring the CLUNK of the door sounded compared to the tinny noise made by my Subaru upon completion of the same task. It’s strange how our minds work under pressure. Or maybe it’s just mine.

I slouched toward the door, feeling exposed and conspicuous—like everyone could see the gun under my jacket—and wondering how out of place I must look to anyone peering out a window. In this area people probably saw worse all the time; it was the sort of neighborhood where if people knew what was good for them, they didn’t see anything; even if they saw everything.

To the right of the door was a panel filled with white plastic call buttons. Next to each button was a small card listing the apartment number and the last name of the associated tenant. I shrugged and picked one at random, pressing it and waiting, hoping someone was home. Fifteen seconds went by and I began to sweat. I had no idea how long it would take for Brick and the guy with the gun to reach the roof, or how long the man would wait once they got there before throwing my uncle to his death.

Finally a tiny speaker under the buttons erupted to life with static. It seemed to be on its’ last legs, a conclusion you could reasonably arrive at about the entire building, and I jumped even though I had been expecting it. My nerves were thrumming. “Yeah?” a disembodied voice demanded.

“Uh, this is Tommy in 3B,” I answered. “I went to the store and locked myself out; could you please hook me up?” I wondered how many of his neighbors this guy actually knew and was counting on the natural tendency of most city dwellers to keep to themselves and mind their own business. It was the first rule of city living and one I followed religiously when I shared an apartment with Allison in L.A. A second later the buzzer sounded, followed a half-second after that by the barely audible CLICK of the door’s lock disengaging.

I breathed a sigh of relief and walked into the building.

* * *

Access to the roof was gained by walking up a short stairway and stepping through a dilapidated wooden door. A rusting sheet metal entryway protected the door from the elements, although how long that would continue to be the case was open to debate. The entryway canted precariously to one side and long strips of peeling brown paint hung from both sides.

From the roof I could hear my uncle chatting with his abductor as if sharing coffee and a cinnamon roll at Beekman’s Deli. I pulled the Browning out of its leather holster and slipped off the safety, gripping the weapon in both hands like I had seen done on TV a million times. My hands were shaking and I had a sudden terrifying vision of the gun slipping from my hands and shooting me in the groin as it bounced off the roof. I took a deep breath and peered around the entryway.

Standing maybe five feet from the edge of the roof, five stories above the cement and pavement below, stood Brick and the gigantic man from The Little Devilz. The man held Brick’s voice-activated recorder in one huge paw and was turning it over in his hand, looking at it with undisguised amusement.

“So lemme get this straight,” the man said, smirking at Brick. “You’re a friend of that idiot lawyer and you decided you were just gonna march into the club and get me to implicate myself and my bosses? You didn’t think it might occur to me to frisk you? Just how friggin’ stupid do you think I am?”

“Is that a rhetorical question or do you actually want an answer? Because, after all, you did admit everything before it occurred to you to search me. And if you’re waiting for specifics, I fail to see what will be gained by discussing your lack of intelligence.”

The man’s face tightened in annoyance and I wondered briefly why Brick was pushing the guy, but it was a fleeting thought because I was focused most intensely on his hands and what he was holding in them. Or, more specifically, what he wasn’t holding. The gun he had pressed doggedly into Brick’s back as they left The Little Devilz was nowhere to be seen. He had apparently decided he could handle a lone octogenarian without benefit of the weapon and holstered it somewhere on his massive body.

He slid the tiny recorder, roughly the size of an MP3 music player, into his breast pocket and reached for Brick, placing one beefy hand on my uncle’s shoulder and roughly shoving him toward the edge of the roof. It happened so quickly it almost caught me off-guard. I had been waiting for some big speech from the guy about what he was going to do to Brick, like the ones the bad guys always seemed to make on TV.

Apparently this particular bad guy wasn’t bright enough to come up with such a soliloquy, or maybe he was just unmotivated and wanted to get this unpleasantness over with so he could get back to the club and all the naked women. In any event, he began pushing Brick toward his death. To my utter amazement, my uncle still looked completely unruffled.

I stepped through the door and made sure I cleared the sheet-metal entryway before training the gun on him and demanding, “Stop right there!” My voice sounded strong and confident and I wondered where the hell that was coming from. I certainly didn’t feel strong or confident.

The man froze and for a long moment nothing happened. Far off in the distance I heard a siren wailing and I wished it was headed here although I knew it wasn’t. The man swiveled his head and looked over at me, surprise etched in his eyes and maybe a little regret, too, as it dawned on him, much too late, that he hadn’t been up against just one octogenarian. He had been taken down by one octogenarian and one mostly out-of-shape divorced accountant from L.A.

Brick removed the man’s hand from his shoulder gently, almost apologetically, and straightened his jacket. I could see the man calculating the odds of grabbing my uncle and using him as a human shield in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage. “Don’t even think about it,” I snapped as I pointed the gun at his chest. Incredibly, my hands had stopped shaking.

The man’s shoulders slumped as the reality of the situation hit home. He shook his head and sighed. I almost felt sorry for him; this was the sort of thing he would never live down in the joint.

* * *

“I don’t know how to thank you for getting to the bottom of Martin’s death, Mr. Callahan, and so quickly. This won’t bring him back, of course, but I simply couldn’t live with the world thinking he committed suicide.” Lillian Saunders appeared to have aged a decade in the short time since we first met her following her husband’s death. It was obvious she wasn’t taking the tragedy well and I hoped the resolution of the case would give her the opportunity to achieve a little peace. It didn’t seem likely to me, but what do I know?

The recently widowed Mrs. Saunders handed Brick a check. He folded it and placed it in his breast pocket without looking at it.

“Believe me when I tell you it was our pleasure to help,” he said. “Your husband died trying to protect a young girl who was being victimized. He was a hero, Mrs. Saunders.” He stood and took the elderly woman’s arm, walking her to the door. “Please don’t hesitate to call on us if there is anything we can help you with in the future.”

He escorted her to the elevator and when he returned he had a satisfied smile on his face. “I talked to my friend Lieutenant Fischer of the Boston Police this morning,” he said, “and Curt told me this thing is about to blow sky-high. That goon we took down is just the hired help. He’s scared to death and not about to take the fall for his bosses. Even as we speak, he’s spilling his guts. I’m telling you, sonny, heads are going to roll. Bigshot heads. Fatcat heads, both in the City Council and the BPD. All the people who were taking kickbacks, letting the scumbags running The Little Devilz employ underage strippers and eventually graduate to murder are about to wish they had made some different choices in their miserable lives!”

I had never seen my uncle so ebullient. He sat down at his desk and rubbed his hands together in glee, looking for a moment like Scrooge McDuck in the counting house. “I tell ya, sonny, there’s not very much in this world I enjoy more than seeing self-important gasbags get what’s coming to them. I wish your dad had been here to see it; he would be damned proud of this little agency along about now.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said, looking me in the eye. “He would have been damned proud of you, too, the way you handled yourself last night.”

I tried to give him my best aw-shucks shrug, but I couldn’t help grinning. I hadn’t seen much of my dad the last ten years before he died and I have to admit it was nice to hear those words come out of his brother’s mouth.

“I’m just glad I didn’t have to shoot that poor bastard on the roof,” I said.

My uncle waved dismissively. “Forget about it, you couldn’t have shot anybody.”

“Are you kidding? That big ox was about to toss you off a five-story building; of course I could have shot him!”

“No, I mean it literally. You couldn’t have shot him. When I slapped the magazine into the Browning, I never racked the slide to chamber a round.”

“So if I had pulled the trigger…”

“Right,” Brick said. “Nothing would have happened. You could have pulled the trigger all night and all you would have gotten for your trouble is a blister on your finger.”

I looked at Brick incredulously, remembering the sheer mass of the big murderer and how close he had been holding my uncle to the edge of the roof. “But… what about the safety? You made sure the safety was on before you handed the gun to me.”

He shrugged. “That was all for effect. Come on, junior, I didn’t want you to actually be able to fire the gun; you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You could have killed someone, for crying out loud!”

My uncle chuckled. Until he saw the look on my face, that is. Then he burst out laughing and didn’t stop for nearly fifteen minutes. Finally he stood, knees cracking, and slapped me on the shoulder, mostly stifling another round of giggles. “Don’t look so glum, kiddo, you’re a hero! Enjoy the satisfaction; that feeling doesn’t come around very often in this line of work.”

I must have seemed somewhat unconvinced, because he continued, “Come on, let’s hit Beekman’s Deli. My treat. There’s a BLT on toast quivering in fear with the knowledge that you’re on your way and you’re hungry.” He marched out the squeaky office door and down the hallway.

I sat brooding for a moment, then shook my head and followed him out of the office. By the time I reached the elevator, I was smiling, too. I just couldn’t help it.

About the author:

Allan Leverone is a three-time Derringer Award Finalist for excellence in short mystery fiction as well as a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives in Londonderry, New Hampshire with his wife, Sue, three children, one beautiful granddaughter and a cat who has used up eight lives. Connect with Allan at http://www.allanleverone.com, as well as on Facebook and Myspace.

Also by Allan Leverone

FINAL VECTOR

Medallion Press, February 1, 2011

http://www.medallionpress.com

http://www.allanleverone.com

http://www.amazon.com

Air traffic controller Nick Jensen’s life is in a shambles. His wife Lisa is dead, victim of a horrific automobile accident, and the authorities suspect foul play. He finds evidence suggesting Lisa, Pentagon auditor, had discovered potentially treasonous material on a fellow employee’s computer. That employee also winds up dead.

Desperate to escape the pain of losing his wife, Nick throws himself into his work and is on duty at the radar ATC facility serving Boston’s Logan International Airport on the night U.S. President Robert Cartwright is scheduled to fly into Boston. Armed terrorists storm the facility, killing the security staff and taking Nick’s fellow controller hostage as he works.

Nick escapes capture, but with time running out, must use the information from his murdered wife to unravel the terrorists’ plot and stop an assassination while outnumbered, unarmed and on the run…

Praise for Allan Leverone and Final Vector

Due February 1, 2011 from Medallion Press

“Allan Leverone raises the stakes with every turn of the page in this can’t-put-down tale of ruthless terrorists and cold-blooded betrayal.”

—Sophie Littlefield, Anthony Award-winning author of A Bad Day for Sorry

“Written with edge-of-your-seat suspense and precise detail that can only come from a writer who did his research while on the job, Final Vector kept me, a white-knuckle flier, in awe from the very first sentence. The successor to Michael Crichton has landed. And his name is Allan Leverone.”

—Vincent Zandri, bestselling author of The Remains and The Innocent

Copyright

KINDLE EDITION

Copyright 2010 Allan Leverone

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

The characters and events in the stories within this collection are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

“Fallout” © 2009, originally appeared in Morpheus Tales Magazine’s special Flash Fiction Issue

“Suspicions” © 2009, originally appeared in Shroud Magazine Issue #6

“The Bridal Veil” © 2009, originally appeared in Twisted Dreams Magazine, June-September

“Regrets, I’ve Had a Few” © 2008, originally appeared on the webzine, TREI Literary Magazine, September

“The Road to Olathe” © 2007, originally appeared on the webzine, Crime and Suspense, July

“Family Ties” © 2010, originally appeared on A Thrill a Minute blog, May

“PussyKat” © 2009, originally appeared on the webzine House of Horror, June

“Heart and Sole” © 2009, originally appeared in Northern Haunts anthology

“Independence Day” © 2008, originally appeared on the webzine, Crime and Suspense, July/August

“The Waiting” © 2010, originally appeared in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Summer Issue

“Due Consideration” © 2009, originally appeared on the webzine, Crime and Suspense, March/April

“Devotion” © 2009, originally appeared on the webzine, Black Hound, February

“The Wheels on the Bus” © 2009, originally appeared in Mausoleum Memoirs anthology

“Dead and Buried” © 2010, originally appeared on the website, A Twist of Noir, October

“Dance Hall Drug” © 2010, originally appeared on the webzine, Dark Valentine, Autumn Issue

“Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills” © 2009, originally appeared on the webzine, Mysterical-E, Summer Issue

“Uncle Brick and the Little Devilz” © 2010, originally appeared on the webzine, Mysterical-E, Summer Issue

Content

Allan Leverone
POSTCARDS FROM THE APOCALYPSE

Author’s Note

Fallout

Suspicions

The Bridal Veil

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

The Road to Olathe

Family Ties

PussyKat

Heart and Sole

Independence Day

The Waiting

Due Consideration

Devotion

The Wheels on the Bus

Dead and Buried

Dance Hall Drug

Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills

Uncle Brick and the Little Devilz

About the author:

Also by Allan Leverone

Praise for Allan Leverone and Final Vector Due February 1, 2011 from Medallion Press

Copyright