Frank Wallace’s ears pricked up at the clanging coming from the back of the building. Those goddamn raccoons back for another run at his pails. The little bastards were persistent, he had to give em’ that. Even after tightening down the lids with a mess of bungees, they still went at it. Sometimes even managing […]
There was snow in the wind’s teeth. The boy rubbed the stinging cold from his eyes and squinted up at the bare trees tearing at each other in the gale. He moved forward, elbows squelching in the sodden earth, settled at the bluff’s edge, and watched the rider approach from Table Rock to the south. […]
The trailer kitchen is a fog of gun smoke; dirty food and garbage are splattered all over me. The screaming heffer in the corner is Ethel. Everything about her is stained, from her teeth to her soiled nightshirt to her blackened, dirty feet. Mike is slumped on the linoleum floor clutching his collarbone and looking […]
I want to say it’s like trying to pilot a spacecraft through an asteroid field but some science minded guy once told me that asteroid fields aren’t what we think they are; everything’s still really far apart. So maybe it’s more like a retarded salmon trying to swim upstream, dodging bits of debris that happen […]
Black Ridge, Wyoming, 1865 Four riders dismounted in the cold freeze of November, gusting with a fresh drift of snow. The air stung crisp with frost and cold. US Marshal Merle Walker tied off his Appaloosa to a hitching post just outside the Sheriff’s office, brushing the snow off his long sheep skin coat, lined […]
Vincent Giordano was out on account of a clerical error. The charges of tax fraud wouldn’t have stuck anyway, and the D.A. knew it. What the authorities wanted to pin on Vincent they had little evidence of, the murder of a hood from Toledo, Ohio, who was an associate of the mafia strongman. At the […]
Dwayne looks very at peace for a seventeen-year-old cuffed to a table, a murder charge being written up against him by an assistant DA in the next room over. I take my boots off the table and decide to bother him. “Why’d you kill Dukey, Dwayne?” Dwayne goes on practicing his eye fucking. He’ll need […]
The white acoustical ceiling tiles jumped, making Davis Pendleton flinch on the toilet seat. Dark shoes and brown polyester pants skulked across the rest room floor. The employee, in his plain black institutional footwear, hesitated at Davis’s stall door, stepped back, then turned to the twin sinks. He switched one spigot on to full rush, […]
He had simply stepped over from one building to the next one, from one flat roof to another, a wide step but one step. The agility in his body, especially in his legs, had diminished from several falls … not unexpectedly. The challenge in the beginning, in getting here to the roof of the Trail […]
Rain ran down the window like water in a car wash. I was sitting at my desk in the gloom, working my way through a deck of Luckies when my brother walked in. He gave me the phony grin. “I’ve got a job for you,” he said. “In a pig’s eye.” My brother is family. […]
“This is about the pig,” I said. Daniel nodded. “Terry Tenderloin.” Daniel Sampson and I had just arrived at a Cape-Cod style farmhouse on the outskirts of Currie Valley. The off-yellow two-story home was on the smallish side, but had a large back yard surrounded by an American-Dream white picket fence. The aromas of a […]
Tobin had supper with Teresa, in her office. They kept the door closed. None of the other hands, not even Mel, said a thing about it. Tobin had been there the longest of them all, since before Michael Cole, the old man’s heir, had taken control and left his sister, Teresa, in charge of the […]
