“You’ll never take me alive, copper!” mutters Eddie Janson in his best Cagney impersonation.
Eddie’s been a thief for all of his adult life. Any “real” job he’s ever held was only the prelude to somehow ripping off whatever he could from whoever it was he was working for at the time. He’s done time twice and has learned a lot about what he needs to do to make sure that there isn’t a third time. Eddie figures that the trick is to have a good plan, execute it, and then not screw it up by doing something dumb for the next few weeks.
Boyd and I got the call on the radio sometime around mid-afternoon. Apparently, Jed and Tyler Garvey were back to cooking meth up in their trailer a few miles north of Caswell holler. Lorraine’s voice crackled something about military-grade weapons, but we couldn’t hear all of it on account of the mountains. I felt a jolt of anxious adrenaline as Boyd pushed down on the accelerator and we started tearing ass up further into Craig County.
Outside my window the leaves were starting to change and the trees stood like colorful sentries guarding a population of nervous deer. I lowered my window and let in the pungent earthiness of autumn. Within a few seconds I was out in my tree stand, freezing except for the coffee in my thermos, my gun nestled between my thigh and tree trunk. I looked down and saw deer walking back and forth underneath me, miles away from the crime and violence of Appalachian poverty. Boyd’s voice jerked me back into reality.
BLIGHT DIGEST Winter 2015 is expected to release the last week of February, and includes 13 all new tales to tingle and terrorize. Our Table of Contents: Grant Jerkins Mathew Andrew Eddie McNamara Angel Luis Colón Paul Garth Mathew Allan Garcia Jacqueline Seewald Tony Wilson John Steele J M Perkins William P Johnson John Leahy […]
It always starts the same way:
I’m on the bus, late at night, and I’m headed home after work.
There’s another person in there with me – man, woman, whatever – and damn if they’re not interesting. Some smokin’ hot chick or a guy who looks like an underwear model or a kid with a lazy eye or an old woman with a plastic leg.
Like I said: interesting.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. There ain’t nothing sexual about it. Between you and me, I hadn’t had sex in ten years.
It ain’t sexual.
They’re just interesting.
-Jen?
-What?
-I don’t like this.
-There’s nothing to like.
-But, Jen—
-You just need to do what I tell you, Tommy.
-But this can’t possibly be real. It’s got to be something else. Some drill.
-Honey, there’s not a lot of time. You need to pick up Connie at school and keep driving north. If you leave right now, and I mean right now, you two should get to the cabin in five hours, four and a half if you push it. You’ll be well ahead of everyone. If we’re lucky, really lucky, the story won’t break ‘til you’re nearly halfway there.
For four hours in the middle of the night, Erik motored his 32ft Bayliner recreation boating vessel from Commencement Bay to Totten Inlet. Gnawing on the remaining nub of a Maduro cigar, he watched his plotter count down the way points around Hope Island until he reached the exact point he previously determined. Erik studied weather and tidal charts for the past week. The location was secluded with minimal traffic. The inlet held a steady fifty feet of water and would not see any strong currents. The hardest part of all was waiting for a night with heavy cloud cover to block out celestial light, mitigating the possibility of a witness from shore.
The cell phone resting on the boats instrument panel buzzed with a text message:
IS IT DONE YET?
Erik responded:
JUST GOT HERE. WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.
Erik dropped the diesel engines to an idle and tossed the cigar into the water. He found the hatch key embedded in the aft deck. Popping open the compartment revealed a lanky man in his mid-twenties, bound at hands and feet with manila three strained line.
Figures: on your first day as supers, Bingo Joe finds someone dead. That crazy bitch in 1-E.
“A bad smell.” One tenant calls, at 6 A.M. “Can you check it out?”
“Yeah,” Bingo Joe mutters. And rolls over in bed.
“I’m not going,” you say.
The garbage, you think. Looney Tunes lives right by it. Raw chicken, diapers, cat litter. On your floor alone are eight cats.
But if it’s just garbage, you think, Looney Tunes would be the first to call.
“José,” she would whine, using Bingo Joe’s real name. “There’s this . . . smell. A real bad one. Like maybe a rat died in the wall.”
No rats in this building, bitch.
It had been the Dane all along. Gustav knew he saw the car behind them as they left the city. The Dane had just waited until they were out on the country road before making his move. Speeding up and charging in. Gustav had lost control and the ice had taken care of the rest. Now there was a tree branch through his partner’s neck in the passenger seat, and the gun was somewhere on the floor.
Gustav leaned down after it but could barely move. The seatbelt was still stuck. He freed himself and leaned forward, reaching down under the seat. Blood gushed from the partner’s neck onto Gustav’s hand. He tried to ignore it. He reached further in and felt the handle. He gripped it and pulled it up, peering into the cylinder. Still two rounds left.
Gustav pressed the door open with his leg and rolled out, scraping his knee on some rocks on the ground. He tried to ignore the pain and the cold, but he couldn’t see anything, and that worried him. He knew the Dane would be around somewhere. The Dane never left a job half finished.
Heads, I add cyanide to my husband’s soup. Tails, I add salt.
I toss the coin and it shows tails.
Fuck.
“Darling,” he wails from the living room. “I am starving.”
Yeah, I bet.
He had come home, late as usual with his usual crap of an excuse: “Year-ending darling, books of accounts need to be audited, you know.”
What he had been in the process of auditing, I know very well. That whore’s body. In his cabin. When everybody has gone home, he tallies her tits. Bastard.
I stir the salt into the tomatoes, add water to the saucepan and raise the flame to bring the soup to boil. I hear him switch on the television and he shouts as if I am fucking deaf: “I think I will have a bath first.”
That’s right, you prick, wash the slut’s scent off your body. Perfume, that by all rights, should have been mine. Perfume that costs 4k for a few bloody milliliters.
I toss the coin and it is tails again.
After a hot day throwing trash I report to county lockup. Sun-whipped and salty, I’m ready for some hours of self-reflection but instead get groaning and muttering from the adjoining cell. It comes from a man with a pencil neck and eyes the color of fresh concrete.
“No reason,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“To live,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “What’s your name?”
To the average gomer sitting in the stop-and-go, it was just another Central Valley commute snafu: somebody’d rolled a southbound 2002 Malibu on the 99 interchange in Ceres, clogging traffic to Fresno for an hour. To Chase Willard it was more. Much more. For Willard it was a third strike that meant a life slam […]
The afternoon heat bounced off the faded brick building. Air conditioners dangled from shallow windows shielded by grizzled blinds. He sat on a bench, twirling a cigarette between his fingers, watching tourists ooze along the street. The tangy scent of sunscreen tainted with baked rubbish drifted on the air.
A young kid approached him. “Hey, can I bum a cigarette off you?”
“Sorry kid. This is my last.”
“Yeah, whatever.” The kid flipped him the bird and sauntered off.
He tucked the cigarette inside his shirt pocket, his fingers grazing the hard steel of his gun. It might be a while before Charlene returned. He went to a small bistro and sat on the patio with a cold beer. The liquid soothed his throat, chasing away the desire for a smoke. He watched a slim woman in red stroll by – something about the way she moved looked familiar. Charlene’s face replaced her image reminding him he still had some business to finish.
It was close to sunset when she appeared, strutting down the narrow sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, the scent of stale wine trailing behind her. He spotted a satisfied smile on her face and pitied the poor schmuck whose bank account was now empty in the wake of her existence.
