Beau Johnson is no stranger to Shotgun Honey with over a dozen short story contributions since 2012. Those same stories have lead to a series of successful collections including or featuring everyone’s favorite axe-wielding anti-hero Bishop Rider. The axe has been passed in his newest book, The Abrum Files. Let’s find out how Beau Johnson […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: “New Dawn” was first published May 4, 2023. This Flash Fiction Rewind is in celebration of Beau Johnson’s new bestselling release The Abrum Files: A Bishop Rider Book. Follow along this week to read bits of Bishop Rider from the Shotgun Honey archives. I tell him I was a child when my father […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Smaller Fries” was first published November 11, 2019. This Flash Fiction Rewind is in celebration of Beau Johnson’s new bestselling release The Abrum Files: A Bishop Rider Book. Follow along this week to read bits of Bishop Rider from the Shotgun Honey archives. As I believed it would, Culver erupts in response to […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Patience and Rage” was first published January 28, 2019. This Flash Fiction Rewind is in celebration of Beau Johnson’s new bestselling release The Abrum Files: A Bishop Rider Book. Follow along this week to read bits of Bishop Rider from the Shotgun Honey archives. Nikki’s Roadhouse. Off a dusty stretch of blacktop between […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Humble Beginnings” was first published May 17, 2021. This Flash Fiction Rewind is in celebration of Beau Johnson’s new bestselling release The Abrum Files: A Bishop Rider Book. Follow along this week to read bits of Bishop Rider from the Shotgun Honey archives. “You right-handed or left-handed?” He looks to me, up from […]
The first thing you smell is piss. Next, and by extension, you realize it’s yours. The room, you think, is a basement. It seems like a basement. Overhead fluorescents. Concrete floor that gives way to dirt and rebar in places. To your left are worktables and benches lined up at angles and upon which sit […]
There are truths to this world. Most are what they should be: universal. Others, however, can be circumvented, allowing men like me to not only flourish, but thrive. It means the list of names we pull from McDonough and a bent cop named Stout works better than I’d hoped. Not perfect by any means, as […]
Look, I’m not going to sugar coat things. These overhead lights, Danny, this basement, it’s the last place you’re ever going to see. And everything that’s planned, it’s going to happen right over there and you are going to feel every last bit of it before we dump you in that hole. Call it a […]
There actually was a time I favoured more conservative methods when extracting information. Not quite naïve, no, but perhaps less committed as I’d one day become. Either way, once Alex starts up the chainsaw and is a quarter of the way through Benny’s right knee, we’re given the name we’d been looking for. Both arms, […]
Big Ron’s is a ghost town and Junior and I are in a booth at the back. I ask him to put his phone away. To just turn the fucking thing off. Not a day goes by I don’t wish to have that piece of time back. Junior looks up, his face as angular as […]
The table took some doing but the gag, right down to the hooks, color and make, are all his. I tell him how I understand that things aren’t going according to plan, not this far into what he’d been attempting. I go one step further and reveal I’m a fan; that I’d been one for […]
You will never change. I know that now. I mean, of all men, me and you combined, did you really not once envision this playing out as it has? Tough call, agreed, but the look on your face tells me more than you’re willing to admit, I think. S’okay, though: we’re almost to the end of it.
Twenty years is what I gave you Frank. Twenty years without me saying a word. You’d think a thing like that could buy a bloke anything he desired. That silence for freedom could be a pact any sane man could abide. Couldn’t be done though, could it, Frank? Whatever would a man of my skill set do with nothing but time on his hands? Isn’t that what you said that very first day? It was in your Caddy, no? You and your driver idling right outside the gate? For truth, I think this might have been the exact moment I knew we’d end up coming to heads. Not twenty years ago, not when we were the same. And don’t get me wrong, I understand this, how you see things. But I will not accept everything, Frank. Not after how much I have taken for the team. A man changes is what I have been trying to get through to you. Sometimes this is for good, Frank, sometimes for not so good. The man, he changes regardless. Doing so whether you approve of it or not. This is what I feel you fail to appreciate: that a man’s ways can be left behind. You would have none of it though, would you?
Nope. Not one goddamn ounce.
