Smitty and me had a big score planned on Friday. We’re spending Wednesday afternoon nursing beers at The Seven Mile House on Old Bayshore. Just passing time, trying to keep from getting too edgy. Smitty tended to be a little quick on the trigger. He had a habit of throwing a little lead around. Said […]
I didn’t know my Daddy very well but that’s not to say I didn’t know plenty about him. None of what I knew was good. Oftentimes there wasn’t enough to eat. He made damn sure though that he always had enough to drink. He would come home after I was in bed. He would be […]
Tommy Miles was decent, decent but not good. Not nearly as good as he thought he was. He was a light heavy with a record of 16-4. The wins came mostly against washed up palookas or kids who had just turned pro. The losses were against guys with .500 records. He had never fought anyone of note. He was destined to become nothing but another tomato can.
His trainer told him about a fight in Oregon. Tommy envisioned The Civic in Portland. It was actually at an Indian casino in Klamath Falls. But it was an eight round main event with a ten thousand dollar purse. His opponent would be a kid from Yakima named Hector Chavez who had won the Washington Gold Gloves and was 5-0 as a pro, his five early round knockouts stamping him as an up and comer.
Don’t ask. Don’t, because I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that killing two junkies in a Tucson alley for the cash they had just gotten from cashing some paltry government check wasn’t worth the needle ride it might cost us. Jimmy and me must have been stupid. It was the kind of thing that always happened when we took a couple of downs mixed with a forty or two.
Now here we were, in a silver Lexus that was hotter than a Hooters waitress driving through the middle of Wyoming, two tatted up hoods with greasy hair and nerves all jangly from the speed that’s kept us going for the last twenty four hours. We stopped in Scottsdale and again in Santa Fe to switch plates that we stole from similar cars. But I ain’t seen a Lexus in the last 500 miles. Might as well of been riding camels down this interstate.
Today we launch the third volume of the Both Barrels series with Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded. Featuring 25 stories by: Available in paperback and Kindle editions. Buy your copy today!
Martin Chambers had been happily married nearly twenty- five years. He was still very much in love with his wife Rebecca. He found her to be even more beautiful than the day they met. Their anniversary was just weeks away and they were planning a trip to Hawaii. They had never had children but enjoyed each other and the life they shared.
There had been no other women since they exchanged vows but there had been plenty beforehand. As the years passed, Martin found he thought of them more infrequently with every day that went by. Sometimes, when he could not sleep, he would try to count them – much like others might count sheep. The count never seemed right though. It seemed as if with the passage of time there were becoming more of them that he could not remember. He seldom counted past fifty. He knew for a fact there were many more than that.
Mike Grabow lived in the kind of neighborhood where some houses sported Christmas lights strung like cheerful beacons that never came down. But from busted appliances littering front yards to dead automobiles that leaked oil and other fluids onto soiled driveways, it wouldn’t appear that there was ever much to celebrate. Grabow was drinking hard […]
Early in that summer of 1905 we came west on a train, Ma, Pa, my sister Pearl and me. Pa worked as a clerk at my grandpa’s store in Ohio. He said he wasn’t ever going to get anywhere being a store keeper. Ma said he was just restless by nature. That he was a […]
It wasn’t the kind of place we would normally go into. But we were out for an evening and neither one of was ready to call it a night. The truth of the matter was Trish and me weren’t getting along all that well. Dinner had been a little tense and neither one of us […]
For weeks on end it had been hotter than Billy be damned. Heat lie on the parched, arid land like a wool blanket that could not be kicked off. Before noon each day, the sky turned a flat white, the sun becoming an unblinking eye of fire. There were no clouds, not a breath of […]
When I found Skeeter Hyland he was a fuckin’ mess. Chucky Nuts found him before I did. All I was supposed to do was break a bone or two. Chucky had done more than that and now I would have to find Chucky. Shit, I didn’t relish that thought. I was liable to end up […]
