Trouble & Strife

by Simon Wood

  TROUBLE & STRIFE

  Killer Crime Stories Inspired by Cockney Rhyming Slang

  Edited by Simon Wood

  Collection Copyright © 2019 by Simon Wood

  Individual Story Copyrights © 2019 by Respective Authors

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Zac McCain

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Simon Wood

  Babbling Brook

  Steve Brewer

  Bunsen Burner

  Angel Luis Colón

  Dicky Dirt

  Johnny Shaw

  Mr. Kipper

  Paul Finch

  Half Inch

  Jay Stringer

  Barnet Fair

  Catriona McPherson

  Tea Leaf

  Susanna Calkins

  Lee Marvin

  Travis Richardson

  Trouble And Strife

  Colin Campbell

  Lady from Bristol

  Sam Wiebe

  Pleasure and Pain

  Robert Dugoni

  About the Contributors

  Preview from The Dead Don’t Sleep by Steven Max Russo

  Preview from Skunk Train by Joe Clifford

  Preview from Encrypting Maya by Lawrence Kelter

  Introduction

  I love colorful language. The sheer creativity of subverting our day to day speech is something I enjoy. That’s the essence of slang. Every culture uses slang where people throw away the formality of language to convey an emotion or a situation in a succinct phrase. In my opinion, no other slang form is more enjoyable than Cockney rhyming slang where rhyme is incorporated.

  So what is Cockney rhyming slang? It’s essentially a code. You take a word, replace that word with a word that rhymes with it, then turn it into a phrase.

  Example: the word ‘Look.’ Look rhymes ‘hook.’ Turn ‘hook’ into a phrase and you get ‘butcher’s hook.’ Butcher’s hook is a classic cockney rhyming slang for look.

  Other classic rhyming slang phrases include:

  Dog and bone…meaning phone.

  Holy water…meaning daughter.

  Plates of meat…meaning feet.

  Sky rocket…meaning pocket.

  If you’re really clever with your rhyming slang, it can be an ironic phrase for the original word, like with ‘Trouble and strife’ which is rhyming slang for ‘wife.’

  Now the fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no! Invariably, to incorporate your rhyming slang into a sentence, you would drop the rhyming word and just say Butcher’s instead of Butcher’s Hook. So if someone said to you, “Give me a Butcher’s?” then the person would be asking to have a look at something in your possession.

  So what are the origins of Cockney rhyming slang? It originated out of London’s East End in the mid-1900s and was supposedly used by criminals to prevent undercover cops from listening in on their conversations. Like many things in British culture, that explanation has been disputed. While there are several other similar explanations, none seem definitive. The only concrete information is when, where and by whom.

  Cockney rhyming slang still flourishes over a hundred and fifty years later. It’s no longer restricted to a particular enclave of London. It’s part of the national lexicon with regional differences and the incorporation of modern references have superseded many traditional phrases, such as ‘Chevy Chase’ overtaking ‘Boat race’ for meaning ‘face.’

  The thing I love about Cockney rhyming slang is that the phrases paint colorful pictures. My favorite rhyming slang is the ‘Gypsy’s Kiss.” That creates such an imaginative visual of the story behind those two evocative words…although we should ignore that it’s actually slang for ‘piss.’ It was the evocativeness of Cockney rhyming slang that I wanted to use for this anthology. I wanted these colorful phrases to inspire the contributors to come up with a story. I chose writers from both the US and the UK to exploit their familiarity and unfamiliarity with the rhyming slang.

  To see what they came up with, turn the page and have a butcher’s.

  Simon Wood

  El Sobrante, CA

  January 2019

  Back to TOC

  Babbling Brook

  Inspired by the Rhyming Slang for Crook

  Steve Brewer

  “I’ve always had the gift of gab,” Sammy Kelso said. “That’s why they assign the new guys to bunk in here with me. I’m the Welcome Wagon for the state penitentiary.”

  Sammy laughed, but he couldn’t tell whether his new cellmate joined in. They were in their bunks, Sammy staring up at the underside of the steel shelf that served as the new guy’s bed. Past lights out, but it was never completely dark in the cell. Always some light filtering in from the corridor, where guards strolled the night away.

  “Judging from the ink on your arms,” Sammy said, “you’ve been inside before. This prison works pretty much like all the others, but I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.”

  He paused, but no sound came from the top bunk. Sammy wondered whether his cellmate had drifted off. It took a minute to remember the new guy’s name, but then it came to him.

  “Jesse?” he whispered. “You awake?”

  The new guy grunted.

  “I can stop talking if you’re ready to sleep.”

  “No,” Jesse said. “Go ahead.”

  Sammy thought he’d better clear the air right away. Before this young man got the wrong idea.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m a big talker, but you should know I never talk to the authorities. Some places, they bunk a new guy with a snitch. But it’s not like that here. Anything we say is just between the two of us.”

  “Good.”

  “So you can speak freely,” Sammy said. “I find that it’s not talkative people you have to worry about. It’s the quiet ones, the ones who are always listening and judging. Those are the ones who will stab you in the back.”

  “Hmm.”

  “There are exceptions, of course, especially when it comes to women. A chatty redhead is the reason I’ve been inside the past fifteen years.”

  The new guy said nothing, but Sammy needed no prompting.

  “Most species of rat—your snitches, your undercover operatives—are the quiet type. They keep their ears open and their mouths shut. But not this woman. She never stopped talking. She couldn’t help it. For her, talking was a nervous disorder, a twitch.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “Anything,” Sammy said. “Everything. A song she heard on the radio. Some show she watched on TV. Celebrity gossip. Stories about her friends and their friends. It never stopped. Her name was Brook, so we called her Babbling Brook.”

  “To her face?”

  “No, man, that would’ve been rude. Whenever she wasn’t around. She was dating one of the guys in my crew, though, so she was kinda always around.”

  “And she was a rat?”

  “Worse,” Sammy said. “She was an undercove
r cop.”

  “Oof. You never suspected her?”

  “Not for a minute,” Sammy said. “I was on alert for the quiet types like her boyfriend. Kinda shy, always hanging back. That’s probably why it was easy for her to sink her claws into him. The guy’s shy, he’s lonely, and here’s this chatty babe who’s his exact opposite.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Rocky. A nickname from when he was a kid, but he never grew into it. He was kinda skinny and nerdy. Wore glasses.”

  “Was he a cop, too?”

  “No, no. Just a lovelorn sap.”

  Jesse snorted.

  “We were planning this great heist,” Sammy said. “Rocky was supposed to handle the electronics—your burglar alarms, your surveillance cameras, what have you. I didn’t really know him, but the other guy in the crew, Nick, vouched for him and I’d known Nick since high school. We met in shop class, both of us making zip-guns instead of the assigned project.”

  Sammy laughed at the memory from forty years ago. Young Jesse didn’t seem like much of a laugher. But he wasn’t snoring, either, so Sammy told him the rest of the well-worn story.

  “We’d gotten word of a sweet setup at the recycling plant west of Albuquerque, out in the desert.”

  “Recycling?”

  “It’s where the garbage trucks take everything from the blue recycling bins—your aluminum and your plastics and every kind of paper. The trucks dump it in this huge yard, where it gets sorted by people and by this conveyor system that uses magnets to separate out the metals—”

  “You robbed a trash place?”

  “I was skeptical, too, at first. But the more Nick told us about it, the more it looked like a big haul if we hit ’em on payday. Most people who work as sorters are homeless or they’re fresh out of jail. They don’t have bank accounts, so they’re paid in cash.”

  “Ah.”

  “The recycling company kept the payroll in a safe overnight. They also used the safe to hold anything valuable the sorters turned up in the trash, from rare metals to gold teeth.”

  Sammy paused to catch his breath.

  “We spent three weeks studying the place, figuring out their routines and where the payroll was kept. We stayed in this rental house on the west side, poring over maps and making plans. The whole time, Babbling Brook hung around the fringes, making drinks, yakking her head off. More than once, I had to go for a walk around the neighborhood to hear myself think.”

  “Why didn’t you make her stay away?”

  “Exactly what we should’ve done,” Sammy said. “But it was awkward, with her being Rocky’s new girl. And she acted like our heist plans were fascinating, batting her eyes and tossing her red hair, so we all were guilty of telling her too much. You know how men are. Women make us soft in the head.”

  “Been there,” Jesse said.

  “Anyway, the day of the heist, she shows up at the recycling plant with Rocky.”

  “You didn’t know she’d be there?”

  “No! Rocky was in the lead vehicle, arriving right at dawn. As soon as he disabled the alarms and got the front gate open, he sent us a text and we came roaring up the gravel road in a van. We were already inside the fence before we saw her sitting in Rocky’s car.

  “Me and Nick nearly shat ourselves, but it was too late to turn back. We tied up the security guard and broke into the office, which was a little mobile home landscaped to look like a real building. The safe was bolted to the wall, but it’s a trailer, so the wall’s only about three inches thick.

  “Nick had a portable cutting torch, and he started cutting the wall around the safe. We were going to pop it out of the exterior wall and put it in the van and drive away. We figured we could take our time cracking the safe once we got away from there.”

  “Good plan,” Jesse said.

  “Except for the cop in our midst. While we were busy prying that safe out of the wall, Babbling Brook was calling in the cavalry. By the time we got it loaded into the van, four police cars were zooming up the road.”

  He fell silent as a guard passed in the corridor, heels thudding on the tile floor. Once the sound faded away, Sammy said, “Nick wanted to make a break for it, but Brook drew down on him with this little pistol. Said she was the police and we were all under arrest.”

  “Bold.”

  “I know, right? Three against one.”

  “She had reinforcements coming.”

  “Yeah, but still. Nick was having none of it. He pulled a pistol out of his belt and they started shooting at each other. Brook hit Nick a couple of times, but they were small-caliber bullets and they barely staggered a big guy like him. Meanwhile, he was blasting away with a .45. Shot her right in her pretty face.”

  A long silence, then Jesse said, “What did you do?”

  “I froze. I was so surprised, I couldn’t process the whole thing. First, there’s a woman at the job who’s not supposed to be there. Next thing you know, she’s a cop and she’s shooting at Nick. Then she’s dead and the sirens are getting close.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Rocky was pretty upset with Nick for shooting his girlfriend, even if she had turned out to be a rat. He pulled out a pistol, too, though he seemed to be in a daze. He pointed it at Nick like his arm was moving on its own accord.

  “I said, ‘No, no, no,’ but it was too late. He and Nick both pulled their triggers. It was like the guns went ‘bang’ right together. They both went down, dying. And there I stood, in shock, as the cops surrounded us.”

  “Last man standing,” Jesse said.

  “I never pulled my piece out of my pocket, but they treated me like a cop killer. I’ll never see the outside world again. Not in this lifetime.”

  The men chewed on that for a minute, then Jesse said, “They held you responsible.”

  “That’s what they said,” Sammy said. “But I was there for a simple robbery. The shooting took me by surprise. And it was over in less than a minute.”

  “A minute that changed everything.”

  “You got that right.”

  Another silence. Sammy was beginning to think his new cellmate had finally dozed off when Jesse said, “I knew I’d hear this story someday, from your own lips.”

  “What’s that?” Sammy leaned out a little, squinting, but he couldn’t see the man in the upper bunk.

  “Everybody on the inside knows the story,” Jesse said. “You’ve been telling it for fifteen years.”

  “It was the pivotal moment in my life. It’s bound to come up in conversation.”

  Sammy snaked a hand inside his orange jumpsuit and scratched his chest. The scar from an old knife wound often itched and tingled, though it had healed a decade ago.

  “I had a moment like that, too,” Jesse said. “When I was a kid, I lost someone close to me. After that, my life went off the rails. Drugs, booze, shoplifting, the usual. I’ve been in and out of stir since I was fifteen.”

  “So you’re an old hand at—”

  “I know how to work the system. Who to pressure. Who to pay off. You can get what you want if you work it hard enough.”

  “Yeah?” Sammy said. “And what is it that you want?”

  “To be right here. In this cell. At this moment.”

  “Is that some kind of Zen thing? Because I don’t—”

  Jesse suddenly dropped out of the top bunk, soundless as a panther in his bare feet. He leaned in at Sammy, his teeth and eyes gleaming. Sammy tried to scoot away, but he was up against the concrete wall. Jesse lunged at him, stuffing a rolled-up pair of white socks into Sammy’s gaping mouth.

  As Sammy gagged on the dry socks, Jesse punched him twice in the face. Bap, bap. The blows made him see stars. He could feel Jesse’s breath on his face as the younger man pressed him down with his powerful arms.

  “My turning point,” Jesse growled, “was the same one as yours.”

  He wrapped his hands around Sammy’s throa
t.

  “The person I lost? She was my big sister. The one person in the world I could trust. She was a cop. And her name was Brook.”

  Sammy thrashed and bucked, but it had no effect on the angry young man. Meanwhile, Sammy’s right hand scrabbled frantically along the wall, searching the edge of the mattress. He felt close to blacking out, but his fingers finally found the four-inch-long shiv he’d fashioned from a sharpened shard of steel.

  Sammy stabbed blindly at his cellmate, the short blade hitting him in the ribs and the back and the gut. Jesse let go of his throat, but Sammy kept stabbing at him. Hot blood spritzed across the bunk.

  They rolled off onto the concrete floor, Sammy landing on top. He scooped the socks out of his mouth and took a ragged gasp of air as he pinned Jesse to the floor with his full weight.

  Jesse coughed, dark blood staining his teeth. Sammy sank the shiv into the side of his neck, into the soft spot just below his ear, and Jesse went still.

  Sammy caught his breath for a minute before he climbed up to sit on the edge of his blood-spattered bunk. His voice was raspy as he called for a guard.

  A fat sergeant named Hernandez appeared at the door. He shined his flashlight into the cell and the beam roamed over the bloody corpse. He shouted for other guards to call an ambulance, then he opened the cell door.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened, Sammy?”

  “Kid came at me with a shiv. I took it away from him, but he kept fighting me, so I used it on him.”

  “You sure did. He’s not going to need that ambulance.”

  “Stupid punk,” Sammy said. “He thought he’d make a splash on his first night in the pen, show everybody he was tough. He hadn’t counted on running into an old lifer with nothing to lose.”

  Hernandez nodded. They’d seen this sort of Wild West behavior before.

  “You hurt?”