Pattern of Behavior

by Paul Bishop

  “Bruised and banged up,” Holt said. “But he’ll be home in a few hours.”

  “The girl?”

  “DOA,” Savage said, removing his glasses. “When the car hit the tree, she flew over the passenger seat and crashed headfirst through the windshield.”

  Tony’s face turned pale, his mouth hanging open. He choked, swallowed, said, “I don’t under...I mean, what was it all about?”

  “Her name was Betty Gavilan,” Savage said, putting his glasses back on, flipping to the beginning of the folder. “Her family says she’d just dumped the prince you tangled with. He probably wanted her to change her mind.”

  Tony stared at his shaking hands, his stomach turning over. He felt sick.

  “There’s nothing more you could have done,” Holt said. He gave Tony’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze and patted his back. “Sometimes we have to settle for what we get, but it’s always a win when we go home alive.”

  Tony nodded. “I guess so.”

  Black Cherry

  Nicole Nelson-Hicks

  I have always enjoyed the company of people who are funny, intelligent, and a bit perverted. My favorite whack-job writer, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, is a rock star in all three of those demographics. She has been pronounced the unholy lovechild of Flannery O'Connor and H.P. Lovecraft, a designation she wears with pride. Jake Istenhegyi, the hero of her Accidental Detective series, is as one of a kind as she is. He’ll make you laugh until you cry, then scare you half to death. I knew Nikki would bring her trademark fiendish twists to a story for this anthology, and she delivered a killer…

  Black Cherry

  It was August, the hottest damn summer on record for the past hundred years. I’m sure you remember it. Every day there was something in the news about a forgotten kid who got broiled in the backseat of a van, or Grandma in Texas baking in her recliner because the rolling blackouts cut off her air conditioner. That summer, civilization was melting around our ears.

  Maybe it was the heat of that summer that spurred the idea. Maybe it was seeing Fontana at all my favorite haunts, dancing and laughing while her husband rotted in his grave. Or maybe it was like my momma always said, “Mick, I’ll never have to worry about you. All a person has to do is look in your eyes and see that you don’t give a shit.”

  It wasn’t like that for Fontana’s dead husband—Ronald, my younger brother. Where I was tough, he was soft. Where I was bold, he was meek. I was in and out of jail while he went to college and stayed clean. We fit each like yin and yang. I was also the bastard who introduced him to Fontana.

  Looking back, I guess I should’ve known better. Ronald dropped dead in love with her as soon as he laid eyes on her. She had gallons of curly hair piled on top of her head, with ringlets falling down her back like a dirty blonde stream. She poured sparkly blue eye shadow on her eyelids, and painted her lips so red they stained her teeth. Her laughter bounced off the walls as she slapped the back of her latest mark while he poured her more beer.

  I still don’t know what Ronald saw in her. She ignored him at first, so he upped his game and started sending her roses. Finally, she relented, and he took her to a restaurant with linen napkins and crystal glasses. Before Ronald, the best Fontana had ever gotten on a date was french fries and a free beer before going down on somebody behind Dirty Dick’s Bar & Grill. I know this to be true because I wasn’t the only one to go through my share of fries with her, if you get my drift. They got married six weeks after that first date. I was the best man. It was as awkward as it sounds.

  Ronald did something in computers—programming, writing software, or some damned technical thing. Whatever it was, he made a serious chunk of green. He needed every penny to keep the new Mrs. Fontana Montresor happy. When Fontana asked for a McMansion in Brentwood, she got it. When she asked for an Escalade with a special paint job to match the color of her favorite fingernail polish, she got it. His money ran through those painted claws like water. Ronald near crippled himself working harder and harder to make sure the well never ran dry.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Fontana was still a bar hag, no matter what her new mailing address read. She added new vices to her closet: cocaine, meth, and a little pot—hydro, the best on the market—all designed to take off the edge. Ronald never knew a thing. I’ll believe that to the day I die. Two years into the marriage and his eyes were that closed.

  To pay off her dealer, a nasty Spic known as Big Bird, Fontana started dealing. She did good business in Brentwood and Belle Meade. All those socialite bitches liked to pretend they were still hip enough to play in the hood as long as they could stay inside the safety of their tree-lined cul-de-sacs.

  Things might’ve gone fine except one of the stupid bitches’ kids found mommy’s special stash and overdosed. Mommy rolled on Fontana like a mutt scratching his back on hot asphalt.

  Ronald took the punch. Mommy started a crusade, enlisted all her friends in high places, and they crucified him. They ran editorials in the paper, and the worthless vultures who call themselves news reporters played the brat’s funeral over and over on TV. Ronald didn’t have a chance. His company fired him. The IRS did a surprise audit and froze his bank accounts. The concerned parents of Brentwood picketed his house and threw eggs at his windows.

  After being granted immunity, Fontana turned witness for the prosecution. She pulled the abused wife defense—Ronald was so far in debt and, you know, he could get so angry sometimes.

  I nearly puked.

  Ronald got sixty years. He served eighteen months before dying of a heart attack. He was thirty-nine years old, for shit’s sake. How does a thirty-nine-year-old man have a heart attack? I’ll fucking tell you in one word—Fontana. That bitch ripped his heart out and stomped on it.

  At his funeral, I remember the look in my mother’s eyes. She kept staring at her son, the good one, the one with a future, now lying stiff in a box. Then she’d look at me—the drug-dealing felon with more tattoos carved in his skin than real teeth left in his head. In a world where God sits in His Heaven with Baby Jesus on his knee, she couldn’t understand why it was Ronald in that box instead of me.

  When they put Ronald in the ground, I saw her eyes dim with each clump of dirt they shoveled into the hole. She never smiled again. Her box garden went untended and withered. Sometimes I would catch her staring at me with those dead headlights in her skull, and knew she hated me. Every day, my upright and breathing presence reminded her there was no God, or if He was there, he didn’t give a rat’s cold ass about what happened to the likes of us. I’m only telling you this so you can understand why I had to do what I did. Shit, that’s not it. I want you to know why I wanted to do what I did.

  I found Fontana one night at the Rutherford County Fair.

  Perhaps you are only familiar with fairgrounds during daylight hours. During the day, the sun bakes the asphalt, and the air smells of cotton candy, funnel cakes, and popcorn. Most of the people walking around are either Mommies and Daddies trying to reach some sort of Rockwellian high with their kids, or FHA kids looking to show off their prize heifer—the moon-eyed, shitting hunk of beef they’ve raised since it was a calf—and sell it to the highest bidder for hamburger.

  At night, the fair takes on a new vibe. The heat from the day remains trapped in the tortured midway. There are screams from the rides that twist and meld with their swinging, turning, and churning lights as they toss the food in their bellies around and around. The smells filling your nose at night are a salad of grease, vomit, and the sweet undercurrent of ganja.

  At night is when the throwaways, the rejects, and the stupid come out to play. That was when I found Fontana. She was puking into a trash can.

  The years had not been so good on her. She was thin and wasted. The colored lights played up the hollow of her sunken cheeks. She was a shadow of the blonde who had married my brother. I almost turned away, I swear. I thought maybe God or whatever else the fuck is out there was doing the job for me. However slowly, justice was be
ing served, right?

  Then she saw me. She looked into my eyes and said, “Looky, looky here, it’s Mickey Montresor.” She stumbled over and wrapped her arms around my waist. I could smell the vomit on her breath. “Give your sister a hug!”

  She cupped my balls. I swear to God, she grabbed my cock.

  That was when something inside me broke. That last little piece of...I don’t know what to call it. Compassion? Hope? Goodness? I felt it snap as soon as she squeezed my nut sack.

  Fuck it. God works too slowly.

  I pulled away from her. “Fontana! Hey, girl, can you do me a solid? You know where I can find Rhonda Zidanka?”

  “Rhonda? What do you want her for?” She smiled with yellow-gray teeth and walked her fingers up my chest. “I’m here. I used to be enough for you.”

  “It’s not that, girl.” I pushed her hands down. “A certain, ya know, business opportunity has come my way. I heard she was the one with the game this side of town.”

  “What sort of game?”

  I looked around and spoke softly. “I got a cone of hydro I want her to test before I fork over more money. Can’t trust spics. They might’ve cut it with some homegrown shit. I hear she’s got a nose for the good stuff.”

  Fontana laughed and snorted. “Rhonda? That bitch wouldn’t know hydro from the shit her uncle grows behind his shed. Fuck, Mickey, why didn’t you just come to me? You know I got links.”

  “I don’t like to twist business with family, Fontana.”

  “You see a ring on this finger?” She wiggled her leathery, bony hands in my face. “I sold that piece of shit months ago. A girl has to live, ya know? Let it go and move on. We got no problem doing business. Let me see your shit.”

  “Not here.”

  She smiled and wrapped her arms around me, grabbing my ass. “Let’s go to my car. I got some happy juice in the back.” She raked my ass with her stiff fingernails. “We’ll seal this deal in style.”

  We left the fairgrounds the back way, behind the tents with the screaming barkers and the lights of the swirling rides, staying to the dark routes known only by carnies and stray cats. She led me, laughing all the way, to her car. Please remember. I almost left.

  “Here it is, lover.” She ran her hands over the hood of her Cadillac Escalade before giving it a sloppy kiss. “This is my pretty baby. I like to park her way out here in Bumfuck, Egypt so she won’t get scratched. She’s all I got left.” She flashed her long fingernails. “See? It’s the same color as my nails. Black cherry. It looks like regular old black here in the dark, but when the sun hits it, the cherry just smacks you in the face.” She laughed so hard at her own joke, she almost fell.

  I caught her and she patted my face. “Always a good boy, ain’t you, Mickey? You always there to save a girl in distress.”

  I helped her to her feet. “Business first.”

  “Right, right.” She pulled a fuzzy bunny keychain out of her purse and I heard two chirps as she unlocked the doors. “Get in the back,” she said. “I sold the two middle seats for some blow. All I got back there now is the long bench seat.” She smacked my ass as I climbed in. “Good for snuggling.”

  Beer cans, candy wrappers, and dirty laundry covered the floorboard. I kicked them aside as I found a place to sit. It had black leather seats. They had probably been very nice before all the pizza and booze and God only knows what else caked into them. Fontana climbed in behind me.

  “Excuse the mess,” she said, starting to throw trash out the open door. “It’s Juanita’s day off.”

  She closed the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Let me find the button. Here it is.” She pressed whatever she’d found, and the overhead console reading lamps came on. “And then there was light!” She giggled.

  “It’s kind of stuffy in here,” I said. “How about you roll down the windows?”

  “I love a man who knows what he wants,” she said.

  The windows came down with a whispered hush. I heard snippets of screams from people riding the roller coaster in chorus with the crickets. I leaned against the open window and breathed in the hot, heavy-air deeply, like a drowning man who had broken through the water’s edge for the first time. I love the heat of summer in Tennessee. The entire state is like a sweat lodge. Stepping outside, your body begins to bleed sweat, cleansing you, bringing all that shit to the surface to either evaporate or cling to you like a stain.

  Fontana crawled into the back with me and slowly squeezed my crotch. “Don’t fall asleep on me, lover.”

  “Business first,” I said. She smiled with those horrible grimy teeth as I pushed her hand away. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a baggie. Inside was a cone of pure hydro, good shit, the best. I know because it’s my own blend.

  She took the baggie, opened it, and took a long sniff, as if she had any idea what she was doing. “Oh, shit, yes! Mickey, this is the shit! But can’t know sure, you know, unless I...until we test it. Got some papers?”

  “Way ahead of you, darling.” I pulled out another baggie with two joints already rolled.

  She clapped and squealed like a little girl finding a Shetland pony under the Christmas tree. “I got something to bring to the party, too!” She reached under my seat, her face nestling right into my junk. She pulled out a plastic carton filled with bottles of booze. There was vodka, gin, whiskey, a six-pack of Pabst, and some white lightning in a mason jar.

  “Damn, girl,” I said. “You know how to host!”

  As she fired up the first joint, the fair’s midnight fireworks show cracked open the sky with thunder and flashed the clouds with streaks of red and blue and green. Fontana took a deep toke and held it, her dull blue eyes staring up at the fireworks. She exhaled and fell over into my lap. “Good shit.”

  “As good as the stuff you used to sell?”

  She smiled slyly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s right. I keep forgetting it was my baby brother, a man who wouldn’t know a hydro from oregano, who was the brains. It keeps slipping my fucking mind.”

  “Shit! Did you have to bring him up? Damn, buzz-kill.” She took another toke and held it. “Damn!” her voice was high and squeaky as she fought not to exhale. “It’s so freaking hot!” She took off her t-shirt. She had a fine rack, the best tits Belle Meade plastic surgery could offer. They hung like bloated melons on her wasted frame. Still, there was something odd about them, something new.

  “Damn, girl! What are those things? Propellers?”

  She exhaled and held up her tits and pinched the tiny rotary blades that pierced each nipple. “It’s the newest thing. The guy at the tattoo studio called them Titty Twisters. Want a pull? First time is free.”

  I shook my head.

  She leaned back and took another toke. “Your loss.” She exhaled with a grimace. “You were never shy before. What happened? Didn’t turn queer, did you?”

  “No.” I took a beer. It tasted like hot, foamy piss. “Just like to keep outside business separate from my personal business.”

  “Thank God.” She took a deep drag and burned down the joint. She held it in, making sharp yipping sounds before letting the smoke roll out of her mouth like a white fog. “I always knew I married the wrong fucking brother.”

  In the next seven hours, Fontana consumed both bottles of vodka, half the whiskey, two swigs of white lightning, smoked both joints to the nubs, and popped two white pills she took from her back pocket. I confined myself to the piss-poor beer. She had her head in my lap, humming and smiling up into my face. Her eyes were closed. I doubt she even knew it. “Wanna me to blow you?” she slurred.

  I stroked her hair. She’d had such pretty hair a long time ago. Now, it was stiff and dry, like corn husk. “No. I think I’m done here.” I moved, letting her head fall onto the soft leather car seat. I got into the driver’s seat, She had left the keys.

  “Where you be...lover?” she mumbled from the back.

  I took the keys out
of the ignition. I heard her snoring. I closed the back windows first, and then the front. I used my shirt to wipe down the steering wheel. I wiped off the keys and dropped them on the floorboard. I took my beer cans and put them in a sack I found among the trash. I located my baggies and stuffed them in my front pocket. I thought about wiping down the seat but decided it would be pointless. How many other sets of prints were back there? Besides, by the time they found her, I doubt anybody was going to want to dust.

  I closed the door, using my shirt as a mitt, and left her in the back seat. The sun’s heat had already burned away the morning dew. I looked up into the cloudless azure-blue sky. It was going to be a hot one. Scorching.

  I finally got to see the paint job she’s been crowing about. She hadn’t lied. When the sunlight hit it, the cherry color sparkled within the darkness. It was like a deep purple-red bruise. The color of a split over-ripe black cherry.

  It suited her.

  No Confession Required

  L.J. Martin

  The first time I met L.J. Martin, it was like reconnecting with a long-lost friend. L.J. is the consummate professional writer, a storyteller able to turn his hand to any genre. His novels are rife with action, but it is his characters and the moral dilemmas they face that stay with you long after the last page is turned. L.J. flexes his writing muscles again for the following story...

  No Confession Required

  I check my iPhone for the time and activate the record feature. I doubt if I’ll need proof of the conversation, but if the phone is found, some clever police forensics dude may be able to figure out how I was whacked and by whom.

  I’ve given myself an absolute twenty-minute time limit. In and out, and back in the van with the goods.

  “Mornin’, Father,” an old black gardener says, looking up from his knees in the flower bed, tipping his wide-brimmed straw hat. His hair and whisker stubble are pure white and soften a face lined deeply—a dusky bean-brown peach pit. He quickly cuts watery eyes down, going back to work with a short grub hoe. I wonder if real priests would presume, as I do, that he has a great deal to confess. But then again, maybe a couple of centuries of being at the bottom of the food chain in the Deep South keeps one’s eyes lowered. Even if so, even if he carries the sins of the South on his drooping shoulders and has a list of sins longer than the hoe handle, don’t we all?