A-Sides

by Victor Allen

  **********

  The next morning, a still emotionally wrung out Reese forced himself to go to the hospital to talk to Heebie. Heebie hadn’t actually been injured, but his mind, already on the brittle edge, might have fractured. And the cemetery was a crime scene. He couldn’t stay there. And there was Joey Green’s testimony, and the dead girl’s lab results. This thing had to be sorted out before the klaxons and bright lights of the media got their hooks into it.

  Of the principals involved, only Joey Green was left to cobble the wobbly pieces together. He had been picked up after the shootout, emerging from the woods of his uncle’s farm as if the officers who had come to cuff him and toss him into the graybar hotel were his guardian angels.

  He had emerged from the dark badlands with his hands held high, wild eyed and babbling, his face and hands hashmarked by bloody red welts, bug bites, and scratches.

  “It’s Jim Thompson!” he blathered. “He’s crazy! You got to get him! He shot Charlie Loflin! Tried to pick me off! You gotta put me in protective custody!”

  The arresting officers were only too happy to hook and book him. Joey had been interrogated all night.

  And what he said had spurred Reese from bed early in the morning when he should have been taking a week off.

  It had taken a Sam Peckinpah gorefest descending upon his town to force the outside world to take notice of the sleepy little burg. A rape and murder victim, Courtney Barnes, another shooting victim, Charlie Loflin, a deputy murdered in the line of duty, and the suicide by cop of Jim Thompson, staged for the most poetic and dramatic effect at night, in a graveyard, with a mentally challenged caretaker as a hostage. Certainly, had Reese known all of that beforehand, he would have shown up at the cemetery with more than a Kevlar vest and a six-shooter.

  Reese drove by the cemetery. Just outside the gates, three news vans and a dozen or so reporters were being kept at bay by a harried deputy. The red, bullet-scarred Saturn still sat by the shed, its windshield milky where it had shattered into a thousand pieces, two of its tires flat. The yellow crime scene tape stretched across the mouth of the cemetery was a jarring and melancholy grin.

  The county hospital was ten miles away and Reese shooed the attending officer out of Heebie’s room. Reese doffed his hat and sat down heavily.

  “How you doin’, Heebie?”

  “Good, Reese. Good.” Heebie’s eyes sparkled. “I’m a hero, right? I’m gonna get my name in the papers. Those bad guys came back to get me ‘cause I knew what they did and you put ‘em right in jail, didn’t you? Took ‘em right to Galax and put ‘em in the county jail.” Heebie practically beamed. His big, gnarled hands with their leathery tan and caretaker cuts and scrapes looked jarringly out-of-place against the sterile, white sheets.

  “Four people are dead, Heebie,” Reese said as gently as he could. “And I need to know why.”

  “How you mean, Reese?”

  “We picked up Joey Green last night, after the shootout. He claims the girl wasn’t dead when they left her. Certainly not buried. Oh, sure, that scumbag Jim Thompson raped and cut her, and as far as I’m concerned, killing was too good for him. But that cut didn’t kill her.” Reese paused and looked with interest at Heebie’s powerful hands. “Lab says COD was strangulation. So I need to ask you again: how did you know where she was?”

  Heebie took a deep breath through his nose and smiled with his brown teeth.

  “I told you, my friends showed me. I don’t know how they do it, they just do.”

  Moments ticked by in silence. Reese shifted in his chair, a twinkling intelligence in his eyes that belied his usual cornbread and buttermilk grin.

  “I’m thinkin’,” he said, “that if I tested your clothes, and your shovel, and under your fingernails, I’d find the dirt from her burial site, wouldn’t I? ‘Course I would. ‘Cause I took you there. I saw you clawing at her grave. I took your shovel to dig her out. And I had a deputy with me to witness the whole thing.”

  “I remember,” Heebie affirmed. “Left out there like a run over dog in the cold, cold ground.”

  “You think a run over dog is suffering, Heebie,” Reese prodded gently. “Something that needs to be put down?”

  “Don’t you?” Heebie frowned. “What are you gettin’ at, Reese? Ya’ll got me on that electric leash. What you think I could do?”

  “I don’t know, Heebie. I need you to tell me something.”

  “I cain’t tell you what I don’t know,” Heebie said, “but, then, I been crazy all my life. And you know what they say about crazy people.”

  Reese peered at Heebie with a little more interest.

  “What do they say, Heebie?”

  “They say we ain’t all there. But I wonder, do they ever ask where that other part is? I seen it, Reese. Her pain, her fear, the sadness of that poor girl, left there like a torn-up little Pit Bull used up in the ring.”

  Reese looked uncomfortably at the sparkle in Heebie’s eyes. For one of the few times in memory, the lights were on and someone was definitely at home.

  “It was,” Heebie said, “almost like bein’ there.”

  Ruby

  By

  Victor Allen

  Copyright © 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  “He’s the most darling child, Jean. I could just wrap him up and take him home with me.” Ruby beamed down at little three month old Lance, an expression of reverent maternity papered on her painted face. Her real face had been varnished to a fine finish with whore’s rouge, caked mascara ringed around eerily attractive blue eyes, and candy-apple red lipstick. Her thick, black wig, used to cover her wiry red hair, bracketed her cat face and ice pick cheekbones, flooding around the powdered, white skin that looked too parched and needy to cover the angles of her prominent jaw without cracking.

  Jean didn’t like that look at all, thinking it too much like the over effusive grin that a witch in a gingerbread house might offer to children wandering in the forest.

  Lance wailed from his crib, wagging his stubby arms. His face, just now starting to develop strong features, kinked into a pained grimace. Jean picked him up and felt his bottom.

  “Wet,” she announced.

  “Oh, here,” crooned Ruby. She held out her pipe stem arms, as white and spindly as the rest of her. “Let me change him. It’s not often I get to take care of my precious, little boy.”

  “It’s alright,” Jean said curtly. “don’t put yourself to any trouble.”

  Ruby let her arms drop. That greedy, I always get my way look on Ruby’s face fell away. She preserved enough self control not to show her anger except for a brief flash of her eyes, but Jean wasn’t fooled. She knew that sulky, spiteful look from having suffered it for all the years that Ruby was wooed like the prom queen while Jean was treated as an afterthought, like the fat kid always picked last on the playground.

  Ruby recovered quickly, her face shifting to a nonchalant expression meant to put Jean at ease.

  “It’s no trouble,” Ruby crooned. “It must be an awful burden to raise a child. So demanding of your time and energy. I should think you would welcome a break.” She touched a large, tawdrily showy diamond necklace that lay against her black dress like ice on satin. The old, jealous anger flamed alive in Jean’s heart when she saw the expensive jewels on Ruby’s tapered fingers. Those fingers were meant to play the piano or violin, but now they were just convenient posts for costly trinkets. It was no surprise that Ruby had married into money. She had always gotten whatever she wanted when they had been kids. One spiteful stare from those cold, blue eyes and people would breathlessly walk barefoot over broken glass to cater to her.

  “He’s mine, Ruby. I’ll change him.” Jean took an angry, petty delight in the hurt on Ruby’s painted puss, even if that look was only a whisper from hatred. After years of playing Aschenputtel, Jean had something Ruby would never have: not for all the money or melting looks in the world could Ruby have a child.

  Ruby’s lips twi
sted into a snarl, all pretense of a smile gone. Her bared teeth gleamed against her poisonous red lips in savage counterpoint. The tension that always built between the two sisters became heavy, threatening, winding up to spring when the scene became ugly and vicious, as they usually did.

  “You’ll never let that go, will you? You’ve always hated me because I’ve got everything you’ll never have, but you’ve always got that particular knife in hand, ready to stab me in the back and twist the blade.” Ruby’s burning eyes could have set the world on fire as she glared at Jean.

  “Just remember that I can always get what I want, and if I want the only worthwhile thing you’ve ever done in your shitty little life, I’ll have it. You don’t deserve that baby. You couldn’t even hold his father, could you? Out the door before Lance was even born. Lance should be in a home where he can have the best things, not this-” Ruby raised her arms expansively at the small, cluttered room “….this hole. But you’re that bitter and selfish, aren’t you. You’d rather let him grow up in squalor and filth. You would….”

  “Get out of my house!” Jean shrieked. “You’re a whore and always have been. I would cut my own wrists before I let you have my baby! If you ever try to take Lance from me, you’ll never draw another painless breath!”

  Ruby matched the fury in Jean’s eyes with her own icy glare.

  “No need to get nasty, Jean. I’m leaving.”

  She bundled herself into an expensive leather coat and draped her purse over her arm. A cold January wind blew in when Ruby opened the door, bringing in a few flakes of snow that settled dreamily on the threadbare carpet before melting.

  “Just know this, Jean. Being a whore has its advantages. No matter what it takes, I get what I want.”

  “Get out!” Jean screamed, her vocal cords seizing in pain as they strained. The small, porcelain figurine that she had thrown smashed against the door just as Ruby closed it behind her.