The truck stopped maybe fifty yards away, skewed so it pointed back toward the gate. Zombie Bill and his lieutenant climbed out, Zombie Bill's hands empty of rifles.
I cocked back the hammer on the 9mm. "I'm not messing with you," I said.
Zombie Bill raised his hands, palms out. "Relax, your stuff's in the backseat there. I just got to check. You okay, cuz?"
Another man climbed out of the other side of the truck: bearded, forearms needled with flaming skulls, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He began walking to the right, worrying my flank.
"I'm good," Miller said. "Just get me the hell out of here."
"Why don't you walk him over?" Zombie Bill called out.
"Why don't you call your dog over here off?" I said, turning my head to keep an eye on roving Mister Skull.
Zombie Bill said nothing. Mister Skull kept moving. I realized I'd made a big operational mistake: never box yourself in. Even if I leapt into the abyss to my left, some mining company had drained the water years ago.
So much for keeping things nice and civil, I thought, swiveling my gaze to the cliff that walled one side of the quarry.
The back of Mister Skull's head exploded, followed a quarter-second later by the sound of a gunshot echoing off stone.
Miller, blind and panicked, did a stupid thing. Rocketing from his knees to his feet with surprising quickness, he tried kicking me in the groin. I sidestepped easily, losing my grip on him—and he decided to run away.
Pro tip: When sprinting a 100-meter dash in a quarry, make sure to remove any blindfold first. He plunged over the edge of the hole, his legs bicycling in space, and Zombie Bill's scream of rage couldn't quite drown out the crunch of a hundred-fifty pounds of pervert hitting granite at terminal velocity.
I raised the 9mm and emptied the clip in Zombie Bill's direction, then ran for an inviting patch of rocks a few yards away. A black SUV bounced down a dirt ramp that led from the cliffs, screeching to a halt beside me. Frankie hopped out the passenger side with her .45 pistol stuttering lead.
"We got to stop them," I yelled at her. "They get out of here, I'm screwed." Zombie Bill and his lieutenant had made it inside the truck, which lurched into gear—Frankie's bullets sparking off its bumper—and promptly crashed into the chain-link fence at the edge of the quarry.
Frankie's laughter came deep and ominous as a thundercloud. She raised a hand above her head and snapped her fingers twice. "Monkey Man," she called out.
The rear door of the SUV opened, and out stepped a man in an unmarked blue jumpsuit, his face covered by a cheap rubber chimpanzee mask so large, it shaded his eyes into black holes. He had a long metal tube cradled in his arms.
"You can't be serious," I said.
"That's what I love about you," Frankie said. "You're all upset about your guns and shit, meanwhile I'm buying artillery online."
As the Monkey Man approached, he grasped the ends of the metal tube and pulled, extending it. Stopping beside us, he flicked up a tiny metal sight on the tube's end, placed the hardware on his shoulder, and cocked his head toward Frankie.
"Put your fingers in your ears," she said, and I did as ordered. Monkey Man swiveled, the tube tracking Zombie Bill's truck as it struggled to pull free of the collapsed fence, its rear wheels tangled in wire. Through the windshield, we could see Zombie Bill fumbling with the clip of one of my beautiful rifles, while his lieutenant shrieked and punched the steering wheel.
The Monkey Man pulled the trigger on the underside of the tube, and the air around us exploded. A white plume of death rocketed across the quarry and impacted the rear of the truck, lifting it into the air on a pillar of flame, the doors blasting open to eject burning Bill and the lieutenant. I felt a little sorry for the two of them. Roasted alive is a pretty horrible way to die…but then again, so is overdosing on the crappy drugs Bill sold.
The truck crumpled back to Earth in a shower of sparks. The Monkey Man returned to the SUV, whistling a merry tune, swinging the launcher around like a prop in an old-time musical. While we waited for the flames to die down, Frankie pulled a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes from the back pocket of her jeans, lit one, and puffed with the great satisfaction of someone doing a sinful thing. "How's my niece?" she asked.
"Good," I said. "She loved that castle toy thing you got her."
"Excellent. I hope it gives her ideas about ruling the world." She took another puff, blasted smoke out her nose. "Because our family, it's all about power, you know? Or we're crushed."
"I just find people," I said.
"You're covering my flank on the lawful side," she replied, punching me softly in the shoulder. "But you're just as much a part of this. You know, I spent a year trying to get Bill out of hiding."
"Good thing he just happened to rob me, huh?" I began walking toward the truck, figuring the fire had quieted enough for me to grab my guns before any law showed up.
"Yeah, I figured you wouldn't let him blackmail you." Following in my footsteps, Frankie paused long enough to crush the finished cigarette beneath her heel. "I have a confession."
"Oh, crap."
"I told Rick to tell Bill's people about the guns."
"Damn it, Sis."
"He bought from Bill once a week. It was a calculated risk, okay? I told him when you were going to the movies."
"What'd you give Rick?" I stopped twenty feet away from the truck, glancing once at Bill, who looked like something left on the grill an hour too long. No bullet in the head required after all. The blast had tossed one of my AR-15s onto the nearby ground; the other, as far as I could tell, had merged with the twisted metal that had once been the truck's cab.
"Told him I'd pay to send him to rehab. I figured it'd get you points with your ex."
"Just as long as she doesn't hear about all this." I slung the rifle over my shoulder. "Give me a ride home? I got to cook dinner for my little girl."
"Bro, seriously, it's the least I can do. You just made me queen of this town."
Mercy
by Dale Sandlin
"Never believe what you read in the papers or see on the TV. Don't believe what people tell you. Only trust your own sober eyes and ears and then only as much as you have to."
My dad told me this two days before a crane dropped six tons of Malaysian tin on his head. He was a longshoreman and had worked the hard Oakland docks for twenty years until his own drunken ears fucked him up, leaving him unable to move or speak or laugh or drink. After that, all he could do was lie in his bed, the one eye left in his crushed skull never closing. Waiting for someone (that would be me) to put the yellow drops in his eye, wipe his ass and feed him baby food. My mother died a long time before. I don't remember her.
After Dad came home from the hospital, no one seemed to notice that I wasn't going to school much. Or if they noticed, they understood that if I didn't take care of the old man, someone else would have to. I wasn't very smart anyway and school was hard for me. Always big for my age, the other kids tended to make fun of me most of the time.
Dad's union was good to their word though. They paid for a fat, mean-faced nurse to come to our little apartment over a liquor store in Richmond, a gritty refinery town north of Oakland, and make sure he didn't suffer too much. She gave him hop, dressed his bedsores every other day, then left without saying a word. Once a week the union doctor would come by and look over the old man's curlicue body, cluck his teeth, pat me on the shoulder and say, "Jimmy. I don't think he's got long now."
He didn't know dick. Dad was as strong a man as ever lifted a hook. What the fuck did this guy think? You think any man off the street could take a six-ton shot to the head and live through it? Dad was tough in a way only the real tough ones are. He worked men half his age into the ground, he beat men twice his size to mush, he paid his bills, he drank his gin and he didn't complain about things he couldn't change or understand. The only scrap he ever lost was to booze. Of course, that was until that tin pretty much kicked his ass.
But
he wasn't going anywhere soon, you could count on that. I would get to watch that body made strong by work, become weak and scabby. The eye would never close on its own, and all he would see or know was the gray wall that stood unchanging across from his bed of bloody sheepskin and shit.
Then one day I walked into his room. He was breathing harder than he had been in the morning, which was normal for the old man now. He breathed harder as the day went by because he got madder and madder at his circumstance and his lungs were the only muscles left that he could work. It was raining that day and I could hear the raindrops on the roof something awful, so heavy it drowned out all the other noises. So loud that it felt like me and Dad were somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A strange place. A place so wet and fierce that only the strong, stupid people like us would ever dare to live there.
"Hey Dad," I said. Listening to his breathing pick up again, I looked at his hands curled shut in front of him as he lay on his side. His hands never could open all the way from years of swinging a hook, but now they looked like the two dead birds I had seen once laying in the weeds out behind the liquor store. There was no life in those hands anymore. It didn't take a smart guy to know that.
And even though I was only twelve years old, I thought I must have enough of his strength in me to finish the job. He had raised me not to be afraid of hard work.
So I climbed up on his bed. I straddled his chest and put my hands down on his thick neck. Like I said, I was a big kid but I could barely get my fingers around the front. It felt like iron under leather, my Dad's neck, but I squeezed as hard as I could. I squeezed even after his breathing stopped. I squeezed until stuff started coming out of his ears. When the stuff coming out turned from red to black, I stopped. I didn't like the squeezing, but I wasn't going to go through all this to not kill the old guy. Christ, that would have been really stupid.
I sat in a chair next to the bed after it was finished, working my hands to get some feeling back into them. After some time, the rain stopped and I sat for a long time listening to the water dripping off the roof and windowsills. I began to hear the cars outside driving through the wet streets. The world was coming back to me now.
I heard footsteps on the landing that led up to our apartment. The door to the apartment opened and I could hear the swishing of the nurse's chubby legs coming into the other room. The sound stopped when she reached the doorway of my father's room. For a long moment she was quiet, then starting low and quickly rising to a piercing wail, she began to scream.
I spent six years in different juvie facilities for killing my old man. It made me meaner, and after that, I would wind up back in jail from time to time on various assault beefs. I spent most of my time inside listening to music. I hated jail, but it was easy for a guy like me to get by. I beat people up. I was good at it. After a while, I found that guys would pay me to do that for them.
I was on my way to doing just that when all this started. It may not be a great job but it was all I could find to do. A guy who never had much school and wears three felony collars (one of them for killing his father) isn't exactly executive material. No one will hire a guy like me for anything legal, but when it comes to busting heads and cracking bones, I'm a goddamn craftsman.
I'm no hit man. I'm not smart or stupid enough for that. Not smart enough to get away with it and not stupid enough to think I could. I rough people up for a little spending money is all. Welshers, wife-beaters, two-timers, low-level snitches, stuff like that. For five hundred dollars, I beat the snot out of 'em. For a thousand, I guarantee a hospital stay.
As far as being wrong, well, I suppose I could say that everybody's gotten away with something in their lives that they deserve to get beat up for, and I'm just balancing the ledger. But that's bullshit. Really, I just don't think too much about it.
I was in Jimmy's Tavern two Saturdays ago. Jimmy pays me a few bucks to hang out and discourage bad behavior on weekends. That night, a lady with a short skirt and a long face offered me two hundred cash and maybe a blowjob to drive down towards Firebaugh and beat up her ex. He wasn't paying alimony—and since according to the state he wasn't working, there wasn't much she could do about it.
I said no thanks to the head, but if she could come up with another hundred, I'd slap him around and let him know why I'd done it. I explained, not wanting to hurt her feelings, that it wasn't that she wasn't sexy or anything, but I could count on one hand the number of blowjobs I've had that were worth a hundred dollars—and besides, my rent was due.
She thought about it for a second and said okay. Her ex-husband's name was Del and he worked for under-the-table cash as a cook at a little truck stop called Angie's just off the highway down there.
It was a hot drive down the I-5 down towards the farmlands by Firebaugh. I don't usually mind the heat, it helps me think. It slows things down, if you know what I mean. But this was too hot.
It was October. But it was a late summer and down mile after mile of asphalt I could feel the grass getting dryer and dryer as the summer refused to leave. In the spring, the drive was green and cool. Today, it was brown and full of wind-blown cow shit and hot dust. The freeway connects northern and southern California and cuts right through the San Joaquin Valley, a huge breadbasket of fields and orchards that roll for miles on end on either side of the concrete ribbon.
It smelled bad by Modesto, where a thousand head of dirty cows waited by the freeway for slaughter. Crammed into a barren patch of ground, they sat there wallowing in filth, passing the time counting flies. A barnyard death row. Wonder if any of them ever think of beating the butcher by hopping that little fence and charging an eighteen-wheeler? I would if I were them.
Angie's diner was a good three miles from the exit ramp to Firebaugh. I pulled into the gravel parking lot and right off I could peg the place as a truckers' party pad. About a half-a-dozen rigs were parked there along with a beat-up white pickup truck and two shabby-looking cars. If a regular traveler could find this place, he'd take one look and drive on by. The place reeked of diesel, deep fried food and piss.
It was a shithole made just for men who drove all day and night and wanted to eat, crank up, and get laid before going back on the road. The food would be bad, the beer warm, and the only women here would be burnt-out crank whores.
Worst of all, I told myself as I got out of the car, the music on the jukebox would be shitkicker C&W. I'd rather be in jail.
My work boots crunched the rocks as I walked up to the closed front door. It looked like the AC in the place was working, at least. Sure enough, as I opened the door, a cold blast of air blew in my face and from the jukebox some drunken cousin-raper was singing about how sorry his fuckin' life was. Christ. I made a deal with myself right then to use the money from this job and get my car's tape player fixed. I had a glove compartment filled with Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders tapes and no way to play them. Now I'd have Billy Bob Clint Garth Chicken Choker clogging in my head all day until I got home. This guy Del was already pissing me off.
The place was big on the inside. Too big considering the amount of business this dump would ever do. It was split into two areas. On the right side was the gas station section. A convenience store from hell with a jar of pickles right at the cash register and a CB radio behind the counter catching calls from incoming truckers hunting pussy and the local girls who would provide it for dope. The floorboards were dirty and on the wall hung t-shirts and hats you could buy. Eatin' Ain't Cheatin'! one t-shirt proclaimed, another said Who's Yer Daddy?!
The left side of Angie's was the diner area. Maybe ten booths and a long counter stretched from the front door down to the end of the building. Three truckers sat in one of the booths and another sat at the counter, jabbering away to a busty red-haired waitress, too old and bored to care. At the other end of the counter sat another guy—maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. He was dressed in very dusty jeans and a blue work shirt.
When I walked in, the truckers in the booth had
been laughing about something, but when they spotted me, they stopped. Two of them were younger guys beneath greasy baseball caps. The other was older, bearded and heavier, with dark circles under his eyes. None of them were a threat to do anything about the big stranger in front of them. They smiled and quickly shifted their eyes to the greasy walls of the diner.
But the kid at the end of the counter was watching me closely. He was scared, but not too scared. He looked at me almost like he was making me for something. I didn't remember ever seeing this guy before. He was blond and kind of lanky. He was very tan, probably worked outside, a farmer I'd guess.
The waitress looked up and stumbled back from the counter a step. My nose is spread from one side of my face to the other and I don't have all my teeth or part of my right ear. I'm big, I'm scary and I tend to draw attention in small places.
"Hi," the waitress said, fear already in her voice. "You want something to eat?"
The little guy on the stool hadn't stopped running his mouth. He was zooming hard. He turned around to see who had stolen his audience and shut up. He spun back around and began eating his burger and fries very quickly. He grabbed a handful of greasy potatoes, mashed them into a pile of ketchup, and in the same beat shoved them into his spit-speckled mouth, almost swallowing his whole hand in the process.
"I'm lookin' for Del." I hadn't stepped any closer to her and wanted her to get used to me before I did. According to her nametag, this was Angie herself.
"Oh. Well, he's with a couple of…" Her voice trailed off and she began to get a little more confident. "Why? What you want him for?"
I moved inside a step or two and closed the door behind me.
"I'm not a cop."
"Didn't say you were. Just wanted to know…" As I stepped closer to her, the fear came back, stronger than ever.
"Is he here?" I was now at the counter, and as she looked up at me, I could see that she had been beautiful once. A long time ago, she might have been the prettiest girl who ever stepped foot in this place. But a life of serving greasy food and country music had made her ugly. Her eyes were as red as her dyed hair and she smelled like sour milk.
THUGLIT Issue Twenty-One Page 9