Two Fisted Nasty: A Novella and Three Short Stories (Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out Book 2)

by Steve Vernon

  I half-dropped, half-fainted to the ground, rolled like I thought I was in a Quentin Tarantino movie and put three quick shots into Chico Fat’s desk and everybody except me got real dead, real quick.

  It was really quiet, and that was the scariest part of it. I mean it was so quiet I could hear my own sweat drop. I was begging myself to scream, only I didn’t. Every part of me wanted to run, but I stuck around long enough to torch his office. I did a pretty good job of it, even though I dropped the tin of lighter fluid twice because my hands were slick with fear sweat and lighter fluid and spattered blood and my pack of Redbird matches refused to sing and my nerves jittered like the lead foot of a coked up swing musician.

  Once I was sure that Chico Fat’s desk and filing cabinet were going up like skyrockets on the Fourth of July I headed for the back door. It took me two, maybe three minutes tops. It went sweet and quick and maybe a little wetter than I figured but I figure I’m done. I mean in this neighborhood the cops all wait to read about it in the morning paper before they bother to make their crime scene reports.

  I was still keyed up on adrenaline and fear when I stepped outside and caught that movement out of the corner of my eye, and it could have been a cat and it could have been a cop, only it wasn’t either of the above.

  It was that kid.

  I saw him once, clearly, just before the bullet hit him. A little Italian looking kid with a cowlick hooked over his forehead like Superman, only the bullet forgot how to bounce off of his chest. I get one half a second’s full of his black jujube eyes boring like laser beamed heat rays into my memory for a twice or two of forever when the bullet blew it all away.

  It gets weird from here on out, because I don’t remember much of anything, but I guess I must have knelt over the kid’s body, like I figured I could save it by saying a prayer, and then I guess I dug two pennies out of my pocket and set them down where the little boy’s eyes had been, because when they finally caught me, it was the bloody fingerprints on those two pennies that sealed my verdict shut.

  *

  When I came out of the alley I knew enough to be cool. I slowed down, like I was out for a Sunday stroll, even though it was only Wednesday night. Then I tucked my hands in my pockets and whistled, something I’d heard my grandmother play on her old stereo, Beethoven’s Fifth.

  Soo-soo-soo-sooooo.

  Soo-soo-soo-sooooo.

  That’s when I first heard it. That damned basketball, bouncing up behind me like Wilt Chamberlain was trying to sneak up on me.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  I turned around, only I couldn’t see a thing. Just the street and a couple of rummies crawling around outside a burnt out barroom like mourners standing outside a funeral, and a cat that was sniffing around near the mouth of a sewer drain.

  Then I heard it again.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  Lazy and slow, like a salesman’s knock on a hot summer day. I heard it just in back of my left ear, like it was somebody trying to get my attention in a crowded room.

  There’s a word for it.

  Insidious.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  Slow and insidious.

  And relentless.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  That’s when I started to run.

  *

  The basketball followed me clear across the city. By this time I’m running and looking over my shoulder, and jumping at every shadow I think I see. I must look like one of those crazy street bums you see every now and then, just running right down the center of the road, screaming and yelling at nothing.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  I remember it sounding like it was getting closer, like it was trying to climb right inside my brain, and I kept thinking there’s no way in hell I ought to be able to hear that thumping over the pounding of my heart and the banging of my footsteps. I’m breathing hard and heavy, like a half-backer headed for the goal posts of hell, and my heart is shouting in the back of my throat, and the coat I’m wearing feels sweaty and gross only I don’t want to take the time to take it off for fear of that thumping sound so close behind me.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  Then I swing around a corner. I figure I’ve lost it, because I don’t hear it following me anymore.

  Now that I’ve stopped having a galloping heart attack I can hear the sirens. Either someone has finally called the cops over at Chico Fat’s place, or else somebody got excited over the notion of a full grown man running down a New York street in the middle of the evening waving a silenced gun.

  I want to slow down, to try and act cool. As scared as I am, I sure don’t want to wind up serving a term at Riker’s. But every time I start to stop, I think about that thumping sound.

  So I kept running, leaning towards the shadows and trying to blend in, and then there’s this pile of crates down by a wharf, a bunch of them thrown around like so many kid’s blocks, all empty and too big to be easily dragged away. It looked to me like an oasis in the middle of a blue suited Gobi, so I crawled in under one of the boxes, and waited.

  I was always the best at hide-and-go-seek in my neighborhood. Nobody knew how to lay low like me. See, whenever you’re running and trying to hide there’s always this half a reflex that keeps you looking over your shoulder, and that’s usually when you get caught. As long as a fellow is quiet and calm, odds are he’ll remain hidden until the end of the game.

  That’s what I’m counting on. Staying hidden until there’s enough of a backlog that the cops have to go and chase some other poor asshole. See, I figure they figure I’m just some harmless nut. It all depends on what they got called in on. If they’re down here looking for whoever shot up Chico Fat’s, then they might want to hang around a while. But if they’re just down here following up a complaint about some nut running down the road waving a gun that was probably a toy, they’re apt to give it up and go home, or where ever the hell cops go when they’re done for the day.

  I crossed my fingers and I kept real quiet. A couple of times I heard footsteps going by, and once somebody even kicked the boxes on the edge of the pile, but I kept trying to think about those dead rats that die in tenement walls. Nobody ever finds them. They just rot and stink their way into forever soup. That’s what I want to do right now. Just lie here under the boxes for the next couple of forevers or so, and hope the world will quietly forget about me.

  For a while, it worked. I heard a couple of squad cars pulling away. There was still a few voices out there, a few diligent policemen plugging away, but I knew that sooner or later they’d receive orders that would send them somewhere else.

  For the time being I’d just have to keep still and wait.

  Then I heard it again.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  Christ, it’s that ball again.

  They’ll hear it, and be on me like lice on rice.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  It was getting closer, thumping louder.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump.

  And louder.

  Thump/thump/thump/thump.

  THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP.

  Then I saw it. The ball, sitting there not more than five feet away, like it had paused to catch its breath. I could see it real close, that orangey-brown kind of basketball color, street dirt and a little blood smeared on it, the inked outlines like the hair of a sniper’s bull’s eye sight, its basketball studded like some kind of reptilian ball bearing.

  I swear I could see it breathing.

  Patiently breathing.

  Damn it.

  It had to be my imagination.

  I tried to snake my left arm to grab it in. Quiet like, because I didn’t want the police to hear.

  I remember once seeing a kid at a zoo reach into an alligator pen to try and pet one of the big bastards, and I’m thinking about that now as I reach for that goddamn basketball.

  I touch it.

  Or maybe it let me touch
it.

  The basketball felt cold.

  I felt it breathe.

  In, out. In, out.

  Only it felt as if it were breathing me. Inhaling me, in and out, sucking me in, spitting me out.

  Tasting me.

  In, out.

  Then the basketball got excited like it knew my scent and then it started to bounce.

  It bounced hard.

  THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP - BANG!

  I fired my Glock without thinking. I don’t even remember having it out in my hand. I know I couldn’t have missed, not this close up, but somehow I must have, because the damn ball was still bouncing.

  That’s when I started screaming.

  The police were all over the boxes before I had a chance to stop. I heard them crashing through the boxes, overturning crate after crate like kids hunting for Easter eggs, only I’m too busy screaming and firing shot after shot at that goddamned basketball.

  *

  It’s been nine months since they’ve locked me in the cell. I keep begging my state appointed lawyer to stop making his appeals, but he keeps telling me that I’m entitled to them, that it’s his job to make them, over and over and over, and every time he makes one of them the state kicks my name back down on the list of those waiting to die.

  I don’t care about my lawyer. I don’t care about the state. I don’t give a damn about my legal rights, not a single one of them. I just want that state appointed needle, like a junkie wants his next fix. I want that jolt that will finally put me under. Finally let me grab some sleep.

  The guards have stopped taking the basketball away. They yelled at me for a while, like I was somehow sneaking it back into my cell, even though I never leave the cell these days, not even for my mandatory exercise periods. The guards have even stopped arguing with me over that. They know it’s not my fault, that I can’t leave this cell. They know that goddamned basketball won’t let me go.

  I remember the day that three of the biggest guards tried to wrestle it out of the cell. If I hadn’t been screaming so loudly it probably would have been funny. Those three great big over achieving bar bouncers, hanging on to this kid’s basketball as it bounced them across the floor. They were ready to quit when the first rib snapped, but it didn’t let them go right off, like it wanted to play with them for a while.

  I think it was enjoying itself too much to stop too soon, or maybe it just wanted to teach them a lesson. The guard that died first, his head slamming like an over ripe melon against the bloodstained concrete floor, he was the lucky one.

  They should have known better. They shouldn’t have even tried. Even the times it lets itself get taken away, it just comes back. Like that goddamned bad penny you hear about, it just keeps coming back.

  Now they just try and pretend it isn’t even there. They just slide my meals through the little slip hole and they sort of slide their eyes away, like they were looking at something else besides that goddamned basketball.

  That’s the hell of it.

  The way they pretend that nothing’s wrong.

  I sometimes wonder why it even lets me eat. I mean, it wants me dead doesn’t it?

  Maybe it’s just enjoying itself.

  How the hell should I know? It’s a basketball, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like it’s a human or a ghost or a zombie. It’s a goddamned echo, that’s all it is. It’s just a goddamned echo.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  When I start thinking about all the things it might be but isn’t, is usually about the time I start screaming. And whenever I start to scream it bounces all the faster, like my screaming excites it.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  It’s sitting there now in the corner of my cell, bouncing, bouncing, and bouncing. Sometimes it likes to run up to my bed. Sometimes it bounces itself right under the bed, making sure I don’t get too much sleep.

  I think that’s what I miss most of all, besides my sanity. A little sleep. Just a little shut-eye. I get some, you know, nodding off every now and then. I have to, don’t I?

  Maybe just a little, drifting in and out, between bounces.

  Don’t I?

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  I hear it now, like a mad dizzying trip hammer thumping, a thousand mad horses all screaming to get out of a stall at once, and I scream for the guards to come get me, I scream for the executioner’s needle, I scream for them to come and kill me and drop me in a crate in the cemetery where I can scream for a thousand more years.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  I keep screaming, because I know that sooner or later somebody will come and get me. Sooner or later they’re going to come and carefully open my cell door, and march me carefully down the hall to the last door that’s been waiting for me since I shot Chico Fat and the other two and the kid, don’t forget the fucking kid.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  And when they come and get me the ball is going to follow me down the hall like an eager puppy, and then I’m going to be poked full of death in front of an audience of strangers, as few as possible because the authorities don’t really want to try and explain that goddamned basketball.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  And then they’re going to bury me in the farthest corner of the prison graveyard, and they’re going to drop me into my grave in a canvas sack rather than a wooden box, so they don’t have to listen to the bouncing of that basketball that will somehow find its way into my coffin, so that they don’t have to hear the bouncing and the screaming that I know is going to be echoing beneath the dirt for more years than I care to imagine.

  Thump - thump - thump - thump.

  The ears.

  That’s where I want it.

  When they give me the needle I want them to give it to me in my ears first.

  That’s what I said.

  I want my ears to die, first.

  Are you listening?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steve Vernon is a storyteller. The man was born with a campfire burning at his feet. The word "boring" does not exist in this man's vocabulary - unless he's maybe talking about termites or ice augers.

  That’s all that Steve Vernon will say about himself – on account of Steve Vernon abso-freaking HATES talking about himself in the third person.

  But I’ll tell you what.

  If you LIKED the book that you just read drop me a Tweet on Twitter – @StephenVernon - and yes, old farts like me ACTUALLY do know how to twitter – and let me know how you liked the book – and I’d be truly grateful.

  If you feel strongly enough to write a review, that’s fine too. Reviews are ALWAYS appreciated – but I know that not all of you folks are into writing big long funky old reviews – so just shout the book out just any way that you can – because I can use ALL the help I can get.

  Also By Steve Vernon

  My Regional Books – from Nimbus Publishing

  Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia

  Wicked Woods: Ghost Stories from Old New Brunswick

  Halifax Haunts: Exploring the City’s Spookiest Spaces

  Maritime Monsters: A Field Guide

  The Lunenburg Werewolf and Other Stories of the Supernatural

  Sinking Deeper OR My Questionable (Possibly Heroic) Decision to Invent a Sea Monster

  Maritime Murder: Deadly Crimes From the Buried Past

  My E-Books

  In the Dark and the Deep – Steve Vernon’s Sea Tales #1

  Harry’s Mermaid – Steve Vernon’s Sea Tales #2

  I Know Why The Waters Of The Sea Taste of Salt – Steve Vernon’s Sea Tales #3

  Flash Virus

  Fighting Words

  Tatterdemon

  Devil Tree

  Gypsy Blood

  The Weird Ones

  Two Fisted Nasty

  Nothing to Lose –Adventures of Captain Nothing, Volume 1

  Nothing Down – Adventures of Captain Nothing, Volume 2


  Roadside Ghosts

  Long Horn, Big Shaggy

  Publishing History

  Author: Steve Vernon

  ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-31-9

  Second Printing – October 13, 2014

  (previously printed in Kindle format by Crossroad Press)

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