Bullets, Teeth, & Fists 2

by Jason Beech

  Bullets, Teeth & Fists

  Volume 2

  by

  Jason Beech

  Copyright © 2016 Jason Beech

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First published in the United States in 2016

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Christopher Lucania

  Formatting by Ryan Bracha

  Also by Jason Beech

  Bullets, Teeth & Fists Volume 1.

  Triple Zombie (with James Newman and John Bruni).

  Paladins (with various authors).

  Moorlands

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Tom Pitts and Joe Clifford at The Flash Fiction Offensive, Sean O’Kane at Plots with Guns, Jason Michel at Pulp Metal Magazine, Erik Arneson at Shotgun Honey, and Gary Duncan at Spelk for their invaluable editing advice and accepting a bunch of stories from me. Every acceptance has sparked progress and each rejection has been a lesson learned.

  I’d also like to thank Aidan Thorn for the cracking charity anthology, Paladins, and for seeing a place for one of my shorts.

  Ryan Bracha and Mark Wilson deserve plenty of cheers for the way they encourage a bunch of authors, as well as how they offer hard and bracing words for anybody who shirks and whinges.

  Contents

  Pusher (first published in Plots with Guns)

  Red Hole

  Here Comes a Soul Saver

  Getting Home Late (first published in Shotgun Honey)

  Pop Star Burger Van

  If You Want a Job Doing (first published in Shotgun Honey)

  Die, Witch, Die

  A Damned Agreement (first published in Pulp Metal Magazine)

  Corner Flag (first published in The Flash Fiction Offensive)

  The Cops

  Brother (first published in Shotgun Honey)

  Drumsticks

  Banking on It

  A Conversational Robbery

  The Lad Needs a Lesson

  Dirty Night (first published in Pulp Metal Magazine)

  The Other Woman

  Invisible Man

  Scrag (first published in Pulp Metal Magazine)

  Pop Star Burger Van 2

  Should Have Been a Son

  Dressed to Live

  For Neeta and Sorrel

  Pusher

  Phil huffed his way through slush and shouted a phlegm-checked call for John to stop – that his actions invited madness. The mush slowed traffic on Sheffield’s Ecclesall Road down to a watch-your-step crawl. It shouldn't have been hard for Phil to catch him – John had to push his wheelchair through all this stubborn half-melted snow – but the boy had arms like tree trunks, both honed from his continual attempts to escape his minder. Still, though Phil had long since let his physicality slip, he still had an old boxer's strength. Stamina was now his problem. He scanned the street, nervous Chrissy might catch him like this.

  Outside the old Pomona pub, his left foot slipped well behind his right. An almost-split stretched a hamstring enough to make him screech louder than he ever did at the pub's karaoke, when he drove most punters back to the bar to avoid his Livin' on a Prayer.

  “Bloody hell, John, just stop, or I call your old man right now.”

  John shouted “Bollocks” over his shoulder. He'd have flipped his fuck-you fingers, Phil was sure, if it wouldn’t have slowed him down.

  Phil cursed his boots’ thin grip. He nearly knocked one elderly lady over, who could barely see where she walked for the red knitted scarf wrapped around her from neck to forehead. He mumbled an apology as he ploughed through the blackened snow. Ridiculous – and the college kids let him know it. A couple of lads rolled up an ice ball. If they hit him, they'd know about it, the smug skinny bastards. Must be nice to have daddy pay for you to read Charles fuckin' Dickens all day while you tickled your bum-hair ‘tache with a frothy latte. They sensed danger and let the eye-gougers slip back into the ice. His muffin top had not yet hidden his menace. The ability to put the wind up people brightened, if only a little, his fears about Barry Green. It pushed him on to grab John before he got to the subway and across the massive roundabout into the town centre. Phil needed to reach him before he had to push the kid back up slopes he hadn't the mood for. John flew on to the road. He didn’t mind the bump from the kerb. Did a wheelie at just the right moment to get up the next and back onto the pavement. Phil patted his pockets and cupped the phone through his jeans. A call to Barry might work – let him deal with his errant son.

  No. Not a good idea. He willed the burn in his lungs into a positive thing, like when he pushed himself to train for the ring – a tool to check his pain threshold. These days, he winced at hot water getting a little burny.

  Phil managed to get within yards of John. The lad’s arms had tired as sooty snow clogged his wheels. He spun on his back wheels, balanced a wheelie and grinned at his pursuer. He knew the game had come to an end.

  “Not funny, John. Not funny.”

  “You're wrong. This is hilarious.”

  “What would Barry Green say if I let you push yourself around?”

  “My old man would put you in a wheelchair, too. But I’d have a word – you’d be okay.”

  All those faces he’d seen before his bullets put them away – on Barry Green’s orders. “I’ll continue to push.” The cock-up in Leeds made his decision solid.

  “I’m not a victim. Dad is all up his arse about me being useless now I’m in this. Let me work my arms, Phil. Come on.”

  “No.”

  ***

  Phil ordered two coffees in the American-themed joint just down the road from Sheffield Hallam University. He berated the bottle-blonde waitress about the icicles above the entrance. They barely hung from the doorframe.

  “They're ready to skewer somebody. I'd love it if it wasn't me on the way out.”

  “Gee.” She rested a hand on her hip, all concerned. “I'll get Mack to deal with it.”

  “You're from Sheffield, love, I don't need a ‘gee’.”

  “I'm from Chicago, actually, though my roots are in York.”

  “Ah.” Phil turned away from her to raise his eyebrows at John. Chicago to Sheffield didn't have the right ring to it.

  He watched John's eyes follow the blonde as she left to sort out their beverages. Detected lust and insecurity whisked together in a bitter dish. It made Phil scratch his nose and watch students through the window. They all hunched inwards to ward off the wind's fingers mugging their warmth.

  “Do we have to go through this?”

  John flicked the floppy fringe from his right eye. Foppish and ridiculous on such a well-built lad. Phil wished he would have a shorter cut, something manlier to match his physique. The kid could have played rugby league if he had his legs.

  “No, we don't. If you stay a good lad, we never have to do any of that again. I'm knackered every time you do a runner, and I'm sick of it.”

  “You're sick of it?”

  Phil shuffled. He could keep his eyes on those poncey students easier than his charge. He hoped Chrissy would eat real food tonight. Fish and chips would slide down nicely.

  John nodded. “I can see your gun.”

  Phil zipped the jacket to his chin and glanced at the boy. Frustration coloured his cheeks. Phil sensed the waitress approach from behind. John needed to get over his wheelchair.

  ***

  “Life's not fair.” John slapped the smartphone against his thig
h after another unanswered call to his friend, Colin.

  Phil couldn't wait until the kid turned twenty. Maybe then his dumb teenage laments might end. Phil shook his head and wore his earphones, cheap black ones from Argos to deflect interest from muggers. The music escaped from them and came out a little tinny, but it didn’t irritate as much as the whines which emerged from John's cake-hole. He sympathised, he really did, but he had sickened of insisting his job consisted of pushing him around. He visualized Barry's cold-fish stare to block sympathy which might force him to relent to the boy's wishes. Barry didn’t make it any easier by having a mechanic fit the wheelchair’s brakes closer to the wheels. Like he pushed the boy through a sea of treacle, now.

  The snow surrendered to spring, thank God. Barry had bought his son a nice little new-build off Ecclesall Road a few months before, but failed to take into account the lack of wheelchair accessibility. Phil had to drag John up five steps – a doddle, he supposed, after all that snow.

  “I'll get the builders in,” Barry had promised – weeks, maybe months, ago.

  Leeds. Always Leeds.

  Phil inserted the key stiff in the lock, the result of an inefficient cut. He just wanted to get inside, luxuriate in a nice cuppa, and watch some mindless telly. He'd heard “This is bullshit” one too many times on their walk round Endcliffe Park, so much that even those pleasant little ducks and their contented quacks couldn't prevent his stomach knots from screwing his temper. Even in the ring he'd managed to keep his calm. Even the performance of Barry's more unsavoury tasks had not unduly knocked his temperament off its kilter. The tinny output of Jon Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive kept him from grabbing the boy's collar for a snap-out-of-it shake.

  He didn't worry too much about the young Green now balanced at the edge of the top step. John did it for the wind-up. He could get up and down the steps without any assistance, and Phil let him do it without his help on the odd occasion he felt safe from Barry's omnipotence. Phil pulled the door handle and twisted the key, pushed into the door and twisted. The damn thing never gave easily, the metal version of the boss and his boy. He checked over his shoulder as he searched for the right pressure on the door and the correct amount of insertion for the key. John had one wheel on the top step, the other on the step below. He interchanged the steps each wheel rested on.

  “Careful, lad.”

  “Always, old woman.”

  There. The door just needed a frustrated push and turn.

  “What you doing?” John’s voice punched Phil’s ears as the kid tumbled. The crash down each step whipped the lad’s neck towards an inevitable brace.

  “I...” Most of the exclamation fired through Phil’s nose. “I didn't touch you. Shit, John, what have you done?” He jumped down the steps, furious John mixed his howls of pain with those of laughter.

  “You pushed me. You fucking pushed me, you twat.” He craned his neck at the old lady who walked past with her old-woman shopping cart. Invited her to tut at the scene. She screwed her eyes at Phil.

  Phil sat on his haunches, his useless hands on John's chest and the side of his head. He made sure his temple didn't rest on hard wet cobblestones. John bore his eyes into Phil's.

  “Why don't you just put that thing in my mouth and pull the trigger? It'd give us all a rest.”

  The hammer-end stuck out through his bomber jacket. He zipped up to his neck, and slapped the boy's cheek. “Cut that talk out. You have things to live for. Plenty. This is just a blip in your life.”

  Phil straightened the wheelchair. The old woman's trolley rattled against the pavement as she walked off. He traced her shaking head as he glanced over his shoulder. Little moral disapprovals like that ate into him, and he'd worry about her all day, as if he needed her approval.

  “Come on, let me help you up.”

  For once, the kid let him.

  ***

  “You didn't tell your dad.”

  “About what?”

  Phil sighed, turned his attention to the telly, found a comfortable position on the sofa, fingered the gulley of the scar which stretched from the bridge of his nose to the far side of his right cheek.

  “A boxing scar?”

  Phil flinched. “Yes.”

  “Must have been one hell of a punch.”

  “It ended me.”

  “A right hook?”

  “Two stupid jabs I should have backed away from. Instead, I shifted into his hook. I couldn’t remember anything for a week after.”

  “And now you're a fat bastard.”

  “And now I'm a fat bastard.”

  Phil counted to ten and attempted to concentrate on the TV soap. The shit always did this – became all conversational to soften him up for a punch. Phil’s feelings always hurt more than physical pain. John balanced on two wheels, spun, sped across Phil’s view of the telly, and finally rested face-to-face with his tired, baggy-eyed pusher. Between him and his viewing pleasure.

  “You know what to do.” John wiggled his eyebrows.

  Phil closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

  ***

  John told doctor Beeson, “My carer abuses me. Every Wednesday between six and seven am, while I’m still groggy.” Phil heard it from outside the doctor’s door and had to fling it open to protest his innocence. The doctor believed Phil. It must have been the fluster allied to bluster which mangled his words into innocence.

  Phil dreaded the Leeds incident would mark him forever. He’d made a simple mistake. As if Barry had never cocked a thing up in his life. He rotated his watch-strap around his wrist in a vague search for a cold part of its metal to cool his veins. Nothing, the whole strap had conducted his heat.

  Couldn’t Barry let the boy live an independent life? Or at least get him a dedicated nurse? Apparently not, a nurse would turn the boy into a pussy. He needed a man to look after him. Barry demanded John needed Phil.

  ***

  John’s first words when he first met Chrissy: “Where’d you pick her up? Same as usual?”

  Before Phil could smash his balled fist into the boy’s cheek, Chrissy closed in on the lad and examined him as if she checked smudged lipstick in her reflection. She patted him on the head, turned, gave Phil a kiss. Told him it was gym night so she’d see him tomorrow, Friday, and left the subtle taste of her fragrance behind as she left. John’s tongue shifted around his mouth as if he worked her taste around his teeth and gums.

  ***

  Chrissy’s warmth shone with the candlelight which bounced off the walls, even after a day typing notes at Sheffield Crown Court trials. He absorbed it as he lied in bed. Watched golden light flicker across her bare breasts as they swung over him. She pulled off his boxers and threw them to the floor.

  Looked him up and down. Settled her eyes on his troubled face. “No?”

  His open palms accompanied the apologetic shrug. “I’m thinking not.”

  She slumped beside him, nuzzled his neck, settled into the arm he wrapped around her waist.

  She stroked his chest. “I always wanted fun in life. I had enough to last me a lifetime in Ibiza, Majorca, the Costa del Sol. Then I wanted a good job, a good education, a future. Now I want contentment, some real love.”

  He eyed the shadows which jerked across his bedroom wall with each breeze that blew through the little gap in the window.

  “I know I have real love. And I do love you, though I have no idea why. You’re not my type.” She laughed at the realisation, but moved closer into him. “But I don’t know if I have contentment. You frighten me, sometimes.”

  “Do I?” He jerked his head round to her. Waited for an explanation.

  She moved her hand to his belly. “It’s not the way you are, it’s what you are. Who you work for. What do you want, Phil?”

  He shifted his attention back to the wall. Worked saliva for his dry mouth. What do I want? Respect, maybe. He always chased it. Viewed it as precious as gold. Nobody ever gave it to him, or he had to work hard – harder than anyone else �
�� to get it. He chased Barry’s. Barry gave it in small doses and then took it back without notice.

  He worked not to be as blank as the wall he stared at, but they fell asleep in each other’s arms without a further word.

  ***

  Phil hardly let either hand leave John’s wheelchair handles, nervous about pushing him one-handed with Barry by his side. Words dammed in all their mouths – only the odd sentence spilled, which the wind clawed and carried off into the air. April in Skegness hardly varied. Phil couldn’t remember when he last came here, but he recalled his family only holidayed in the summer holidays. They all wore coats then, too. At least the sun shone today.

  Skegness Pier didn’t have much going for it. The North Sea slopped around as grey as ever, even under the sun. It matched each of their moods as they sat on hard benches and contemplated its depths.

  “Fantasy Island might be a good idea.” John scratched at his arm.

  “We’ll go later.” Barry gazed into the sea rather than across it to the horizon.

  John’s right cheek twitched. His suggestion about Fantasy Island had come out almost as a choke. His dad’s rejection meant they’d walk about dull streets instead, with dull company. If only he knew.

  They took their time up the Grand Parade. Phil controlled his urge to grunt at the brakes on John’s chair. John sat slumped and contemplated the seagulls as if he wished to join them.

  “Fish and chips, anyone?” The chirp in Phil’s voice only narrowed the others’ eyes. “No?”

  Skegness smelled of chip grease. It pulled at his nose and dragged him into the next chippy, a place which had only just reached the 70s. Turquoise and white tiles assaulted his corneas, but the place appeared spotless, and the grease made saliva fill his mouth.