Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels (Volume 1)

by Dan O'Shea

  Me? I’m still standing here.

  They told me this would happen. But I feel weird. They told me to lie down. Try and fall asleep. I lay back on my old bed. Stare at the posters on the wall. My little television set. The boom box. Jesus…I remember those…fucking boom boxes…

  …said it wouldn’t take long. Even if I didn’t shoot him we’d both be toast. Like a positive and a negative, canceling each other out. If somebody heard the gun or saw me shoot, no one would be able to explain what happened after…

  WAVE OF MURDER-SUICIDES HAS LAW ENFORCEMENT BAFFLED

  Authorities acknowledge nationwide pattern

  Posted: 8:53 am EDT Jan. 14, 2001

  LOS ANGELES, CA (AP) – A wave of motiveless killings over the weekend has left federal and state law enforcement personnel on high alert. In a three-day period beginning on January 11th, more than two hundred homicides were reported in Los Angeles County alone. Similar figures were reported by Atlanta Police, as well as by law enforcement in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, New Orleans, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Boston. FBI Deputy Director Thomas J. Pickard said the rash of unexplained murders, many presumed to have been perpetrated using large caliber handguns, is unprecedented, not only in number but complicated by the sheer lack of physical evidence in a majority of cases. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Pickard said, addressing reporters outside the White House before an emergency briefing with the President.

  Detective Larry Gay of the Los Angeles Police Department told this reporter that the instances of homicide in L.A. County were categorically epidemic in nature. “It’s as though several hundred people between Friday and Sunday were murdered the exact same way…for no rhyme or reason. Not a trace of hard evidence left at the scene, and if there indeed was a witness, most if not all of them were unreliable, if not downright psychotic. We’ve got a morgue full of dead bodies, a bullet hole in each of them. But no bullets. It’s…freaky.”

  THE WARMEST ROOM

  Ray Banks

  The one thing I truly appreciated about The Black Cap was its resistance to change. The pub sold peanuts and scratchings from a little cardboard hanger behind the bar, the women were expected to sup in the lounge or the snug, and the main bar still stank of cigarettes and cheap cigars five years after the ban. Entertainment, such as it was, was mostly live action. There was a sports-centric quiz machine in the corner of the main bar, but it had gathered a thick layer of greasy dust, and the landlord was too much of a cheapskate to get the big matches now that Sky had upped their package prices. Twice a month, a drag artist named Ophelia Balls would do his/her stuff - lewd jokes and Ethel Merman-style musical numbers with a Bontempi accompaniment - and on the last Saturday of every month there was a karaoke competition.

  That comp was the only reason I set foot in the place. I didn’t drink - my meds wouldn’t allow it - and I wasn’t particularly fond of the company of those who did. Then again, the booze did help to flush the mumsy drunks into menopausal arousal, the acoustics were good, and of course it was only a competition in the nominal sense of the word - the only time I didn’t win the £250 and crate of Fosters was when I didn’t turn up. The Fosters went to my fans, which helped to keep them fans. I had other plans for the money.

  Andy Glover sat in the corner of the main bar. He was one of those men whose weight made them permanently untidy, their fat refusing to yield to standard tailoring, pushing out shirt tails and buckling collars. He was red in the face - a fifty-fifty combination of booze and sun. From what I’d heard, he’d just come back from Fuengirola. He’d set himself up as a private investigator over there, but only the Spanish were legally allowed to run a business like that, so technically he was based in the UK and happened to serve the expat community. I wasn’t interested in Spain - my problems were domestic - and I wasn’t particularly interested in investigations, either. Andy Glover knew men, larger men than Andy, with heavy foreheads and blue tattoos, which was why I smiled when I saw him.

  “Y’alright, Trev?” He said it to his pint. I bet he thought it made him look street.

  “Not so bad, Andy. You catch the show?”

  He nodded, put pint to mouth, took a drink. “Never thought you’d do a bird’s song, like.”

  “It’s not really a bird’s song.”

  “That whatsherface, that Adele did it, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right, but --”

  “She wrote it an’ all, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, I take your point, Andy, but it’s a unisex song. A man can do it, too.”

  “If he changes the words, aye.” He sniffed and drank again. “It was good, like. You’ve got a voice.”

  “It’s an art.”

  “Aye.

  “I’m an artist.”

  “Course you are, son.”

  It sounded dismissive, but his face was blank.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Andy - there are plenty of people who come in here and do the karaoke, and they’ve got a decent voice or whatever.” I looked around the bar at the fat, sweaty, middle-aged clientele. “You know, actually, when they’re not piss-mortal and emoting too hard, there’s a few of them in here with recordable, sellable voices.”

  Andy nodded.

  “But the difference between them and me is that I know music. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Another nod. His eyes were glazed. I wondered how many pints he’d had.

  “I know what I’m doing up there. That’s the difference. Everything I do, every run, every touch of vibrato, every nuance of back phrasing, every time I switch from chest to head or vice versa, every time I hammer an appoggiatura - do you know what an appoggiatura is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a non-chord tone.”

  “Ah.” His expression hadn’t changed.

  “You don’t know what that is either, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s the tone that pulls at the heart strings, Andy. It was a common occurrence in the work of the Romantics --”

  He nodded. “Spandau Ballet.”

  “The Romantics.” I fumbled for names that Andy might recognise. “Mendelssohn, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler. The Romantics.”

  “Ah.” And he was lost again.

  “Or - look - a song like ‘Yesterday’, right? You know that one?”

  He did. He hummed a part of it. It was off-key, nasal, and an affront to Lennon and McCartney. Luckily, the appoggiatura was right at the beginning, so I could point it out and shut him up. “There, right there. That very first word has an appoggiatura. Straight in there with the dissonance, resolving - do you see? - downwards. That’s longing, Andy. For yesterday, for resolution. It’s the universal currency of pathos in Western music and, I’m sorry to say, the very essence of my current situation.”

  Andy frowned. “We’re talking about that again, are we?”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  He nodded slowly, touched his pint glass in a way that made me uncomfortable. “Okay, well, I’ve been thinking about your situation, Trev ...”

  “And you have some names for me?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “This isn’t my usual business, Trev.”

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t normally source thugs.”

  “I’m not after thugs. I’m after professionals.”

  “Professional what, though?”

  “I’m not paying you enough, is that it?”

  “No --”

  “Because I can pay you more.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Oh, you have a heart of gold now.”

  He blinked at me. “I don’t need the work.”

  “Yeah, you could be trailing some tomcatting expat, I know.” My tone was bitter, my voice a little too loud. I glanced around the pub to make sure no one was listening. “So what you’re saying is you came here tonight to tell me no?”

  “I thought you deserved to hear it face
to face.”

  “That’s white of you, Andy.”

  “Don’t be like that. I did what I could.”

  “You bottled it.”

  “I’m not bottling anything.”

  “Fucking well looks like it.”

  “See, this is what I’m talking about.” He drank from his pint. It was almost finished. Had this been a normal conversation, I would’ve offered to buy him another.

  “Look, if you don’t do this, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have special needs.”

  “We’ve been through this --”

  “I’ve been epileptic since birth. I’m on constant and lifelong medication, and my incap only goes so far.” I shook my head. “I mean, I’m an artist, Andy. You know I am. I shouldn’t be expected to work.”

  He finished his pint. “I wish I could help.”

  “I’m not asking you to give him the bike chain or anything.”

  “Bike chain?”

  “Or whatever it is you do.”

  “I don’t do --”

  “I just want you to talk to him.”

  “And what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell him to leave my mother alone.”

  “Haven’t you already done that?”

  “He won’t listen to me.”

  “But he’ll listen to a complete stranger?”

  “If that stranger words it correctly, yes.”

  Andy shook his head, blew air between two slick lips. “You’re asking me to threaten him.”

  I leaned in, caught his eye. “I’m not going to give up on this, Andy. With or without your help, I’m going to sort this out.”

  He sighed. Picked up a beermat in one hand and clacked it against the table top. He showed me his bottom teeth. They were small, wonky and yellow. Finally, he dropped the beermat onto the table. “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “I can give you a couple of names.”

  “That’s brilliant --”

  He held up a hand. “They might not want to talk to you. They might not give the first shit about your situation and I don’t want to know anything about it if they say yes. I’m not involved.” He dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and retrieved the envelope I’d given him last week.

  “No, come on, don’t be silly, Andy --”

  “I don’t want it.” He tossed the envelope onto the table. Save it for the lads.” He patted his pockets, pulled out a bookie pen and an old betting slip. He wrote down a phone number. “This is a gym in Denton Burn. You give ‘em a ring and you ask for Danny or Rob, okay? They’ll be there, they’re always fuckin’ there, and you let ‘em know what you want. I can’t promise anything.”

  I took the slip, looked at the phone number. “Thanks, Andy.”

  He looked at me, then his pint. Both disappointed him. “Don’t mention it.”

  “I mean it.”

  “So do I.” He got to his feet and left.

  The next morning, I called the gym, explained the situation. Danny was laid up in hospital - put his fist through a window trying to knock his girlfriend around - so he was out. Rob said he’d think about it. I said I’d pay him three hundred, and his thoughts came thick and fast and affirmative. He was for sale. That was good. The last thing I needed was another Andy, too caught up in his own sense of sentiment to see the truth of the situation.

  This man, Douglas Shepherd, was a menace. He was a predator, the kind of man you saw on Watchdog, fleecing the elderly out of their life savings before skipping the country. I recognised him for what he was the moment I first clapped eyes on him. And he knew that I knew. That should have been enough to scare him away, but I could see that he didn’t think I was a threat.

  Shepherd met Mother at the hospice. He’d been there apparently visiting a sick friend - no doubt his last unfortunate victim - and the two of them had made small talk about aches, pains, prescriptions, and all the other inane things old people like to chatter about. Mother didn’t tell me anything about him until they’d already grown friendly, as if I were the kind of son who’d stand in the way of his mother’s happiness. I smiled, and told her it was wonderful she had a new friend, and that he should probably come over to the house one night for dinner. And that was when I met him. By that time, of course, a lot of the damage had already been done.

  I was - and still am - a man used to a certain level of comfort, a certain consistency. I lived with Mother in our little two-bedroom house and everything was fine. She would do my washing, cooking, cleaning, and I would provide her with a little money on the first Sunday of every month, or whenever I won a comp. But Shepherd threatened that almost immediately. He was sly about it, too. He never came to me, never had the balls to outright accuse. It was all roundabout, asking questions about how old I was (thirty-six), how sick I was (very), how motivated I was (what the fuck did that have to do with anything?), and he treated my art as if it were a hobby (“Oh, you know I do a little painting, myself ...”) instead of a calling. All of this went some way to shaving the affection from my mother’s mind. These were old tricks, a child’s tricks, manipulative. But the seeds were sown, watered and sunned to grow a weed of interminable maternal dissent, and it was choking the life out of me.

  I could have weathered all this, fought a war of attrition for my mother’s attention, but then Shepherd went and started asking my mother about the house. And that was when I lost my patience. You see, it was her house, bought and paid for, her only real asset, and Shepherd was pushing her to sell.

  Of course, I didn’t hear that from him. My mother delivered the bad news over a plate of her special cottage pie. I dropped my fork, splashed mash onto my shirt. I felt like screaming at her, but I didn’t. “Why?”

  She blinked at the slight mess I’d made, then pushed some peas around her plate. “Well, there’s the insurance for one. I would save on that if I didn’t own. And Douglas says the market’s quite good at the moment. Signs of recovery. He says I could make quite a profit.”

  “And then what? Where are we going to live?”

  She looked at her meal. “Douglas has a house.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not living with him.”

  Mother chewed her lip. “Well, Trevor ...”

  “Oh, right. I see.”

  “You’re thirty-six.”

  “No, I understand.”

  “Perhaps it would be good if you spread your wings a little.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What if I want things to stay as they are?”

  She shook her head, looked sad. “Things change.”

  “They don’t have to.”

  “Trevor --”

  “They don’t have to!”

  And that was that. I tipped my plate and ran to my room, where I paced and rubbed the back of my neck until it bled. That old bastard was trying to tear my life apart. He would throw me out onto the street and watch me fit to death in the gutter. He would con Mother out of the proceeds of the sale and no doubt leave her destitute. Mother might not have seen it, but I did.

  I couldn’t bring it up to Shepherd, not face to face. He was too sly for that. He would undermine, distract and evade. He was a clever man. In a way, it was his occupation to be clever. But I had something he didn’t have - youth and contacts.

  Douglas Shepherd lived in sheltered accommodation, not a house. I knew this because I paid Andy Glover to follow him. It was another con job - Shepherd wasn’t disabled, wasn’t on the assisted living ticket. He was living there because he was poor, or appeared to be, and thus probably depriving some poor old bastard of a roof over his head.

  Rob and I arrived shortly after nine o’clock. Most of the windows in the surrounding flats were dark, but I saw the blue flicker of a television set coming from Shepherd’s place. I buzzed the door. Behind me, I heard Rob shuffling his trainers.

  There was a click on the intercom. “Hello?”

  “Shepherd, it’s Tre
vor. I think we need to talk.”

  There was a pause. The door buzzed open. I held it for Rob, and then led the way up to Shepherd’s flat. When he saw Rob standing behind me, all broad shoulders, thick neck and shaved head, Shepherd’s face spasmed with confusion, which was disappointing because I’d expected something more like fear. That disappointment turned to anger when I heard him speak in that same old unctuous tone. “Can I offer you boys a cup of tea?”

  “We’re not here for tea, Shepherd.” I went into the flat, striding through towards the living room.

  Shepherd closed the front door, offered a brief smile to Rob. “No, I rather thought you had something else on your mind.” He came into the living room and clasped his hands together in front of him. He looked older than usual, decked out in a sweater, shirt and tie, slippers on his feet and a two-bar electric fire turned right up. “So what is it, Trevor? Something delicate, I’d wager, given your moral support.”

  I looked around the room. It was decorated with watercolours, competent but bland. Shepherd’s paintings. “I want you to leave my mother alone.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  “I see. You’re telling me, are you?”

  “That’s right.”

  He moved his head as if his collar were too tight. “And what does your mother think about this?”

  “She doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s all about what you want.”

  “It’s about what’s best for the both of us. My mother isn’t exactly in her right mind when it comes to you and your lies.”

  “I haven’t been lying to her, Trevor.”

  “She said you lived in a house.”

  “She misunderstood.”

  “You told her I need to move out. Spread my fucking wings.”

  “You’re a grown man, Trevor. A grown man living with his mother, a grown man who refuses to work --”

  “I have a medical condition.”

  “A medical condition that afflicts millions of people who still manage to hold down jobs, live away from their parents and contribute to society --”