Gleefully Macabre Tales

by Jeff Strand

  I pulled the pistol out of my inside jacket pocket and pointed it at her. "Open up the register, bitch!" (You pretty much have to say "bitch" in these situations.)

  Her mouth dropped open and she looked like she was going to wet herself. I’ve always enjoyed seeing that facial expression. However, she didn’t move toward the register.

  "I’m not playing around here, bitch! I will shoot you if you don’t start handing over some cash!"

  "We don’t have much," she insisted.

  "I didn’t ask for your fuckin’ financial history! You lookin’ to die tonight? Is that it? Got some terminal disease? Open it now, bitch!"

  She nodded and opened the register. She was a cute one. Tall, stacked, red hair, freckles, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six years old. She wasn’t dressed suggestively, but her tits were definitely trying to make their presence known. Hopefully I’d score enough from this robbery to pick up a hooker on the way home.

  The woman grabbed the bills out of the register and slid them across the counter. I grabbed them and did a quick count. "Twelve bucks? That’s all you’ve got?"

  "I said—"

  "I know what you said! But twelve bucks? How can you even make change with twelve bucks? What if somebody paid with a twenty?"

  "We don’t get a lot of business."

  "Well, hell, I guess not! Give me the coins, too. All of them."

  She scooped out the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I used the gun to scrape them off the counter and into my hand, then shoved the change into my pocket.

  "Do you have any checks in there that you could sign over?"

  "We don’t accept checks."

  "Dammit! How do you even stay open?"

  She shrugged.

  I thought about stealing some laundry, but I didn’t want to weigh myself down and this place probably only washed clothes for nerds or fat chicks. Oh well. At least I got enough for the fast food meal.

  "You stay right where you are, hands in the air, and count to a hundred," I said. "I don’t know if your twelve bucks was insured, but if I find out you called the cops on me, I’ll hunt you down and shoot you in the back of the head, execution-style. Got it?"

  The woman nodded.

  "Good." I turned and headed for the door. Next time I’d hit a library. Even twenty-five-cents-a-day late fees had to add up to more than this.

  "Wait!"

  "What?" I asked, not turning back.

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  I immediately had a really bad feeling about this, like her question was going to be something ironic like "Did you know there are eighteen cops waiting outside with helicopters and a tank?" I sure hoped there weren’t eighteen cops waiting outside with helicopters and a tank. That would suck.

  I pushed open the door. "No, you can’t."

  "Have you ever killed anybody?"

  I stopped, took a step back, and let the door swing shut. What was this chick’s deal? When some guy robs you at gunpoint and doesn’t shoot you, you don’t turn it into social hour. You cheerfully let him exit your place and then thank God you’re still alive.

  It could’ve been a trap, but she seemed genuinely interested. And, like I said before, she was stacked. Perky, too. Fear does wonderful things to nipples.

  "You serious?"

  "Yes."

  I gave her my most winning smile. "You bet your sweet ass I have."

  "How many?"

  "Eight."

  Okay, officially it was two, and only one was on purpose. The accidental one was during a mugging. This jackass in a business suit handed over his wallet like I asked, no problems, but then he tackled me. I mean a literal tackle, like he thought he was a football player or something. My gun went off. Too bad he wasn’t wearing a football helmet. Heh heh.

  The one on purpose was this guy Jason who ripped off some of my DVDs. I wasn’t planning to commit murder, just get back the DVDs (or at least the pornos) and beat the shit out of him, but he kept mouthing off the whole time and finally I got sick of it and popped him. I felt kind of guilty watching him writhe around on the floor, clutching his chest, but I’m not the kind of guy to hang on to feelings of remorse for very long and I shot him twice more.

  If you want to get technical about it, I did throw a guy off a bridge once, and I beat another guy so badly with the handle of my gun that he wasn’t moving anymore when I left, but for all I know they all lived and went on to fulfilling careers in the clergy, so I don’t count them.

  "Eight?"

  "Yeah, eight. Why? You looking to make it nine?"

  "Maybe."

  Great. I’d robbed some whack-job with a death wish. "Sorry. I don’t do assisted suicides."

  "No, no, I didn’t mean me! I thought that maybe you could kill…somebody else."

  "Who?"

  "My husband."

  "You’re kidding me, right?"

  "No."

  She sure seemed sincere. Of course, I’ve never been any good at reading women. Ask my ex-girlfriends. "Sorry, babe. Not interested."

  "I could make it worth your while."

  "What’re you gonna do? Dig through your couch cushions for spare change?"

  "I know I can’t offer you any money, but I can offer other things."

  "What kind of things?"

  "Use your imagination."

  Suddenly I was more than a little interested. (Remember: Stacked. Perky nipples.) "I’m not very imaginative. Why don’t you spell it out?"

  "Kill my husband, and you get one night with me, anything you want to do that doesn’t leave permanent marks. No cameras, spectators, or other participants. Protection at all times. Aside from that, anything goes."

  I whistled. "Wow. That’s quite an offer."

  "Oh, and we’re defining ‘night’ as ‘eight hours’. Consecutive hours, so if you decide to sleep for six of them, that’s your call."

  "You seem to have this pretty well thought-out."

  "I need my husband dead."

  "Why not kill him yourself?"

  "I’ve tried."

  "So why do you need to waste him? He screwing around on you?"

  "Something like that."

  "You probably should’ve offered him that ‘anything you want to do’ deal."

  She glared at me. "Do you want the job or not?"

  "The way I figure, this is like a big cocaine deal. You sample the wares before you purchase."

  "You’re really sleazy, you know that?"

  "Know it. Like it. Don’t plan to change."

  She sighed. "Fine, fine. Let me lock up the place first."

  Now I’m not one to kiss and tell, but that’s okay, because there’s no way I was kissing those lips after what they did. This chick was amazingly talented. I mean, that sort of thing is always enjoyable unless they scrape you with their teeth, but this was exquisite. She even let me grab a handful of her hair while she worked.

  Believe me, I’m not exactly hurting for female attention, so the fact that I was actually considering killing her husband was proof that she was mmm-mmm good. I know what you’re wondering—hey, Frank, you’ve got the gun, why not just take what you want from her?—but I don’t play that way. I’m scum, but I’ve got a moral code tucked away somewhere.

  So, yeah, it didn’t take all that long for me to decide that I definitely wanted to indulge in her offer. I already had at least five or six ideas for ways to test her "anything goes" attitude.

  "When do you want to do this?" I asked her, when it was convenient for her to speak again.

  "Tonight. Now."

  "Now?"

  "Do you have a problem with that? The sooner we do this, the sooner you get paid."

  I shrugged. "Your call. I kind of assumed that there might be some planning involved."

  "This isn’t going to be some elaborate Agatha Christie scheme. I just want you to come to my place and kill the bastard."

  "Works for me. Why make homicide into a big deal?"

  "Exactly. I only live three
blocks away."

  "Question for you," I said. "You got a name?"

  "Call me Gretchen."

  "Call me Frank."

  "Hi, Frank. Let me close up shop and we’ll head off."

  - 2 -

  I guess I’ll be honest with you: I was sweating like a morbidly obese kickboxer as we walked those three city blocks. This would be my first premeditated murder. I was okay with the guy biting it, but this was a pretty big crime to be committing with so little prep time. I didn’t want to end up in prison over this or have the husband blow me away with a shotgun or something. I’d just have to be careful.

  She unlocked a graffiti-covered door, and we walked up three flights of stairs to her apartment. She unlocked that door as well.

  "So, what, I’m just supposed to walk right in with you?"

  "Yeah."

  She opened the door and stepped inside. I hesitated. This was too weird. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. If I ditched this idea and went bar-hopping, there was a chance I could pick up some skank who’d do at least one of the things on the "anything goes" request list.

  Gretchen dropped her keys, then bent down to slowly pick them up. This was clearly for my benefit in case I was thinking of backing out. The sight of that fine ass got rid of those feelings real quick. If you’d seen it, you’d have been willing to kill her husband, too. (If you’re a straight chick or a gay guy, imagine that it was Brad Pitt’s ass or something like that.)

  I closed the door behind me and looked around the living room. The place was nicer than I’d expected. I wouldn’t invite the Queen over for high tea or anything like that, but I’d been thinking "shithole" for sure, and that wasn’t the case.

  The television was on, the volume low. A commercial was playing for one of those phone numbers where you could spend $4.99 a minute to talk dirty to a fifty-three-year-old hag pretending to be a hot eighteen-year-old slut.

  "He’s right there," said Gretchen, pointing to the blue recliner facing the TV.

  There was clearly not going to be a hell of a lot of subtlety involved here. Staying on the opposite side of the room, I walked forward so that I could get a good view of the guy.

  "What the fuck?"

  I’d figured he was sleeping or something, but this bastard was dead. He was slumped over to the side, eyes open, skin drained of color, his pajamas covered with blood. He looked about sixty (how the hell did he end up with such a hot young wife?), and his mouth hung open. A thin line of bloody drool had dried on his chin.

  I quickly noticed two other very important details: his throat was slit, and the left side of his head looked like it had been bashed in with a sledgehammer.

  "You have to kill him for me," Gretchen said. "Please."

  "There’s nothing left here to kill! Jesus Christ, he looks like he’s been dead for days!"

  "He hasn’t."

  The only stiffs I’d ever seen were freshly killed, but her husband had clearly croaked, and had been in that state for a while. This crazy bitch had brought me here to murder a dead body.

  "I’m outta here," I said. "This is too messed up for me. Your ass ain’t that nice."

  Gretchen stepped in front of me to block my way. "Please. You have to help me."

  "Can’t. Don’t have any prescription meds to share."

  "He’s not dead!"

  "He’s a rotting corpse!"

  "But he doesn’t stink."

  I took a whiff. She was right. He didn’t reek, though he did sort of have that old man smell. "What’d you use, Febreze?"

  "He’s alive. Check his pulse."

  "I’m not touching that nasty thing."

  "He’s breathing."

  I watched him for a moment. "No, he’s not."

  "He is. It’s hard to see, but he’s still breathing."

  "Babe, your husband isn’t doing anything but waiting for the maggots. Hell, it was probably maggots moving around under those PJ’s that made you think he was breathing. The guy is dead. I’m not judging you for killing him, I’m just saying that you may want to join our little piece of reality."

  Gretchen almost looked like she was going to cry. Fortunately, a woman’s tears have never affected me. The lunatic could bawl all she wanted. I wasn’t hanging around.

  "Why won’t you check his pulse?"

  "One, because he could have diseases. Two, because I don’t feel any great need to put my fingerprints on a murder victim. Three, because it’s fuckin’ gross. Do you need more reasons?"

  "I’ll prove it to you," she said. She walked past me and down a hallway.

  I stared at the body. That was one dead dude. As far as I could tell, in addition to the slit throat and bashed-in head, she’d also stabbed him in the chest about a dozen times. I guess it made sense that she’d go insane after doing something like that. She was probably hearing his voice, whispering into her ear. "Gretchen…Gretchen…you’ll pay for this atrocity, you skanky tramp!" Or she was hearing his heartbeat like in that thing where the guy kills the old man with the weird eye—I think it was a Shakespeare play.

  Why was I even still here? The obvious course of action was "step away from the looney." It’s sort of like when a chick tells you she’s pregnant. You don’t hang around, waiting for her to start whining about child support; you get the hell out.

  Then I realized that I was being a complete idiot. This would be the easiest kill ever! Poke him with a stick, let him flop over onto the floor, and call it a job well done. I had no moral issues about taking advantage of an insane woman. I’d just make sure I didn’t fall asleep afterward and that I went home before she started to get clingy.

  Gretchen walked back into the living room with one of those stupid little mirrors women use to check their makeup. She pressed it underneath his nose.

  Nothing happened.

  "Maybe his dainty breaths are light as a feather," I said.

  "Shhhhhh."

  The mirror fogged up just a bit.

  I leaned closer, pretty sure I hadn’t seen that. It fogged again.

  "See?" she said. "He’s breathing."

  "Well, dip me in hot fudge and roll me through a Weight Watchers meeting," I said. Or maybe I said "holy shit." I forget which. It was probably "holy shit."

  I would’ve never believed that the old guy could look like that and not be dead. To be honest, I still wasn’t totally convinced, but I supposed it was possible that he had some tiny little flicker of life left in him. I had to admire this guy. A dozen stab wounds to my chest would probably be the end of me, and I’m no sissy.

  "Now do you understand why I need your help?" she asked.

  "Uh, no."

  "What do you mean, no?"

  "I mean, uh, no. Look at him! This guy is about two or three heartbeats away from giving up the ghost as it is. You don’t need me for this. You could finish him off by throwing a Tic-Tac at him."

  "Try it."

  "I don’t have a Tic-Tac."

  "I mean try to kill him." She grabbed the old man’s hair and yanked his head forward, revealing a nasty, deep gash on the back of his neck. "I’m not stupid, Frank, and I’m not insane. I’ve been trying to murder him for the past week. I’ve sliced him, stabbed him, and beat him, and he won’t die!"

  "You just didn’t stab him hard enough," I said. "Or hit him hard enough."

  "I also used poison."

  "Or poison him hard enough."

  "Right. So you can see why I need your help."

  "Yeah, yeah." I figured that a good bullet between the eyes would keep that mirror from fogging. Unfortunately, if I fired a gun in an apartment, I’d probably have to kill all of the neighbors who overheard the shot, and I wasn’t that motivated.

  "What’d you hit him with?" I asked.

  "A rolling pin. It broke."

  "Do you have a baseball bat?"

  "No."

  I looked around the living room. There were a couple of ugly vases, a lamp, and a figurine of two piglets getting it on (or maybe snuggling). I picked up
the figurine, but it turned out to be cheap plastic.

  "Don’t you have any good, solid bludgeoning objects?" I asked.

  "It wasn’t usually a bludgeoning type of household."

  "What about the TV?"

  "I need the TV."

  "Do you have a microwave?"

  "What about a book?"

  "I need something heavier than a book. I want to do this in one blow."

  "What about a chair?"