All Due Respect Issue #2

by Owen Laukkanen

  It wasn’t quite as hard as talking her into carrying Roger’s lifeless body into the tub, and after some coaxing, Dottie made a date for her and Loraine to go out on the town.

  Dottie met her in the shop. She got there early.

  When Loraine arrived, Dottie let her in. Both women were dressed for the best nightclubs in town.

  “So, where to?” Loraine asked.

  “I want to let you know,” Dottie said. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dottie stepped around the corner and picked up a crisp white butcher’s apron. “I mean, getting rid of Roger. Setting us up for a life of being our own bosses. What could be better, huh?”

  Loraine shrugged. Dottie slipped the apron over her red, formfitting dress. “I suppose we both have Roger to thank, really,” Dottie went on. “I mean, if he hadn’t snapped and carved up your husband, we’d still be ordinary housewives welcoming home our men stinking of raw meat every night. I tell ya, that smell? It can make you crazy.”

  Dottie stood in front of Loraine, apron covering her from her neckline down past her knees.

  “What are you doing? I thought we were going out.”

  “Just me, Loraine. Just me.”

  Dottie raised the cleaver and wondered to herself, is this what Roger felt like?

  8.

  DOTTIE SAT IN THE reception area of the United Capital Bank, a tissue clenched in her hand. She kept her head down, the veil concealing most of her face. She let out a quiet sob now and then to let the secretary know she was there.

  The bank manager, Mr. Howland, came out from his solid oak door and greeted her.

  “Mrs. Zucco, I’m so sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.”

  She took his hand in her black-gloved palm. “Me too.”

  Dottie kept her head tilted to the floor. Her black dress, the black hat and veil, it all made people uncomfortable. No one wanted to look at her too closely or be near her for too long. And that was the idea.

  “I’m so sorry you’ll be withdrawing from our bank, Mrs. Zucco. But I understand your desire to make a fresh start.”

  “Thank you. I’d love to stay but…the memories.” She let out a few more fake sobs, dabbing up under her veil with the tissue. No one noticed it was still dry.

  “I still wish to advise you that a cashier’s check is a much more secure way to withdraw this money. We can have it sent to whatever establishment you decide on once you get to where you’re going.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Howland. But Anthony always preferred cash. And to respect his final wishes, as laid out in his will…”

  Dottie turned on the waterworks. Howland snapped his fingers and a nervous teller brought over a bankers box filled with $427,000 in cash.

  “Well, as I said, Mrs. Zucco. I wish we’d met earlier under different circumstances.” Howland pushed a piece of paper across the desk for her to sign. Dottie copied what she’d studied of Loraine’s signature on all the deposit slips.

  Howland inquired, “Do you mind if I ask where you’re going?”

  “Some place warm. I swear sometimes around here, it feels like I’m hanging around in a freezer. It’s enough to make your limbs fall off.”

  Dottie scooped up the box in her arms and walked outside.

  * * *

  Eric Beetner is the author of The Devil Doesn’t Want Me, Dig Two Graves, White Hot Pistol, The Year I Died Seven Times, Stripper Pole at the End of the World, and the story collection, A Bouquet of Bullets. He is co-author (with JB Kohl) of the novels One Too Many Blows to the Head and Borrowed Trouble. He has also written two novellas in the popular Fightcard series, Split Decision and A Mouth Full of Blood. He lives in Los Angeles where he co-hosts the Noir at the Bar reading series. For more, visit ericbeetner.blogspot.com

  God’s Country

  By Liam Sweeny

  A LONELY STREET SIGN stood crooked against the wind in front of Saint Mary’s Church, Open for prayer, it said. A couple of old birds got out of a grey Ford Focus, ambled out onto the sidewalk, strolled in to encase their petitions to the Almighty in brick and stained glass and the scented votive candles in sanguine red glass holders.

  I don’t pray in churches. I only need to pray behind shellacked-pine bars in the middle of fucking nowhere when the bottles above are giving up their spirits to automatic lead, drowning me in frontier holy water.

  There’s no atheists in foxholes or country-bar shootouts. I’m looking at Ned, and he’s looking up at the Genesee neon sign above, and he’s saying prayers, making the barest trace of a cross on his chest. Fifteen minutes ago, he didn’t believe in nothing except the kilo of uncut blow in his belly, strung like cellophane sausage-links.

  At the bar a week ago, sitting at a table that had a few less holes in it, I told him what I thought of his “faith.”

  “Man, that’s fuckin’ stupid.” We were sitting side-by-side at a half-table bolted to the wall, staring out the front window, watching the dusty Texas dandruff set aloft by a passing F-150. Just me, Ned, and Clem, the bartender. If not for the weekend line dances, the place would’ve been tumbleweed years ago.

  “C’mon, Blake, easy money, man.” Ned popped a Mentos.

  “You don’t know these people.”

  “I know Shawn. He knows ’em.”

  “Shawn doesn’t know a condom.” I looked around, “Fuck, half this town is his bastard kids.”

  “Shawn’s alright,” Ned said.

  “Look, I like Shawn, but he’s in over his head this time, kid.”

  “What’s the big deal? I go over the border, they fill me up with baggies, I come back and shit ’em out. No big deal.”

  “Assuming you don’t get caught by border patrol, big assumption, what if one of them breaks inside ya?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, you’ll just smile, give a thumbs up like in those damn Mentos commercials and just like that, everything’s just gonna be A-Okay, right?”

  “You should talk, Blake,” Ned said. “You’re no angel.”

  “I’ve been ‘no angel’ successfully for thirty years, and not by doing dumb shit like this.”

  “I’m gonna’ do it, Blake. Sarah needs it for the divorce.”

  “If I were you, I’d pray to God you’ll be around to hear me say I told you so.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” Ned said. “Just sweet tail. I’m surprised you believe in God.”

  I took a quencher from my beer bottle. “When I have to.”

  So now I have to. Ned comes back a’ cryin’—he can’t shit. And Sarah disappeared with his money. I wish I could say I was surprised, that I haven’t become some world-worn, cynical old dick, unable to be surprised by anything other than gunfire. But being honest, even gunfire’s not a surprise. Ned’s gut is pregnant with a kilo of uncut cocaine, and the guys outside are prepping for an emergency C-section. I don’t know who’s the bigger fool; Ned for doing it, or me for coming to his side when it went south. They say God suffers fools. Hope so.

  I’m looking around—I’m out of bullets, and the shotgun Clem kept behind the bar is on the floor in front of the bar in Clem’s dead hands. Actually, it probably flew somewhere when they pumped him. But other than that, the inventory I’m taking is bleak. Just beers, glasses, sodas. I’m gazing at two-liter bottles of diet Coke, thinking who drinks that shit here? But the bullets are still tap-dancing along the brass rail.

  Then the image comes into my eye, and the synapses fire, bringing all the clips and images and words into a coherent story. A half-assed epiphany. Maybe a miracle. Maybe.

  “Ned, you still got Mentos?”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that?” More than fear, actually.

  I grab his collar. “Answer the fucking question!”

  “Yeah, I got two packs.”

  “Okay, just follow my lead.”

  I grab a white apron and put it on top of a broom handle and raise it. A bullet whi
zzes by it, then silence.

  “You givin’ up?” Mexican accent. Not a local.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Don’t shoot! I’m coming up.”

  I slowly rise, arms to the sky. No one shoots. That’s as good as an ice-breaker in situations like this.

  “Look,” I say. “We have a problem.”

  “No,” a fat fuck in a knock-off Stetson says. “You have a problem.”

  True, but nonetheless.

  “Then we both have a problem. They did it wrong.”

  The Mexicans sweep open the bullet-ravaged door and step in. All casual, ’cause they know we’re out in God’s country—only God payin’ taxes out here. We’re both rat-meat if I can’t play the game I end when so many others play it with me—the ‘Spare my life, please!’ game.

  I motion the fat one over to the bar. “Get up, Ned,” I say, but Ned just groans.

  “What they did was, they tied the baggies in one long string,” I tell the Mexicans, who by now are guns down. “Makes it easy to pull up, that is, if something doesn’t push a baggie into the bowel. That’s why you’re supposed to do ’em one at a time.”

  A short, ratty, pock-marked kid with The Virgin Mary scrawled on his bicep comes up with a fucking Bowie knife. “We’re getting’ our shit, man!”

  “Look, you’re gonna’ get your shit all over this floor if ya cut him up,” I say. “Unless you’re a doctor with a team, it’s impossible to disembowel somebody neatly.”

  “How you know that?” The kid says.

  I get Ned up, arm over my shoulder. “I was dumb enough to wear a thousand-dollar suit once,” I say. “Had to burn it, and shower for three hours.”

  “You sayin’ you’re a killer, big man?” The fat one says.

  “I’m saying I know you can’t just cut it out of him and expect product. But I think I can at least salvage some, no cutting needed.”

  I search Ned’s pockets and feel two rolls and pull ’em out. One is unopened, the other has a few left. I have no clue about any formula or recipe, but I figure you need the soda in first, ’cause in the video they dropped the Mentos in the Diet Coke, not the other way around. Then I remember the video of the guy I saw. He drank the soda first. I grab a two-liter from the ground, but easy. These guys are still a bit itchy.

  “Any of you guys seen the Diet Coke and Mentos trick?”

  They’re deadpan. The tattoo boy grabs a roll and looks at it like he never saw candy.

  I hold up the Mentos. “A couple of these, Drop ’em in enough of this,” I hold up the Diet Coke, “causes a chemical reaction. Turns the soda bottle into a volcano of soda.”

  I look back, know I got enough bottles. I sit Ned on the barstool and open the Diet Coke. I drop two Mentos in and the Mexicans are, for a moment, wide-eyed at the eruption. Then it ends and we’re out of science class.

  The third man, a short, lean, muscular hombre dressed in a three-piece Brooks Brothers suit and a black felt fedora, speaks for the first time.

  “How does this,” he points, “chemical reaction pertain to our friend here?”

  He’s calm. Maybe I got a shot here.

  “I make him drink the two-liter, or as much as he can hold without throwing it up, and they’re his Mentos—he likes the shit—and we wait a minute or two for the eruption.”

  “So he vomits?”

  “He’ll be blowing it outta’ both ends.”

  The man strokes his chin, forearm resting on a chair back.

  “Can your friend handle it? He looks ill.”

  “It’s the blockage. This might be the only thing that’ll help him.”

  I grab one of the other two-liters of Diet Coke and sit Ned up. He looks weary, defeated. Pretty much like he should look. He’s clutching his side.

  “Ned, I know you’re not thirsty, but you’re going to drink this whole thing.”

  Ned looks up at me, eyes puffy. “What if I can’t? They’ll kill me.”

  “No, they won’t. But I will, you have my word.” I shove the bottle in his mouth. “Now drink.”

  Ned struggles, but I get him to drink almost three-quarters of the bottle. He tries to puke it up a few times. I handle it. I’ve had to poison people before. It doesn’t work if you let ’em puke it up.

  “I’m not guaranteeing you’ll get all of your product in one piece,” I warned them, “but the alternative would get you far less.”

  I give Ned two Mentos. “Chew them up in your mouth, Ned. Then one gulp, swallow it all.”

  I back up. “Y’all may want to back up.” Ned’s face goes bleach white and he contorts in a God-awful way. The Mexicans back up, their eyes wide like Ned is about to go thermonuclear. In a way, he is.

  A blast of foam shoots out of his mouth like super-rabies and the back of his pants bulge out and turn dark. He collapses on the floor, gagging and convulsing. I know two things are happening: He’s choking on baggies, and one of them broke inside. Ned is dead, just waiting for the clock’s hand to strike the second. I hop down and pry his mouth open and stick my fingers in as far as I can until I feel slimy plastic. I pull at it slowly, break Ned’s jaw open with a wrench on the floor. Like I said, he’s dead anyway. The coke is gonna’ kill him. Treating him like he’s salvageable is gonna kill me.

  I start pulling up the string of baggies. After the first one, the rest come easy. Shit, there’s a ton of ’em. Hopefully a kilo.

  “How much was in him, a kilo?” I ask over the bar as the Mexicans look on.

  “Why you need to know?” the kid says.

  I had a pile of baggies in my hand. “So I know how much is still in him.”

  “One kilo, yes,” the professional says. I pull the last baggie I can out—the one that burst. I tip my hand up and lower it quick, letting the full weight of the baggies hit my palm.

  “There’s probably still a quarter in him. Let me turn him over.” I undo Ned’s buttons and yank his corduroys down. Then I spin him, pull down his shitty boxers, and pretend the stench doesn’t make me want to have an eruption of my own. I grab the surrender apron and give Ned an ass-wipe. A string knot is embedded in his corn-hole and I pull it. All told, four more baggies from the back-door. I take them over to the sink and set all of them in a pan of water. I think twice and squirt some dish-soap in there.

  Then I grab a cigarette from my pocket, light it with a wooden matchstick from the bar, my own votive candle. Can’t figure if it’s for my immortal soul or my very mortal skin.

  “Do you know who I am?” the professional says.

  “A reasonable man, I hope.”

  He dusts off a seat before he sits down.

  “I don’t take a piss for one kilo, Mr. Blake.”

  Mr. Blake? What?

  “Come, sit,” he says. I’m not one to argue. I hop over the bar and don’t bother dusting off. There are worse things on my clothes.

  “Do you think me a fool, Mr. Blake?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to think anything.”

  “Which is good, good. But I’m no fool. I would not send the likes of your friend over the border to do my business, nor the fool who recruited him. This, Shawn, was asked to recruit your friend.”

  I listen. What the hell else do I have to do?

  “And I know how to properly bring things through the border. You were right, you do not tie them together, it’s…messy. But I instructed this for that reason.”

  “So he’d die?”

  “So he’d come to you when he couldn’t pass them. I needed to see you in action.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will.” The man calls out to the other two. “Empty your clips into the mule,” he says. They walk over to the bar. The man eyes me hard, pulls a Beretta out of his coat and hands it to me. “You fire three times. He was your friend.” He points to the other two who are aiming down, prepared to air out dead Ned. I get up to shoot a corpse in good faith, but the man tugs at my shirtsleeve. I lean down.

  “Only two men will leave this b
ar tonight.” His black eyes burn. “Choose wisely.”

  I could shoot all three of them. Way I figure, I have three bullets, if the man at the table isn’t full of shit. One for Ned, one each for his triggers. I look back, and he just sits there, staring out the window, like he knows he’s walking out, suit unsoiled. He’s got an ace. A man who doesn’t piss for a kilo of coke doesn’t walk around without aces. So I walk up to the bar and shake the gun like Ned’s something more than cooling meat on the barroom floor as the triggers empty full clips. Glancing over at me like I’m a pussy, soon to be vic’ two. I fire finally, mush out Ned’s eye and I hear the toy-sounding clicks of their empty pieces. I push the wiry one with the jailhouse ink into the fat fuck and give them both their last rites.

  I walk back over to the table and hand the man his gun back. No point holding on to it.

  “You didn’t point the gun at me. Curious,” the man said. “Why not?”

  “It’s empty.”

  “And you know this how? The weight?” The man’s eyes lit up, a kid, curious.

  “You said you don’t piss for a kilo.” I tapped the Beretta. “Bet you don’t load four bullets for a three-bullet job either.”

  The man laughed. He took off his fedora and held it in his hands.

  “I am Javier.” He says. “Do you need to clean anything up before we leave for Juarez?”

  “Juarez?”

  “I have killers, Mr. Blake,” he says. “I have many killers. I need thinkers. I have to say that the soda and candy thing was impressive. I’m sure I can find you excellent accommodations and steady employment.”

  “I don’t really have a choice here, do I?”

  “You always have a choice. You can believe that if it helps.”

  I look around at a bar made into a war zone by three men in two hours, in a land where the Law is no friend and my friends become ghosts and holy-rollers preach Judgment Day to the hungover bastards whose wives go to churches Open for prayer, and I realize that I don’t really have a choice, or a prayer.

  I clean up the Diet Coke and Mentos and my gun, the only things linking me to the carnage at the bar. I join Javier in his inky black Escalade, and this one weird thought comes to mind: