“Lesson learned yet, Vincent?”
I twist my oil-soaked head. I can’t talk. The best I can manage is a sort of caveman-like grunt.
“Uh, uh, ughhh!”
“I think not. Mr. Willy, if you will.”
Willy pulls back on the lever, and I’m approaching that grease pit again, trying like hell to twist my head one hundred eighty degrees so that my mouth and nostrils point upwards. But it’s impossible. This time I drop so fast I make a splash when I hit the black liquid.
Holding my breath doesn’t work and I swallow a mouthful of the sludge. I swear I’m going to drown in it once and for all. But then he pulls me out. There’s more spitting and vomiting. Death has finally arrived for Dick Moonlight inside a mechanic’s garage.
But maybe I’m not going to die. Maybe I might have a shot of getting out of this. All that toxic oil is doing something to my wrists and the tape that binds them. It’s neutralizing the stickiness. I move my wrists one way and another. I feel the tape coming loose. Then looser. Same goes with the ankles. In fact, I feel my whole body starting to slip away from the jack. Then I’m free. Just like that, I’m airborne, making a nose dive back into the pit.
I hit like a fat man doing a belly flop. The sludge breaks my fall, but at the same time, it sprays in every direction, slapping Billy and the weasel in the face, taking them by total surprise. I’m up and on my feet, standing mid-shin in oil and gas. I’m facing Billy as he frantically wipes the mixture from his eyes like a panicked kid trying to wipe away soap in the bathtub. The weasel is tearing his now stained white shirt off and wiping his face with it.
My window of opportunity has arrived.
SIX
Payback is a Bitch
I reach behind Billy, take his piece and cock back the hammer. I point the barrel at his face. Concrete Blonde screams, drops her lit cigarette to the floor, where it begins to smolder. Oil drips into my eyes, burning them, but I still manage to catch sight of the weasel. He’s got his own piece out now and he’s planting a bead on me, trying to hold it steady. I shift my aim, sight in on his eyes, and squeeze one off. His brains drop to the floor a split second before his skin and bones.
Billy must be worse off than I thought, because he’s starting to scream, the toxic mixture in his eyes burning and blinding him. Not even the blast of the pistol has had an effect on him. Concrete Blonde goes running to him. She’s clawing at him. At first I think she’s trying to help him. But wiping the oil out of my own searing eyes, I begin to see the light. She’s not helping. She’s clawing at his eyes, trying to gouge them out.
“Shoot him!” she screams. “Shoot him now!”
Behind her, the smoldering is getting worse. Blue and red flame erupts on the floor. It’s spreading fast along the floor, fueled by all the spilled motor oil and gasoline. It begins to creep up the walls.
Concrete Blonde won’t stop her mouth. “Shoot the animal, the woman-beater, the coward! Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot! Him!”
For the briefest of moments, I find myself listening to her. I’d love to shoot him. I’d love nothing more than to put a cap in his big fat, used car salesman, mafia head. Or better yet, one in his throat so he suffers. But I’m not the type to shoot someone execution-style—myself included—unless it’s absolutely necessary. My mind is not always right. But I have my standards, my morals.
Billy’s down on his knees now, trying to free the oil from his eyes with one hand, trying to slap his girl with the other. I take a step back and fall into the pit. I lose the piece, but it doesn’t matter. Concrete Blonde dives in after it. I back myself out of the hole, managing to get back up on my feet. I position myself on the opposite side of the pit, just as she pulls the .9mm from the oil. She wraps her finger around the trigger and squeezes. But all she gets is a click, click, click. That’s when the fire makes it up to the roof, the burning turning into a blazing roar. The flames spread laser-fast along the floor, catching Billy’s clothing on fire and running up his back. He’s screaming now, running around in blind circles. In a matter of seconds, he’s lit up like a torch, fully engulfed. The big man drops into the pit and the effect is HUUUUUUGGGE! It’s like a lit match dropped into a pool of high-grade gasoline. The concrete blonde bursts into flame along with the entire pit.
I know I have maybe five seconds to find a way out, or I’m as dead as my new employers. I locate a side door right beside the roll-up door. With no hesitation, I sprint for it, through the flame and the smell of searing flesh. I kick it open and make my way out into the darkness of the late afternoon.
SEVEN
Sleeping Dogs
The place burns to the ground in a HUUUUUUGGGE conflagration that lights up the night, taking its owner with it, along with his sig other and his suck up yes-man. I stand outside with kid who tends bar and we watch it burn. After I move Dad’s hearse to the lot behind the bar, the kid generously gives me a hose to wash off all the oil or else I’m going to have some explaining to do when the cops and firemen finally arrive. That is, if they spot me in all this confusion.
He’s really not a bad kid after all. It turns out Big Billy was his uncle. The short of it is that his father had racked up so much gambling debt to his bigger, used car brother that the kid had become a sort of slave. Big Billy actually owned him, which is why the kid took the chance on contacting me in the first place, under that John Smith alias. He wanted me to go to work for Billy, collect all the incriminating evidence I could, and then bring it all to the police. He knew that the only way he could do it without risking his or his father’s life was to make sure Billy was put away for good—life imprisonment, thus the three Gs and the promise of twenty-seven more. But this little bit with the fire and Billy’s unexpected but tragic death, well, that’s even better than his going to prison. Finally, for the first time in years, the kid is free.
“Were you really going to pay me thirty Gs for this job?” I ask him. The fire trucks finally make it past the illegally parked cars and trucks outside the bar.
Kid cocks his head.
“I would have tried, one way or another, Mr. Moonlight, to get you the dough. Really.”
I nod. Up on the hill, the entire Italian restaurant has emptied to watch the car dealership go up in flames. Too bad about Billy’s truck. In order to get at the hydrant, the firemen had to smash all the windows. And eventually they had to push it out of the way with one of their trucks, crushing the entire driver’s side. Guess that door ding isn’t the only thing marring its perfect finish now. That’s when something dawns on me.
“How much you think the bar is worth?” I pose to the kid.
He cocks his head, thinking about it for a few seconds.
“It don’t make that much money. But the place is paid for, and it’s a cash-only business.”
He smiles. Without my having to ask, we have ourselves a deal.
“You wanna job?” I ask. “Stay on as the manager?”
“Sure thing,” he smiles. “I’ve been applying to law schools in my spare time.”
“Great,” I say. “I’ve got myself a working bar and a new lawyer. Now that’s HUUUUUUGGGE!”
I hold out my hand. He takes it, grips it tight and shakes.
“What about my uncle, his girlfriend, and Willy?”
It doesn’t take much thought from my end.
“Cops will probably find their remains,” I say. “They’ll find the guns and the duct tape. They’ll assume that Billy was up to some of his old tricks with one of his wise guys and that it all got carried away. It’ll mean one or three less wise guys on the streets. End of story.”
For a time, we stand in silence as the roof on the dealership caves in, sending sparks and burning embers onto the used cars that fill the lot.
“Well, hows about a drink, Mr. Moonlight? You look like you could use one.”
Jack. I can taste it now.
“You buying?”
“Nope, it’s your place now.” He raises his hands, making like he’s pi
cturing the new marquee that will take the place of Billy’s Bar. “Moonlight’s…Moonlit…Manor! How’s that sound? Looks like drinks are on you, Boss Man.”
“Maybe we should drink one in memory of your uncle Billy,” I lamely suggest, following the kid down into my very own watering hole.
“May he forever rest in hell,” the kid shouts.
“On second thought,” I say, “maybe it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”
The End
Vincent is the author of the bestselling noir thrillers, The Remains (available in Amazon.com Kindle store http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TSEN0I), Moonlight Falls, (available in Amazon.com Kindle store http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0034XS9TY) and more. For more information go to www.vincentzandri.com or www.thestonepublishinghouse.com
Also by Vincent Zandri:
Concrete Pearl
The Remains
Moonlight Falls
Godchild
The Innocent (As Catch Can)
Permanence
Pathological (A Digital Short)
True Stories (A Digital Short)
Chris White
Chris loves history, Sherlock Holmes, and anything that’s not virtual, like old motorcycles and mechanical typewriters. He also doesn’t get why we have these things called “smartphones” when all they do is make people dumber. He recently celebrated 10 years of marriage with his wife, April, and has two boys: Noah, age 8, and Jaden, age 3, who inspired the Great Jammy Adventure series; the OK-to-color-in picture books. Chris is working on a short story called The Marsburg Diary that will further explore one of the subplots of Airel (with Aaron Patterson). His first novel, K: phantasmagoria, is due out in 2011. Chris has a major crush on Audrey Hepburn, who is now dead. He also thinks Mary Poppins is hot. His wife is okay with all of this.
K: phantasmagoria
(excerpted)
PROLOGUE
AN EIGHT-AXLE HEAVY-HAUL fuel transport truck and trailer, both of its massive aluminum tanks freshly polished and gleaming, sits at the terminus of an underground fuel pipeline that stretches about 500 miles from the Salt Lake area to Nampa, Idaho at what the drivers call the “fuel racks.” It’s a fenced-in dirt lot yard that houses citadel-like tanks that hold unleaded, premium unleaded, diesel and kerosene. The September sun is already beginning to beat down though it has only been up about an hour now, and the high desert sweetness of cool sage is rapidly giving way to the dusty dryness of sandy earth resigning itself to another cooking. In the long shadows, the driver of the fuel truck is loading his cargo via four-inch hose lines, minding the valves and volumes of his tanks.
Along the driver’s side of the truck at the tandem drive axles, on the inside surface where the dual tires face each other, an arrowhead-shaped flap of rubber is growing in size and depth, cutting into the carcass of the tire. The driver is unaware that he rolled over a piece of steel rebar sticking up out of the ground as he entered the racks this morning, that it ripped into the interior sidewall of one of his drive tires. Now, as the truck takes on cargo and the mass of it further stresses the steel plies of the tire’s sidewall, the flap protrudes slightly more, and the resultant bias of air pressure at that point begins pulling apart the steel belts that give the tire its strength. When the truck’s ready to roll, the mechanical wear and tear of each revolution of the tire will compound its weakness, rising exponentially with inputs from the driver.
The driver, already sweating, wipes his brow in the heady fumes, beginning to shut valves and disconnect hoses as he finishes loading the fuel. He makes notes in the log at the racks and on his shipping manifest for the load. It’s premium for the truck and barely a 20% rated capacity load of kerosene for the pup trailer. Loading heavy on the truck and light on the trailer allows the driver to control the load with the truck, rather than the load controlling the truck by terrorizing it—he knows from all the way back in driving school that it’s suicide to load his trailer heavier than his tractor; especially with these kinds of trucks: even though the tanks are baffled inside, the motions created in normal traffic cause the cargo to slosh and surge inside the tank, amplifying mistakes.
He finishes off his notes and caps off the hoses. He doesn’t notice from the ground that the hatches covering the tank pressure vents, about eleven feet above the road along the top of the tanks, are coming loose. He takes a cursory walk around the vehicle though, verifying his lights are functioning and checking the tires. He looks for physical damage and finds none—it’s a brand new truck anyway—though the tanks are simply swapped from older trucks and reused whenever new ones are bought; it cuts down on needless expenses. He walks up to the tire with the flap shaped like an arrowhead and kicks it with one steel-toed boot. It feels nice and hard, just like it should. He can’t see any problems and he sure isn’t young enough anymore to go around crawling under his truck looking for problems that are never there. Michelin makes a good tire, he thinks. He makes sure his truck is properly HAZMAT placarded for his cargo, then walks to the driver’s door—his office.
The big Cat comes to life smoothly, rumbling, pulsing through the seat and controls, and he turns the AC up all the way. The fat turbo chirps crisply at idle through the dual stacks. He radios his status to dispatch and notes the time: about a quarter past eight. Well, we might beat the morning rush after all. He releases the parking brakes with a surging and subdued hiss of pressure. Getting paid by the load means his incentive is to work hard and fast so he can be paid well.
Two short blasts on the air horn signal anyone around him that he’s moving. The gleaming fire-engine red Kenworth crawls powerfully over the bleached dust and gravel hard-pan service road. Its cooling fan kicks up a poof of powdery dust as the driver executes a tight sight-side left turn and makes for the exit, eventually the freeway. He’s headed for I-84 East; a local customer in Boise.
ONE
The alarm is shouting at him, flashing 5:30 with each granular irritant of beep. He reaches for the alarm and smacks the snooze button to stop its nonsense, and the cycle repeats every ten minutes until 6:20. K then rises with silent foreboding, thinking once again he dreamed and didn’t remember; that he missed something. That might be good, it might be bad. He dreads mornings these days; it’s hard enough waking up anyway—but not nearly as much as he dreads what sits in the corner of his bedroom at night, watching. He fumbles for the kill switch on the old travel clock that slides one irritating notch to the left to disable entirely the beep he so hates, but that marks with depressing regularity the beginning of each of his days now. He makes his mark with it and then recollapses into the heavy softness of his bed. As usual, he wrapped the tail end of the down comforter under his feet last night, a requisite ritual making him feel slightly more secure for all his disturbed attempts at sleep.
He wrestles in his mind with the idea of sitting up, feet to the floor, and getting on with his day. He can’t fall back asleep now, the alarm is disabled entirely. It is especially ironic to him that he can hate so completely the thing which, in the final analysis, starts his day every day with the kind of tirelessness that running two years on a single AAA battery can define. He mumbles hateful expletives about irony and hatred, his especial hatred for irony, and thrashes around until he can no longer fight the sunshine—he sits up.
Another sunny day, chuck it all and light it on fire. Why can’t it rain even once? It’s the endless Boise summer of sixteen hours of daylight, ten o’clock sunsets, and in which September burns brightest and hottest. The leaves on the trees are so tired from the abundance of sunlight that they’re hanging over the town in a dirge that prophesies expiration. A little rain might do wonders—if not for the scenery, then at least for a little contrast to make him feel as if he’s alive.
His feet gingerly probe the carpet for a platform on which to raise his tired body. Tender. His mind is jerked back to nightmarish visions he wishes would go away, wishes he could avoid. All at once he feels too young and altogether too old for much of anything. He can feel depre
ssion stalk into the room with a bag of Doritos, ready to pull up a chair and irritate him just by being there, with all its not inconsiderable bulk. K’s irritable, first thing. But he lets it slide—again—because it’s justifiable when sleep just isn’t happening.
The sun rises on Boise, Idaho, a place which is simultaneously both big city and small town. This torn conflictedness is precisely K’s poison, too; bittersweet hate-love that keeps him going, if nothing else. At his age, too, he’s wondering when he’ll discover enough of himself to be enough. For what, well…that’s the question, is it not?
He had a conversation just the other night with Rosa, a copper haired beauty, the typical desirable—the latest feminine semi-obsession in his life—who enjoys, he suspects, toying with him. It’s not intended to be high stakes. It somehow always ends up that way though—and once a woman is backed into a corner it’s shocking how evil she can be. But he sees her often, though it never moves past a meet for drinks in another safe alt-rock pub for sexless banter about their experiences vs. their hopes and dreams—gag.
The worst time of K’s life is now. It’s not just that he’s struggling at the end of every day, once he finally turns in for the night and tries to get to sleep. He tosses and turns not just for the backaches, but also because he’s trying not to release his mind to macabre places where horrifically distorted children play the Devil’s games in roadside parks, then get swallowed up by earthquakes and are replaced by weird plasticized spiny trees that feed on their corpses in the ground, and random dark corners contain sepia-toned starving orphans who sit patiently awaiting him, as if they bear some message for him. This is why he keeps such odd hours, why he stays awake until two or three in the morning. He simply has to be tired enough when he goes to bed to sleep instantly, or he will be haunted. And he fears that he will see again what watches him from the corner in the dark.
Intrigue (Stories of Suspense) Page 24