by Joe Clifford
He awoke with a start, dazed and unsure of where he was. Someone or something was crashing through the woods. He jumped to his feet and saw Raymundo walking toward him from the direction of the house.
Ray flicked his head to clear the hair out of his eyes. “Man, you should see the pool they got back there. Is beautiful.”
Skooley wiped off some spittle that had accumulated on his chin with the back of his hand and then ran his hand under his armpit to clean it off.
“Anybody see you?” he asked.
“No, man, is like I tole you, nobody home. They away. They away for a month, maybe more.”
“You go into the backyard?”
“Yeah, the backyard, the front yard, all over. I even knock on the door. “
“I told you we was gonna wait, check it out first.”
“We did wait, man. You fell asleep, Skools. I got to pee. I walk back over that way, you know, to take a leak. I right there so I take a look around. I don’t see nobody. I come back, you still snoring. We got no more beer. I go out to the road, walk up the driveway in case someone home, you know, looking out the window, they don’t see me sneaking around. I walk up to the front door and knock. No one answer. I ring the bell. Nothing. I walk around, yoo-hoo, anyone home? I go into the backyard. Nice pool. It got a cover, but you can still see, you know. Little waterfall, hot tub too, man, is beautiful.”
Ray stood there looking at Skooley with a smug, self-satisfied smile, and it took every ounce of self-control for Skooley not to sucker punch him. Instead, he beamed back to his best friendly smile.
“Suppose someone answered the door, Ray. Suppose there was some old lady in the backyard, you know, laying out by the pool thinking she’s all alone getting a tan, maybe even naked with her titties sticking out. What then, huh?”
“Someone answer the door, I say I looking for work, you know, clean the yard, cut the grass. Not sneaky, real polite. But no one answer. Is like I tole you already, they not home. They go away for like a month. They go every year. My friend, Esmeralda, she say every year, same time, they go away to California, Arizona, someplace like that.”
Skooley rubbed his chin and thought about it. They were there because Ray had heard about this house from one of his beaner girlfriends who cleaned houses. She had told Ray that there were only two people who lived here: an old rich guy along with his wife. She said the guy was loaded, owned a paving and construction company, and had a big motor yacht they kept docked somewhere on the Hudson River. Skooley could see a small backhoe parked on the far side of the house next to some construction debris. It had to be the guy’s machine. And his wife was supposedly some sort of famous artist. Esmeralda said that she had her own art studio over the garage, and there were expensive paintings hung up all over the house. One room on the main floor she described as being like a gallery in an art museum. She told Ray that their three kids were grown, married, and out of the house.
But Skooley was cautious. What kind of dumbass would just leave a big old house like this sitting empty for so long? Guy was rich, and he didn’t get that way by being a dumbass. It wouldn’t hurt to take their time and look things over. See if anyone was house sitting. Maybe one of his kids decided to stay over for a few days to make sure that everything was locked up good and tight. Shit, maybe this was the year they decided to just stay put and not go to California or Arizona or wherever the hell they went. Maybe right now, this very minute, they were just leaving the local supermarket or their neighbor’s house and heading back home. Skooley certainly wasn’t afraid of breaking the law, but he didn’t see any need for being reckless.
“C’mon, man, let’s go check it out, see if we can get in,” said Raymundo, and with a flick of his head he started out of the woods toward the house, “I bet they even leave a door open for us, Skools. Maybe they got some beer in a big Viking fridge, huh?”
Skooley scratched his chin and thought about it for just a second, then figured what the hell and followed the little Mexican from Guatemala into the yard.
Click here to learn more about Thieves by Steven Max Russo.
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Here is a preview from The Bad Kind of Lucky by Matt Phillips, published by Shotgun Honey, an imprint of Down & Out Books.
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1
Remmie Miken heard the voices through the wall, two loudmouths shouting at each other in the studio apartment next door. Something about a skinny girl named Veranda and a used Dodge Charger with low miles. Remmie caught bits and pieces, put together that the girl was gone, but somehow the Dodge might still be around, maybe in Tijuana. Who-fucking-knew?
Thing was: Remmie couldn’t sleep.
Not with the shouting and the stomping and the constant back and forth about the goddamn car. Whether the girl and the car were in Tijuana or not, Remmie was tired after ten hours on fryer duty at Big Stop’s Roadhouse, a grease pit burger joint smudged beneath a freeway overpass on the outskirts of downtown. He worked six days a week and all he wanted—besides a timely fucking paycheck—was a few hours sleep before his next shift.
How to get some quiet in this rundown apartment building?
He started by banging his fist against the wall and smothering himself with a lumpy pillow.
The conversation coming through the wall was the scumbag version of the scientific method:
Could be the girl got picked up by the cops, no? Would have been out by now, that’s right. Okay, so she didn’t get picked up, but maybe the girl took the Dodge up north? What’d the raspy-voiced guy think? Well, he thought the skinny bitch was too lazy to drive herself. No, she maybe sold the car to a gringo down on the border, used the money for a flight to Mexico City. The Dodge had leather interior, a decent sound system. Some nice fucking rims.
Big loss. Too big. They had to find it. And Veranda, too.
This fucking car. This fucking skinny girl who runs off without a word. Remmie wanted to burn the car and kill the girl, drown these two loudmouths in their own toilet bowl. He tried some deep breathing exercises, a thing he learned in his anger management courses—it was no good.
He couldn’t fucking sleep.
He got out of bed and put his ear to the wall. He noticed how bare his apartment looked. Sad. Pitiful, in fact. All he had in the place was a mattress on the floor, a cell phone plugged into the wall, and a mini-fridge filled with cheap beer next to the electric stove. He had a stack of paperback books, too. Old mysteries he found in a cardboard box in the alley outside his apartment building. Moody covers. Tough guys with five o’clock shadow and loaded pistols. Naked women clutching wet sheets in dingy motel rooms.
For all Remmie knew, the books could have belonged to the skinny girl.
He listened while the two men talked:
“Veranda couldn’t find her own reflection in a mirror.”
The raspy voice said, “Trust me, that girl knows what kind of money Leo Action pulls in. Don’t think she doesn’t have the balls to rip him off.”
“If she took the car, she did it because it was easy. That’s all.”
“Fuck if I believe that. She’s smarter than you give her credit for.”
“She didn’t know about the cop.”
More from raspy voice, “She does now.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Remmie banged on the wall again and said, “Can you two shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep over here.” Before he could scream at them again, a blast slammed his ears and Remmie stumbled backwards, sat on the cheap carpet. It was like being shot through a cloud; he didn’t know what was happening. His ears rang and pain started in the front of his head. What the fuck? He wiped particles of dry wall from his face, brushed dust off his hands and arms. He squinted through the darkness, tried to stand up, fell onto his knees. After a few deep breaths, Remmie stood and stared at a gaping crevice in the wall, just belo
w where it met the ceiling; it looked like his apartment was yawning. He could see the two-by-four wall studs and some red and green electrical wires dangling through the slit. Across the room, in the far wall, he saw the splattered, pockmarked surface of a shotgun blast.
Those scumbag motherfuckers: They shot a hole in his wall.
Looked like Remmie needed to pay his neighbors a visit.
Remmie Miken was starting over after a bad run.
Divorce.
Lost custody.
Ten thousand dollars in gambling debt.
Here’s a bit of advice: Know what the fuck cricket is before you start laying bets on the sport—it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than you think.
What happened to Remmie could—he was sure—happen to almost any high school graduate. You start out alright, but you get bored. You get sick of frying catfish and mixing mayonnaise into tarter sauce. Everything starts to feel watered down; your snot-nosed kid cries a little too long each night, your wife asks a few too many questions, and your mother-in-law won’t stop talking about Oprah and her favorite reality tv shows. The double-wide starts to feel too much like a cell in the county jail.
Next thing you know, you’re sipping from a toilet bowl in a dive bar down by the mud flats, a thick slab of hand holding you by the neck.
Here’s the gist: They want their fucking money.
Of course, later, there’s a whole arson plot when it comes to the double-wide. And insurance fraud. Too much bail money to think about. And collateral, what little you have. Another bit of advice: Those class rings aren’t worth a solid-shitty-half of what you paid for them. Oh, and they’re not real gold either.
Just so you know, you know?
Point is, Remmie Miken needed a fresh start after the first thirty-six years of his life. He thought he’d try to make it in the Big City. Give it the old junior college try. Why not? All his shit was burned up and he’d never been loved.
Not for what he was, at least.
How much worse could life get?
The apartment building was low-rent, a two-story place next to a freeway on-ramp, refurbished with cheap carpet and mismatched paint. No credit check required. The property manager told Remmie not to cook meth or grow marijuana. Everything else, from Remmie’s experience in the building, was fair game. That included prostitution—the skinny girl’s vocation.
Funny, Veranda was taking a vacation from her vocation.
Rolling around TJ in a stolen Dodge Charger.
Not a bad way to do it if you asked Remmie. He rode the city bus to work, and thinking about it made him want to scream. Anyway, he was used to living with scum. Hell, he was used to living in scum. But Remmie needed sleep; he needed it so he could go back to making limp-dick French fries in the morning. And these scumbags next door would not shut the fuck up—there was also the new decorating they’d done to his apartment. Remmie didn’t have a gun, not yet. The best he could find was a butter knife with a bent tip. He carried it in his right hand as he walked down the hall. He reached the next door apartment and pounded on the loose number seven nailed to the door. “What the fuck, man? I need to talk to you guys. I have to work in the morning and—”
The door swung open and Remmie gasped. His voice lodged in his throat and a headache burned behind his eyes. In front of him, face speckled with blood, was a fat man with a shotgun propped on one shoulder. He smiled at Remmie—the man’s top two front teeth were missing—and said, “Nice to see you, neighbor. I could use a little help with the clean up over here. Thanks for the visit.” The fat man moved aside and waved Remmie into the room. “Come on in. Hurry on in. Don’t stand out there like a stranger. Let’s be friends.”
Remmie slipped the butter knife into a pocket.
He shuffled into the apartment.
So much for starting a new life. Remmie had an odd feeling, a feeling like he was slipping out of his new skin and back into his old one.
2
“Now, you see here what happens when I get annoyed?” The fat man pointed at the body draped across the carpet. “And sometimes, you know, when I get annoyed, people get in the way and, shit—” He grunted and cleared his throat. “They get some bad luck coming their way.” The fat man jabbed the shotgun at Remmie; his cheeks flapped while he talked. “You the one banging on the goddamn wall? What do I have to do to have a decent business meeting in this shit hole? Here I am, in quiet palaver with my steamed colleague, and I got a fry cook,” the fat man squinted at Remmie’s ketchup-soiled pants, “thinking he’s the goddam quiet-police. You got a badge to go with that righteous dig-nation? Or maybe you think everybody keeps the same hours as a broke-ass hamburger jockey? Is that it, friend?”
Remmie didn’t know where to look.
He had two choices: The shotgun or the dead man.
The body was oddly twisted across the carpet, as if the man—in blue-tinged pimp suit and wingtips—was doing ballet when he got plugged. Half his face, framed in dark oily curls, was drenched in blood; one eye was a fleshy black mass, like a tumor unveiled. From the looks of it, Mr. Pimp (raspy voice, Remmie knew by now) got half the load, and the other half plunged through the wall. A little more demo and they’d have a two-bedroom on their hands.
The fat man sighed. “What do you call yourself? What’s your Christian name, friend?” He wagged the shotgun at Remmie. It was a finger of doom.
Remmie grunted, felt his throat tighten. He choked out a response. “Remmie. Miken. I live in number five, just down—”
“Howdy, neighbor. It’s nice to meet you.” He swung the shotgun toward the dead man, pumped it once, and fired. The blast filled the room, echoed like a heavy metal chord. The body shook with the gut shot. “One for fun,” the fat man said turning back to Remmie. He tossed the gun onto a worn leather sofa. “They call me Trevor Spends around here.” He smiled and offered Remmie a hand. “Because, like the name says, I spend.”
Remmie forced himself to shake Trevor’s hand. “Shit, I didn’t know, I mean—fuck. I didn’t figure you’d shoot the guy.” Remmie rubbed the place between his eyes, tried to scrub away the pain. His ears rang; a sharp, persistent odor of gunfire filled his nose.
Trevor shrugged, pointed his palms at the ceiling. “Accidents happen, especially when I get pissed off. It’s a weakness, I admit it.” He looked into the dead space behind Remmie, as if conjuring a wise thought: “I got this therapist, guy says I shoot myself in the foot. You believe that? Says I let my anger run loose, like it’s a rabid dog or something. I shoot myself in the foot, he says.” Trevor laughed from the round fat belly beneath his suit and tie; he wore a blood-red tie over a black shirt—smart looking guy, even with the extra weight on him. “What I want to tell the guy, it’s that I might shoot myself in the foot, but I’d like to shoot him in the throat. Right here,” he said and lifted a finger to his Adam’s apple. He lifted his eyebrows and smirked. “But I digress, huh?”
Remmie said, “You got blood on your face.”
“Oh, shit. Give me a minute.” Trevor went into the bathroom adjacent to the couch, just beyond the lifeless pimp. He ran the sink and scrubbed his face with a wet towel while Remmie stared at the scene. “You know, I didn’t really care for Donny anyhow. He’s the son of a bitch who let Veranda run off, take the fucking Dodge Charger with her. I let a guy borrow my car, and look what fucking happens, will you? Motherfucker brought it on his damn self.”
Remmie lifted his eyes from the body, traced the shape of the shotgun on the couch. If he moved fast, he could have it in his hands before Trevor finished in the bathroom. One quick step, lift the goddamn thing, point it. But wait. No, two shots fired and that meant, what? Time to reload. Fuck. Okay, Remmie. You’re going to walk out of here, let this scene be what it is. You’re going to walk back to your apartment, crawl into bed, and sleep. That’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to sleep. And when you wake up, this’ll be so far away it never happened.
No de
ad pimps. No missing whores.
And, most of all, no fat man scrubbing blood off his face.
Except, no—you’re going to stand here, Remmie. You’ll wait.
Trevor came out of the bathroom, wiped the back of his neck with a blue towel. Blood ran down one side of the towel, like shit stains on boxer briefs. “Remmie, my new friend,” he said, “how’d you like to make a little money?”
Too late, Remmie. You’re stuck. “Doing what?”
Trevor lowered his chin at the dead pimp. “Well, now we got to chop him up, toss his ass in a dumpster somewhere. What do you say? There’s five hundred big ones in it for you. And a nice breakfast when we finish.”
Remmie licked his lips. He realized the pain in his head was gone, vanished behind dollar signs. He sniffed the air, scratched behind his head.
Without blinking, Remmie said: “Cut him up into how many pieces?”
3
Ten pieces. That’s how many. Two each for the skinny arms. Two each for the legs, sawed through below the knobby knees. But you leave the torso all by itself after you cut the head off; Remmie never forgot how those dark curls looked rolling across the bathroom tile. Jeez-us Kee-rist. Trevor used a hacksaw to do the job, made Remmie watch. He leaned against the doorway, grimaced as his stomach knotted, tightened, released each time another body part came loose. Less bloody than Remmie imagined, but surreal as all hell. Trevor worked the saw like a carpenter, like he’d been doing it his whole life.
As he went through the second leg: “I don’t expect you to do the dirty stuff, neighbor. But, hell, you got us into this.” He stopped the slicing motion of the saw and looked over his shoulder at Remmie. His brown eyes looked both alive and dead at the same time. “And that means you got to be along for the ride. The whole ride, too. Not just the tossing the bags in the dumpster stuff. I’m talking the grunt work here.” Trevor turned back to the body with an agonized grunt, bore down on the saw.