A Twist Of Noir 251 - Allen Kopp

THE SENTIMENTAL MAN - ALLEN KOPP

The time was between ten and eleven and traffic was light. An occasional car went by, slowly, its lights reflected in wavering bars on the wet pavement. A liquor store in the next block went dark. A policeman walked his beat, rousting a drunk from a doorway.

A man stepped out of a dark alley. He took a few slow steps into the glow of a streetlamp and stopped. He heard a siren off in the distance and lifted his head to listen, but gradually the siren faded to nothing. He reached into the pocket of his coat and removed a cigarette and put it between his lips and lit it with the little gold lighter engraved with his initials that he always carried. He took a long drag on the cigarette and turned and walked down the street.

In appearance he was a man like many others: not young and not old, of average height, lean and muscular, broad through the shoulders and narrow in the hips. He wore an expensive, perfectly tailored suit and a hat low on his brow, making his face difficult to distinguish.

He spotted a policeman walking toward him on the opposite side of the street. He knew without looking directly at him that the policeman was watching him. He didn’t want the policeman to think there was anything about him out of the ordinary or that he was, perhaps, planning on breaking into one of the businesses along the street that were closed down for the night. He began walking a little faster, with apparent purpose in his step, so as not to arouse the policeman’s suspicions.

After he had walked another half-block, he glanced over his shoulder to see if the policeman was still looking at him, but he was far down in the next block peering into a darkened window. A taxi went by, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A woman’s laughter came from inside the taxi, a high-pitched sound that might have been a drunken laugh or even a scream. The tail lights of the taxi were receding into the distance when movement in an upper window across the street drew his attention. A woman came to the window and was silhouetted in the light behind her. She looked down to the street for a moment—she seemed to be looking right at him but he couldn’t be sure—and then reached above her head and drew the curtain closed. Seconds later the window went dark like all the others.

As he kept walking, he passed an all-night bowling alley and several small bars and cafés that were opened, but all the stores and offices and businesses were dark and shut down for the night.

After walking several more blocks he came to a movie theatre that was an island of light in the sea of darkness. The marquee was outlined in flashing bulbs surrounding the title of the movie currently playing. The sidewalk and the street in front of the theatre were bathed in garish white light. Inside the ticket booth at the front of the theatre a fat woman sat behind the smudged glass. She wore round glasses and a black dress with little red flowers. She had no customers at the moment and so appeared bored. She leaned her head on her hand and looked longingly out at the street.

He stood on the sidewalk underneath the marquee, put his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall. The woman in the ticket booth looked at him and then looked away. If she thought anything about him at all, she would think he was waiting for someone to meet him for the next show. He lit a cigarette and avoided looking at the woman and watched the few cars going by on the street.

A man and a woman walked past on the sidewalk. The woman stood out because she was tall and straight and she wore a red coat and a jaunty red beret with a black feather sticking out of the side. The man was older and shorter; he wore a black hat that seemed too small for his head and was smoking a cigar. They seemed too polite and restrained with each other to be anything other than business associates. They walked past and went to the end of the block and crossed the street and disappeared into the next block.

Suddenly the doors of the theatre opened and people started coming out. At first they came out in twos and threes, and then in dozens. In a couple of minutes there were as many as two hundred people on the sidewalk in front of the theatre. The fat woman in the ticket booth came alive, as dozens of people lined up to buy tickets for the next show.

After the crowd had reached its maximum size and began to dwindle, a lone woman came out of the theatre. She was the only person in the crowd who wasn’t with someone else. She was wearing an ugly tan raincoat like a man’s raincoat and a hat that covered most of her hair, the type of hat worn by women who don’t care how they look when it rains. She walked out to the edge of the sidewalk and looked up and down the street, as though looking for someone. Maybe someone was supposed to meet her or pick her up after the movie and didn’t show up.

From where he was standing under the marquee he watched the woman. She stood at the curb waiting for a couple of minutes and then she began walking down the street. After she was about halfway down in the next block, he began following her, close enough that he could still see her but far enough away that she wouldn’t know he was there.

Something in the woman’s manner indicated that she was not afraid of being alone on a dark street late at night. She looked straight ahead and didn’t seem in any hurry. He knew she didn’t know he was following her. She hadn’t even seen him. He was careful to walk so she wouldn’t hear his footsteps on the sidewalk.

She came to an intersection and stopped, waiting for a couple of cars to pass. When the way was clear, she crossed the street and went through the open door of an all-night drugstore on the corner.

He hesitated for a moment and then went up to the window of the drugstore and stood at the edge and looked in, so that anybody inside would not be able to see him. The inside was brightly lit and cheerful. He could see all the way to the back of the store, rows of display cases and a large rack of magazines and newspapers. Three fans in a triangle hung from the ceiling and turned slowly like airplane propellers in slow motion.

The woman in the tan raincoat went behind a counter and disappeared through a doorway. A man at the magazine rack picked up a magazine and went to the counter to pay for it. An old woman with a little boy standing beside her waited at the prescription counter for the druggist to come back.

Soon the woman in the tan raincoat came out of the doorway at the back of the store. With her was a slightly older woman who resembled her enough that they must have been sisters. The older woman put on a coat and picked up an umbrella and laughed and said goodbye to someone, and then the two of them came out the door. He was standing several feet to the right of the door and, since they turned to the left, they didn’t see him. He stood beside the window and watched them until they turned the corner in the next block and went out of sight.

He turned and began walking again in an easterly direction. There were more people on the sidewalks and more cars in the street than earlier. People were finished with the evening’s activities—the boxing match or club meetings or whatnot—and were heading to bars and nightclubs for some of the nightlife the city was fabled for. A dirty-looking man, a hobo, stepped out of the shadows and blocked his way, asking him for a quarter. He waved the man away and stepped around him to keep from colliding with him.

He came to a bar and stopped and looked at the place. He was tired of walking and needed to sit for a while, have a drink and maybe order some food. He was considering whether or not to go inside, when the door opened and a woman came out. She was wobbly on her feet as though drunk, or nearly drunk. She stumbled and then righted herself and looked up at the sky as though expecting rain. She mumbled something but he didn’t hear what it was.

He saw the red beret and the black feather sticking out of it, and he knew right away it was the same woman he had seen earlier in the evening when he was standing in front of the movie theatre; except now she was alone. He had a fleeting thought that, since it was the second time he had seen her in the same night, they must have been fated to meet. He believed very much that two strangers came together because they were fated beforehand to do so.

He was standing there on the sidewalk in front of the bar, silently, and she didn’t see him until she had almost walked into him. She was startled slightly and confused, but when she looked up at his face and saw he was smiling at her, she relaxed and didn’t regret so much almost bumping into him that way. She apologized profusely and gave a little laugh and stepped around him to continue on her way.

He thought quickly about how he might get her to keep from leaving, how he might engage her in conversation. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it between his fingers and asked her for a light. She laughed again and looked grateful that he had asked for anything at all and opened her purse and took out a lighter. She held the flame to the cigarette in his mouth and returned the lighter to her purse.

He took a draw on the cigarette and blew smoke out above her head and smiled at her again and asked if she would like to have a drink. She said she had already had several drinks but she wouldn’t object to a nightcap all the same. She suggested they go to the bar in the hotel where she was staying, which was nearby.

The bar was on the ground floor of the hotel, just off the lobby. They went inside and sat at a small table against the wall. He removed his hat and she took a good look at him. She reached across the table and ran her hand along his arm from his shoulder to his elbow. He looked at her without expression. He didn’t like being touched that way, but he didn’t tell her to stop. The waiter came and took their order and in a couple of minutes their drinks arrived.

She told him the pertinent facts of her life. She came to the city a couple of times a year on business. She always tried to mix in a little fun with the business while she was at it. She had been married once but it didn’t work out and she sent the boy packing back to his mother, where he never should have left in the first place. She liked a man to be a real man and not a grown-up baby.

She lived with her sister in a big dreary house in a small town in another state. Her sister was older and a widow. No fun at all. It was a stale kind of existence, so that’s why she liked to kick up her heels whenever she had the chance. She supposed, however, that was as happy as the next person.

She talked only about herself and didn’t try to find out anything about him, not even his name. She leaned across the table and, breathing into his face, told him she found him exceedingly attractive. She was always stimulated by a man’s indifference, she said. She didn’t like the kind of men who were always cloying and falling all over themselves to present themselves well. She liked a man to be a bit of a brute. He grew bored with her talk, but he pretended to be listening to every word, while in fact listening more to the music playing in the background.

After a while the bar was getting ready to close for the night and everybody was going to have to leave. The woman smiled sadly at him and told him she hated to break up their little party, she was having such a good time. She finished her drink, and he put his hat back on and put some money on the table and they both stood up and walked out into the lobby of the hotel.

He was going to ask her if she’d like to go to a place that didn’t close for the night where they could continue their little tête-à-tête, but they saw through the window of the lobby that it was raining furiously outside and he didn’t think she would want to get wet. As he started to leave, she put her hand on his wrist and said she just had a wonderful idea. She had a full bottle of bourbon in her room and she wasn’t sleepy at all. Would he care to come up to her room for a little while?

When they got to her room on the eighth floor, she was too drunk to fit the key into the lock. She laughed and dropped the key on the floor and he picked it up and opened the door and pushed it open for her to go in before him.

She switched on the lights and took off her red hat with the black feather and put it on the dresser and removed her coat and threw it down and stepped out of her shoes. She told him to make himself comfortable and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He took off his hat and jacket and sat down on the couch and waited for what was going to happen next.

In a couple of minutes she came out of the bathroom and turned off all the lights except for the small one in front of the window, throwing one side of the room into darkness. She turned on the radio and found some music she liked. After she adjusted the radio to just the right volume, she opened her bottle of bourbon with some difficulty and poured some out into two tiny paper cups, apologizing for not having anything better.

She handed one of the paper cups to him and sat beside him on the couch to his right. She had partially unbuttoned her blouse so that a large portion of the area between her breasts was visible. She remarked how cozy it was sitting there with him, with the sound of the rain and the music and the drinks.

He finished his drink and she offered to pour him another, but he refused, saying he had had enough for one night. He crumpled up the paper cup and slipped it into his pocket. He put his arm up behind her on the back of the couch and she sat very close to him.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, not because he had any great need to kiss her but because he believed it was what should come next. She kissed him back harder and reached out for his left hand and placed it on her right breast. He squeezed her breast gently and she made little moaning noises.

Suddenly the phone rang shrilly. The woman sighed and stood up and answered it impatiently. He listened carefully to what she was saying; it was the front desk calling to give her a message that was left for her while she was out.

She concluded the call and came back to the couch and sat down beside him again, leaning her body heavily against his. She leaned in for him to kiss her again and he could smell her musky smell and the alcohol on her breath. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing hard.

From his pocket he extracted a two-foot-long silken cord that he always carried, very strong and lightweight. In one deft movement he had the cord around her neck, and before she was aware of what was happening he pulled it very tight. He watched the expression on her face change from surprise to fear and then to pain. He stood up and pulled her sideways on the couch and got behind her and pulled both ends of the cord at the back of her neck.

She made little gurgling noises and tried to get her hands around the cord to pull it loose. She kicked out her feet, propelling her body into his and knocking him off-balance. He pulled the cord tighter and tighter until his arms trembled from the exertion. She gave one violent backward thrust of her body against his and then she began to go limp. When he was sure she was dead, he eased her down onto the floor in front of the couch carefully so as not to make any noise.

He was out of breath and his muscles ached. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his mouth and when he pulled it away he saw her lipstick that had come off onto the handkerchief. He could smell her perfume and he still had the taste of her mouth in his. He shuddered and retched and collapsed onto the floor.

He lay on the floor until he felt that his legs would carry him again and then he stood up and went to the door and put his ear against it to see if he could hear anything from the hallway outside the door. Hearing nothing, he put on a pair of thin kidskin gloves he carried and began methodically going through the woman’s luggage and purse and other belongings. He found two hundred and ten dollars in cash in a pocket of her suitcase. He folded the money and put it inside the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he found a train ticket and put it with the money without even bothering to look and see where she was bound for.

He turned off the lamp but the light from the windows was enough for him to see the body of the woman on the floor in front of the couch. Her face was turned slightly toward him and her eyes were opened; she seemed to be looking right at him. Her skirt was pushed above her thighs and her legs slightly twisted. Her left arm was folded under her and her right arm was underneath the couch. He went over to her and knelt down and removed the silken cord that was still partway around her neck and returned it to his pocket.

The rain gently pelting the windows was lovelier than any music and made the room seem peaceful and inviting. Suddenly he was tired and every muscle in his body ached; he felt an overwhelming desire for rest and sleep. He would stay for a while and then be on his way. He knew he would be safe there until morning.

He went to the bed that had been carefully made up and lay on his back with his head on the pillow. He had never known a more comfortable bed in his life. Soon he drifted into a sleep as deep as any sleep could be.

He awoke in the morning feeling replenished. He looked at the clock and saw it was not quite seven. He sat up and put on his shoes and went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face and combed his hair, looking at himself in the mirror the whole time.

Suddenly he was eager to be gone, to be on his way again. He straightened the wrinkles out of the bed and put on his jacket. He took a quick look around the room and made sure he was leaving no trace of himself behind. He took one tiny sentimental souvenir of the woman to remember her by.

He put on his hat and went to the door and opened it and stepped out quietly into the hallway and walked up the hallway to the elevator. When the elevator arrived and the door opened, he was relieved to see he was its only passenger.

He took the elevator down to the lobby, crossed the lobby to the front door and went out the revolving door onto the street into the gloomy morning unnoticed. He found a cab and took it to the train station and paid the driver out of the bills he had folded in the pocket of his jacket.

He hadn’t decided yet where he was going, but he planned on taking the earliest available train out. First, though, he would have some breakfast. He bought a newspaper and went into the train station coffee shop.

He sat down in a booth toward the back and a pretty blonde waitress came and brought him a glass of ice water, smiling the whole time. He ordered enough food for two people and while he was waiting for it he lit a cigarette and looked the newspaper over without much interest.

Setting the newspaper aside, he remembered the train ticket he had taken from the woman’s luggage and took it out of his pocket. It was for a train that left at nine o’clock for a city he had never visited before. He would use the ticket and not bother with buying another one. He marveled at how everything had gone so well for him, as if it had all been planned in advance—all the pieces had come together in a most pleasing and beneficial way. He would keep traveling around from one place to another until the time came that he decided he had seen enough, experienced enough. When that time came, he would buy a small farm somewhere and live out the rest of his days.

He took the black feather out of his pocket from the woman’s hat and brushed it over his mouth and held it under his nose. It smelled the way the woman had smelled. Ever since he was a small boy, he had kept a little souvenir of the significant events of his life. He had a whole box of them. From time to time he would open the box and take out each item and relive fond memories of the person or event it represented. He would add the black feather to the collection and it would help him to recollect the woman and her face and the sound of her voice and the time he had spent with her. Of course he would remember her fondly. He remembered all of them fondly, being the sentimental man that he was.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”

A Twist Of Noir 250 - Timothy P. Monaghan

GENUINE CITY HIPPIES - TIMOTHY P. MONAGHAN

On Thursday, August 29, 1968, after Cynthia moved into her dorm and after orientation she had the rest of the day to herself: she was born and raised on her grandfather’s farm in Iowa and it was her first day in a big city, Philadelphia. In the mid-sixties, she and her grandfather watched the dramatic social events of the sixties on TV and they came to the conclusion that the longhaired young men Cynthia met at Iowa State University were not the genuine article – a hippie. The Iowa State young men were just farm-hippies: the sons of farmers with long hair that drank beer, smoked marijuana, and talked farming. So the first chance she had, Cynthia went hunting for the real thing, a genuine city-hippie.

She asked around and found out the closest location where hippies congregated. It was about a mile from campus, a short walk for Cynthia. After some awkward questions to random long haired young men, and women in sack-like dresses or just pants and jeans, to her surprise, she ended up with in a hippie ‘family’ house, a commune. About twenty young men and women lived in small, three-story house, three rooms on top of each other, at the end of an alley. The small house had a coal-burning furnace.

Cynthia was full of questions and listened, trying to understand the beliefs of this genuine city-hippie ‘family’. They explained to her their hate of ‘the establishment’, the status quo, the war in Vietnam, and a general disgust with American society.

“That’s why we live together, Cynthia, we’ve pulled away from the accepted norms, we’re living our own way. No rules, just smoking dope and dropping acid.”

Cynthia was concerned about dropping or drinking any ‘acid’ but they laughed and explained that ‘acid’ was LSD, a popular hallucinogenic. They offered her some, she declined and things started to get awkward as some of the longhaired men dropped acid and started to act real strange. They stared at Cynthia’s body and drooled. She felt uncomfortable, made an excuse, and left.

Two months later, Cynthia read about a fire that killed five people on the same street where her hippie ‘family’ lived. She worried that it was them. The university warned students to stay out of that section of the city; it had the highest assault rate in the city. But she had to find out. Despite their crazy ethics, she could not get them out of her mind. So her next free afternoon, she went to visit her hippie family.

The small house was a burned-out shell with small, thin snakes of smoke drifting upward, looking like the aftermath of a Hindu funeral. Cynthia stood stunned. A voice from behind her broke into her grief.

“Did you know any of the deceased?”

“And you are?”

Irritated, he reached in his jacket pocket and flipped out a detective’s badge.

“Do you suspect murder?”

“Did you know them?”

“Yes.” She told her story.

When she finished, they both looked at the smoking ruin of a small row house. Finally, the detective broke protocol and told her, “The five that were killed were a couple of feet from the door.” He pointed to a cluster of small orange ‘evidence’ flags.

“That’s where they found the five who died.”

He nodded yes.

“Did the rest...jump out windows?”

Another yes, then he explained. “It was a slow-moving fire. Started in the basement. That’s where they stored their drugs. They had a small laboratory down there.”

“What started the fire?”

“The furnace. Coal-burning furnaces require a certain amount of maintenance. They don’t tend to themselves. The fire started in the basement but they had plenty of time to get out. The five who died were so high they just watched the fire approach. One of the survivors told me, ‘We go by our own rules.’ What the hell does that mean? When the fire hit the space cadets, they started screaming but they were so high they couldn’t find the door a few feet away.”

“If one of them was just sane enough to lead the rest out...”

“Rules, simple fire prevention, coal heater maintenance, fire escape procedure – all rules. But they made up their own.”

BIO: Timothy is an attorney living in the suburbs of Washington, DC. His first short story was published in Long Story Short, with two others that have accepted for other publications but not published yet. He's written a mystery novel, the first few ‘set up’ chapters can be seen at McFayden's Mess.

A Twist Of Noir 249 - Katherine Tomlinson

PROOF OF LIFE - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

Originally published in THUGLIT Issue #19, September 2007

It was 2:45 in the afternoon of a sleepy fall Friday and Michelle Martorelli was proofreading a report it had taken nearly a week to write. The document was meant to accompany a PowerPoint presentation but her boss was a Luddite who didn’t really trust data he couldn’t hold in his hand, preferably in a binder with tabs. He liked to see lots of pages arranged into topics and subcategories and separated by dividers. It made him think he was getting his money’s worth out of Michelle, whose title was Senior Data Analyst and whose salary was in the low six figures.

He always wanted pie charts.

Michelle knew he would like this report. In addition to pie charts, it had clip art and bar graphs and tables of numbers, all of which lined up in a positive way. The narrative sections were cogent and precise, models of elegant prose, written with a sharp eye for detail and a knack for making complex information accessible. The message the report conveyed was good news. The company, which was number two in a very competitive market, had unexpectedly profited when the CEO of their competitor had died in a sky diving accident. A notorious micro-manager and an all-around son of a bitch, the CEO had left his company without a clear heir. The resulting disarray was destroying the company from within and had left an opening for Ukacom to surge into first position.

Michelle had been working for Ukacom (rhymes with “puke”, some of the younger employees joked) since graduating from college 11 years earlier. She liked her job, though she never really became “part of the family”. She didn’t go to office picnics or go out for drinks with the other employees. She was what other people dismissed as a “numbers cruncher”, or if they were being snarky, “a bean counter”.

She didn’t really care what other people thought.

Her office was on the West side of the building, where the mid-afternoon sun poured in and cast a mellow golden light across her desk.

The light often annoyed her, creating a glare on her computer screen, so she kept her blinds more or less permanently closed.

The light from her computer screen cast the only illumination in the room as she finished reading her document and pressed the key to send it to the printer.

She was thinking about rewarding herself with a latte when the bomb planted in the base of a newly installed “water feature” in the building’s atrium lobby exploded.

The explosive had been shaped for maximum destructive force and it blew through the fourteen floors of the Ukacom building like a knife slicing a layer cake.

Michelle’s office was on the fifth floor, and she was still alive when it collapsed through the lower four floors. She was still trying to process what was happening when the nine floors above her pancaked at the bottom of the crater created by the bomb.

People always say, “They never knew what hit them,” but that wasn’t really true for Michelle. She died fast but not without pain. And she was awake until the end.

Seventeen people were pulled from the wreckage alive and for a while, there had been hope that more survivors would be found. Officials brought in search and rescue dog teams from but they found nothing but corpses. The dogs got stressed and depressed about that and their handlers did, too.

So the body count stood at 814, with 47 people missing, mostly from the lobby area where there was a café and a little convenience store. One of the building’s security guards had survived because he’d gone outside for a smoke. His wife quit nagging him to quit the habit after that.

The office building explosion dominated the news for the next three weeks and other crimes that had happened around the same time fell through the cracks. There was a home-invasion robbery, a missing person complaint and a rape that all got shoved to the back burner.

The home invasion crew made the mistake of hitting the home of a paranoid senior citizen who believed in his right to bear arms and who kept his aim sharp with weekly visits to the gun range. The geezer shot the gang’s leader, who turned out to be just 18, which confirmed the old man’s belief that the younger generation was just a bunch of hooligans. The kid survived the shooting and his parents brought a suit against the home owner.

The rape complaint was withdrawn because both parties had had a little too much to drink.

The missing person was a guy who’d left a bar with a woman and had only been gone 24 hours when his friends made the report. The cops weren’t too worried about him. And besides, they had other priorities. Most of them were working double shifts doing nothing but identifying the bombing victims.

There were enough miscellaneous body parts to account for 23 people on the missing list. They found one intact hand still clutching a ball-point pen with the Ukacom logo on it. The hand wore a white gold wedding band with an inscription in Gaelic. The hand belonged to Lisabeth Quinn, whose husband identified her by the ring and the close-bitten fingers on the hand. Ukacom didn’t fingerprint its employees, a policy that immediately came under review in the aftermath of the bombing.

After all the bodies and parts were processed, what was left was unidentifiable, just so many pounds of fat-marbled meat. The investigators had worked car accidents and plane crashes but only one — a National Guardsman who’d done a tour of duty in Iraq — had ever seen the effects of an explosive device on human flesh. It’s not something you forget and when he found himself scooping remains into plastic bags with a shovel, the investigator seriously began planning his exit strategy. He was getting way too old for this shit and he was only 37.

In the days after the bombing, investigators asked Ukacom for a list of all the employees who’d been working in the building on the day of the blast. The list the company gave the investigators was alphabetical. Michelle’s name was 438th on the list. The investigators also asked for floor plans to mark the last-known locations of the still-missing employees.

Five people from the fifth floor had survived but none of them, oddly, seemed to know who Michelle was. Her office door was nearly always closed. Computer logs showed that she always came in early, almost always worked late, and didn’t, so far as anyone knew, take a lunch break. One or two of Michelle’s office mates seemed apologetic, as if they were embarrassed not to have known the woman who had so suddenly vanished from their midst.

The investigators went to Human Resources and asked for addresses on all the people still missing. At their homes, they talked to loved ones who offered them soiled pillowcases and used toothbrushes and sweaty socks from the laundry hamper. These were used to distill DNA. And so, one by one, the fragments of bone and the bits of flesh were gathered up, put into boxes and burned or buried according to custom.

No one came forward to claim Michelle, so the investigators finally went to her apartment in hopes of finding something that would help identify which lump of flesh was her. The investigators had to track down the management company (an out of town group of doctors and lawyers who owned rental property all over the state). The owners’ lawyer came over with a set of keys and let the investigators in. They fanned out over the apartment and found...absolutely nothing except fingerprints they could not match to a missing hand.

There was no evidence of a roommate, a lover, a pet. There weren’t even any potted plants. The rooms were as sterile and impersonal as a hotel room between guests.

The investigators started with Michelle’s bedroom. Her sheets had just been changed and the old ones were found in the dryer of the little washer/dryer combo tucked away in her kitchen. There were no dirty dishes or utensils. She had stacked a bowl and a spoon and a coffee cup in the drainer after washing them. There was a large, serrated bread knife in the drainer too and investigators found a round loaf of raggedly sliced artisanal rye bread in a bin on the counter.

The bathroom was completely antiseptic. The toilet was clean enough to drink from, the faucets and mirror sparkling, the sink gleaming as if polished. The towels were freshly laid out. (The old ones were in the dryer with the clean sheets. The investigators concluded Michelle must have done laundry right after her morning shower.)

There wasn’t even a plug of hair in the drain of the bathtub, or a clot of that black ick that gathers in bathroom sinks.

Her bathroom cabinet contained no prescription medicines, no birth control pills, no over-the-counter remedies of any kind. There was a bottle of baby aspirin (half full) and some eye drops. There was a pump bottle of antibacterial soap. There was a small bottle of generic mouthwash.

There is not even a toothbrush in her bathroom, which the investigators found odd. They didn’t know that Michelle habitually took her toothbrush to work so she could brush between meals. (She actually did take lunch, but she usually brown-bagged it. Her office had a tiny “executive” bathroom so she never had to frequent the ladies room.)

There was no hair in her hairbrush, which was found soaking, along with her comb, in a container of some sort of antiseptic. There was nothing in her bathroom trashcan, no used tissues or tampon wrappers. The apartment dumpsters were emptied weekly, and the regular pickup had been on the morning of the explosion. By now, any trash she might have discarded was moldering under a foot of new garbage on the local landfill.

There weren’t any photographs in the apartment, no magnets on the fridge, holding cartoons or recipes or pizza coupons. She didn’t have a land line, but she’d had a cell phone. Presumably it been in her purse and had been destroyed in the explosion. Analysis of her phone records showed she called and checked her business line regularly but other than that, made no calls. Her only incoming calls were wrong numbers and solicitors.

The investigator had gone through her underwear drawer which was full of surprisingly sexy underwear — cobwebby lace bras, silken thongs, a sheer full slip that reminded one of the investigators of a garment his mother used to wear. He did not share this memory with his colleagues.

Michelle had been a petite woman, slim hipped, with tiny breasts. Her closet was full of shoes, all more or less the same style — conservative low-cut heels for work, a pair of ratty generic brand tennis shoes, recently washed. The investigators were not able to extract DNA from the shoes. Michelle’s feet apparently didn’t sweat much and she’d sprayed Lysol in them every night.

Her jewelry box contained a pair of pearl studs, a pair of gold loops the size of a dime and a pair of what looked like diamond earrings but turned out to be cubic zirconium. There was also a rose gold wedding ring, which excited them for a while. They thought they might be able to track down an ex-husband somewhere, someone who might mourn her death, or at least take notice of it, but the ring turned out to be a dead end.

The investigators gave up and told the Feds there was no chance of identifying Michelle from the things she left behind. She’d been a ghost even before the bombing.

There were other remains whose identities proved just as elusive and in the end, the investigators had to give up on them, too. They still had their regular cases to work and the relatives of the guy gone missing from the bar was driving the department crazy, demanding that something be done. Nobody wanted to tell the guy’s mom the obvious, that when an adult disappears they don’t usually show up again, at least not alive.

There was a memorial service for the bomb victims. The governor came and so did the Vice President. The Veep made a speech to polite but desultory applause. An actor widely known for his support of Darfur spoke too and got a much more enthusiastic response. He later hooked up with the sister of one of the victims who was unclear on what the connection between the star and her sister’s death might be but who was happy enough to shag a celebrity in the name of sexual healing.

The unclaimed remains were combined and buried together. Ukacom paid for the grave and a handsome marker. They moved their operations to another city soon after and half the people who’d survived the bombing ended up losing their jobs in the reshuffle.

Life went on. Michelle’s landlords hired a cleaning crew to prep the apartment for another tenant. The head of the crew was supposed to box up her things and put them in a storage unit in the basement but instead he sold all Michelle’s clothes and gave her shoes to his wife, who had dainty feet even though she was pushing 200 pounds on a five-foot frame.

He gave Michelle’s pearl earrings to his mother, the gold loops to his daughter and the cubic zirconium studs — which he thought were diamonds — to Lucia, the new girl on his crew who could barely speak English and had the sweetest body he’d ever seen without clothes.

She was very grateful.

The owners put an ad for the apartment in the paper, charging $100 more for the one-bedroom, one-bath unit than they’d charged Michelle. A young woman who’d recently graduated from college moved in, unaware of the fate that had befallen the previous tenant. It was a building with a lot of turnover. No one had ever met Michelle.

Two months after she moved in, the new tenant was taking a shower when she noticed an uneven place in the bathroom floor. Curious, she pried up a loose tile and recoiled at the stench. Removing more tiles, she found herself looking at the severed head of a 25-year-old man named John Henderson. His friends called him Johnny. His roommate had reported him missing on the morning the office building had been bombed.

Johnny’s parents had haunted the police station in the wake of his disappearance. They hadn’t wanted to hear that the police resources had been badly stretched by the office building explosion and that they were doing the best they could.

On his own, Johnny’s dad had gone to the bar where his son had been drinking the night he disappeared. The cops had already questioned the bartender but he felt bad for Johnny’s dad and told him what he’d told them. Johnny had left the bar that night with a woman, but no one ever saw her face. She was small, he said, with slim hips and tiny breasts. He thought her hair was dark, but he couldn’t really be sure. She was dressed in a business suit, with conservative, low-heeled shoes.

Johnny’s devastated parents talked about suing the police, to make someone pay for the senseless crime that had taken their son from them. In the end, though, they chose to do nothing. Johnny’s mom gained a hundred pounds in the next six months and by the first anniversary of Johnny’s death, his parents had divorced.

Belatedly, the investigators who saw the bread knife in Michelle’s kitchen later realized it was probably the murder weapon but it was never found among her boxed belongings in the basement.

The owners re-rented Michelle’s apartment, tacking on another hundred in rent. The owners mentioned the new bathroom flooring in their classified ad, passing it off as an “upgrade”. The new tenant was happy to have the place.

Ukacom’s annual report had a special “in memoriam” section to list the employees who died in the bombing. There were 860 names on the list. Michelle Martorelli would have made it 861 but in view of the ongoing investigation into Johnny Henderson’s murder, the man in charge (Michelle’s pie chart-loving boss) decided it would be inappropriate to include her. No one noticed the exclusion.

No one ever really notices the bean counters.

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson lives in Los Angeles where she works as a freelance writer and editor. Her fiction has been published in Thuglit, Astonishing Adventures Magazine, Acorn Newspaper and other print and online outlets. Her story "The Sin Eater" will appear in the January 2010 issue of Dark Fire.

Interlude

Pixie J. King.

Probably not a name that you've heard before, unless you've been clued in (until today, I hadn't heard her name) or been over to Thrillers, Killers 'N' Chillers (where I am all the time) today.

I will lay money that you will be hearing a lot from her in the future.

Go on over to TKNC and check out SWIRLS OF WONDER, a most interesting, intriguing, gut-wrenching, heart punch of a debut.

And when you're done reading, drop her a line or make a comment in the comment section.

She's the youngest writer that TKNC has published and, as long as she continues to write, she's got a brilliant career ahead of her.

Check out her websites, which she has linked on TKNC, and see what else she has to offer.

SWIRLS is only the tip of the iceberg.

After you've done all that, go have a look at that long-awaited eighth installment of what I've been calling my drug of choice, DOGFIGHT.

Entitled RUSSIAN DANCE, this ain't your father's Barishnikov. Brian Roe goes the extra mile with Doyle's side of the story and the overall story is heading into the last five chapters. And what a ride it's going to be!

Interlude

Haven't done one these (where I'm actually pointing out new stories) in a while so let's see if I can still do it.

Glenn Gray is all about SHADOWS AND ARCS at Thrillers, Killers 'N' Chillers today.

This story has been described by readers as "gut-wrenching", "poetic", "unique" and "tragically beautiful".

It is all this and more. Go check it out.

Meanwhile, as usual, I'm behind the curve and haven't been paying attention, apparently, as there are three items from Powder Burn Flash and Darkest Before The Dawn.

First, the story at PBF.

Tom Leins, who is always killer, takes us to the JUNKYARD with his latest tale involving Queenan.

If you like your crime raw, Tom Leins is always a good bet and this one doesn't disappoint.

Next is the scheduling at Powder Burn Flash and Darkest Before The Dawn.

Apparently, everyone and their brother and sister has been writing Aldo and he's backlogged, necessitating a change of publishing.

At PBF, this means that there will now be three stories a week (Sunday, Tuesday and Friday). Also, Aldo would like to do a monthly recap or a Best Of Powder Burn Flash in PDF format come the new year.

I personally love this idea (as well as the Best Of) because it gives writers the ability to see their stories "out there" sooner. And there's nothing bad about seeing more crime stories.

If you haven't already done so, let Aldo know what you think by dropping him a line at powderburnflash@sbcglobal.net

The backlog at Darkest Before The Dawn will allow Aldo to publish two stories per week, starting this month, on Sundays and Wednesdays. And, as with PBF, Aldo is thinking about doing a quarterly Best Of...in PDF format.

To let him know what you think about this, drop him a line at darkestbefore@sbcglobal.net.

Again, I think both these ideas are great and look forward to reading more crime.

Are you entered in Michael J. Solender's Thanksgiving Flash Fiction Contest yet?

You've got nine days and counting until the deadline.

And remember it's for a good cause, whichever one you wish Michael to give to, with the winner of the contest having Michael give $100 for the charity of their choice.

Just keep it under 1000 words and you should be fine.

A Twist Of Noir 248 - Nick Quantrill

TICKET TO RIDE - NICK QUANTRILL

‘Piece of piss,’ said Kevo. He threw the beer mat on the table, lent back and smiled at me. ‘Absolute piece of piss.’

‘You reckon?’ I said.

He sat back up and beckoned me forward. The pub’s Kevo’s territory, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted others to hear. The old woman sat next us to was trying to listen in to our conversation. Nosey cow. I tried to angle my body so that Kevo wouldn’t see her. It was easier that way.

‘Nothing to it. We go out tomorrow night on the ferry, meet my associate and then sail back the following night. That’s all there is to it. All expenses paid. Your very own ticket to ride.’

I wasn’t sure.

‘Don’t you need the money?’ Kevo said. ‘I’m only offering to cut you in on this because we’re mates.’

He knew the buttons to press. I’d argued with our lass before heading out to the pub. I hadn’t worked for three months and the redundancy money was long gone. She needed money to put in the electric meter and buy our lad some new shoes. She hadn’t shut up about it all day, carrying on like it was my fault I wasn’t working, like there were hundreds of jobs out there for people like me. ‘Yeah, I need the money.’

‘You’re in, then?’

‘How many times have you been over?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘A few. Fuck’s sake, are you in or what? It’s a bit of work and we’ll have a laugh.’

I nodded. ‘I’m in.’ Kevo winked at me. ‘Told you. Piece of piss.’

*

A quick flash of our passports at the Customs Desk, and we were through and walking up the gangway towards the ferry. Another fourteen hours and we’d be in Belgium. A bored looking worker pointed us in the direction of our cabin.

Kevo unlocked and walked in. ‘Like fucking prison cells, aren’t they?’ he said. The tiny room had bunk-beds against one wall, a stool in the corner and a bathroom that smelt like it hadn’t been cleaned for months in the other corner. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said.

Kevo laughed. ‘Don’t look so worried. We’ll be on our way home this time tomorrow.’ He threw the two rucksacks we were carrying on the bottom bunk. ‘Bargain or what? Got them cheap; buy one, get one free. Love a bargain, me.’

I picked up the one I thought was mine. I got the wrong one. They were that similar. Digging into the correct bag, I found my mobile. The signal was down to one bar. No missed calls or new messages from our lass.

‘Fuck it, let’s go get a pint,’ he said. Kevo downed his pint in one and said he was hungry. I was pleased to go. He was heckling the entertainment; a lone man, apologetically strumming his guitar along to some Beatles backing tapes. Our lass hates his swearing, especially around our lad. I was used to it. He’d been that way since our school days. The only place serving food was the small coffee bar. Kevo ordered a pizza, so we sat and waited. ‘How’s that kid of yours?’ he asked me.

‘Starts school soon,’ I said. ‘He’s doing great.’

‘Expensive business that. No way I’d pay for any of that shit.’

‘It’s not cheap,’ I agreed. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, though. I knew Kevo had at least two kids, but he had nothing to do with them. ‘Sounds like this could be a decent earner for you, then, seeing as you need the cash. What else are you going to do, anyway? When was the last time you worked?’

His pizza arrived before I could answer. It could have fit on a saucer.

‘Fucking starving,’ he said, tearing into it anyway.

The boat lurched. I turned away so I didn’t have to look. I couldn’t have eaten, even if I’d wanted to. I found the sea-sickness pills in my pocket and swallowed one.

It took him less than five minutes to finish his food. He burped and swept the paper plate onto the floor. ‘Right. Here’s what we’re going to do tomorrow.’

I threw up twice before we went back to our cabin. The crossing was getting rougher as the night went on. Kevo had insisted we had a couple more pints. I could only walk back to the cabin if I held onto the railings on the wall. Kevo told me I was on the top bunk, so I’d climbed up and shut my eyes, hoping the swaying would ease. Whether it was the sea-sickness or the thought of what I was about to do, I didn’t know, but sleep wasn’t coming. I fumbled around and found my mobile. I had no signal. Throwing it back down, I shut my eyes and tried to zone out Kevo’s snoring. I was doing this for my lad; no other reason. With the money, he could have the clothes he needed. We could pay off some debts and maybe put some aside. I pulled the duvet further up and tried to sleep. I told our lass I was doing a spot of labouring work for a friend of a friend. She hadn’t questioned it. She wanted me to be earning some money as much as I did. Hopefully this was the start of better times for us.

*

A couple of hours later and Kevo was up and showered like it was a normal day.

‘You set?’ he asked me.

I was dressed and ready to go. I nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be,’ I said. I still felt ill from the crossing.

We waited to disembark. Most of the people on the ferry were probably heading to a pretty market town for the day before returning back for the night crossing. They’d see the sights, eat a nice meal and soak up some culture. I told myself to calm down. For all his faults, Kevo wasn’t stupid. I’d do as I was told and everything would be alright. We were staying in the port and meeting Kevo’s associate, Robin. Kevo flagged us a taxi down and gave the driver the address. The drive took about ten minutes. The town looked like a home from home. The port dominated the city. Freight containers lined the side of the road, all neatly stacked in uniform piles. The drizzle in the air seemed fitting for the greyness of the place. Lorries trundled slowly down the dual carriageway. I’d hate to be a long-distance lorry driver. I couldn’t bear to be away from home all the time like that. Kevo looked carefully at his Euros before handing over the correct note. The driver wasn’t impressed not to receive a tip, but he eventually got the message and drove away. I could quite fancy being a taxi driver, but that required a car, and I couldn’t stretch to that. We were stood outside an anonymous bar, just off the main drag of shops.

I said that the place looked closed. ‘Robin’s sorted it. They’re opening for us.’

‘Right.’

Kevo winked at me and started walking towards the door. ‘Remember. We are Hull. Nobody fucks with us.’

I nodded and followed him. Inside, the bar was dark and smelt of last night’s stale beer. ‘You are late,’ someone said from the back of the room.

Kevo guided us over. ‘Now then, Robin. The ferry was late docking.’

‘I do not appreciate your lateness.’

‘Not much I can do about that.’

Robin pointed to me. ‘Who the fuck is this?’

Kevo made the introductions. I said nothing. I wasn’t expected to.

Robin asked what I was doing here.

‘He’s going to help us out,’ Kevo said.

Robin stood up and walked over to us. I got my first proper look at him. He was tall, at least 6’ 5” and muscular with it. ‘You are his friend?’ he said to me.

I nodded and cleared my throat. ‘That’s right.’ I looked him in the eye whilst I spoke. I thought about my lad and focused on the money.

He stared back before breaking into a smile. He turned to Kevo. ‘I like this friend of yours.’

‘He’s a mate,’ said Kevo. ‘We go way back.’

Robin sat back down and turned to me. ‘I assume it was explained to you how we transact our business here?’

I said nothing.

‘The same rules apply to you both,’ he said, pointing at us. ‘It really is quite simple. If you fuck up, I kill you both.’

I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

Robin looked at Kevo, like he was surprised. I was out of line.

‘Did you not explain this to your friend?’ he said. ‘Does he think I am joking?’ He stared at me. ‘And once I’ve finished killing you, I kill your family.’

Kevo put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. ‘We understand, Robin. We won’t fuck up. You can count on us.’

I got the feeling Kevo was genuinely scared.

Robin nodded and smiled. ‘Good. I’m glad we understand each other. You have the money?’

Kevo nodded. He took the envelope out of his pocket and threw it down on the table. Robin smiled and counted the money. ‘Good. It is all there.’

‘Of course it is.’

Robin nodded to a sidekick. He passed Kevo a bag.

*

We hadn’t hung around in the bar after the meeting. Instead, we’d trudged around the town for a few hours before heading back to the ferry. A quick flash of our passports and we were back on board. Kevo locked the door of our cabin and emptied the rucksack we’d filled at the bar. We had ten boxes of chocolates in front of us.

Kevo inspected the boxes one by one. I sat there quietly and watched.

‘Fucking clever, or what?’ he eventually said. He passed me a box to look at. ‘Robin’s people hollow them out and then fill them up with the good stuff.’

I didn’t want to look. I passed the box back to him. ‘Clever.’

‘It’s perfect, he says. You can’t move at airports for scanners and security checks, but on the ferries, no one gives a shit. You’ve got to be pretty stupid to get caught.’

I was surprised how lax it was. It didn’t make it any easier, though. I knew how high the stakes were. It was all about holding your nerve.

‘It’s perfect. It only takes Robin a couple of hours to drive over from Holland to meet me,’ Kevo said. ‘He gives me the stuff, I jump on the ferry, go back home and give it to the boss. Piece of piss. Less than two days away, a few beers, and I’m done working for the week.’

I stood up and stretched. The cabin felt more like a prison cell than ever. Looking out of the window, we were slowly pulling out of the dock. The captain announced the crossing would be calm. We would be docking on time tomorrow morning in Hull. I wasn’t taking the chance, though, and popped another sea-sickness pill. My mobile now had a full signal but the battery was nearly flat. There were no new messages, no missed calls. I slept soundly, which was surprising. I wasn’t so calm as we stood in the queue, waiting to disembark.

‘Alright?’ Kevo asked me.

I nodded. I didn’t feel alright, though. In my hand was a rucksack full of Robin’s special chocolates. I was starting to sweat. Kevo was all smiles. He had plenty to smile about. All of the gain and none of the risk.

He held out his rucksack to me. ‘Hold that for us. I need a piss.’

I took it from him and placed both of them down in front of me. One was full with chocolates, one had dirty clothes in it. The one with the chocolates in had clothes packed around them to offer protection. Effectively, they looked and weighed the same. I looked down at them and remembered why I was there. I needed the money; my family needed the money. I needed my family; my family needed me. I had no other irons in the fire. Kevo had been the only person to offer me some work. They said the economy was recovering but it wasn’t recovering fast enough for me. It certainly wasn’t recovering as quickly as my lad’s feet were growing. I looked from one rucksack to the other and knew I had a decision to make. I was scared. Whichever way I jumped, I was opening myself up to a potential shitstorm. I knew things would never be the same again.

‘Alright?’ Kevo was back, standing at my side.

I knew what I had to do. The Customs Desk was manned by the same bored looking officer as yesterday. He was stopping the occasional passenger and having a perfunctory rummage in their bags. I reached down and selected a rucksack. I nodded to Kevo and took a deep breath. ‘Never better,’ I said.

BIO: Nick Quantrill lives and works in Hull, East Yorkshire. His debut novel, 'Broken Dreams', will be published by Caffeine Nights, early 2010. Nick can be found at www.hullcrimefiction.

A Twist Of Noir 247 - Alun Williams

THE MURDER OF DOROTHY GALE - ALUN WILLIAMS

Interview Room 3 - 14th Precinct - 03:05 AM 16/03/08
Statement: Joe Campasino

“I never knew her name was Martha. She never looked like a Martha. She called herself Brandii, with two I’s. I remember she was insistent on that. The first time I saw her was about six weeks ago but I can’t be precise about it.

“One of my girls picked her up at a bar on East and Washington, called Lou-Lou’s. You know it? It’s by the bus station. A lot of young girls hang around out there. They come in on a Greyhound full of fancy ideas and when they finally reach LA they don’t know where to go. So they sit at Lou-Lou’s or some other bar and wait. Sooner or later, someone’ll pick them up.

“I never knew she was sixteen. She told me she was nineteen and looked it. Listen, Officer, I don’t have the time to check paperwork. She was from Kansas. I never knew they had such lookers there. She seemed a little lost at first, kinda like Dorothy in Oz, but she suckered me, too.

“I put her up in a small apartment with Linda Vines out on Cable Street. I buy her new clothes, give her money and what does she do? She screws me over, that’s what!

“Look, Officer, I run a business, ok maybe it’s not strictly legal but you ain’t never gonna stop it. I treat my girls well and I expect them to toe the line. This girl, Brandii, Martha, whatever, she ain’t too smart. She thinks I’m green, but I’ve seen sweet-talking girls like her before, the kind that’s always looking for a meal ticket. They get greedy. If she’d have had half a brain, maybe she’d have gotten away with it.

“I put her in a few skin flicks. I’m all heart but, hey, she wanted to be in movies! Who doesn’t? Monroe did porn and it never did her any harm. She gets clever and starts screwing the producer and makes her own deals.

“I’m sorry she's dead but I didn’t kill her. I’ve got a cast-iron alibi. I guess that’s down to one of her tricks.

“She was sexy for a country girl, but she was plain stupid. Talk to Linda Vines, maybe she can tell you more.”

*

Interview Room - 14th Precinct - 4:37 AM 16/03/08
Statement: Linda Vines - Prostitute

“He said she was stupid, uh? He knows nothing. She was young but she wasn’t stupid. I didn’t know her well, even though we roomed together. Mr Campasino figures I have a mothering instinct. She was a little young and inexperienced. She wasn’t a virgin, though, but she said it had only happened once. Said her name was Brandii. I’m not one to question her, but I knew her name was Martha. I looked in her wallet one time. It pays to know these things but she told me what she wanted me to know. Yeah, she was a little shy at first and I thought she wasn’t going to make the grade but she did. She learned fast.

“She told me she was looking to make it in the movies. I think I wanted to do that, a long time ago. Do you mind if I smoke? Thanks. I think there’s a lot of actresses working the streets but, you know, given the chance, I think she could have made it. She was a cold bitch, though, no heart. Street girls tend to stick together, but her? She may've been young but she was ice. There was no warmth to her. I know most of what we do is an act but there’s acting and there’s well...

“She could play any role she wanted and that takes some doing. I saw her work tricks and it was like she was another person, you know? She could play like Dietrich and she could play like Mae West. She could play any woman under the sun but the one she liked to play best, the one she was really good at playing was the little girl lost, like Dorothy Gale in Oz. She liked to play innocent. I think that was her best role. I think, deep down that was the real Martha. She was no dumb cluck, but she was heartless.

“I asked why she came here, half expecting the usual runaway story but she said she had a good life at home, kinda cosy, but a girl with no feeling doesn't do cosy and she ran away. Maybe she thought she’d find the Emerald City.

“I’m sorry she’s dead, though. She didn’t deserve that.”

*

Interview - City Morgue - 10:13 AM 17/03/08
Statement: Mrs Dorothy Hayes - Mother

“Stupid? Heartless? That wasn’t my daughter, Officer. Martha wasn’t like that. I mean, she was a good girl and I gave her all I could. We still have a stable life at home, despite the fact her Daddy left and it’s not as easy as it was. I don’t blame him. It’s been as amicable as any divorce can be. He had access every weekend. Martha was a shy God-fearing girl. She never did anything wrong and her grades were fine and she had friends, lots of friends. I guess her one failing was that she liked everything to be as it was. Her father and I... I suppose it wasn’t easy for her. She didn’t want to face the fact that we weren’t the perfect family anymore. She didn’t like to face up to things like that. Yes, I guess she was a little timid. Perhaps you could say she was a little cowardly for not facing up to life. I think that’s the wrong word but the divorce affected her more than the rest of us. I have two other children but she changed most when my husband left. I hoped that they’d work it out by themselves but when she ran, I knew it was too late. Children do that, don’t they? They run away when they’re scared and maybe Martha just couldn’t find it in her heart to come back. I guess she didn’t have enough courage to do that.

“Can I take her home, Officer, back to Kansas?”

BIO: Alun Williams, 55. Born and still residing in Wales. Member of Crittersbar (writing under maxieslim), Zoetrope and Scrawl (writing as maxwell allen) and has had several shorts published in Write Side Up, bonfire, Twisted tongue, Skive, The Legendary and various others. Loves noir and Charles Bukowski.

A Twist Of Noir 246 - Des Nnochiri

SOUR GRAPES - DES NNOCHIRI

In the dim light of the moon, Hotchkiss looked ridiculous.

For one thing, he was standing in the middle of a vineyard, in the middle of the night, in his pajamas.

For another, he was weeping uncontrollably. Blubbering. Tears streaming down his cheeks. Snot pooling from his nose. The whole mess dribbling into the graying Van Dyke beard (he hated the name “soul patch”) that was his trademark. And which graced the bottles of his signature product, “Don Santos’ Reserve”.

It had been Rosa’s idea.

When her old man had died, and left her the estate (and a controlling interest in the wine-making business), there’d been uproar in senior management. Attempts to unseat Rosa, or at least to teach her (a woman!) her place.

She’d plucked Hotchkiss from relative obscurity in Production Control, wooed him, married him, then set him up in a figurehead position on the board. To all appearances, the business-savvy executive, a guiding (and restraining) influence on his upstart wife.

Hotchkiss was handsome, if austere-looking, and had been flattered when Rosa first suggested that he’d look great with a beard. And then, that he should use himself as the model for the label on the new vintage.

It had all been a great success.

But that was 12 years ago.

The years hadn’t been kind to him. Rosa, on the other hand, had blossomed.

In the moonlight, she made that silk nightdress and robe look positively regal. The silver-plated automatic in her outstretched hand only added to the effect. As did the even tones of her voice.

“WHAT did I tell you?” she asked.

“Y-you sai--, you said--” Hotchkiss was a wreck.

“I SAID,” enunciated Rosa, “if you EVER touch my daughter AGAIN--”

“You... you...”

She finished it for him. “I will KILL your ass.”

And then, she finished it for him.

Across the vast acreage of vines, the crack of the pistol shot was like twigs, snapping underfoot.

BIO: Desmond (Des) Nnochiri spent his early years traveling with his parents, and was educated in England, the USA, and the Republic of Ireland (Eire). He writes freelance now, and has taken his first steps into the world of screenwriting. He has contributed stories to A Twist of Noir, The Flash Fiction Offensive, and Powder Burn Flash. He has just started blogging, at Des Nnochiri's Write to Speak.

A Twist Of Noir 245 - Joshua Andra

THE PERP WALK - JOSHUA ANDRA

So we started to leave the station house for the courthouse and I asked a young deputy they called Norton for a jacket to put over my head but he just laughed and said something about it being summertime and who has a jacket around here being it’s so warm out you know. The other deputies laughed too and I felt pretty helpless. I figured on seeing a whole mess of reporters and photographers waiting to take my picture on the front steps like my lawyer said there would be. I’d never once admitted to doing what the police was saying I did and I sure didn’t want my face plastered all over the newspapers saying I was a double murderer. They’d already taken my name and run it through the mud and the last thing I wanted was my mother seeing my mug next to the pictures of those people that got killed. I’d never even been arrested before. Hell, I even only got one speeding ticket ever.

My lawyer had said he’d give me his suit jacket to put over my head so the photographers wouldn’t get the perp walk shot as he called it that they were looking for but where the hell was Rubenstein and his jacket now?

Two of them officers grabbed the back of my arms and pushed me out the station lobby to a long hallway and down some steps and out the front door of the station house. For a few seconds I just closed my eyes and let them lead me on like I was blind. They had my hands cuffed tight behind my back and those deputies weren’t exactly worried about being gentle neither.

Before I made it down one step them photographers and reporters circled all around me and I couldn’t move an inch or even make out what any of them said ‘cause they was all talking at the same time and popping flashbulbs in my face. I tried to just stare down at the ground but I kept looking up at them out of curiosity, you know like you would at a car wreck or something horrible like that. My lawyer had said he’d get me through this thing as painless as possible but where was he now that I needed him most? I asked the cops if they knew where Mr. Rubenstein was but one of them just laughed and said you get what you pay for which striked me odd ‘cause Rubenstein had gotten my cousin off three times for robbing different stores when he got called down to court here in Gallipolis.

I didn’t answer none of the reporters’ questions ‘cause I couldn’t even hear what they was saying and there was too much frustration inside of me to listen to that kind of nonsense anyways. I could hear a word here or there but I couldn’t even put the words together in my head to make sentences. The shouts and all them bulbs popping around me sounded more like a truck engine all hopped up on some kind high octane than it did like people.

Them deputies paraded me around on the station house steps for what seemed like weeks and then they shoved me through the crowd towards the street where a long black car just sat waiting. One deputy put his hand on the top of my head and pushed me into the car and slammed the door. The car window was only so far up so I could still hear the reporters and that humming noise and I looked and I took my own mental pictures but otherwise I just tuned them out.

I just sat there thinking like you do in a daze or like you would after you hit your head in a car crash. I was thinking about all the things I told them police when they first put me up in that pokey, thinking that maybe some of the things I’d said didn’t make so much sense and that maybe this thing was a lot worse than my lawyer had let on. I’d gone from a one room jail house back in Vinton to a nine story station house at the county seat in Gallipolis and I’d never seen so many photographers in my life. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever seen one photographer except maybe for my pop with his polaroids.

I was sitting there in that black car in that daze thinking about what I may have said that might of made them think I could do something like a double homicide, bringing me down here in cuffs and telling me they’re setting a pre-trial date like they just know it was me who done it all along. I was also thinking about the alibi I told them about hunting rabbits by myself off the east side of Tycoon Lake. I thought about the way that cop had looked at me when I kept telling him I didn’t do it and how I could tell they didn’t hear me no matter what I said and how many times I done told them I didn’t do it and how they didn’t care whether I really done it or not ‘cause in their heads I done it no matter what really happened. I was also thinking about all the other things the police didn’t understand.

What they didn’t really know was that I most certainly did kill Ben Proctor and I did kill his wife and I did bury the both of them down by the Raccoon River in a refrigerator box I took from their back yard. I shot Ben at close range four times in the chest and I got his blood splattered all over my shirt. Mrs. Proctor I shot once in the head.

It didn’t have nothing to do with what the police said it did ‘cause they didn’t really know nothing about the sit-ee-ation even though they sure thought they did. They didn’t know I had looked old Ben square in the eye before I killed him ‘cause they kept saying I ambushed him as it was some sort of plan I had. The missus was another story they didn’t know much about. With her I just closed my eyes and pulled the trigger and got lucky I even hit her in the first place ‘cause I was down to two bullets and she was twenty feet away I’d guess. I know it ain’t right to hurt a lady but if you’d a known Mrs. Proctor you might of done the same thing I did only a bit sooner.

The police had their own version of what happened, though. They said I done killed Mrs. Proctor ‘cause I was in love with her but like I told them that couldn’t be further from the truth. She was way too irritating and prone to moods for me and, for that matter, she was married to Ben and a little crazy in the head and you just never knew what to expect with her. She was also twenty-some years older than me and not the prettiest pumpkin in the patch no more. They said old farmer Ben was the real victim here ‘cause he was an upstanding citizen of the community and it was me and the missus that had a thing on the side and when Ben figured it out I ambushed him and killed him to keep him out of it. Then they said I shot the missus, too, ‘cause somehow I realized I could never really have her all to myself for some reason I didn’t even understand or the police said ‘cause she got scared and said she might call the cops on me.

Just for the record, upstanding was the last thing Ben Proctor was, according to me, and the missus was anything but some doll I could ever fall in love with. My family known the Proctors for a couple of generations. I’d drive by their place some mornings if I was out hunting in Shaw’s Woods ‘cause Mrs. Proctor made delicious pies and I swear she made a different kind of pie every morning. Ben was a farmer so they always had fresh in-greed-ents and she’d give me pies all the time and I didn’t even have to stay and talk to her too much. Like I said my family has known Ben’s for some sixty years or more and we ain’t never been too close but we knew them.

Ben was usually out farming when I’d stop by and Mrs. Proctor was what you would call socially awkward or maybe just weird in the bean, I’d say. If I was driving by, I’d sometimes slow down and honk my horn and, most times, Mrs. Proctor would pop her head out the front door and signal me to stop and come in. Usually before I could even tip my hat, she’d shove a fresh hot pie into my arms and tell me it was nice seeing me and goodbye. Sometimes she would ask me odd questions, like one time she asked me how many eggs were in a dozen and, every time I would say twelve, she would start laughing like I was the funniest guy who ever lived and one time she asked me if I’d ever seen Mr. Proctor drinking whiskey in the barn ‘cause she had once and she was on to him. Just one time she made me sit down and drink a cup of coffee and she told me how she sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and makes soft boiled eggs ‘cause Ben don’t let her eat enough for dinner but that was just that one time in a hundred over the years that she invited me in the kitchen for coffee.

My mother hadn’t been well for the last couple of years and she didn’t cook at all no more so I was happy getting those fresh pies on occasion. I also stopped because I was a little afraid of Mrs. Proctor and I felt a little sorry for her and I’ve pretty much just always did what older folks told me to ‘cause my parents raised me that way. Mrs. Proctor kind of acted like she was two different people in the same body and that’s also what scared me a little and I guess why I also felt sorry for her.

I also felt bad for her ‘cause she was married to Ben and I’d been scared of him since I was knee high. Ben Proctor had been a crusty old man when I was a boy and he was even meaner and crasser now. He had a hulking big figure and was intimidating to say the least and he always used his weight to push folks around. And believe me, I know how much we weighed ‘cause I had to haul his body off that driveway and up into my truck and I had to drag him thirty or forty feet to get him in that hole I dug for him and the missus by the river.

The Ben Proctor I knew never had nothing nice to say to no one, not once I ever heard and especially when addressing the former or latter Mrs. Proctor. My parents knew Ben and even knew his parents but I never trusted him once and he probably said all of ten words to me personally in my life before the morning I shot him.

I had no plan of admitting to killing either of them, though, no matter how much pressure the police and them prosecutors put on me. I lived with my mother and like I said, her health weren’t so good no more so I took care of her. She didn’t have no one else to watch over her with my pop and my brother Jake being dead. No, I wasn’t going to admit to nothing. I did feel some regret for killing Mrs. Proctor but in another way I felt like maybe I’d put her out of her lonesome misery or something like that.

Sitting in that police car, I also got to thinking about all the things Mr. Rubenstein, my lawyer, said to me in private. He’d told me about what he called the chain of custody and how that bloodstained shirt might get thrown out of court as evidence. He said how the Staties had taken the shirt in as evidence ‘cause they were the first ones to arrive at the farm after they dug up the bodies by the river but how it weren’t their case to take up evidence in the first place and how that had fouled up what he called the chain of custody. He also said they got nothing on the murder weapon ‘cause they ain’t got no murder weapon. I’d bought it at a flea market and never bothered to register it. Hell, I’d never even shot it before, not even once. My mother would never testify that I owned a gun like that ‘cause she never saw it in the first place. Everybody knew I carried my .22 rifle everywhere I went and the police knew it weren’t no .22 rifle that done in the Proctors. I’d also gone and melted the gun I used down to smithereens in the oven in our scrap yard the night I killed them.

Rubenstein said the prosecution’s got no eyewitness and, with no gun, what the hell have they got? I kept telling myself that and it made me feel a lot better. What they hell have they got? I kept thinking that to myself like a broken record.

He also said they got no real motive. He’d told me there was no evidence linking me to the missus romantically and no one ever heard of any problem between me and neither of them. It weren’t no mystery that I stopped over there for a pie sometimes but you can’t lock a guy up for that; not yet at least you can’t. Their neighbor, Mrs. Wabash from down the lane, told the police how I made visits to the farm but no one saw me that day and no one saw my truck, according to what Rubenstein known.

I guess I’d left that bloody shirt right there on Proctor’s front lawn ‘cause I must a taken it off as I got pretty hot moving those bodies around and cleaning up the porch. Rubenstein said the shirt might get thrown out ‘cause of that chain of custody rule and that’s what he said we was really hoping and praying for. He’d smiled real big and said something about those foolhardy small town deputies being what he called priceless.

The shirt he said could be a problem ‘cause they known that’s Ben’s blood on it but they didn’t know yet for sure whose shirt it was but they was saying it was probably mine ‘cause I wear a medium, too. He said my alibi wasn’t what he would call air-tight ‘cause there weren’t no one to say they saw me that morning but Rubenstein also said they couldn’t prove I wasn’t out rabbit hunting by the beach at Tycoon Lake that morning where I am lots of mornings. So what they hell have they got? I kept telling myself that and probably more asking myself.

Rubenstein finally showed up and came running towards the car just as we was about to pull away for the courthouse. He had his arms wrapped up around a big stack of papers and some of them blew away and he didn’t even care and he just kept yelling stop the car that’s my client stop the car! It was funny seeing Rubenstein in his suit and tie running with them papers like that and I couldn’t help but laugh even though I did kind of like him as a person, even if he did probably have all-teerior motives. That deputy Norton let him in the backseat with me.

Rubenstein said he was sorry for being late and he was sorry for giving those assholes the real perp walk they were looking for but I knew something else was going on ‘cause he had the biggest smile on his face I ever did see. He was like that cat that ate the canary, you know. That big smile reminded me of our talk yesterday when he got all excited as he was telling me all about how they didn’t have no murder weapon and no real motive and how all he had to do now was plant some seed of reasonable doubt, as he called it, and so long as that shirt didn’t come back to bite us, we’d be good as gold.

Yesterday was also when he got me talking for the first time about what really happened that morning at Proctor’s farm. He’d told me that the best way for him to get me off was going to be if he knew what really happened on Ben Proctor’s front yard that day. Rubenstein said how he got my cousin off for his thieving by knowing what really took place so he could spin something different as he called it. And my cousin Edwin never did one minute in the pen.

So I told him.

I told him how I was taking a walk out in Shaw’s Woods the day before I killed Ben Proctor. Shaw’s Woods is just across the Raccoon River from my property and probably about ten miles from Tycoon Lake, which is where I told the police I was the next morning when I shot old Ben. Proctor’s place is on the west side of the woods just about three miles south of where the Little Raccoon River runs into the Big Raccoon.

My mother took long naps and really only needed to be checked in on every five hours or so and I’ve always taken to hunting and taking long walks and things like that. I had my .22 rifle over my shoulder, like I always do, but I wasn’t really even hunting that morning. I was just taking a walk ‘cause we had a season’s worth of meat in our freezer back home. I didn’t go anywhere without my .22 strapped over my back, though, so Rubenstein liked me to point that out, ‘cause he says if I’d a shot the Proctors, I’d a done it with my .22 rifle.

I also told Rubenstein how there’s a little abandoned cabin at the southern tip of Shaw’s Woods where it turns into Wayne National Forest and how sometimes I stop there when I’m out hunting or walking to take a break or eat something or if it starts raining out. There’s a couple of dusty old chairs in there and some pots and pans and a place to build a fire and there’s a roof over your head even if it is a little leaky. I ain’t ever seen anyone else in that cabin before but this time, on my walk along the river, it starts raining kind of hard so I go into that cabin only to find old Ben Proctor in there with Billy Morgan, the half-wit kid whose mother owns the dry goods store in Vinton. Billy’s dumb or mute or whatever you call it ‘cause he can’t talk none and he ain’t the smartest kid by any stretch of the imagination. He certainly ain’t never done me no wrong though and he’s always acted a perfect gentleman when I been in his mom’s shop.

But this morning, when I come in the cabin, I see the Morgan kid was half naked from the top up and he was crouched right up against old Proctor real close-like, and as soon as he sees me, he goes running out the cabin faster than greased lightning. Old Proctor pulls up his pants and tells me it ain’t what it looked like but I know a thing or two and I ain’t no fool. I told him it was wrong to take advantage of a half-wit boy like that but he keeps saying it wasn’t what I said it was. We argued for a minute but then he just storms out.

I stewed on it all day and night not knowing what to do. I woke up the next morning without really having any plan and went right down to the Proctor farm house and this time I took my .45 revolver and not my rabbit hunting rifle ‘cause I knew exactly what kind of guy I was dealing with. Like I said, my parents known Ben’s family since who knows when and it was no secret that Ben’s first wife Annabelle had gone missing some fifteen years ago or so and nobody ain’t heard a word from her since ‘cause he probably did her in as far as I can tell. He said she run off to Pittsburgh with some fella she met but I never believed that not for one second. What kind of fella from Pittsburgh comes all the way down here to Gallia County to pick out a married woman when they got all them women up in Pittsburgh? I been to Pittsburgh twice and I seen all the young ladies they got there. And I knew the former Mrs. Proctor and believe me she weren’t any kind of long distance catch.

When I pulled up, I didn’t honk my horn and I didn’t even try to hide the .45 tucked in my pants when I pounded on Proctor’s front door that morning. He answered and come out swinging and shoving me into the front yard and he almost knocked me down twice. I backed up and told Ben that I’d decided he needed to turn himself in to the police for abusing that boy but he said he didn’t do nothing like that and that I damn well better stop talking like that. I said he either was going to turn himself in or I was gonna take him in and he said I could go to hell. Then he laughed and said he’d like to see me try and take him in and he pointed at the front door and told me to go in the house and call the police myself ‘cause what did he care ‘cause what the hell were they gonna do about it with it being my word against his and then he laughed real hard and said something about it being his word against the boy’s and then he said oh wait, the boy don’t have no word and he can’t read or write his own fucking name and what the hell are the police going to do about that and then I just thought for a second ‘cause he was probably right and I knew that and that’s what I’d been stewing on all night.

Then Mrs. Proctor comes out the front door with a hot pie and Ben tells her to get the fuck back in the house but she comes out anyways and tries to give the pie to me. I tell her plain as day what I seen in the cabin yesterday but it was like I was speaking a foreign language or talking to an animal or something ‘cause she wasn’t getting it at all. She starts spouting off to Ben about him hitting the sauce and keeps trying to give me the pie and then she starts blabbing on and on about a lot of nonsense. Ben starts cursing at her and then she rushes back into the house and drops the pie right on the porch and, a second later, I hear her scream inside and then a window got broke.

Proctor tells me to get the hell off his property and how he’s gonna beat the stuffing out of me if I don’t get back in my truck so I start backing up towards the truck. He’s shouting at me and I pull out the .45 without even thinking about it and he’s still yelling at me even though I got a gun in my hand. He’s screaming about how that dumb boy didn’t even know no better and how it was his idea and how it was the fucking kid’s fault anyways and he said he never wanted to see my face ever again. Proctor said he never like any of my family anyways, including my lazy stupid brother Jake, who worked on his farm and quit after two days. He said he never liked me none, neither. Proctor’s still pushing me and yelling about my brother and me and then he says he never liked my mom none ‘cause she talks too much and how he never liked my pop none neither ‘cause he was a real patsy and before I knew it, I’d shot him a bunch of times all over his chest and he just fell down and didn’t move no more. Then before I know it, Mrs. Proctor comes running and screaming out the front door waving a big kitchen knife that looked more like a machete and before I even think about what to do, I just close my eyes and pull the trigger and I kept pulling it till I didn’t hear no more bullets. I heard a thump and then there was a silence and after a second or two, I opened my eyes and seen that I’d blown off the side of Mrs. Proctor’s head and it looked like a ripe busted watermelon broken all over the porch steps.

Rubenstein said I could tell the police the real story but then they’d have to bring in the Morgan kid and get his testimony somehows and put him through all kinds of torment. They’d probably still put me in the pen for five or ten years by which time my mother would be long dead and buried. Rubenstein said it weren’t a clear cut case of self-defense and if we start pleading self-defense now, the prosecution’s gonna find a bunch of holes in that right away as there’d be no signs of a struggle on the old man’s body other than them gunshots. I’d also thrown that kitchen knife in the Ohio River somewheres and they’d never find it. He said to just sit tight and stick to what I told them about hunting rabbits in the woods by the beach at Tycoon Lake that morning with my .22 rifle over my back ‘cause there weren’t no way to prove I wasn’t.

In the car, I asked Rubenstein if he had any news about the shirt and he just looked back with that big canary cat smile of his and said what shirt?

BIO: Joshua Andra is an unpublished author who has just starting sinking his teeth into the art of fiction writing. He is a lover of everything hardboiled and always appreciates a good kick-in-the-mouth blockbuster ending. He is a woodworker by trade.

A Twist Of Noir 244 - Karl Koweski

THE GREAT ST. CASIMIR HARD LIQUOR THEFT - KARL KOWESKI

“Hey, man,” Milsap cocked his head at the Mexican approaching the entrance of Hideout Liquors.

The Mexican stopped and raised a bushy eyebrow. “Que pasa?”

Milsap stepped away from the wall flanked by his buddy, Brian. They both held sweaty bills clenched in their fists.

“I hope to fuck you speak English,” Milsap said.

The Mexican said nothing.

Milsap continued. “While you’re in there stocking up on Corona, how about you take this money and get us a fifth of kiwi/lime Mad Dog 20/20 and a fifth of Wild Irish Rose? White preferably.”

The Mexican said nothing.

“Fucking hell,” Brian muttered.

“Comprende?” Milsap said. “Wino de Bottlo si Loco Muttismo! And some Wild Irish Rose for our deniro. Que?”

The Mexican stood there a moment before his gigantic mustache curtained away from his brown teeth. “Shit,” he said and walked inside without so much as a backward glance.

“Goddammit,” Brian sputtered.

“I don’t think that motherfucker understood a single fucking word I said.”

“He understood just fine,” Brian said. “He just ain’t gonna buy any booze for a coupla thirteen year olds. That’s all.”

“Well, what the fuck we gonna do now? I promised Kirsten and Michelle we’d have some booze for them.”

“Guess you’ll have to break your promise.”

“Then Kristen will break her promise. And who suffers? My dick, that’s who.”

“I’ve seen Kristen. That Mexican did you a favor.”

“Yeah, well, Michelle won’t be too happy with you, either.”

Brian looked up and down the empty side street. “We’re wasting our time here, Milsap. Let’s go to Skiba’s. His mom might have a bottle stashed. She’s usually good for a pint of brandy.”

“Shit, he’ll wanna go with us.”

“So? Let him come. Having him around makes us look like a couple champs.”

Milsap couldn’t argue the logic.

Twenty minutes later they sat at the kitchen table in Skiba’s dingy two bedroom apartment. Milsap traced his finger from one cigarette burn to the next across the formica table top. Brian glowered from the other end of the table, arms crossed. Skiba stood at the kitchen sink piled high with dishes filthy with dried smears of ketchup and tv dinner remains. He presented a kitchen cabinet, empty except for the desiccated corpse of a mouse stuck to a glue trap.

“Mom ain’t had a bottle all week.”

“Bullshit,” Brian immediately called. “How long we known you, Skiba? First grade? I ain’t never known her not to have a bottle. Or a man with a bottle. Which bar she cadging drinks at tonight? I’ll ask her myself. And hopefully I won’t have to knock any dicks out of her mouth to hear the answer.”

“Fuck you, Brian.”

“Fuck me?”

“Shut the fuck up, the both of you. You can slap each other’s mouths all night, it ain’t gonna put any booze in our hands. And it ain’t gonna help us snake the puss.”

“Snake the puss? Where you guys going?”

“Why, motherfucker?” Brian hissed. “You know where your ma keeps her hooch stashed all of the sudden?”

“No. But I know where we can get some.”

“Where? The liquor store? We stood out there a fucking hour trying to get someone to buy for us.”

“I was gonna say St. Casimir School. Down in the basement between the chapel and the gym where they do the Thursday night bingo and spaghetti dinners. They got a liquor cabinet full of all kinds of liquor. They keep it padlocked, but it’s nothing we can’t knock off with a claw hammer.”

Twin smiles surfaced on Milsap and Brian’s lips.

“Skiba, you just earned yourself an invitation to the party, pal.”

St Casimir Church rose up on Hammond’s north side like a lighthouse offering safe passage to the afterlife for all the ancient Polish ladies shuffling through the remains of their lives. Walking out the front doors, the first sight one is greeted with is the Dombrowski Funeral Home across the street, which is why most of the old Polish ladies lined the length of the stations of the cross to leave out the side door after mass. Across from the funeral home, the St Casimir rectory where the priests lived and masturbated to kiddie porn. Across the parking lot from the church, St Casimir School, looking no different than it did when it was built back in 1954, right down to its utter lack of air conditioning.

The trio stood in the shadow of the gymnasium, backs against the brick wall. They took furtive hits off their cigarettes, palms cupped around the cherries. Within a two block radius of the church, every home housed at least one elderly Polack who stayed perched at the window twenty-four hours a day making sure no punk kids were trampling their grass. Hell, anyone walking along the sidewalk after sunset got the cops called on them. Made it difficult to do anything illegal around here.

“Can’t believe it’s been a year since we graduated this dump,” Brian said.

“Can’t believe we graduated at all.”

“Shit,” Brian sneered at Skiba. “You could’ve taken a shit on the chapel altar on Easter Sunday and still graduated. After Father Francis put that big ass scar on your forehead with the bumper of his Buick.”

Skiba turned his head, feeling the scar pulsate like a Scarlet Letter. A giant letter “I” bisecting his forehead. It wasn’t a question of what crime he committed, but which crime he was being punished for.

Milsap pushed himself off the wall and flicked his cigarette away in disgust. “Brian, your brother’s a fucking idiot.”

“What?”

“I thought you told him to be careful and keep to the shadows. That kind of shit.”

Brian’s younger brother, Harley, walked along the sidewalk toward the gymnasium as though he were going to shoot some hoops. The backpack over his shoulder contained the sort of tools that might have looked inconspicuous on a workbench, but altogether suspect gathered in a bag this time of night. The streetlights illuminated the stupid grin on his face for all the old Polacks to see.

“He ain’t no thief, is he?” Milsap concluded.

“Fuck you, Milsap. I’d just as soon have let him stay home and watch The Simpsons than come here.”

Milsap rolled his eyes, nudged Skiba. “Go get him, will ya?”

With Skiba gone, Brian leaned into Milsap. “We get the backpack off him, we’ll let him get on his way. He’s still in the seventh grade here. He don’t need to get involved.”

“He’s already involved, Brian. Might as well let him get his hands dirty. I don’t want him telling his friends tomorrow he saw us come in here last night.”

“He wouldn’t sell us out.”

“Not purposefully. If we bring him in, let him realize what’s at stake, he won’t talk out of turn. He’ll be just as guilty as the rest of us.”

“I don’t want him to be like the rest of us.”

“Then you shouldn’t have been lazy, man. You shoulda just gone home and got the tools yourself.”

“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?”

“Well... yeah.”

“And your answers don’t mean shit. He’s my brother. It’s my choice to make.”

“Sure, it is, Brian.”

Skiba returned with Harley. Harley handed the backpack to Milsap. Standing there, it occurred to Milsap they were all wearing Metallica T-shirts. Harley wore his “Kill ‘Em All” shirt, a hand-me-down from his brother. Brian, the “Damage Inc.” shirt. Skiba wore a five dollar flea market knock-off of “Ride the Lightning”, fraying at the seams. Milsap wore a T-shirt featuring the cover of his all-time favorite LP “Master of Puppets”.

“Everything there?” Brian asked.

“Everything you told me to bring.” He glanced around. “You guys breaking into the school?”

“No, we’re just meeting here.”

“Yeah,” Milsap interrupted. “We’re gonna slip in here and liberate all the hooch. You wanna join our crusade? Once we get the shit, we’re going over by Kristin’s. Get her and her friends liquored up, see if we can’t get them to show us the Promised Land.”

“Hell, yeah,” Skiba said.

Brian did a slow burn. Milsap wouldn’t look at him. Fucking coward. The grin on Harley’s face was as superficial as the Metallica T-shirt on his back. Harley wasn’t a metal head. He had George Michael’s “Faith” in his walkman. His hair was buzzed around the ears. He went to confession once a month, still firmly enmeshed in junior high Catholicism.

Milsap didn’t realize this because Milsap was a fucking idiot.

Milsap withdrew the crowbar and handed the backpack to Skiba, who slung it over his bony shoulder.

“You know how to keep your mouth shut, right?” Milsap asked Harley. “No telling your little boyfriends at school tomorrow. No matter what we do in here. No saying shit to nobody. Got it?”

“No. Yeah. C’mon, it’s me. I ain’t gonna say anything, guys.”

“Good enough for me. Let’s go.”

“You gonna pry open the gym door?” Harley asked.

“Hell, no. Too much work. Too noisy. By the time we get inside, every Polack between here and Warsaw is gonna be wanting to know what we’re doing. Ain’t that right, Brian?”

Brian ignored the question. He shook out a cigarette, lit it, slowly. Milsap didn’t try to bum one. Too bad. Brian would have relished telling him to fuck off.

Milsap took the crowbar and, like a bandleader directing a parade of fuck-ups, led the boys around the gym, over a chainlink fence and into an enclosure surrounded on three sides by the chapel, the school and the gym.

“Any sort of alarms or burglary systems been installed during the past year?” Milsap asked.

“I don’t think so,” Harley answered.

Milsap knew Harley would be hard pressed to remember if there was a crucifix in the goddamn chapel. Nonetheless, he nodded. “Good enough for me.”

He wedged the crowbar into the top of the window and cracked it open with a sharp pop. He leaned against the bar and reached down gripping the window and pulling up on it, grimacing against the tightness in his back. Brian was a fucking horse. He could have been holding this up for Milsap, but the lazy fucker leaned against the dumpster, smoking his cigarette.

“Get in there, Skiba,” Milsap grunted.

Skiba dropped the backpack, got down on his stomach and squirmed through the narrow opening. Once inside, Skiba cranked the window open as far as it would go.

Milsap hunkered down. “See anything down there, Skiba? Blinking red lights? Anything like that?”

“Nah, it looks clean. Spooky as hell, though.” Skiba’s voice receded into the darkened classroom.

“You want to, Harley,” Milsap said, “you can stay out here and keep your eyes open. Let us know if anyone comes around.”

“Hell, no. I’m coming down with you guys.”

Milsap shot Brian his patented “Well, it’s out of my hands, now” look. Brian said nothing as Harley crawled into the classroom. Milsap handed Harley the backpack and followed him inside. Brian entered last. He closed the window behind and used his shirt to wipe off the fingerprints.

Milsap withdrew a flashlight from the bag and flicked it on. He kept the beam low, playing it across the school desks lined up in their regimented rows. Second grade classroom, maybe? First through fourth were located on the ground floor, fifth through eighth on the second.

Poorly colored paper crucifixes hung from the bulletin board to the right of the door. Several spelling words on the chalkboard. Savior. Garden. Communion.

He felt a chill, couldn’t suppress the shudder. There was something inherently creepy about an empty classroom after dark.

“Hey, Brian. Remember back when we were like in third grade, we’d dare each other to go into the bathroom, look in the mirror and chant, ‘Bloody Mary, bloody murder’ three times?” Milsap asked.

“Oh, man,” Harley said. “Now ain’t the time to be bringing that shit up.”

The smile returned to Brian’s lips, but only for an instant. “I remember Sister Helene calling me a Satanist. I remember them taking the mirrors out of all the bathrooms cause all the kids were scared to take a piss by themselves.”

“So that’s why there ain’t any mirrors above the sinks,” Harley said.

“Yeah,” Brian said. “Somehow I got the blame for that.”

“Where’s Skiba?” Milsap asked. The beam shifted across their shoes.

“Must’ve gone on ahead.”

“He’s hungry for that booze. Thinks it’s gonna get him the chance to fuck,” Brian laughed.

“Maybe it will,” Milsap said. “We get the girls drunk enough, Skiba could fuck all them.”

“There ain’t enough liquor in the entire Vatican to get the girls drunk enough to spread for Skiba.”

“Hell, who gives a shit? Let’s get the booze. He’ll catch up.”

Though he attended the school for a large portion of his life, a year hiatus made the halls alien to Milsap. Nothing had changed during the time span except the names on the artwork Scotch-taped to the walls. The hallway still smelled strangely of tapioca. He’d never been inside the school without the prerequisite uniform of navy blue trousers and sky blue polo shirt.

“Seems wrong to be in here,” Milsap murmured as they walked the hallway toward the gymnasium.

“It’s because we broke in with the intent to rob,” Brian said.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

They stopped to admire the trophy case. Two lonely trophies. The 1983 seventh grade girls Diocesan championship and the 1984 eighth grade girls Diocesan championship. A legendary team led by star guard Tracey Novotony who went on to drop out of high school and then get plastered by the 2 AM freight train at the Cameron Street crossing.

The hallway led to the cafeteria and the gym. In a locked closet between the two; more liquor than they could carry.

Milsap handed the flashlight to Harley. He withdrew a small sledge and chisel from the bag. After a moment’s consideration, he slid the chisel back. “Guess I’ll just knock the hell outta it with the mallet.”

“Need me to do it?” Brian asked.

“You think you can beat a knob better than me?”

“No. You are the knob-beating champion. I’m just tired of waiting.”

Milsap raised the sledge. Before he could bring the hammer down, an explosion of shattered glass echoed through the hallway. The flashlight jumped in Harley’s hands.

“The fuck was that?”

“Skiba.”

“Sounds like two kangaroos fucking in a Wicks N’ Sticks store.”

Several more glass panes splintered. On the second floor, receding. Tinkling glass and then what resembled a muffled dragon’s roar.

Brian grabbed the sledge from Milsap’s hand. “He’s your buddy, you go deal with him.”

“My buddy? I can’t stand him.”

“If I gotta go get him,” Brian said, shaking the sledge for emphasis, “it’ll be to give him another scar across his head.”

“All right. All right. Just don’t take off without me.”

By the time Milsap reached the stairwell, Brian was all ready clobbering the door with what sounded like detonating thermonuclear warheads. Somewhere on the second floor, the dragon’s roar muted to a whisper and the crashing glass returned to prominence.

Milsap took the darkened stairs two at a time.

“Skiba! Skiba! What the fuck are you doing?”

At the top of the stairs, Milsap saw Skiba all the way down the hall, silhouetted against the street light’s illumination pouring through the front windows and sparkling off all the broken glass. “Skiba, you’re gonna get us all busted, man.”

Three running steps and Milsap’s feet shot out from under him. There seemed to be a moment’s levitation before he landed, his upper back and shoulders taking the brunt of the impact. His head hit hard enough to disperse his thoughts, momentarily, nothing worse.

Fire retardant. Milsap leapt back to his feet, but the chemicals had all ready begun soaking into the ass and calves of his jeans. Milsap gritted his teeth. It was going to be difficult to impress upon the ladies his superior grooviness with his ass soaked in fire retardant, regardless of how much liquor he carried.

Milsap eased down the hallway. Skiba had sprayed down the floor and walls with several canisters, then used the empties to smash out the glass in every classroom door and knocked out the overhead fluorescent lights and several ceiling titles. Milsap kept close to the wall. Another fall here would likely earn him a skinful of broken glass.

Skiba held a fourth extinguisher. He busted the glass out of the eighth grade classroom door and reached his hand through, unlocking the knob. Inside, he pulled the pin and sprayed fire retardant foam across Mrs. Gordon’s desk, soaking her lesson planner, the catechism, the spinster sweater draped over her chair. He sprayed the bookcases, file cabinets and school desks.

Milsap crept behind him and waited for the extinguisher to peter out. As it spurted weakly, Milsap said, “What are you doing, Skiba?”

Skiba slouched forward, canister dangling from his hand. He turned slightly. He’d been sobbing. His face red and twisted, eyes swollen, snot bubbling from his nose. His scar was a livid white slash dividing his forehead. He swung the extinguisher and knocked over the podium Mrs. Gordon liked to hide her wide hips behind when reciting lessons. His rage spent, Skiba tossed the canister at the bookshelves, dislodging several volumes celebrating the lives and violent deaths of Christian saints and martyrs.

They stood silently a moment, surveying the room they spent two hellish semesters. Eighth grade had been especially torturous for Skiba. An unfortunate growth spurt had made his uniform pant legs too short by a couple inches, necessitating the nickname “Noah”. Of course, Skiba would have been golden if that was the worst of his worries during the year.

He wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve. “I hate this fucking place so much.”

Milsap, who originated the “Noah” nickname, nodded his head sympathetically. “I hear you, man. It’s amazing we made it out of here.”

Milsap grabbed a piece of chalk and drew a pentagram on the board. Beneath it, he wrote FUCK GOD. “There,” he said. “Now, they’ll think public school students did this shit. Now how ’bout we get a few bottles of scotch and see what we can do about getting you laid.”

Skiba smiled a rictus. “C’mon, Milsap, you think I don’t know Kristen and her bitch friends? You think I ain’t heard some of the things they’ve said about me? It’s not like they wait until my back is turned.”

“Well, we’ll get them drunk.”

“Stop it. I don’t care when you say ugly things about me. I know what I look like. I know I live like a fucking roach. It’s not my fault. But quit acting like I’m stupid. I’m not stupid.”

“I know. I’m just saying, you’ve done a lot of damage, here. I’m thinking we should probably get the hell outta here before the cops show up.”

“Go ahead and go then.”

“I ain’t gonna leave you here to take the fall.”

“You mean you ain’t gonna leave me here cause you’re afraid I’m gonna rat you out. You don’t give a fuck what happens to me so long as you’re in the clear.”

Milsap gave Skiba a sharp slap across the mouth and pushed him back against the desk. “Fuck you. Every fucking second I’m here, I’m risking getting my ass sent up to juvie hall. If it was a question of watching my own back, I’d already be half way to Kristen’s with a bottle of Jack in my hand.”

Skiba’s bottom lip trembled. “I ain’t gonna get in trouble. I could burn this fucking school to the ground and get away with it. After what Father Francis did to me, I could do anything.”

Here we go again, Milsap thought. “Father Francis running you over with his Buick can only take you so far, champ.”

“I’m not talking about the accident, asshole. I’m talking about the things he did to me after. The things he did to me at the rectory. Why do you think I always got pulled out of class to altar boy all those mid-day funerals?”

“What? No...”

“Milsap...”

“Did he fuck you in the ass? Or make you suck him off? Or both... or... did he go down on you? Goddamn. He kinda had that look to him. No wonder you walked funny. I thought it was because your pants were so tight. Holy shit. You know you could get some money off that sick bastard. Take his pedophile ass to the cleaners.”

Skiba’s face collapsed in on itself, leaving only a red pool of humiliation. His shoulders lurched. He reached out, but Milsap ducked his touch. Instantly, he regretted his movement. They both did.

“It’s not my fault. I didn’t do nothing.”

“I know. I know.” Milsap tried a more sympathetic tone of voice. He reached out and patted Skiba’s shoulder in what he hoped would be construed as a compassionate gesture. “Still, though, you probably should’ve turned the cock down when he offered it to you.”

“Oh, God...”

“Relax, man. It’s not worth crying over. What’s one dick? Let’s grab some whiskey and get going, all right?”

Skiba nodded, depleted. Milsap led him downstairs, keeping a step behind him. Back in the hallway between the cafeteria and the gymnasium, there was no sign of Harley and Brian, only their handiwork.

A misshapen doorknob laid on the floor like a lumpy shrunken head. Milsap got a sick feeling in his gut before he even reached the beaten door. He knew what he’d find. Bare shelves. Not so much as a Captain Morgan shooter.

“Goddamn,” Milsap said. “Looks like a another night of sniffing airplane glue for me.” He felt around the shelves just in case his eyes were deceiving him. “Yep, nothing.”

“Brian took off with it all?”

“Yeah. Either that or you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“This is where they used to keep it.”

“Really? Is this where Father Francis useta take you to get you drunk before playing Hide The Crucifix?”

Skiba stood there, head down. Silent.

“I’m just playing, man. Hell, I kinda envy you. I’d take a shot of dick from a man in a dress if it meant I could sue the diocese for thirty million dollars.”

Skiba’s voice was a void. “You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you?”

“I don’t honestly see how I can keep this to myself. But don’t worry, you can always deny it. Let’s get the fuck outta here. See if we can’t catch up with Brian, that buddy fucker. Then you can do to him what you did to the school’s second floor. And I can go to Kristen’s and do to her what Father Francis did to you.”

BIO: Karl Koweski escaped the shadow of the steel mills thirteen years ago. He's been running in place ever since. He writes the monthly column Observations of a Dumb Polack for www.zygoteinmycoffee.com. His stories and poems have been published across the small press. His first full length collection of short stories will be out by the end of the year from Epic Rites press.