A Twist Of Noir 182 - Matthew Quinn Martin

THUG’S PARADISE - MATTHEW QUINN MARTIN

Although this was the first time Rick had laid eyes on him, Boss Raffone looked every inch the picture-perfect mafia kingpin. An exquisitely tailored Armani suit draped his six-foot, seven-inch, three-hundred pound frame like a pin-striped cocoon. The man sat across the wide expanse of a mahogany desk and, despite the chilled air filling his glass-walled penthouse, slight beads of sweat glistened from his freshly-shaven pate. In one hand smoldered the last of a Cuban Cohiba and the other clutched a brass handled blackthorn cane, one rumored to have bludgeoned to death a hundred men.

By the look in his glassy blue eyes, Boss Raffone was betting that Rick Malone was about to become number 101.

Rick felt naked. The fact that he was standing there in nothing but his jockey-shorts and a ribbed wife-beater was only half the reason. The other was the stacked brunette dream standing two paces behind the boss in a skirt little wider then a belt, and shirt so tight it could have been painted on, for all it left to the imagination. Even as Raffone barked at him, Rick had a hard time tearing his eyes off the dame’s seamed stockings.

One of the standing rules of meeting the boss was that you had to do it in your skivvies. Not just disrobe at the door to his lair, but show up at the lobby of his hi-rise undressed, walk the whole block like that––Raffone’s cameras, and his goons, watching your every step of the way as you shivered in the February chill. That tidbit of intel was hard won from Billy The Saint down at Marco’s Pool Palace. Rick had managed to get him behind the 8-ball, so to speak––ten large behind it, and Billy had a bit of a cash flow problem, so he ponied up the goods knowing he’d probably pay for it later. The reason for Raffone’s precaution was two-fold. First, to make sure you weren’t packing heat. The second, to let the boss know that any information you might be bringing was worth it–or that you were crazy enough to risk dying for wasting his time.

Rick wasn’t sure which category he best fit into.

“So, fuckface,” the boss growled as he rose from his seat with a spring-straining screech. “You got something for me?” He punctuated the query with a dull-thudded rap of cane hilt against palm.

“Yeah,” Rick said, still stealing glances at the doll standing behind the boss. Her eyes swept the floor as he spoke. “Those girls you got working out of the Green Street Karaoke Bar––the one with the beds in the private rooms...”

“What about, ’em?”

“You’re going to let them go.”

Boss Raffone’s hollow laugh echoed through the room and Rick’s ears both. “Or what?” the boss asked, as his chuckling slid into a sigh.

“Or I’m going to kill you,” was Rick’s answer. Simple. Solid.

“That’s funny,” Raffone said, even though no laughter accompanied the words. “I’d almost let you live for that.” He stepped close, raising his cane. “Almost.”

And a bone-cracking thwack filled the air as the cane’s brass knob connected with Rick’s jaw. He watched a tooth fly in a spray of blood from his mouth. Two more strikes came and Rick went down to the deep pile carpet stretching out across Boss Raffone’s floor, almost knocking his head on the man’s rich leather sofa.

“Now look at that,” he said. “I’m going to have to call the rug-cleaner. Hope there’s money in your wallet. Nothing I hate more than a broke corpse.”

Rick reached his arm behind him, slipping it under the six-inch gap between sofa and floor. His hand found what it was looking for, nestled between the springs just like he was told it would be. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt and pulled it out.

And Boss Raffone found himself staring at a double-barreled derringer half the size of Rick’s hand. “What you gonna do with that?” he laughed as he moved forward, lifting his cane for another strike. “Shoot a couple of cans?”

–bang bang–

Boss Raffone stopped laughing, stopped moving. He dropped to his knees and then to the floor. His eyes rolled up and crossed, like they were searching for something just above his eyebrows. Something like the twin holes weeping blood onto his shag rug that no one but the cops was likely to be cleaning anytime soon.

Rick looked down at what he held in his hand. It was a tiny gun. And it made tiny holes, but they were big enough to let a man’s life to leak right out. Even a man Boss Raffone’s size. He turned to the girl. “Thanks,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Candy,” she said. “Candy Devine.”

Candy was one of Spidera’s girls. Rick knew that. Knew there’d be a person inside, or he wouldn’t have been so keen to waltz into this death-trap. Spidera had been the one to hire him for this gig, promising the rising star money, power and more, if he succeeded. Rick walked past the former boss’s still-twitching body. Walked right up to Candy.

She traced a pattern on his chest, then nearly collapsed into his arms. “He had my sister working there,” was all she could choke out between the sobs.

“Well, not anymore,” he said, holding her. Rick looked down at Candy. He knew that she would have done the deed herself, if she could have but, in that outfit of hers, there simply wasn’t room to hide a piece. Not even one that small. Lord knows how she’d even managed to smuggle it in here. He knew, too, that Spidera’s girls could be whatever you wanted. Angel in your bed, or Angel of Death. Haloes or hails of gunfire. They could do it all. For a price. Not that Rick had to pay. His touch was all the currency a girl like Candy could ever want.

Her tears dry, and her face flamed with passion, she went down before him. Her breasts straining the buttons of her blouse as she took his length into her mouth. Deep in. Pausing only for air and to moan his name. “Rick. Rick. Rick...”

*

“Rick. Rick,” the shrill voice cut through the sound of Candy’s digitized tones in his earbuds. Rick tugged them out, pulling off his virtual reality goggles with them and setting both on the desk, gingerly. Those VR specs had cost him nearly a month’s time bagging groceries at the First National, but they were worth it. Playing Thug’s Paradise just wasn’t the same on a plain old LCD screen.

“Rick? Rick?” The voice came from the other side of the hollow core door of his one-room basement apartment. He wiped the Jergens from his left hand, and jizz from his sagging, hairy belly with a wad of tissues then tossed them into the overflowing wastebasket.

“Rick! Rick!” the voice said again, this time with a pounding on the door. “You’re going to be late.”

“I know, Ma,” he yelled, struggling to squirm back into his trousers. “Be out in a minute.”

“Are you playing that game again?” his mother asked.

“No.” Rick looked over at his clock. 6:30 A.M. He shook his head. He had been playing it. The empty cans of Red Bull covering his desk and discount cigarette butts clogging his ashtray told him he’d been playing it all night long. Again.

“Rick?”

“I said, I’m coming!” He took a quick look around the room, clicking off the game and hastily shoving anything too embarrassing into his filing cabinet. There were things a thirty-three year-old man just didn’t want his mother to see. She’d been turning a blind eye to most of it ever since he’d moved back home five years ago. But Rick judged by the amount of dirty laundry heaped on his floor and the mostly empty pizza boxes stacked in various places that she’d probably give his room a cleaning while he was at work. He knew from experience that she never spoke about what she saw, but her disappointed and shameful silence was enough to make him want to put his father’s shotgun barrel into his mouth.

Rick took a quick look in the mirror. His red-rimmed eyes had bags hanging under them and the shadow on his face had passed the five o’clock mark two days ago. He reached for his stained First National apron and told himself. “You can do this. Nine hours, man. Just nine more hours.” Eight bagging groceries, and thirty minutes each way on the bus. He’d even grab a tuna sandwich and a can of Hawaiian Punch on the way out to save himself some time.

And then he’d be back. Back in his comfy desk chair, VR goggles wrapped around his eyes, and pants down around his ankles. Back in the game, mouse in one palm and gob of hand lotion smeared across the other. Back in Thug’s Paradise. Back where the only light was neon. Where you could tell where a man stood by the sharp cut of his double-breasted suit, or the rake of his fedora. Back where you could do the crime, but never had to do the time. Where the women were all dames, dolls, molls and broads. And where all of them wanted a piece of Rick.

Back to Thug’s Paradise, where maybe it was all a game...but at least he wasn’t a loser.

BIO: Matthew Quinn Martin is a very accomplished writer of a great many stories, many of which are plays, some of which are short stories, three of them films of varying length. He's had crime stories published at The Flash Fiction Offensive, the soon-to-be defunct Eastern Standard Crime and at A Twist Of Noir.

He wrote the feature-length crime drama Slingshot, produced by Bold Films and starring Julianna Margulies, David Arquette, Thora Birch, Balthazar Getty and Joely Fisher.

Currently, he is hard at work on not one but two novels, one solo, one with Libby Cudmore.

And Matthew is an MFA candidate in Popular Fiction writing atthe Stonecoast Program, University of Southern Maine.

For more information about Matthew, his stories, his films, his novels, his life, check out http://www.matthewquinnmartin.com/.

A Twist Of Noir 181 - Michael Kechula

THE POTSDAM PROTOCOL - MICHAEL KECHULA

Originally published in Skive, an Australian magazine, in 2005

I spent three weeks in Moscow rummaging through KGB archives. Ten hours a day. Didn’t find what I was looking for.

All the real good stuff is still hidden. Figures. They ain’t gonna volunteer anything about their nastiest black operations.

Waiting for the bus to Moscow’s Rossiya Hotel, I thought about Higgins from our Berlin squad. He was still at CIA headquarters. He’d urged me not to go to Moscow. Said it was all ancient history. What we did during the Cold War didn’t matter to anybody anymore. We succeeded in stopping the Reds, and that was good enough.

“Only we know the ugly things we did for God and country,” Higgins had said. “We got our noses bloodied regularly to make sure America made it to the twenty-first century free of communist totalitarianism. Well, we made it. Now it’s time to rest, Stokes. Time to write sanitized memoirs. Time to make it sound more glorious than it was. Time to let it all fade into the secret annals of the Cold War.”

“Easy for you to say,” I’d told Higgins. “You got to Berlin after Harry Fox was killed. After the CIA and KGB signed the Potsdam protocols where both sides agreed to stop killing each other’s spooks. Bashing, broken bones and maiming were still sanctioned. But somebody up high on both sides decided we were butchering each other at unacceptable rates. And if we lessened our spook power, then third world countries with interests inimical to both America and the Soviet Union could fill the vacuum. Better off finding out who the piss ant countries’ agents were, and kill them instead.”

“As I remember,” Higgins said, “you violated the agreement by killing two more KGB lower-echelon goons. You were lucky the KGB were reorganizing. By the time they got around to dealing with the fact that they had two less on the payroll, they figured to hell with it. They never complained officially. Saved you from hard time at Leavenworth.”

“I did it to retaliate. They violated the protocols first by killing Harry Fox. In fact, I’m heading to Moscow now that they’ve opened KGB archives. I’m gonna check the books. I wanna see if I can find some missing pieces. I wanna know for sure who killed Harry. He was my best friend. I always figured it was that freak, Vasil Pescuda, but couldn’t prove it. If I can find any reference to their operations in West Berlin in ’75, maybe I can make some logical leaps. If I can pin it on Pescuda, I’ll die a happy man.”

“Stokes, you’re a crazy bastard! For old times’ sake, we never had this conversation.”

Honking horns broke my reverie. Moscow’s version of rush hour. Traffic crawled.

The bus stopped where I stood outside old KGB headquarters. Somebody got off. Those ahead of me crammed the bus so badly, I couldn’t get both legs aboard. The driver yelled. With me half in, half out, he couldn’t close the door. I stepped out.

When the bus pulled away, I saw something that made my adrenalin rise. A face that could’ve been Pescuda’s, after 30 years of hard living, peered through a rear bus window.

I followed the bus for two blocks through mired traffic.

Next stop, enough got off so I could board. Shoving my way toward the back, I tried to get a closer look.

The only potential weapon I had was my room key. If I rammed it into his eye socket and pounded hard enough, maybe I’d pierce his brain.

That’s when I spotted a nail. It looked long enough to jam into his temple. Some Russian agents killed themselves with rusty nails to avoid interrogation by the German Gestapo. They’d tape the nails on the inner side of their belts, just in case.

I reached for the nail. Too bad it wasn’t rusty. It’d add a bit of icing.

I worked my way to the back. When somebody sneezed loudly, the target looked my way.

A hideous scar marred his left cheek. That didn’t square with my memory of Pescuda’s dossier photos. The photos I’d studied from every angle to ensure I’d never forget. Dammit! The scar planted a seed of doubt. I didn’t want to kill an innocent.

My mind raced when he pulled a cord to signal the driver.

“Harry Fox,” I yelled.

The target looked at me, then shouted, “Stokes! You bloody bastard!”

“Truce,” I said. “Potsdam Protocols.”

“Da! Truce!” he said.

We left together.

“Vasil, I see a McDonalds. I’ll buy you a Big Mac.”

He agreed.

While he chomped on a burger, I said, “Do you realize, if you’d won there’d be no McDonalds in Moscow?”

“We wouldn’t want them,” he said. “We’d be in America, dynamiting McDonalds and every other bastion of capitalism.” Then he added, “Why did you mention Harry Fox?”

“He was killed. After the protocols were signed.”

“I heard that. Shame.”

“No loss,” I said. “He was incompetent.”

“Then I did you a favor,” Pescuda said.

“Where’d you do it?”

“East Berlin.”

“Figures. How’d you kill him?”

“Drano.”

“It’s the nature of war,” I said. “Only the cruelest survive.”

“I’m glad it’s over and we can be civil,” Pescuda said. “Oy, my bladder’s about to burst.”

He headed for the loo.

Men are exceedingly vulnerable when facing a urinal. Holding urine back too long, and then suddenly releasing, makes their blood pressure drop. Weakens them momentarily.

He’d held it in too long. He shuddered.

I threw him to the floor and slammed the nail into his temple.

“Say hello to Harry Fox, you bastard!”

I propped him on a commode, jammed the stall door shut, and crawled out a window.

He’d pissed all over me. It was a small price to pay for revenge.

BIO: Michael A. Kechula is a retired tech writer. His fiction has won first place in 8 contests and placed in 7 others. He’s also won Editor’s Choice awards 4 times. His stories have been published by 116 magazines and 32 anthologies in Australia, Canada, England, India, Scotland, and US. He’s authored two books of flash and micro-fiction stories: “A Full Deck of Zombies--61 Speculative Fiction Tales” and “The Area 51 Option and 70 More Speculative Fiction Tales.” eBook versions available at www.BooksForABuck.com and www.fictionwise.com. Paperback available at www.amazon.com.

A Twist Of Noir 180 - Kieran Shea

ELEPHANTS - KIERAN SHEA

Originally published at Crooked in June 2009

A loft in Jersey City, fourteen years ago...

Heaven was an asshole.

Heaven planted a cold engineer boot on Pat Flood’s neck and slowly fanned the room to a freeze with a .45. The girls, Heaven’s “talent”, gathered their frilly things and shouldered past Heaven’s draped open leather coat—out the condo’s front door.

“Keep passing the bag,” Heaven said.

Pat never saw the blow. Typically, he prided himself on his fighting instincts, playing things street smart, being one of the last of the Irish raised in Flatbush and all. But nerves were slowed by hours of tilted stout and a couple bowls of good weed. Christ. Wasn’t this bad for business? Taking off a bachelor party?

And, man, he was just negotiating for more time, nothing more. For crying out loud, the ten of them in that condo had enough money slaving in Manhattan day-in and day-out they could have paid the girls to stay for a year and then some. But that had never been Heaven’s plan apparently. Heaven chopped him down.

“Keep it comin’. Yo, Charlie Sheen Wall Street! Watch, too, bitch.”

Pat squirmed his cheek in the greasy empty clam of a discard pizza box, elbows cocked as if he were resting between push-up sets. Out of the corner of his bloodied eye, he saw the plastic shopping bag sway between the passing hands of his friends. The thin white skin of the bag was dark with wallets, jewelry and loose bills. Finally, the bag was handed over his head to Heaven. The pressure from the boot increased on Pat’s neck as Heaven looked in the bag.

“Nice. Might wanna take a minute to pull together your story an’ shit before dialing any police, seeing that I now own these wallets. Couple wedding bands ‘round the room, too. Good times, huh? Went to college together an’ shit?”

Somebody mumbled.

From the shift in pressure on his neck, Pat could sense that the .45 in Heaven’s hand had swung back across the room.

“Yeah, well, you college pussies oughta know better.”

*

Two weeks later...

Pat did the bench squat next to his cousin Mikey, both of them rolling paper cups of coffee between their hands. Pat stared absently at the impatient 6:40 commuter shoes and felt the chugging vibrations of the Staten Island Ferry deep in his spine.

“What do you want me to say, Pat? Yeah, of course, the guy has a sheet, d’fuck you think? Jesus. Petty this, couple of pops, nothing major. But then he finally screwed the pooch and did six and a half in East Jersey State for a liquor store robbery. So what? So now he’s pimping strippers and you guys fucked up and lied to the Jersey City cops because a couple of you were stupid enough to buy blowjobs and nobody wants to ruin their precious life? Big deal. Grow up. Buncha babies. Chalk gettin’ robbed to experience. Get back to your MBAs, your jobs, your fiancés, whatfuckin’ever. I’m telling you, a douchebag like this character? S’not worth it.”

“Just gimme the paper, Mikey.”

Mikey sighed, slurped his coffee, then warned, “This comes back to me, I swear to God, Pat...”

“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

Reluctantly, Mikey fished a folded-up square of paper from his breast pocket. Pat snatched the paper and gave his cousin an envelope.

They both drank their coffee for a while after that and said nothing. When the ferry finally bumped into the Manhattan terminal, Mikey stood.

“So. These good seats or what?”

Pat looked up at his cousin adjusting his creaking duty belt.

“They’re gold. Third base line, fifteen rows up. Company seats. Make sure your kid brings his glove and pays attention.”

The masses of humanity shuffled past.

“Fuckin’ kid,” Mikey said, “He’s like half a fag for Mr. November, y’know?”

*

Present day—Bergen County, New Jersey...

“Honey, what’s this?”

Pat poked his head around the corner into the master bedroom. He had half a beard of shaving cream and a thick, black towel cinched around his waist.

“What’s what?”

“This.” His wife Jeanie held up a faded swatch of paper. “This was in your junk box on your bureau. I’m cleaning it out. Is this important?”

Patrick padded over and plucked the paper from his wife’s scissored fingertips, giving her a puzzled look. He unfolded the paper, read the handwriting and felt a surge of memories rise behind his eyes.

“Who is Raúl Gomez?”

Pat tsked dismissively. “Um, just this guy... wow. Phew. Long time ago. Forgot I even had this piece of paper anymore.”

“Is that a Social Security number?”

“Umm...kind of. Yeah.”

“Why do you have his Social Security number?”

“It’s a long story.”

Later that day in midtown, Pat swiveled in his desk chair and stared out at the canyons of Manhattan. Rain leaked jagged streams down his office window.

It had been over ten years since he asked his cousin Mikey in NYPD for that favor, a wild young hair up Pat’s ass, looking for some payback. He had no idea what he’d do and, in the end, ended up doing nothing. Once again, Pat was amazed at the banal dross of life accumulating around him like so much cold, wet sand.

Nothing really came of the stolen credit cards and missing driver licenses from that night. After all, the robbery was back in the salad days of the Internet, back when identity theft was just a faint notion on a far back burner.

A couple of gas charges, a restaurant bar tab, and poof—it was over. Cops said cards were probably buried deep in a landfill somewhere.

Pat swiveled back and picked up the piece of paper from his desk blotter.

Raúl Gomez. A.K.A. Heaven.

Pat unclipped his personal cell phone from his belt, shut his office door, and made some calls.

*

“He owns a what?”

The private detective next to Pat trolled a finger down his report and squinted. They were perched in a Starbucks window on West 56th.

“Ahh...a small auto supply house in South Amboy, New Jersey. Actually, they just sell high end rims. Fancy chrome accessories, that sort of thing. The detailed, bass thumping 808 crowd, if you know what I mean.”

“And he’s no longer doing anything criminal?”

The detective smoothed his tie. “From all outward appearances, no. After his last jolt for aggravated assault, nothing comes up. Rents an average looking townhouse, has a wife, who runs a nail salon, and a daughter in private preschool, if you can believe that. It seems the correctional system has rehabilitated Mr. Gomez. Joined the rat race, as it were. Here's a current picture.”

Patrick looked at the photograph taken from a distance. Older, yes, softer, yes, eyes of menace still. Hair gone and a shaved dome, dipped a bit more in ink and a tad on the jowly side, but it was definitely him.

“Heaven.”

“Yes, sir. Raúl Gomez. Heaven.”

Pat snorted and shook his head in wonder. He then shook the private detective's hand and wrote him a check.

*

The following Saturday, Pat Flood opened the glass door to Heavenly Hubs a sharp electronic deet-deet-deet announcing his entrance. Heavy plodding hip hop vibrated the air and hard April sunshine blasted through the barred windows, flashing up the chrome.

A clerk at the front with a flat-brimmed purple Yankees cap, wet-looking Lil’ Wayne dreads, and an oversized Nets jersey cocked a fuzzy chin at Patrick, “S’up, can I do y’fo’?”

Pat's heart raced. Gingerly, he made his way forward down the central display area, his mouth drying. At the counter, he drummed his fingers on a glass case near the register. An aisle over, two wannabe bangers in white skull caps and droopy shorts were snickering.

“Owner around?”

“Wha?”

“Is the owner around?”

“Depends, dog. You sellin’ shit?”

“Selling shit?”

“Yeah. You a salesman? Sign front window says, like, no solicitation.”

“No. No, I just would like to speak to the owner that’s all, please.”

Purple Cap leaned back on his stool and scratched the neck of a panting Rotweiller the size of an ottoman resting on the floor behind him. Patrick noticed the dog’s collar was a hand-tooled black leather belt with the word PRIME on it in raised, sharp studs.

“I’ll check if he’s available.”

“Thanks,” Pat said, the dog looking up and appraising Pat’s presence. Purple Cap paused at the doorway and turned back. “And who’re you?”

Pat crossed his arms and forced a smile, “I’m Patrick.”

“Patrick...”

“Yeah. Patrick Flood.”

“A’ight. Watcha register, Prime.” The Rotweiller whined.

After a bit, a man emerged from behind a doorway with the Purple Cap trailing behind. The man smelled of onions and vinegar and was chewing open-mouthed, wiping his ring adorned hands with a yellow paper napkin.

“Can I help you?”

Pat let his memory roll backward then forward. It was him—Heaven—the guy who brokered the strippers for that bachelor party oh-so-many years ago and brutally pistol-whipped him to the floor.

“Are you Max Hernandez?” Pat asked, floating a ruse.

Raúl looked at Purple Cap then back at Pat standing there. There was an exchange of rough, smoky laughs. Pat felt sweat on his upper lip. There wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in Raúl’s eyes.

“Naw, man. My name is Raúl. I’m Raúl Gomez.”

Yeah, Pat thought, old anger tightening in his chest.

I so fucking know who you are.

*

What happened next was possibly the dumbest, mid-life crisis play of all time.

Pat figured he’d wait a week, come back and case Gomez’s closing routines. Then he’d seize the right moment, get a couple of shots in and settle the ancient score once and for all.

Meanwhile, at the gym, Pat signed up for a couple of early A.M. private sessions with one of the martial arts instructors to beef up his arsenal of debilitating quick strikes. Catch Gomez off-guard, unleash the barrage, and drop some knowledge on his gangsta ass.

It was a crazy idea, dangerous. But Pat had seen the photos from the detective. I’m in way better shape than that scumbag, Pat thought. He’s gone doughy, looked slow. Plus he’ll never expect it or see me coming.

Pat’s grandfather, a strict off-the-boat mick who drove for the MTA for forty-five years, always told him—they may beat you down and it may take a while, but the Irish? The Irish always have a way of coming around. Memories like elephants. Goddamn right.

But Pat’s vision of justice didn’t go down that way.

What Pat remembered was the parking lot behind Heavenly Hubs tilting. He remembered being kicked and stomped and beaten and rolled over, a thick worming hand fishing free his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. Then nothing for a while as a car alarm chirped and a door was opened. Then footsteps before the hot shot of a baseball bat caved in his front teeth. Pat passed out.

Later, there were flashes, bursting snapshots...like when he used a View•master back when he was a kid, the toy with the waffled disks of images you advanced by fingering a lever. The dark blue coats of the EMTs, himself using his thumb and forefinger to tweezer out a bloody piece of glass the size of a diamond from his chin, stay with me, stay with me, the doctors at Raritan Bay Medical Center with their minty smocks and that syringe the size of a sixteen-inch screwdriver.
Oh yeah. And the screaming.

His.

Pat cracked his left eye, the one that wasn’t swollen shut like a leaking fig. His wife Jeanie was at his bedside. Pat’s throat was on fire but he managed a croak.

“Jea...”

Jeanie snapped to, her watery green eyes flicking desperately back and forth as she leaned closer, touching his chest, “Oh, thank God, you’re awake!” She cried over her shoulder, “Nurse! Nurse! He’s awake!”

Pat weakly clasped his wife’s hand. “Did you...ulkk.. say...anything?”

Jeanie turned back, “Say anything?” She stroked his matted hair above a bristlingwedge of fresh stitches, “What? Say anything about what, baby?”

“Who...”

“Who? Who did this to you? They don’t know. Police are saying you got mugged. What were you doing in South Amboy anyway, Pat baby? I don’t understand, why were you down there, honey pie?”

Pat tried to shake his head but could barely manage an agonizing drift. Jeanie started sobbing. Smiling and sobbing.

As the nurses buzzed around him, Pat fought the pull of the medications insisting that he slip back down into the cool, black zero. Sweet freakin’ Christ, he hurt, how can he be forty-one and hurt so Goddamn much?

If Raúl Gomez had his wallet, well, then Gomez had him. He may have forgotten Pat from the robbery more than a decade past, but he sure as shit knew where Pat lived now. Lived with Jeanie. With his two kids.

Jeanie kissed his cheek, her breath hot and sour, lips dry as a paper.

Man, Pat thought miserably. Payback's such a bitch.

BIO: Kieran Shea scratches at the crime fiction eight ball like a lot of sordid lots. He blogs his struggle at BLACK IRISH BLARNEY.

A Twist Of Noir 179 - Robert Crisman

GETAWAY DAY - ROBERT CRISMAN

On Getaway Day, the question is this: where do you think it is that you’re going?

They heisted the dopehouse the night before Christmas. It blew up in their faces. Dennis went batshit when Danny, the dopeman, refused to roll over.

They got what they came for, the money and dope, but the wrangle spilled out on the street. Danny came out with a shotgun. Dennis blew him away and killed an old lady just out for a stroll who’d come up behind.

Then he’d gone back in the house and plugged Danny’s woman. The dead drop no dimes.

Eddie couldn’t hang with the mop-up. Dennis put the gun to his head and told him, just drive to the storage. They stashed the loot there. They’d already made plans to get back there and divvy the next night.

But Eddie was not going to hang. Ramon decided he wanted him dead and told Dennis, bag his ass out at the storage and leave his ass there, and then bring the stash out to Ramon.

Dennis fucked up, tipped his hand and let Eddie get back behind him. Eddie clocked Dennis and left his ass there in the weeds by the storage. He also made off with the kilo of dope that they’d heisted from Danny.

Ramon deep-sixed Dennis for fucking it up and came after Eddie.

He almost got him. Eddie came back to shiver and shake at his pad and figure out what to do next. Ramon came up on him and trapped him inside.

Ramon was going to torture his ass but he slipped and they tussled. The neighbor next door started pounding the wall with a hammer. Ramon’s gun hand jerked.

Eddie rushed him, tripped him, and shot out the door, to a bolthole he knew two blocks down. Ramon, gun in hand, rushed out after—too late. Eddie was nowhere. And the neighbor had called the police. Ramon had to split.

Eddie, meanwhile, had pell-melled to Belmont, the Laundromat there. He rushed around back and dove down the stairs that led to the laundromat’s basement.

Down on the landing he wedged himself in a corner. He curled up tight and breathed through his mouth for five minutes. If Ramon found him now...

He huddled, gasping, cartoon explosions lighting up inside his skull. Ramon and that gun... The darkness and silence clutched at his throat. Please, don’t let him find me.

Eddie’d lost cops in this very same bolthole some 20 years back.

It seemed he’d been ducking in boltholes his whole fucking life.

He could not stay. He had to get out, get away. If he stayed there he’d die. Somehow, some way, Ramon would get down there and find him.

Ramon was out there, poking through bushes and shadows right now. And he’d find him. He’d smell Eddie’s sweat and the blood in his veins. He’d come down the steps like a leopard, eyes blood-red slits, grinning murder. He’d come down step by step, slowly, drawing it out.

“Hey, baby,” he’d say, “how do you want it?” He’d make kissing noises.

Ramon never came. Eddie booked. To Aurora in north end Seattle, up by the graveyard, the Ares Motel. A dead-end for junkies and old, flat-back hos.

But a scout flushed him out and Ramon came to call.

Eddie had gone out for smokes. It was six pm, dark. He’d rounded the corner, was headed on back to his room—and there was Ramon and some other vato poised now to kick his door in.

They didn’t see him. He backed into shadows, ready to run past the ends of the earth. Then, bam! This cluster of big motherfuckers busted into the courtyard from back in the alley, straight at Ramon and his partner!

The cops! They’d had scouts too, scouring the town for the fucker who’d maestroed the Christmas Eve slaughter. They rushed in like bad-ass Apaches. They got to Ramon and his partner and slammed them right into the room.

Eddie relearned to breathe and jammed to his car a block down the road from the Ares.

He sped like a methedrine bat to I-5. By the time they came to bag up Ramon, he was halfway to Portland.

He had enough money to get himself down to L.A., provided his beater held up. That afternoon, he’d pieced off five grams to mutts in the District. He’d come back to the Ares with $600 in his kick and banged his own dose. A half-hour later he’d gone for the smokes.

Now, in the car, he had the six bills and maybe a pound and a half of the chiva. He’d banged a ton in his week at the Ares.

The dope in his trunk was a bust just waiting to happen, of course. But, leave it? C’mon, man, get real.

*

Eddie was thinking, he might even make it. He’d stopped off in Kent and filled up the tank, then went back in the can and topped off again. He got back on the road, blasé blasé. The willies were muted, at least for awhile.

Live large while you can.

Down through Chehalis and bang-on toward Portland. A stop by the side of the road to smooth out the edges. It got smooth as a baby’s behind. The world was a slow-motion parade.

Eddie would daydream back in the day: somehow, some way he’d hit it big. Big money, baby, some kind of way. Bank like he’d dreamed of forever. He knew, way down deep, that it didn’t mean shit, that all the tomorrows were nothing but some other time like it said in that song. But what else was there?

He had this big car in the dream. A snazzy Mark IV, all midnight purple like Batman’s. With bitchin’ chrome rims, cruise control, and a sound system made for angels who scream out to heaven and hell, and on key.

Sights set on Cali in gangster-lean mode. All skies were blue.

China White in the trunk in the dream. Enough to hold him for life plus forever.

The plan? Just fucking go. Down 101 in the cool breeze. Playing tunes, dreaming dreams. And ease in the trunk when the groove would begin to wear thin.

All at his leisure, you dig it? Winding his way down the Oregon coast looking out at the waves. And watching the seagulls swoop down on dinner as the sun tracked its way to Japan.

Heroin’s perfect for that. It keeps out the chill. You’re bundled up snug as a bug in a rug and the world sweeps softly on by.

It turns, of course. One day it’s a raft on the White Powder River. Next day you bang and you bang and you don’t quite hit Eden. Almost, but almost isn’t shit.

You’re chasing it now. Chase all you want. Something cold deep inside you just will not be touched. You’ve used up your ticket. Soon enough, every nerve end you’ve got will be begging and bleeding and shitting all over the car seat. Turns out that Eden is merely a road stop to under a dumpster somewhere.

Eddie knew this. That’s why the gameplan, at least in the dream. He’d feel the turn coming and pull in to some no-tell motel by the sea. One good geez left, the one that would float him to Alpha Centauri.

He’d tie off, find that last vein in life, drive the dope home. He’d lay back on the bed, eyes slowly closing as waves lapped outside. Blackness would come like a loving mother’s caress.

That was the dream. Now, just past Portland, rain started falling. Grant’s Pass by morning? He let out a sigh. In the dream, skies were blue.

Funny thing, it seemed now that time was rushing up on him. Telling him, move! There were ogres and demons in crannies scratching up under him now. The soft, feathered groove was not going to carry him long.

A movie flickered inside his eyes. Reverie was not quite the word. Reverie wafts. Eddie’s visions, wherever they started, locked right on track, the route pre-ordained. Reverie, also, is toothless. Eddie’s thoughts gnawed, under the chiva, insistent.

Up on the screen now, Ramon in deep shadows. Posed and pimped-out top to toe, Mexican chorus-boy pretty. He turned. His eyes locked on Eddie, went dark. His face now was hard as a diamond, lips tight over teeth. Then he grinned, spit contempt, dancing murder. Those eyes! Eddie’s whole life summed up in those eyes.

The rest of the movie bled out from there.

Wars, twisted hatreds, bottomless fear. A cat Eddie tortured in third grade to get past his blues. A wino he hit with a bottle for nothing.

His wanted poster: a sharp-featured, pale, near-white-trash jamoke, to be swept out of sight with the rest of the shavings and sweepings of life in this city.

Out of sight, out of mind.

He’s three years old. He’s dancing and laughing and mugging for mama. She laughs, delighted, she and her friends. The women all love him with laughter, applause, enveloping warmth. He tries a new role: Godzilla, destroyer of cities! A three-year-old monster, roaring and stomping, on stage for the ladies! Powerful, thrilling, the leading man—little man!—once again.

Mama starts wringing her hands.

Mamas would have their babies stay babies. Especially boy children, the next set of dicks in the world. Godzilla scared mama.

Daddy scared mama. Daddy scared Eddie. That dead, failed dog of a man. A voice that could shred you, a backhand... Eddie knew, just from mama wringing her hands, that something inside him and hanging down off him was scary, ugly and wrong, just like daddy.

Daddy ruled. The man had the power, or so it seemed.

Eddie prayed for some power. He wanted the world to fear him the way he feared daddy. Scare all the others, he reasoned, and someday maybe he could stop shaking.

Dear daddy! Only way later would Eddie pick up a chair and put paid to his ass. And then watch him dies of cirrhosis some 20 months later.

Home followed him out in the world. Purse-lipped adults—nuns, priests, and shrinks, the caseworkers, cops—the various suits in this world. At school, in the church, in gray buildings downtown, and in all the canned drama on radio, newspapers, prime-time TV, and the Six-O’clock News.

A framework that outlined an infinite prison.

Fear bleaches your face like stigmata. By this sign the world will know you. Fear also shrieks questions. Hatred comes up with some answers.

Hatred, a friend and protector.

Some say that hatred is love screaming out to be free.

Eddie at 12, a felon-in-waiting, now being cut from the herd. He tells his jailers, fuck you, fuck you sideways. His screams are the dictate of hatred and fear. He tells his jailers, fuck you again and then spits on the floor—thereby complying with all their best efforts.

Always the hatred and fear! Like a river, at times underground, then rushing, torrential, leveling the mountains! Eddie is swept out to sea.

He drove and drove now, on towards Grant’s Pass. And then it was time to pull over and go in the trunk.

Back on the road. Marvin Gaye on the box. Marvin’s daddy, a drag queen, shot Marvin dead.

Eddie’s daddy loved boxing. March ’63, the Wednesday Night Fights. It’s funny what snatches your soul and your gonads for life. Emile Griffith put Benny Paret in the graveyard with 18 right hooks to the head, Round 13. It wired that five-year-old boy from his head to the tips of his toes.

All the boys that he fought scared as dogs. The boys he learned to attack with something in hand if that’s what it took.

A boy, Jimmy Good, throwing bricks, had Eddie pinned on the other side of a porch. The house right behind was abandoned. Jimmy Good threw that last brick and missed—and Eddie leapt on him, man! He leapt, 20 feet, must have been! He flew through the air, wrapped his hands around Jimmy Good’s neck. Took him down to the ground and strangled and strangled and strangled. The white, bursting hatred he felt as he launched off that porch gave him wings, iron strength, the soul of a leopard fastening on prey.

Eddie remembers this one boy he ran from, a rabbit seeing to burrow away from the laughter and sneers aimed at cowards.

Fast cut to black: Eddie’s alone in his room, age 14. A Life Magazine expose, ten years or so out of date. Junkies, Manhattan, a man and a woman, Mary and John, tore from the floor. Their lives, abcesses, horror. Turning tricks, stealing 24-7, chasing the hit that turned them out in the street for the rest of their natural lives.

Eddie can’t wait to get back there.

Funny, the things that will light you right up.

Then, downtown Seattle. The smell of the salt in the sea as he walks on down First. Fifteen years-old and who’s there to school him? Young kings, cutting swathes.

He watched himself watching their every last move. He learned the new language, slathered on greasepaint, and hid in plain sight.

Eddie dressed over with hard talk, the pimp walk and—what?

All the years: dope, prison, bullshit. And the jailers scribbling their notes. Biographers, man! The last chapter already written.

Daddy, the jailers, addiction. Ramon with those eyes...

Alesha, the, uh, love of his life, does her turn.

Alesha. She doled out the drug love in dollops that cost him. Then tossed him like old, used-up Kleenex.

Well, that’s what you get. He’d lived that pulp fiction, where women, the ones who aren’t doormats for love, roll their eyes.

Pulp fiction. Truth hurts.

The hard talk, the pimp walk. Eddie even tried to believe it sometimes. Like all the rest of the comic-book heroes who litter the mix late at night. Who wants to admit that they’re just a lost dog, out there and crying for shelter, with no roadmap home?

Comic-book heroes must all pretend to be men. Men, moreover, according to corporate dictate, with steel-plate facades and the sewer-rat ethics big business demands, regardless of whatever clown show it is that they’re running this week. Success in the mix, i.e., manhood, is measured in dollars. As it is at all levels here in this bankers’ wet dream of a country.

The mix as capitalist hijinks and warfare, funhouse distortions and all.

And failure? They cut off your gonads, what else? And then they dump you into a hole, in a landfill down by the river. Bon voyage, brother.

Our comic-book heroes—businessmen, baby! That’s their refrain, never doubt it. Post-graduate Fool School.

Fake men can never show fear. Too many hostile takeover artists looking for cracks in the armor.

And so these fake men—they murder their tears. They hide behind dope. And they all sob to Jesus or some other fetish in cold, lonely rooms at four in the morning, when all the note-taking snitches and spies have gone home and no one else is around. Except maybe those very last ghosts who can no longer bother to care.

My, my, cheap pulp fiction. Eddie’s tears helped make him real. They were part of his passage to manhood and he killed them dead.

The world is prison with no mercy in it. Get hard in the yard or you die.

Who told him that?

He believed it.

Life in the mix. Death, drip by drip. What else could he do? Stay in school and slog through? Make his peace, make his place, and been what the squares call a man?

Squares. Lames and lops. Sucking the boss off for nickels.

Eddie looked down his nose at the squares and spit up from the gutter.

A man among men!

Alesha and Eddie and old used-up Kleenex.

His eyeballs are pounding. Time to go back in that trunk, geez and geez. Sticky brown Mexican shitball.

Back on the road. The movie has faded to soft, gauzy black. He’s down in L.A. in the bookstore he’d dreamed as his very own thing, with books piled high. He’s deep in his chair in the back with his book, and deep in a chapter where danger’s a shrouded embrace. Outside, it’s sleet—in L.A.!—and the squarejohns are plodding all over the world. The taxman is coming and who gives a fuck? War in Lower Slobbovia, my man? Just some old news.

Now, down past Salem and on through Eugene. Grant’s Pass not too long...

The swell of a soundtrack: the Temptations. Hurry Tomorrow. Yes, perfect and—hush now, the movie is starting!

Foggy mist, closeup—Ramon...

Another long replay of This Is Your Life.

Time to pull over. The side of the road on this twisty stretch is a thin patch of gravel.

A bad place to be, especially on Getaway Day.

BIO: Robert Crisman could have very easily been Eddie. He spent some years living parts of the life depicted in this story. Unlike most of the people who live it, he found his way out. He brought his ghosts with him, however, and his fiction, about lost dogs stuck on the Road With No Exits, is his way of turning his time in the mix to account.

A Twist Of Noir 178 - Kevin Brown

ANGELA'S RISING - KEVIN BROWN

Originally published in Space & Time #103 last year andreprinted in Sex and Murder Issue 1

The stars are wonderful tonight. I want to reach out and trace Orion with my finger, but my arms are pinned down above my head, and this one is taking twice as long as the others.

I measure the time it takes by the number of stars I count. I’m at one hundred and sixty-six, now.

It doesn’t really matter. The result is the same.

After two years, you’re not even bothered by the process anymore. When the really violent ones bash your face in, or use rusted knife blades to mark you up, you harden. You have gun barrels jammed so far down your throat it takes days to get the copper taste off the back of your tongue. You accept it, because you have your purpose. And you have your stars.

I’m Angela Shepherd. I’ve been raped twenty-four times, not counting this one. I’ve been cut eleven times, stabbed twice, and beaten more times than I can remember. I was shot in the stomach near the mouth of Devil’s Tunnel a year ago. The only one that ever hurt, though—really hurt—was the first one, the one that gave me AIDS the same year I learned long division.

*

This one finally finishes. He breaks a beer bottle against the alley wall and presses a sharp piece of glass to my cheek. He says he’ll take my tongue if I run to the cops. “Anyway,” he says, “you fucking liked it.”

I’m not really listening, though. My hands are free now, and I’m tracing Orion’s bow drawn wide at Taurus. Blood slides over my cheek where the glass is digging in and I start to laugh.

“Stupid cunt,” he says. Then he’s off me and into the shadows up the alley.

With AIDS, you get open lesions. You get ballooning lymph nodes.

Lying in broken glass and maggot-covered garbage, it starts to rain in pucker marks on the alley floor. I can still smell him—all sour beer and mildewed cigarettes, on my torn clothes. According to our information, I’m the fourth girl he’s raped.

Walking up the alley, I’m holding my clothes together in fistfuls, and Brandon comes to me out of the darkness like an illusion. His police issue Baretta Elite is drawn and he’s carrying my first-aid bag. “Jesus,” he says, “Christ. Nine and a half minutes.”

“The rule’s ten, Brandon. You know that,” I say, and suddenly I’m on my elbows and knees coughing dry, hot air.

You get weak breath.

The rain comes harder. Brandon helps me up and drapes his coat over my shoulders. “What’d he cut you with?” he says, wiping the blood with a towel from the bag.

“Bottle,” I tell him. “I counted two hundred and twelve.”

And he says, “I told you, you’re his fourth. He’s comfortable.”

“He’s dead. He just doesn’t know it.” I hold the end of an adhesive bandage to my cheek, and Brandon pulls the other end tight and thumbs it down. “Probably wouldn’t give a shit, anyway,” I say.

“Don’t know,” Brandon says. “Balls are just balls until you’re kicked there. Then, they’re your whole goddamn world.”

*

How I met Brandon was, he was an assisting officer in the investigation the first time I was raped. He’s who found me. He always stood away from the other cops, watching me. Just being around, he seemed to take some of the hurt away, to hoist it onto his shoulders. He rarely spoke except with his eyes, looking out from under his dark hair. What they said was: I’m sorry this had to happen. They said: I’m sorry this happened to you.

Someone who’s raped, they’re raped again every time they’re asked about it.

Tell us again exactly what happened.

Give us the details.

What I remember was the man’s rotted teeth smiling, saying, “You’re my little pussycat, ain’t cha?” I remember the large, bruise-colored birthmark around his colorless right eye. “Here kitty, kitty. Here kitty,” he said, his spit stringing into my face. The sores around his nose and mouth. His breath on my neck.

Details.

I passed out under a monster and woke up with Brandon holding me.

My attacker, police found him three weeks later in the basement of an abandoned house on Lampkin Lane. What the AIDS left, the rats mostly took.

After the rape, Brandon's eyes said he was hurting. After I was diagnosed positive, they said he’s pissed.

The doctors tell you all about HIV. They tell you about rapid weight loss and chronic fatigue. Fever and night-sweats. You learn about venereal diseases.

The details.

You’re put on a drug treatment called Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy. Called HAART. This is a combination of three HIV drugs: NRTIs, PIs, and NNRTIs. This is what you will feed your body the rest of your life.

Words you can’t spell. Words you can’t even say.

In the hospital, Brandon never left my side. Even after visiting hours, he was never asked to leave. In that room, in the burning hours of the early mornings, something was growing.

One afternoon, a Social Services agent tells you, all smiles, about a family that will take care of you. Your first one. This is where you will go to die until Brandon takes your hand, his eyes telling you: I’ve lost faith in the Justice System. They tell you: It’s a bed and three hot meals a day. A color TV. Weight room and recreational yard. It’s state-funded programs for better prison libraries and improved inmate education.

At the age most girls have first dates, I ran away from my first family. Brandon and I, we had a plan.

*

At the car, I change clothes. I always have extra clothes in the trunk: underwear, shirts, pants, and socks. Even an extra pair of shoes. I put on a hooded jacket, zip it to my chin, and pull the hood over my head. I can’t stop my hands from shaking.

You get chills.

My fingers on the heater vents, Brandon puts the car into drive. His eyes say: I’m so tired. Rain shadows pelt his cheek and slide down in black streaks.

“Look,” he says, “you done one. Let’s call it a night.”

I knew this was coming.

I tell him, “We planned two.”

“It’s so cold,” he says. He rubs his eyes and sees my hands rattling against the heater vents. “You’ll get pneumonia again—”

“Brandon—”

“—your body won’t hold up this time.” He looks out his window. “We could take some time off.”

“I told you I’m fine. This isn't seasonal,” I say. “Just drive.”

“I know what this is, better than anyone.” He rubs his eyes again, shakes his head, and laughs. “Why’s it thinking about living makes some want to die, and thinking about dying makes others want to live.”

I laugh the kind of laugh when you don’t feel like laughing and say, “Confusion.”

We turn left on Pilate Street and a black Sedan whips in behind us. Brandon adjusts the rearview mirror, squinting from the glare of the headlights.

In my mirror, I open my mouth.

You get a thick, yellow tongue.

Still looking in the rearview, he tells me we’re all on our way out. That the key is to dance a little before the song’s over. “Husbands, mothers, children—me,” he says and runs a hand through his hair. “Look in that mirror. With or without AIDS, it’s the reflection of someone doomed.”

I roll my tongue around my pale reflection and cough into the glare from the headlights. “Objects,” I say, “may be closer than they appear.”

*

Our plan, it consists of an active phase and a preventive phase. First, Brandon and I scout the worst areas in the city, the sections overrun with gangs, drug dealers and addicts, the districts scarred by derelict houses hiding known felons. We take notes.

Now, imagine a young girl in one of these areas late at night. Imagine her alone except for her stars and an angry cop parked two blocks down, counting the seconds off ten minutes. Imagine her held face down over a gutted sofa littered with syringes and used needles, head pulled back by the hair, a knife to her throat.

Imagine a worm on a hook.

And they share their needles and spread themselves around. This is how the disease is injected. The active phase.

In the preventive phase, Brandon heads a strike unit called A.R.E.A., the Anti-Rape Enforcement Agency. It consists of four eight-man teams, each assigned to an area we’ve infected. The teams are divided into four pairs on rotating six-hour shifts.

Some are undercover. Others work surveillance—over two hundred and fifteen strategically placed mini-cameras, from vans parked at nearby locations.

A.R.E.A. quarantines the infected sections by any means necessary. Think of them as angels protecting you while you live. No potential victims are allowed within a three hundred-foot radius of the areas. None of the infected are allowed out, no questions asked. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week for fifty-two weeks.

See you on Christmas.

See you on the Fourth of July.

If you are in one of the areas, we see you now.

And rapists are not confined to any certain social class. They’re not all junkies in wrecked out heroin houses, or gutter-rats living like zombies in back alleys. Many of them are doctors and bankers, athletes and CEOs.

We have a division of A.R.E.A. that collects intelligence. If you’re a sex offender—a date rapist, sodomist, if you’ve insisted upon intercourse when your partner was not in the mood—this division knows.

Number four on my list of twenty-five was a family doctor who sometimes gave sedated female patients a little “extra” check-up.

Number nine was a high school history teacher who gave A’s for more than hard study.

Number twenty, a preacher, a husband and father of four, had a thing for young Asian boys.

And these people are easiest to infect. You find their hangouts or where they work. You’re young and attractive. An easy worm on a poisoned hook.

After they finish with you in some rent-by-hour hotel, you trail them to their home. Late at night, you slip a 4”x 6” index card into their mailbox. Written on it in careful print is this:

TO THE FAMILY OF _____, YOUR HUSBAND RECENTLY HAD AN AFFAIR WITH A WOMAN CLINICALLY DIAGNOSED HIV POSITIVE. I URGE YOU TO TAKE EVERY PRECAUTION NECESSARY TO PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR CHILDREN. I’M SORRY THIS HAD TO HAPPEN. I’M SORRY THIS HAPPENED TO YOU.

Since we began two years ago, six of the twenty-five have died—two from the disease and four suicides. At the bone, this is how our world operates. Do unto others what they’ve done unto you.

Bomb us, we bomb you. Attack. Counterattack.

Turn the other cheek when you get tired of watching.

*

I look back at the headlights of the Sedan. They’ve been in our mirror for six miles.

“I’m serious,” Brandon says, “we need a few months, just till the weather eases.”

“That car’s still behind us,” I say.

He glances in the rearview. He says, “I just don’t think I can keep going.”

“Then stop, but this was your plan, too.”

“That we started two years ago. We’re even now. And things,” he says, “are different.”

“Different? The people we deal with? I say things are worse.”

“Maybe we’re helping out with that.”

“I’m sacrificing myself for people I don’t know—who wouldn’t look twice at me on the street—so no other kids’ll have to grow up knowing they were murdered.”

“You’re sacrificing us. I know the shit holes you disappear into every night. How you might not walk out.” He rubs his eyes and looks back out the window. “It’s killing me, too.”

We’re near our location and I tell him to pull over. The Sedan passes us. Down the road it U-turns and pulls to the opposite curb.

“Look,” I say, “what we do works. We're saving lives every night.”

“But we're giving every bit of ours.”

“Like you said,” I tell him, starting to cough. “We all get the gate.” I cough until I’m dry heaving into my jacket sleeve. I wipe my mouth, open the door, and he takes my arm.

“Please,” he says.

“Just promise,” I say, “when I die, you’ll be two blocks away, watching the clock.”

He lays his head back and says, “Be careful.”

“See you in ten or less.”

He knows it’s useless. This is who we are. This is why we are. You could not have kept Christ from His cross. And when the nails are in the wrists, you just have to hang.

*

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl walks into an alley and three guys are hovered around a barrel-fire near the end. The alley’s lit red like the sunset of a bad love poem, and these three guys, they see this girl coming toward them through the filmy heat rising off the fire, her jacket hood slipped over her head. She’s a sickly looking bitch, but ass is ass, right?

They step around the barrel-fire and are backlit into silhouettes: Two short ones. One Goliath fucker. They surround me, and I’m snatched and lifted like an offering and carried toward the end of the alley. Their hands are tearing at the sores on my back and shoulders, and for a second, I see the handle of a dipper between a break in the rain clouds. Then, I’m flipped face-first into a pile of half-opened garbage bags. Rats scatter beneath me.

“Get her legs open. I want in her asshole,” one says, Goliath, I see by his flickering shadow on the wall. My pants are skinned off in a hard jerk, and my knees drop to the concrete. Silhouettes one and two each grab a leg and spread me open.

“If she shits on me,” Goliath says, over the sound of his zipper, “kill her.”

This is where you close your eyes and wait. Try to imagine Orion reaching down and lifting you away.

“Get down!” I hear from behind. “The fuck down, now!”

My legs are dropped to the concrete again, and there is a flurry of shadows on the wall. A hand takes my elbow.

“Careful, her knees are bleeding,” a voice says.

Turning around, I see the three silhouettes face down, their hands behind their heads. Three cops are standing above them with their guns pointed.

The one holding my elbow says, “Ma’am,” and hands me my pants.

To the right of the men is Brandon, standing in an entryway, his hands in his pockets. His head is lowered but his eyes are looking at me. They say: I’m sorry.

“Angela Shepherd,” the cop with my elbow says, “you have the—”

“Brandon?” I say.

“—right to remain silent—”

“Brandon, what’s this?”

The cop stops and looks over at the entryway. Brandon rubs his eyes.

“—anything you say,” the cop says, looking back at me, “can and will be held against you in a court of law.”

“I’m with Brandon,” I say. “Tell him.”

The cop looks back at the entryway, then back at me. “Miss Shepherd,” he says, “who are you talking to?”

“Brandon, tell him to let go of me.”

The cop looks over again. “Miss Shepherd, you see someone there?”

The other three cops look toward the entryway, then at each other.

“Brandon fucking Hooper!” I say, pointing. “Sergeant Brandon Hooper, who runs the A.R.E.A. Strike Team.” Brandon looks at me and lowers his head.

The cop holding me looks at the other cops. “Miss Shepherd, we don’t have a Sergeant Brandon Hooper,” he says. “There’s no unit called A.R.E.A. I’m aware of.” He pulls my elbow. “Come on.”

“Brandon, please!”

Looking down, he rubs his eyes and looks away.

“Come on, now, Miss Shepherd. There’s no one there.”

*

They tell you your name is Angela Shepherd and you’re in the Raining Hills Sanitarium. You’re in the advanced stages of the AIDS virus.

Brandon Hooper, they tell you, is a delusion, a part of you. The part that wanted to stop.

They also tell you A.R.E.A. does not exist, either. Like Brandon, it’s your creation. “The part that wanted to protect.”

You hear about tertiary syphilis. According to lab tests, this is what you contracted approximately two years ago. The AIDS virus is feeding off the syphilitic infection, as the syphilis feeds off your dilapidated immune system caused by the AIDS. The result of this is what we call paresis, they say. “You call it insanity.”

The night you were arrested, they tell you with needles and cups of pills, four off-duty officers saw a young woman driving alone in a bad neighborhood at a late hour. They thought you were after drugs.

Then you parked and got out.

One of the officers recognized you as Angela Shepherd, a missing case from two years ago. Based on similarities in some of your older handwriting samples and that of several handwritten index cards, the Angela Shepherd wanted by authorities for intentionally spreading the AIDS virus.

They tell you about some of the men you infected, and their families. Since A.R.E.A. isn’t real, the intelligence you claim to possess isn’t real, either. Most of the men you infected were ordinary, hard working citizens who met the wrong girl. Only one has a police record. “These men were adulterers, not sex offenders.”

The index cards, police initially suspected they were being given to random families as a form of psychological terrorism, because the people you gave the cards to were not in any way related to the men you infected.

So, what you have is families who think they have AIDS but don’t. You have families who have AIDS and don’t know it. You have the most dangerous men in the city possibly carrying this disease, and no one to stop them.

This is what they tell you. What they want you to hear. What they don’t tell you is thank you. Thank you for doing for the world things that create religion. Thank you for the love and the blood.

For being the shepherd and the lamb.

For fighting the Beasts.

Because these Beasts, these days, they’re everywhere.

BIO: Kevin won the Permafrost Literary Journal's Midnight Sun Fiction Contest, theTouchstone Fiction Competition, and placed third in the Cadenza FictionContest. He was nominated for a 2007 Journey Award, and has published inGUD, Space & Time, Murky Depths, Neonbeam, Morpheus Tales, sub-TERRAIN,Rosebud, and Underground Voices.

A Twist Of Noir 177 - Tom Leins

STOMPING GROUND - TOM LEINS

I’m standing on the fire escape with Butcher. It’s a hot day, but I can smell rain in the air. He’s smoking a cigarette in silence. Every now and again, he pauses to spit blood onto the bin-bags below. When he talks, his voice drones in the heat.

“Sawbones says that the bullet entered her mouth and passed through the back of her neck. Made a bloody fucking mess.”

I sigh. Mad children’s laughter echoes down the corridor and through the fire escape door.

“Bang. Just another scum-stain in Bone City.”

I suddenly feel exhausted.

“Maybe, Butcher. But she was my scum-stain.”

The Excelsior Hotel is the tallest building in Paignton. From our vantage point, the town centre looks like a tarmac leper colony. I gaze at the dirty web of side-streets wordlessly. Across the alleyway, I notice a badly-bruised woman with orange hair staring at me from the rooftop. A tall, cadaverous man walks over to her and puts his skinny arm around her waist. Her dress rides up and I can see a thin strip of pubic fur at the top of her legs. His lank, greasy hair whips around in the wind and makes me feel sick. He glares at me and flashes me a flick-knife sneer. I know his kind. I’ve had my fair share of gruesome romances and this guy’s days are darker than my nights. The swollen sky cracks. Rain dances across the rooftops. Love’s young dream retreats indoors.

“Just tell me where he is, Butcher.”

“I’m busted, Joe. I’ve got no connections, no juice. You’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way.”

*

Bent Eddie’s holding court in the TV lounge at the Hotel Alaska. He’s waxing lyrical about the time that he spent a fortnight in Alicante with a sun-ravaged male prostitute. Eddie leans back in his wheelchair and takes a delicate sip of gin.

“He was a lovely boy. Tight little body of a seventeen year-old, leathery old skin of a 45 year-old.”

His cronies chortle as he elaborates further. The laughter dries up as they notice me standing in the doorway. A teenage boy stands up and reaches under his jacket. I stomp on his instep and leave him writhing on the threadbare carpet.

“Hello, Eddie.”

“Hello, young man. What can I do for you?”

“I need to find Roach.”

A flicker of concern creases Eddie’s ugly, misshapen face.

“You heard what happened to Donna?”

Eddie grimaces and wriggles in his wheelchair, saying nothing.

An old-timer in the corner clears his throat.

“You have my condolences, son. There’s a special place in hell reserved for the bastard who did that.”

I nod to him.

“I’ll carry him to the burying ground myself if I have to.”

I grab Eddie by the throat and give it a gentle squeeze.

“Eddie, where’s Roach?”

He grunts, deflated.

“You like the chair? How about I make you quadriplegic next time? See how you like that, motherfucker?”

I let my threat soak in. All the way in. Slowly, with shaking hands, Eddie rips a page out of last week’s TV Guide. He retrieves a cheap biro from his shirt pocket and scrawls three words on the paper in florid handwriting. He folds it up and hands it to me. I slip it into my pocket and nod my thanks to him. He glares at me with sunken eyes as I turn around and walk back into the rain-ruined afternoon. Outside, I take out the piece of paper. Three words. The. Rusty. Cage.

*

I don’t feel like walking so I flag down a Voodoo Taxi near the bus station. The driver plugs some kind of gypsy cassette into the tape-deck. The music pulses like an open scar. He starts to shout over the music at me.

“You want a lady? I find you a lady. Good price. Clean lady.”

I shake my head irritably and lean back against the leatherette seat. He shrugs and turns the music up even louder. It sounds like animals being slaughtered.

*

By the time we reach the Rusty Cage, the rain has stopped and sky has turned the colour of concrete. I get out around the corner and watch the doorman for a few minutes. He’s skinny, and he smokes like a bastard. He doesn’t look like much of a threat from here. I emerge from the shadows, trying not to attract suspicion from the scammers and screamers who have congregated on the pavement outside the Rusty Cage. The doorman chuckles when he sees me. I have no idea why. I slip the pick-axe handle out of my overcoat pocket. The doorman looks confused and I jab him sharply in the gut.

“One word and I’ll bounce your eyeballs off the cement, motherfucker.”

*

I drink two beers in quick succession – for the calories if nothing else – and kill time glaring at the freaks. At 9 p.m., Roach limps in, and heads straight towards the toilets. He’s got a serious kidney infection and has to piss sitting down. I push my beer bottle away and walk across the club. I linger outside waiting for Roach to get settled before slipping inside and locking the door behind me. The bathroom feels hotter than a blast furnace. Inside the cubicle, Roach squeals, obviously in some discomfort. Discomfort is something that I know all about. I kick open the cubicle door and burst in, thrashing wildly with my pick-axe handle. It connects with his nose and I thrust it into his neck when he starts to howl. He slumps back against the toilet, face soaked in blood. I drop the tool into my overcoat pocket and retrieve the moody sawn-off that Butcher slipped me this afternoon. Roach murmurs something about Jesus. I level the filed-down weapon and jam it into his slack mouth. I feel a couple of teeth crack as he resists. His eyes shine with deranged malice.

“You know why I’m here, Roach.”

Nothing.

“Tell me what I need to know and I’ll leave you alone.”

Nothing.

He reaches for the barrel and I wedge it in even further. The piss-stink makes my eyes water.

“Blink once for yes, and twice for no.” He nods in agreement and blinks quickly. He’s even more stupid than he looks. I squeeze not waiting for a second blink. As I pull the trigger a second time, I feel myself waking from a long, sick electric dream. Suddenly the room feels colder than a grave.

BIO: Tom Leins is from Paignton, UK. His short stories have appeared online at 3am Magazine, Dogmatika, Straight From The Fridge, Beat The Dust, Savage Manners, Powder Burn Flash, The Flash Fiction Offensive and A Twist Of Noir.. He is currently hard at work on his first novel Thirsty & Miserable. Get your pound of flesh at: www.myspace.com/tomleins.

A Twist Of Noir 176 - Robert Crisman

A BLIND DATE - ROBERT CRISMAN

Date a guy you don’t know, you make out the best way you can.

That afternoon at the pad, Roanne and Michelle had just got done fixing, Michelle in her arm and Roanne in her thigh. Roanne took awhile.

Michelle whooshed and fell back in her chair. “Goddamn!”

Roanne finished up, tossed her rig on the table, leaned back, and grinned. “Speedball deluxe, dear. I told you.”

“You did. Damm—it’s the shit!”

They sat there and grooved.

Michelle had just started banging again after three jagged months, first in treatment, then those damn 12-Step meetings. She’d been angling her way back to dope since the exile began. She was 5’7”, slender, all peaches and cream, with long, dark-brown hair, big baby-blue eyes, and legs that went all the way up. Michelle, 22, made the boys want to put bibs on and pray and dive in.

Roanne was fresh out of jail. Even raw as she looked after that little trip, the woman left echoes. Her skin was a rich olive sheen, richly buttered, it almost glowed; you wanted to nuzzle it, taste it. The most beautiful skin that God ever put on a woman. A little paler today than he might have envisioned. Her eyes were black pools with thich lashes, the better to drink you.

The smile on her face on he days that she smiled, the play of emotions, quicksilver mischief. You wanted to make her your partner in crime.

Michelle said, “Where’d Joey go?”

“Back to work I suppose,” Roanne said.

Michelle giggled. “God, Roanne. How did he get a job delivering flowers anyway? I mean, God, he’s so dirty!”

“I don’t know, girl.” Roanne snorted a dry little laugh. “Must be his charm.”

Joey, Roanne’s old man, at the moment at least, sold lighweight dope—20s, eighths, quarters, etc.—mostly out of the flower delivery car on his way to and fro through the city. Dealing kept him in dope, which worked out for the girls as well—except on those mornings he blatzed off to work without leaving a wakeup behind. Like this morning.

Good thing he’d come back an hour ago with an eighth, or Roanne would have killed him that night in his sleep.

Roanne yawned and stretched and got up from the table. “I’ve got to start getting ready.” She told Michelle she’d be going out later, some time around eight. She had a…date.

A date? Like with Joey? Michelle didn’t quite... Oh. That kind of date.

Roanne said, Uh yeah. That kind of date.

It was as if she’d been keeping this secret, her manner guarded, peering now from under her lashes. How Michelle took it seemed really important.

Michelle sat there and blinked. This, uh, date... Roanne, tricking. Wow.

Michelle couldn’t have told you to save her own life what she felt, but one thing was sure; she wanted to know more.

Tricking, well, ugh and all that, as far as she, Michelle, was concerned. But... Roanne, who’d gone down those byways she’d only dreamed of, whose cachet with Michelle was precisely that dance down dark alleys. Roanne, turning tricks. Michelle, cotton-soft, had to know more. Her eyes, even pinned, said it all.

Roanne laid it out. See, it was like this: she was an Escort. She’d signed with this service a couple weeks back, had been out on some dates and, it was cool. Two-fifty a pop, she kept half, and the guys were mostly 30s on up, lots of white-collar yuppie-type guys. Sometimes, you know, a truck driver or something.

“What is it like?” Michelle said.

“What do you mean, what is it like?”

“Well, you know, like, do you go to a motel, or the guy’s house, or, you know, what?”

“Depends. Guy calls the service, he’d like to meet you at such-and-such or, here’s his address and you go where they send you.”

“Uh huh... Then what?”

Roanne looked at Michelle, laughed a little. “Well, then you go in and do what you came for.”

What Michelle really wanted to ask was, what’s it like to have a trick’s dick in your mouth? Also, how freaky, you know, did it get?

Little Miss Clean Jeans Michelle. Roanne knew what this was now, down to the dime.

“What do you think?” Roanne, grinning now, pushing Michelle just a little.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“It depends what they want,” Roanne said. “Sometimes they just want a blowjob. Or to fuck. And they’re paying for an hour of your time, right? And, it’s not like it’s in the back seat of some car. They like you to dress nice and talk, some of them, you know, just like to talk, and you’re there in this place and it’s usually, you know, nice.

“This guy last week, I went up to the Westin, and the guy had this dinner laid out in his room and, like, candlelight, wine, like this real high-class date and...” She shrugged.

“What was he like?”

Roanne laughed one more time. Little Miss Clean Jeans, my ass.

“We-el, he was this older gentleman, from Atlanta, he said, and he was tall and white-haired, with a nice, dark gray suit and—”

“How old was he?”

“Maybe 60.”

Michelle made a face.

Roanne went on blithely. “So I came into the hotel and— ”

“What were you wearing?”

“That red blouse and those black slacks that I got, and these open-toed black shoes, and I had this shiny black purse and my hair was done up, and this gorgeous red lipstick and—” She snapped her fingers. “I was quite the one, let me tell you.”

Michelle sat rapt, drinking that scene in the lobby.

“So,” Roanne said, “they told me just go right up, Room 1209, and so I went up and then down to his room and I knocked on the door and he opened up and, like, practically bowed me into the room.” She laughed.

“Wow,” Michelle said.

“And I smiled, said hello, my name is Alexis—”

“Alexis!” Michelle loved it.

“Yes, dear.” Roanne fluttered her eyes. “Alexis. Yes.” She laughed. “His name was Mr. McWilliams. Martin McWilliams.” She grinned that wry grin. “And he escorted me into the room and offered me wine, and then we stood by the window, looking out at the lights, and he told me how beautiful I am.” She batted her eyes and they laughed.

Michelle said, “Too much!”

“Yeah,” Roanne said. “So, anyway, we talked for awhile and he told me his business and stuff and, like, why he was here in Seattle and—Girl, I was so loaded!” They laughed. “And he’s asking me what do I do, you know, besides this and I told him I’m going to school, dress design, and he’s really, like that’s just so great! He couldn’t get over it, hardworking girl like me, and so beautiful, too, and he really went on and I’m, maybe he’ll help me open a shop and—“ She couldn’t help laughing at that one.

“So the room service comes and they’ve laid out this dinner, poached salmon and something, and, just, laid out, candles, the works—and all of a sudden I feel like I’m going to puke. So I excuse myself and go in the bathroom and refresh. And then I felt better. And then I went out and we sat down to dinner and—”

“Did you eat?”

“I pushed my food around on my plate. But, by this time, he didn’t care. He’s looking into my eyes and I’m mooning back, and he’s telling me how absolutely stunning I am—and, by this time, I’m beginning to feel like I’ve been there for two million years. So I started to, you know, hurry it along. I told him how excited to be there I was, what a gentleman he was, a sexy, attractive, older man— ”

“Oh God!”

“Until he just—he practically carried me into the bedroom.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes!” Roanne laughed.

“And then...what?”

Roanne arched her a look. “We-el...”

Little Miss Open-Nose Michelle. Roanne hadn’t been sure how Michelle would react at the start. But the storyteller’s art had done what it set out to do: rope in the listener. That had actually been easy; Michelle had opened herself to the tale like right now. She was complicit, both in the telling and in the adventure itself.

“We fell into bed,” Roanne said, “and we were wrestling around—”

“Oh God!” Michelle giggled.

Roanne laughed. “Yes and—now he’s trying to rip off my clothes, and he’s calling me his beautiful whore—”

“Oh God!”

Roanne laughed, rolled her eyes. “And anyway, I finally got him under some sort of control, and he’s got his pants off, his shoes...”

Michelle leaned forward. “Then…what?”

“I sucked his cock.”

Michelle got this look, like the spritz just got lodged in her throat.

Roanne laughed. “God, Michelle, you should see yourself.”

“Well, God, I...”

“It only took a couple of minutes.” Roanne grinned. “You don’t have to swallow.”

“Thank God!”

Roanne, still laughing, said, “You never swallowed?”

“God, Roanne! No! I mean...”

“No? Never swallowed? Or what?” Roanne, torturing her buddy.

“No, that’s—I don’t know! I mean—an old man like that, it’s just—”

“Michelle, he was a trick. Jesus Christ.”

“Well...I’ve never done that.”

Roanne just deadpanned her ass. “Uh huh.”

“I haven’t! I never—I swear to God, Roanne!—like, when Chris and I were together, he always had money. And then, before that, it was like, you know, lots of times when I didn’t have money, there was always somebody to, you know, turn me on.”

“Uh huh.”

“Really, Roanne!”

“And you, like, never slept with any of these guys.”

“Well, sometimes, but not always, no.”

“Not always. Just sometimes.”

“Well, yes, but—when I wanted.”

“When you wanted to.”

“Yes. You know, if I felt like it.”

“And what happened when you didn’t feel like it?”

“I just said, see ya, I gotta go.”

“And they didn’t mind.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t stick around.”

“So, they just got you loaded out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“Well, some of them did.”

“But not all.”

“Well, no, but—”

“You thought they were just being friendly?”

“No, I didn’t say that, but—I didn’t say I was, you know, going to give them sex so I could get high.”

“You just let them think what they wanted to think.”

Michelle shrugged. “I can’t stop anybody from thinking whatever.”

“What about those guys you did go to bed with?”

“Huh? What about them?”

“Well, like, would you have gone with them if they didn’t have dope?”

“What? Well, I guess—yes, like I told you... Most of the time.”

Roanne laughed. “Most of the time.”

“Well, yes, I mean...” Michelle, sweating under the third degree lights.

“Yeah, and? Those other times?”

Michelle did not want to answer. Roanne had her in crosshairs, however. “Well... Okay, so I did sometimes. But it wasn’t like—they were just...guys. I mean...it wasn’t like, you know, some...old man, or...”

Roanne decided to end all the stutter and drive home a lesson. “Honey, it doesn’t matter what you call it, or who the guys are, or how old they are, or anything else. You’re giving up something to get what you want, and that’s—”

“Well, okay, but—I just don’t think I could, you know, an old man, and—”

Roanne laughed. “God, Michelle, you are a puss. Look. Old man, whatever, a dick is a dick and a trick is a trick. And anytime you’re giving up pussy to get something back from a man, that’s the deal. I don’t care what. Money, dope, a white picket fence with the kids and all that, a charge card at Nordstrom’s—a trick is a trick and a dick is a dick. Sometimes, you just gotta do what you gotta do, and that’s it.”

Michelle had no comeback. She knew she’d been spooned a big dose of truth. She hunched her shoulders a little, as if a cold wind had just blown in from the street.

Old men, yucka pucka! Still, though, socked at the crib after Roanne had left, Michelle mulled things over. Yeah, the old man and all—but something about this thing jazzed her. Reverie took her. She heard the echoing click of Roanne’s heels on her way to her dark assignation. Dark assignations downtown.

Bright lights and fast ladies, and dangerous, beautiful men in the shadows. The sounds: late-night laughter and whispers that tickled.

A whole other world, set free from the bland weight of days in L7.

The silent roar of dark, unknown things.

Michelle lay back on the bed and replayed the dream.

*

Next day, she picked up her check. Three hundred ninety-nine bucks, dopefiend welfare. It went poof in two days.

Well, what now? Go out and boost? Not Michelle’s thing. She’d tried it a couple of times and got busted once, and, uh-uh, no more. Daddy? Uh...Daddy, no dummy, who’d been through this once, would know right away she was back on the stuff. He wouldn’t give her a dime. Not only that, he’d probably try and hammer her back into treatment. Fuck that.

So, what? The Escort service and all but... God, this was tough!

The Escort trip, man. There’d been this war raging inside her the past couple days. On the one side, Little Miss Clean Jeans. On the other, Michelle the Seeker After Adventure. Now, with the last of her check in the breeze, Michelle the Broke Dopefiend checked in.

The war lasted one more day, more or less. Then poor Miss Clean Jeans went down for the count.

Roanne took her down to sign up that same night. Behind the desk, an ice-cold blonde with nutcracker jaws and eyes to go with them. Michelle, scared as hell; today the first day of the rest of her life.

Nutcracker gave them a good one right off. He wanted two girls, $250 a pop, that very night. Eight o’clock, the Ramada out by the airport, Room 242. Be there or stay broke.

Michelle wore form-fitting jeans. Roanne wore all black, crowned with a small feathered hat with a veil tipped over one eye.

They took a cab out. Michelle imagined the driver could hear her heart blasting away, loaded as she was.

Roanne was calm, cool, collected. She did the best that she could on the way to bring Michelle out of the trees. She’d done doubles a couple of times. They were actually better, she said. There were two of you there, so it wasn’t just you and the guy, which was good, especially the first time and all. And what they, the guys, wanted a lot of times was basically to watch. You know, you and your partner, like, doing each other.

Michelle clung to those branches. Doing it—with a girl? She’d—wow. It just kind of hit her. She hadn’t realized. Roanne sat and watched her. Michelle looked her way, then away. It wasn’t, you know, that she had anything really...against it, it didn’t disgust her, just...she’d never been with a girl, and—she’d seen girls, known girls who, you know, were that way, and she’d even, a couple of times, it could have happened. This girl named Jeannie she’d known in ninth grade. Jeannie was pretty and blonde and athletic and she had this way of looking at you...and she’d smile at Michelle. Michelle used to think about Jeannie.

Roanne took Michelle’s hand, squeezed softly, slowly. Michelle, eyes in her lap, held her breath. Then, gradually, she let the warmth bring her in. She felt herself blushing. And then—she’d uncoiled to a point where breath would now come—the tension blew out of her bigtime. Almost like somebody’d uncorked her. She choked out a giggle, spraying saliva, her eyes squeezed shut tight. A long moment then, and she brought her eyes up and breathed deep and turned to Roanne and smiled a bit of a smile. She blinked and, again, for an instant, breath would not come. But this lack of breath was a whole other world than before.

She sat there, face toward her friend, eyes widened, mouth slightly open to draw in the softest of breaths now, offering herself to be taken wherever it was that she had to go.

Roanne’s eyes, lasers, searching Michelle, the last hidden crannies. She snuck a quick look at the driver in front. He might have been back in Somalia for all the attention he seemed to be paying.

Roanne cupped Michelle’s face with her hand. She drew Michelle to her and kissed her, brushing her lips, then bringing her mouth full on Michelle’s. She stroked Michelle’s hair. Gently insistent, she forced her tongue past Michelle’s lips, past her teeth, found her tongue, stroked it, inviting response.

Michelle brought her hand up to Roanne’s face then and rested it there, almost not touching. Her own tongue now probed, caressed, her eyes shut and then opened, taking in all that they could.

It seemed like the traffic had gone off the face of the earth. Roanne pulled slowly, gently away. She pressed Michelle’s head to her chest and looked off. Then she sat back in the seat and pulled Michelle closer.

She stroked Michelle’s hair and looked at the lights and the traffic.

They pulled into the Ramada. Roanne paid the driver and tipped him five bucks. He smiled and said thank you.

In the light of the doorway, Michelle started patting and futzing and tweaking her hair and her clothes into some kind of order. She took out her mirror and lipstick and undid the damage she felt she’d sustained in the cab. There was almost a frenzy about her, trying to airbrush what all had transpired in the cab.

Roanne finished her own quick toilette far more calmly, then laughed. She took Michelle’s arm and steered her inside.

The second-floor hallway, Roanne checking numbers. Michelle lagged behind, her neck all pulled in. Her legs had no flex. Her arms hugged her body. Her face was a hard-set emotionless mask.

She walked as if blind, eyes ahead, except for the glances she’d dart at her lifeline Roanne.

Two-forty-two up there on the left.

Roanne quickened her pace, then looked back, slowed, beckoned Michelle, all but whispering, “C’mon, girl!”

Michelle caught up. Roanne took her arm gently and grinned, then leaned in close and laughed softly.

Michelle flinched when Roanne licked her ear.

Roanne kissed Michelle’s cheek. “This’ll be easy, baby. Just go with the flow. I’ll show you. You’ll be okay.”

Michelle nodded, quick tics in succession.

Roanne knocked on the door.

*

Afterward, on the ride back, Michelle rested her head on Roanne’s shoulder. Roanne told her, See? That wasn’t the end of the world. They made veiled jokes: Old shorty back there, that waste of a hose he had dangling.

All to the good, Michelle joking. It showed she could hang.

Roanne stroked her hair and looked out at the silent bip-bip of oncoming headlights, the unending neon, the absolute blackness that rules up above. She saw herself veiled, a carved bas-relief, her face like Queen Nefertiti’s, haloed by neon as night stretched forever.

Michelle, chewing the evening, stared out at nothing.

Nothing: a black night of sorts that stared back and rang changes.

The cab dropped them off at the 13 Coins Restaurant on Denny. In the booth sipping coffee, Roanne said, “Hey, girl, how are you doing?”

Michelle said, “Alright...” She grinned and shuddered. “Unngghh! What a warthog!” They laughed. “God, Roanne! It was like, I swear to God, he opened the door and—I don’t know, I—”

“You were scared shitless.”

“Well—yes, I guess. God, he… And then, we go in and he—it was like, he thought we were going to, like, steal his bedsheets or something. Goddamn, Roanne, I swear. And then, when we were, you know, on the bed and he’s—”

Roanne laughed. “That was so funny!”

“Funny?” Michelle screwed her face. Then, she had to laugh too. “God, I could just—there you are, and he’s all pressed up, like, humping the both of us, and his hands are—”

“Believe me, girl, he had at least eight of the fuckers. I know.”

“And then, he grabs my hand and puts his fucking cock in it, and—God!”

Roanne started laughing again, as much at Michelle as at George.

“It was a firehose, Roanne! God! And he’s humping my hand and—I don’t know how you...” The visual took over. Michelle blinked.

Roanne was still laughing. “I had to get you out of your predicament.”

“I can’t thank you enough but—yuck! What did you… I mean...”

“I had a rubber.”

“You had a rubber?”

“In my mouth.”

“You—I don’t get it.”

“When I went down on him, I had the rubber in my mouth and, you know, I just slipped it on there and did him that way.”

“Oh.”

Roanne laughed. “God, girl, you should see yourself.”

“Well, I...”

“It’s just, you know, something you learn. You know, it’s just—”

“A real taste treat.” Michelle giggled.

Roanne laughed. “Scrumptious, honey!”

“Bleaugghh! Oh well...” Michelle slumped in her seat. “At least it’s over. God. I thought we were going to be there forever.”

“God, Michelle. How long do you think we were there?”

“I have no idea. Eight months.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes? Really?”

“Yup, twenty minutes.” Roanne laughed. “And we spent half of that in the bathroom.”

“He’s just lucky we didn’t just lock ourselves in there!” Michelle giggled. “I could just see it. We’re in there, you know, and then, panting and moaning, and he—” She started laughing, “he’s beating his meat and drooling all over the door—”

They both whooped at that one. “And then, when we finally come out he just pays us, you know? He got what he came for, so, sayonara, you know?”

“Really, girl, it was almost that easy. I told you he was a mouse.”

“With a hog.”

“Yes, wasn’t it…” Roanne laughed. “He came in two minutes.”

“Two minutes? He fucked my hand for a day-and-a-half!”

“No, dear. Two minutes.” Roanne rolled and then batted her eyes. “I knew it wouldn’t take long. He just—I knew. We came out of the bathroom, old George was ready. And then, God—we’re there on the bed and he’s—I thought he was going to cum on my back.”

“On my hand.”

Roanne laughed. “Yeah. Anyway, soon as I, uh, took him in hand, I knew. He was just about ready to spit, girl, and—”

“Oh god, stop. Anyway, Jesus, twenty minutes. It sure seemed longer.”

“Twenty minutes. Two-fifty a pop for the both of us, girl, and that’s $750 an hour, less commission, which knocks it down to $375—”

“The service takes half?”

“Yeah, I told you.”

“Jesus, I must have missed that.”

“Well, dear, you were loaded and—”

“God, I guess.” Michelle shook her head, grinned.

“Yeah, so anyway, $375. That’s still not bad, eh? Let’s see, $187.50 for each of us and—”

“It sure beats working at Denny’s. Or, being a bar-r-rista at fucking Starbucks for six bucks an hour plus tips.”

“Indeed yes it does,” Roanne said. “And it happens, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Us getting out of there early. You notice, our little mouse, after he, uh, spritzed, he just, he wasn’t much for small talk and stuff. He just wanted us gone.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did notice that. Poor man, he seemed, what do they call that?”

“Post-coital depression. And that’s exactly what it was, too. All he wanted to do after we left was jump into his bottle or bourbon or whatever and get drunk. I think if we’d’ve, you know, lingered, he’d’ve started gnashing his teeth or something like that. I mean, he was just, Please go away! He didn’t even want to look at us. I said, Goodbye, George, and he’s just, like, unh or something and nods his head and gives me this look out of the corner of his eye and goes back to looking out the window.”

“I know,” Michelle said. “That’s so weird. Men, I swear. It’s like, as long as their dick’s hard, they’ll kiss your ass. But once that’s over, it’s, well, fuck you, bitch, and goodbye.”

“Yeah, well, that’s alright, dear, they can pay for the privilege. Five hundred fror twenty minutes’ work. I’ll take that every time. And some guys give you a bonus, too, so... He didn’t, but—”

“Cheap motherfucker.”

Roanne laughed. “Maybe next time.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Uh huh. Yeah,” Roanne said. “I figure, six more months.” She took on a musing sort of a tone. “Six more months. A year, maybe, I’ll have enough saved and then, kiss this shit goodbye. Get back into school. Do that, come out, open my own shop, and I’ll be set.” Her tone darkened. “I can do what I want then, and the world can go kiss my ass.”

“Yeah...” Michelle looked for a moment as if she was afraid of being left behind.

Roanne caught it. “I’ll take you with me, girl.” She laughed. “And, in the meantime, I’ll teach you the trick with the rubbers.”

“Yuck.” Michelle rolled her eyes. “Oh well. I want cherry-flavored. Then maybe...”

Michelle sat back in her seat. First date down. Michelle thought, not too bad. She remembered dates back in high school. Those times with some pimply-faced doofus with change for the bus and that’s it. Who’d keep sliding his hand up her dress till she slapped him or something.

At least with old George she got paid.

BIO: Crisman knew Roanne and Michelle a long time ago. They were funny and smart and strung out. Roanne was street-tough and Michelle was well on her way. Roanne appeared to be matter-of-fact about ho-ing; that's just what she did to stay well. Michelle would spit when she talked about tricks. Roanne once said that, out in the street, a man's world indeed, a woman has limited choices: she can turn tricks, boost out of stores/ like Mandrake the Magician, or be ready and able to kick a man's ass and take what she needed, whatever it took. There weren't too many of those, but the few that there were got respect...