Deadly Short Stories Read online

  The man turned the gun to point at his own face, as if expecting a verbal explanation. Next, he tilted it back and forth in his hand, as if searching for a leak. Finally, he pointed the pistol back at me. Click-click-click once again.

  It’s here where James Bond would’ve sprung up to do battle, or at least throw something. But the blood puddle, my own blood bath, had me feeling strangely content on the porch floor in the summer sun, unable and uninterested in taking any action.

  My opponent scrutinized the blood pool while slapping his pockets for bullets. His expression changed as he watched me and, all of a sudden, his searching for ammo ended.

  I thought he grinned as he put the gun away and turned and strolled back down the steps.

  The morning grew as dark as night and I was thinking, this is a funny way to go. Not in a funny “ha ha” way, but in a “this really sucks” way.

  Behind me, the bump on my head pressed against the faded Coca-Cola logo, partially blocking the “Coke Adds Life” slogan.

  Am I out of my mind, or does this stuff take out bloodstains? I read somewhere that a little Coke poured on blood and allowed to soak in can do miracles.

  AS I LAY DYING

  The sea air swirled around me, filling everyone else’s morning with the promise of fresh fish, sailing, and sunbathing. I took that moment to reflect.

  Do you know how many moments I’ve had to reflect in my entire life up ‘til today? None. Funny how a bullet in your body can give you pause.

  So I thought about my life, y’know, like people say you do when your life is about to end. You never contemplate your life before then; you’re too busy living it to stop and think and figure out how to live right.

  Anyway, if you were an accountant and you added up my debits (what I took from everyone) and my credits (what I gave back), you would find my spiritual books heavily out of balance.

  I had no credits, no favors, nothing to cash in—it was why I accepted this job in the first place.

  When you’re broke, strung out, and in the world all alone, you don’t consider the outcome of your actions. Who would get hurt. Most certainly not who you might or might not make as an enemy—what’s one more?

  When Snot-nosed Billy (wasn’t snot that made his nose look that way, but a chemical “warning” applied to his face earlier in his career) suggested I take a certain job as a way to clean the slate between him and me, I took it. No need to think.

  Plus, his guys had beaten me with a wrench for a couple of minutes before Billy and I had really gotten a chance to negotiate.

  Even without the persuasion, I was eight thousand dollars in the hole with Billy. Can you comprehend what kind of money that is? It might as well have been eight trillion. Conclusion: No way in hell I would ever pay those dollars back in this lifetime.

  So I would get a new slate and get out of town. Start over. Get myself cleaned up. What’s not to like? Kill a guy, forget you ever sank so low, so close to the Gates of Hell, get on with your life. God works in mysterious ways, y’know?

  Only problem was, this little favor involved not only killing one mope, but also, it turns out, his whole family.

  This would not necessarily have been an issue, except his whole entire family consisted of him and his two little girls, aged seven and nine; as cute as cartoon kitties.

  In other words, the target was a widower and a father. Makes you doubt yourself for a second.

  When that happens, when you hesitate, you’re screwed—unless you act like lightning, like a tornado.

  Model yourself after the most merciless killer of all time. No, not Hitler, not Stalin, not anyone you might be thinking.

  I’m talking about Mother Nature herself. Mother Nature, the serial killer.

  Of course, I didn’t realize kids were involved. Not at first. Not until the night when I showed up to put a bullet in some dumb mope’s head and torch the place.

  Let me restate that: I didn’t arrive to kill nobody’s kids. I arrived to eliminate one Salvatore Ciccano: a mob accountant who’d gotten a little greedy. He was stupid enough to steal mob money .

  But when I kicked in the door, the stakes changed in one split-second. There they all sat, eating Domino’s pizza and cinnamon sticks (with the frosting cup you dip into) at their kitchen table, all big eyed and open mouthed.

  Christ, the idiot didn’t even carry heat; didn’t even jump up to defend his family.

  He just slowly dropped his pizza to his plate and turned to stare at his little girls, who started whimpering.

  Now what was I supposed to do? Whack the kids in front of their father? Or whack the father in front of his kids?

  SANCTUARY

  So, I just stood there, them looking at me, me looking at them. My finger skipped against the trigger like a squirrel chewing a nut, quick little flicks.

  I lowered the gun, locked the safety, and put the weapon back in my belt.

  Salvatore said, “What—” He meant to say something like, “What’s going on?” or “What are you doing here?” But “What—” was all that came out.

  The two young girls were crying now, the initial whimpering ratcheted up to full-blown tears and runny noses.

  The littlest one, her hair cut short like a miniature lawnmower had ripped over her scalp a few times, was thin and pale and her eyes were big, like a bush baby’s.

  “Calm down,” I tell them, my voice deep and cracking. “I’m not here to hurt anybody.”

  This came as much of a surprise to me as it did to them, as it was the first time I’d considered such an option. Of course, saving their lives meant I flushed my own down the toilet.

  Salvatore continued to stare at me. He got up. I reached back for my gun, but he stepped over and squatted down between his kids. They hugged him and he hugged them back.

  “Salvatore,” I said after what I considered a respectful pause. “We need to talk. Alone.”

  The little ones had calmed down by now, at least a bit. He gave them the cinnamon sticks and the cup of frosting and sent them to the basement to watch cartoons.

  “You don’t need to tell me why you’re here,” he said to me. “I know why.”

  He waved me into the next room, which turned out to be the living room. Dim light emitted from a single standing lamp.

  The place stank of spilled beer and saturated cat litter. Curtains covered one window, but remained half-open on another. The TV squatted against dark wall, glowing but with no sound.

  A solitaire game in progress, started who knows when, sat lonely on the coffee table. Clearly there hadn’t been a woman’s touch in this house for quite a while, y’know? Salvatore being a widower with two girls to look after and no domestic skills.

  He practically fell into the lounger, and I remained standing while he wept into his hands.

  “Who’s going to take care of them?” he said. “When I’m gone, I mean. Their mother’s dead.”

  “They weren’t part of the agreement,” I said to him.

  I stared at him in my version of the way Clint Eastwood would grimace at a line of scumbags in movie after movie in the seventies and eighties.

  What the hell were you thinking, man? What the hell?

  I stood in the darkened room with him as the television flickered. The faint conversation between SpongeBob and Patrick drifted up from the basement below. The man sniffled and drew the back of his hand across his nose.

  “Fuck it,” he mumbled like a prayer at a wake. “Fuck it all.”

  After another minute, I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get you away from here. Not for your sake; for the sake of those two little girls.” I pointed past my feet in a redundant gesture of direction.

  “Can’t,” he said.

  Now I was getting mad. Selfish bastard. I was about to say something when he continued.

  “Teresa, she’s in treatment. Can’t go anywhere. Mondays and Thursdays, every week at four pm . . .” I breathe out. “Treatment can be found in any
city.”

  “The treatment; it’s how they found me. It’s how you found me. It’s how they’ll find me again.”

  I looked at his shriveled red face. I was disgusted by his manner, but I had to admit he had a point. I knew deep in my gut that they needed to run, get far away. A different state, a different country. But reality wasn’t cooperating.

  The man was right; he couldn’t go anywhere with a sick daughter. He was as stuck in this town as if he were behind bars.

  Would’ve been easier, I realized, just to have pulled the trigger and got out when I first got here. Done the deed and left.

  Now here was me acting the big hero. The hero who was only making things worse and sealing the fate of everyone in the house, same as if I had never showed up. They’d all be dead by this time next week, and so would I. At least they wouldn’t be tortured first.

  “We need to go, just the same,” I said. “We—you all—can’t stay in this house anymore. Get the girls. Pack up some stuff.”

  “Where are we supposed to go?” the man whined. “I don’t got no relatives here. I can’t expect any of the guys I know to take us in. No way.”

  “First, let’s get out of here and get into my car,” I said, still squinting, teeth gritted to the complete facial expression. “We’ll figure it out when we figure it out.”

  Slowly, he responded. I imagined him picturing one big grave with little graves on either side.

  My head, meanwhile, spun worse than after my biggest night of drinking ever.

  I had to face facts. I was way out of my depth, up against a ruthless enemy, and I had no idea what to do next.

  I’d made an agreement with myself, however: These people would not die as long as I still breathed. And I was sticking to it.

  Even though I didn’t know when or how or even why I’d made that pact with myself.

  But I knew, deep down, the exact moment the first bullet stayed put in the chamber of my gun, things were all said and done. I was committed.

  The rest was simply action, reaction, and consequence.

  UNVANQUISHED

  We drove all night and throughout the next day. Two thoughts locked my focus and staved off sleep.

  One, get far away, because otherwise, these girls would die. Two, find a town in the middle of nothing, which nonetheless maintained the right kind of facilities this kid needed.

  After a lot of pondering, it occurred to me: the scum wouldn’t be looking for us in Canada.

  So, after my brainstorm and a lot more hours of driving, we ended up in a small town outside of Toronto. I would tell you the name, but doing so would defeat the whole purpose of hiding the family there.

  Why Canada? Because Snot-nosed Billy was too dumb to realize Canada even existed. Not really. But he would never search for Salvatore and his family anywheres other than the good ol’ USA. After some awkward thank-yous and good-byes, I left them with their new life.

  I crossed the border a second time and headed farther east toward the Atlantic. The ocean called me, as it always did, even since my earliest days. The coast always brought me comfort.

  Why didn’t I stay in Canada like them? Frankly, I felt no compulsion to. I figured I would handle whatever they threw at me. Plus, I had no plans to ever go back anywheres near Snot-nosed Billy.

  I had my mind on Massachusetts; more my style. I had relatives in the vicinity; distant, sure, but maybe somehow we would all get reacquainted.

  Regardless, I would lay low, y’know? Start over, get on with life.

  What a fool I was.

  I’d murdered people, for shit’s sake! In cold blood, with no mercy. Sometimes they fought back, shot back. Sometimes they were defenseless, maybe even sleeping.

  Their fate would become my fate, obviously, if I’d given it a thought. Live by the sword and so on.

  The sun climbed higher now, warming the air, although I stayed bitter cold. The darkness closed in on me like that Looney Tunes circle at the end of the cartoon. Th-th-that’s all folks.

  I sighed, things almost completely black now. But know what? I felt content. Even though here I lie dying, stuck to the porch in a puddle of spilled Coke and my own blood.

  I chuckled to myself, the life draining from my body. For some reason, I’d always figured I would remain unvanquished, unbeaten.

  I would live forever, despite all the murders.

  Seriously . . .

  Who was I kidding?

  CHAPTER 5

  Gibberish

  “Ants and Larry?”

  “No, idiot. Ancillary. I was saying that the ancillary functions to this project are critical—”

  “Critter kill?”

  “What? No. Look moron: critical. The ancillary functions, on this project, they’re critical to the successful delivery of the project’s components—”

  “Cup my nuts?”

  “Hey, jerk, pay attention. The ancillary functions. This project. Critical. Get it? All right, like I was saying. The ancillary functions relating to this project are of critical importance due to the fact that bandwidth—”

  “Hand grip?”

  “Right, I mean, no. Bandwidth—bandwidth! It’s critical because bandwidth is limited. At the end of the day, if we want to be best-of-breed, we need to leverage our core competencies. This requires a dialogue—”

  “Lick my frog?”

  “For crissake, stop interrupting! We need to dialogue, reach out, touch our clients, and make sure to inhibit feature-creep as we approach go-live! That, my friend, is our secret sauce.”

  “Sneaker’s ass?”

  “BLAP! THAT’S ENOUGH FOR TODAY. BZZZ-BUZZ,” the voice of a bearded clinician, just outside the room, burped through the speaker.

  The clinicians who had monitored all this from across the hall took a minute to speak together before retrieving the two patients.

  “We’re making very good progress,” one of them said with the speaker off. The two watched the men on the monitor. Two men, a teenager and a man in his early fifties, sat across the table from each other in an otherwise empty room.

  “But we still have our concerns,” said a second clinician to his left, unbearded (but with a mole).

  They looked at each other and stood up. Then the clinicians left their monitor station, walked across the hall, and stepped inside the room. The bearded clinician reached out to the teen, who was recovering from brain surgery, and took his hand.

  “Come along, Justin. I think I heard them say they have cheeseburgers tonight.”

  “Knee-warmers, all right?”

  While the bearded clinician led Justin from the glass room, the other administered a shot in the arm of Wallace W. Sloanum, ex-CEO of UpCell, a former darling of the Menlo Park startups.

  “I believe the free associating exercises we’ve been conducting these past few weeks,” the man with the needle said, “are really starting to have an effect.”

  “Is that your professional assessment, doctor?” asked Sloanum, already feeling the effects of the drug. “We’re fast-tracking this thing, then, eh?”

  “Absolutely,” the clinician said, leading the patient back to his room. The two entered Sloanum’s room and the patient climbed into bed. “You’re starting, just ever so slightly, to make sense.”

  The bearded clinician returned from bringing Jason his food. “You rest now, Mr. Sloanum,” he said.

  The two clinicians left Mr. Sloanum and strolled together down the hall.

  “Do you really think he’s getting better?” said the one with the mole.

  “I think we’re dealing with holistic denial here, actually,” said the one with the beard.

  “Hmm . . . yes. A clear case of concurrent transference and counter-transference,” said the other.

  “With fetishistic OCD/NPD. A classic anal co-dependent, in my opinion.”

  The other man nodded. “Let me ask you this, then. He’s a borderline Type A survivor, wouldn’t you say? Needs closure and less projecting.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, yes. I agree. The best treatment from here on out would be synergistic self-actualization.”

  “Which will come with time, and continued dysfunctional empowerment...”

  “Exactly. One can only hope he’ll let go of his dependence on the jargon of his field.”

  “Indeed. But you know how people cling to their secret languages.”

  “Don’t get me started!”

  CHAPTER 6

  1OO% Barney

  Barney knew the difference between up and in-between, between there and gone. But that didn’t stop him from plunging a knife in places it didn’t belong.

  That’s why he ended up where he did. On the floor of the prison building where the crazies were housed. You know, back in the corner, back in the dark? His group earned the name “The Murder Squad.” People would kill to get in.

  This group held weekly séances, trying to contact their victims. However, it seemed the deceased would not oblige. It was not an attractive proposition to have to confront the last face seen before death.

  Barney—a breast man first, and a leg man second—had ironically stabbed his victim, a woman of twenty-nine, in the chest. He got a lighter sentence, through lawyerly legerdemain, for being stark raving mad.

  During the trial, though, Barney insisted he was innocent. Despite being caught in the act by the fiancé (who’d only been parking the car), Barney’s protests merely sharpened the point of the insanity plea.

  “What are you doing!” the man had screamed.

  “This? Self-expression,” Barney had tried.

  Now, Ouija puck in hand, Barney makes stabbing motions behind the backs of nurses as they leave, pills administered successfully.

  Or so they think. Or so Barney thinks they think. But they’re both wrong. Mostly Barney.

  Well, completely Barney, really.

  100%.

  CHAPTER 7