Kwik Krimes (12 page)

Ricky pulled the gun from his waistband, firing two shots into Wade’s gut. Wade looked down dumbly, trying to stuff the holes leaking bloody intestine. He stared at Ricky and opened his mouth, but only bright red frothed out. Ricky pulled the trigger again, and Wade slumped against the steering wheel, a dead man’s gaze fixed on the gun.

Ricky slid over and unlocked the door, and the kid outside jumped in back.

“Holy fuck!” the kid said gleefully. “That was some cold-ass shit!”

“What took you so long?” Ricky snapped.

“Lot of big trees in this park.” The kid leaned forward, tentatively peering over the seat. “Is he…?”

“What the fuck you think? Yeah, he’s fucking dead.” Ricky tried to look tough. “You got the pipe?”

The kid in back fumbled through his pockets, passing pipe and lighter over the console. Ricky tossed him the paper bag full of money. “Stick that in your pocket.”

“I thought you were only capping him if he didn’t loan you the green?”

“Wasn’t a loan. Said he was giving it to me.”

“I don’t understand,” the kid said. “Why’d you shoot him then?”

Ricky dropped a rock in the bowl, sparked the glass. He inhaled deeply, blowing out a thick cloud. “Because while you were beating your meat, I was stuck listening to a goddamn history lesson on trees.” The smoke hit, and Ricky felt right.

“Trees? What about ’em?”

Ricky stared through the rain at the ugly banyan tree. He didn’t see anything special. There were a million overgrown weeds just like it in these swamps.

“Who the fuck knows,” he said. “But I’m on to better things. I popped a cap in Wade Wojcik. When word gets out, I won’t just be Big Rick’s son anymore.

“They’ll know I’m a player in this game for life.”

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
N
EAR TO THE
K
NUCKLE
.

Joe Clifford is editor of
The Flash Fiction Offensive,
and the producer of Lip Service West, a “gritty, real, raw” reading series in Oakland, California. He is the author of three books:
Choice Cuts, Wake the Undertaker
(Snubnose Press), and
Junkie Love
(Vagabondage Press). Much of Joe’s writing can be found at
JoeClifford.com
.

Christopher Coake

T
his work—the most significant I’ve ever attempted—could not have been possible without assistance from many. Please indulge me as I offer my deepest and most abiding thanks to:

Margaret, my wife. You were this story’s subject, its reason for being. I think, by its end, you understood me at last.

Paul, who since childhood has been my closest friend. What can I say that I haven’t already said? If you never knew me before, you know me now.

My father, who, in so many ways, has been my inspiration. You taught me—in no uncertain terms—that each day in this world we must earn our manhood anew.

Lisie. Here’s to the future. Our future.

My children, Melinda and Greg, for your obedience. I have raised you to see only what you must.

Thanks as well to:

The tall, silent man at 437 Wakefield, standing in his yard at two thirty yesterday morning, whose eyes could not penetrate the shadows. To you, sir, I am eternally grateful.

His dog, unchained, who exchanged silence for half a scone.

Ms. Anne LeChance, for Dostoyevsky.

The high-pressure system that stalled last week over the East Coast, causing three days of rain in this city, the rain that softened the ground.

Betsy, my seventh-grade crush, for laughing, laughing.

The Pep-Me-Up, for serving me coffee and a snack at 10:01, even though the sign said
CLOSED
.

Officer Jim Pope, CPD, for believing.

The admins and message-board community of
LastGasp.com
, for their most excellent advice.

My mother, for her absence.

All those who have hurt me, for my convictions.

And finally, thanks to the silence, which has lasted.

Christopher Coake is the author of
You Came Back
(2012) as well as the collection of short stories
We’re in Trouble
(2005), which won the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. Coake was listed among “Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists” in 2007. His stories have been published in several literary journals and anthologized in
Best American Mystery Stories 2004
and
Best American Noir of the Century.
He is a professor of English at the University of Nevada.

Reed Farrel Coleman

A
lthough his window faced a brick wall and the bed was as welcoming as a butcher’s block, his dreary little room at the Terminal Hotel was a step up from most of the shitholes he’d crashed in over the years. Rough living and life on the run teaches you how to compartmentalize physical discomfort, and he’d been an apt pupil. The sheer drabness of the joint had its upside. When he was awake, he wanted to be elsewhere.

Given its rich (and by rich I mean pathetic) history, you didn’t need an imagination to figure out why they called the place the Terminal Hotel. Unlike the old Half Moon, the place where Murder Inc.’s notorious Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was helped out the window while being guarded by a squad of New York’s Finest, death at the Terminal tended to be anonymous and inglorious. Over the decades, it had been the last stop for Drano-drinking housewives, crack whores, and cirrhotic old alkies on a good-bye bender. But like the deaths themselves, the name of the hotel had more mundane origins. It was right across the street from the Stillwell Avenue Terminal in Coney Island: the last stop for several subway lines. Last stops. He knew a little something about last stops.

“They was lookin’ for you again, Doc. They out there waitin’ for you,” the deskman said, fishing for a five-spot. “They know you’re here.”

Doc.
He repeated the name to himself as he put five bucks on the counter. He had a given name too, but that felt more like a pulled tooth in a jar on a dentist’s shelf than a part of him.

He stepped out of the Terminal and stood on the corner of Mermaid and Stillwell. It was damp, the ocean breezes cutting ragged little holes right through him. Weather reports were useless this close to the water. Living in Coney had taught him that there was more to the local climate than the heat of the sun, the pull of the moon, or the direction of the wind.

He walked away from the Terminal, past Nathan’s, over the boardwalk, onto the beach. He knew they were there behind him. That was okay. She was safe. He was old. He was tired of running. Still, he got the shakes. The salt smell of the sea was nearly overwhelming, but the clank and rumble of subway wheels blending with the swoosh and retreat of the waves relaxed him. He liked it here. He liked how Coney displayed its decay like a badge of honor. It didn’t try to hide the scars where pieces of its once-glorious self had been cut off. Stillwell Avenue West was like a showroom of abandonment, the empty buildings wearing their disuse like bankrupted nobility in frayed and fancy suits. He had come to the edge of the sea with the other last dinosaurs: the looming and impotent Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, Nathan’s, the Cyclone.

He stared out at the caravan of container ships queuing up to enter the mouth of New York Harbor. He tried imagining what this odd slice of Brooklyn—then populated only by rabbits and local Indians—had looked like to Dutch sailors as they laid their eyes on the New World for the first time. Could they, he wondered, have imagined what this tiny peninsula would become? As
he turned to his left to look at Brighton Beach and the Rockaways beyond, he heard their soft footsteps in the sand. He held his ground.

“Hey, Doc.” It was Johnny Rosetti and two of his boys.
Boys!
They were the size of the damned Parachute Jump and didn’t look nearly as impotent.

“Hey, yourself, Johnny Rosetti.”

“Where is she?”

He smiled at Johnny and realized he didn’t smile much anymore. “I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“You know, Doc, for some reason I believe you.”

“I never lied to you before.”

“She used you, Doc. She made a fool of you, old man.”

“That may be.”

“Was she worth it?”

“I thought she was, but I guess I’m about to find out, huh?”

“I guess you are. I guess you are, Doc. Do us both a favor, old man, and turn around, face the other way. Okay?”

Doc turned his back to the ocean and beheld the amusement park’s moth-eaten splendor. From where he stood, in the first light of morning, it still looked a grand place. At that distance, it all seemed in working order. Even the Parachute Jump appeared ready to shine again. From Doc’s place in the sand, he thought, you might be able to fool yourself that the sun-faded, blue-finned Astroland rocket atop Gregory and Paul’s food stand might fire up its engines and blast off. You had to get much closer to see the truth of it, the rust and folly of the place. So Doc walked ahead.

“Where the fuck is he going, boss?” One of Rosetti’s boys asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Rosetti answered. “Doc, cut it out. Stop. This isn’t going to help you,” he called after him.

Doc didn’t answer. He didn’t stop. He didn’t turn back. With each step forward, the truth of the place became more evident. He found a strange comfort in its truth. The truth was that the Parachute Jump was a useless steel carcass and that the Astroland rocket would never fly. Coney Island’s truth was its fate, and its fate was Doc’s fate, everyone’s fate: in the end, we all fall down. In the end, we all have reservations at the Terminal Hotel.

He heard the first shot, but not its echo.

Called “a hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and “the noir poet laureate” in the
Huffington Post,
Reed Farrel Coleman has published fifteen novels. He is a three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel, a two-time Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee, and he has won the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. He is a founding member of Mystery Writers of America University and an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University. He lives with his family on Long Island.

David Corbett

T
he woman, on her knees, pressed her lips against the man’s rough palm. “I swear, all I’ve told you, every word—”

“Run through it again.” He took back his hand. “All of it.”

She didn’t dare look at his face. “I haven’t lied.”

“A thief too proud to lie.”

“I didn’t steal—”

He got up, kicked his chair backward. It clattered across the bare floor. “I said tell me what happened. Again.”

She clenched her hands beneath her chin, steadying them. “My cousin, Marisa—we live in Boca del Monte—she told me all I had to do was carry a suitcase to Panama. I lost my job at the hotel. My daughter, Rosela, she cries herself to sleep—”

“Leave your daughter out of it.”

“‘People do it every day,’ Marisa said. Yes, some get stopped at the airport, the suitcases ripped apart, the money found stitched up inside. But the amounts are legal, just under 78,000 quetzales. No one gets arrested. ‘That’s why they call us ants, because the amounts are small.’”