The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 26
Gravesend
Chasing Charlie Chan
Circling the Runway
By Trey R. Barker
2,000 Miles to Open Road
Road Gig: A Novella
Exit Blood
Death is Not Forever
By Richard Barre
The Innocents
Bearing Secrets
Christmas Stories
The Ghosts of Morning
Blackheart Highway
Burning Moon
Echo Bay
Lost
By Eric Beetner and JB Kohl
Over Their Heads
By Eric Beetner and Frank Scalise
The Backlist (*)
By Rob Brunet
Stinking Rich
By Milton T. Burton
Texas Noir
By Dana Cameron (editor)
Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon Anthology 2014
By Eric Campbell (editor)
Down, Out and Dead
By Stacey Cochran
Eddie & Sunny (TP only)
By Mark Coggins
No Hard Feelings (*)
By Tom Crowley
Viper’s Tail
Murder in the Slaughterhouse
By Frank De Blase
Pine Box for a Pin-Up
Busted Valentines and Other Dark Delights
A Cougar’s Kiss (*)
By Les Edgerton
The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping
By A.C. Frieden
Tranquility Denied
The Serpent’s Game
The Pyongyang Option (*)
By Jack Getze
Big Numbers
Big Money
Big Mojo
Big Shoes (*)
By Keith Gilman
Bad Habits
By Richard Godwin
Wrong Crowd (*)
By William Hastings (editor)
Stray Dogs: Writing from the Other America
By Matt Hilton
No Going Back
Rules of Honor
The Lawless Kind (*)
By Naomi Hirahara, Kate Thornton & Jeri Westerson (editors)
Ladies’ Night
By Terry Holland
An Ice Cold Paradise
Chicago Shiver
By Darrel James, Linda O. Johsonton & Tammy Kaehler (editors)
Last Exit to Murder
By David Housewright & Renée Valois
The Devil and the Diva
By David Housewright
Finders Keepers
Full House
By Jon Jordan
Interrogations
By Jon & Ruth Jordan (editors)
Murder and Mayhem in Muskego
Cooking with Crimespree
By Andrew McAleer & Paul D. Marks (editors)
Coast to Coast (*)
By Bill Moody
Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz
The Man in Red Square
Solo Hand
The Death of a Tenor Man
The Sound of the Trumpet
Bird Lives!
By Gary Phillips
The Perpetrators
Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes (editor)
Treacherous: Griffters, Ruffians and Killers
By Gary Phillips, Tony Chavira, Manoel Magalhaes
Beat L.A. (Graphic Novel)
By Robert J. Randisi
Upon My Soul
Souls of the Dead
Envy the Dead (*)
By Rob Riley
Thin Blue Line
By Ryan Sayles
The Subtle Art of Brutality
Warpath (*)
By John Shepphird
The Shill
Kill the Shill (*)
By Anthony Neil Smith
Worm (TP only)
All the Young Warriors TP only) (*)
Once a Warrior (TP only) (*)
By Liam Sweeny
Welcome Back, Jack (*)
By Art Taylor (editor)
Murder Under the Oaks: Bouchercon Anthology 2015
By Lono Waiwaiole
Wiley's Lament
Wiley's Shuffle
Wiley's Refrain
Dark Paradise
By Vincent Zandri
Moonlight Weeps
(*) Coming soon
Back to TOC
Here’s a sample from Trey R. Barker’s Death is Not Foever.
1
He dreamed...
“A mustache, Mariana?”
She was dead, she was a dream, but his wife was still a young girl dancing on the desert breeze.
“Something different.” Her mustache was thin and curled and reminded him of a melodrama villain.
“A little, yeah.” The Judge twirled with her, his big feet stumbling in his beige cowboy boots, toes scuffed from desert rock.
“I miss yours.” Mariana smiled, looked at him through the tops of her eyes.
It had been one of the things she loved best. He’d had it from before they’d met until well after she died. In fact, the real Mariana, flesh and blood, had never seen him sans mustache. Only in his dreams, when he conjured her from deep in his soul and gave her voice and life by what he knew was his head full of delusions, did she see him without his mustache.
She laughed, a sound as sweet as pecan pie. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He dipped her to music only they heard. “Don’t see a mustache on many women.”
“I grew it to remind me of yours. Or maybe I joined the circus...the mustachioed lady.”
“Got a circus in Heaven, do they?”
“That where you think I am?”
The Judge stopped dancing. “Aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Probably in hell, too, though.”
Knowing it was heavy and boring in its banality, Judge Bean sighed. “As long as we’re separated...I am, too.”
“Jeremiah...you never found it, did you?”
He avoided her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
She kissed his cheek. “It’s okay, honey, it’s just a piece of tin.”
“Helluva lot more than that.”
In this dream, they were on their first date again: that incredible spring night when the air inside the Barefield Country Club smelled of honeysuckle and warm dust. The band was on fire, tearing through old big band tunes that both of them knew from their parents’ record collections. Saxophones jumped double time, never out of synch, while trumpets wailed over everything and the drummer and bass player laid down a foundation that made Bean’s chest thump.
Tables sat in the back half of the room, more a place for people’s drinks while they danced rather than a place to eat dinner. On each table were electric candles inside tall glasses. It gave the entire room an eerie cast, light flickering against the walls, doing its own dance.
And on those walls?
The full-page newspaper ads from the Judge’s first campaign, writ large as wall-sized posters. In one, a rusty 1930s truck sat in a field on blown-out tires. Across the hood of the truck was his opponent’s name. The brutally clear implication was that the Judge’s opponent was not only old, but broken-down and hadn’t any understanding of how the World worked anymore. That one was for the younger voters, to tell them Bean was as cool and hip as they were. In the second ad, an old woman answered her front door on Halloween. A kid, dressed as Bean’s opponent, tells the old lady he’s going to let all the bad guys out of jail so they can break into her house.
“That one was for the older voters,” Mariana said.
With a big dip, her back arched onto his left arm and a beautiful smile on her face, he nodded. “To scare them. So they’d vote for me.”
Both ads had been bullshit. Bean supported them, no crap about that...because he wanted to win. But now? It wasn’t really regret he felt, just a kind of sad resignation at what he’d done to his opponent.
The question was: what the fuck were those ads, now as big as posters, doing in his dream? Their first date had been beautiful and fantastic and had left him giddy for days afterward and had no hint of politics...all that bullshit came way later.
“Ignore them, baby.” Mariana pulled him close. “Spin me.”
So he did, still chuckling about her mustache. “I miss you, Mariana.”
“I miss you, too, Jeremiah.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
“You see me every day and every night.”
He frowned. “Bah. Dreams and visions and hallucinations. You know what I mean. You’re dead and I’m alive and so I miss you. If you asked, I’d end myself here and now.”
“Babe?”
“I’ve been thinking about it again.”
“A bit of suicidal ideation, Jeremiah?”
“A bit.” He spun her again, the music loud and pleasant in their ears.
“It would be a mortal sin.”
He said nothing. His feet, always clumsy, were still clumsy in dreams. His boots shuffled her across the floor, as often as not stepping on her toes.
Her smile disappeared in the darkness of the ballroom, in the darkness that was theirs alone. “I want to see you, baby, I really do.”
He eyed her as they moved semi-gracefully. “But?”
“Someone needs you first.”
He shook his head. “I don’t give a shit.”
“But someone needs—”
“Don’t care. I need you, Mariana. Twenty-one damned years. I’m tired, I want to be with you.”
“But you don’t remember so many of those years.”
Bean ground his teeth, stung by the criticism.
“Honey, if it were some old man, some bullcrap politician or some damned attorney, I’d say eat a bullet and come home to me.”
Bean snorted. “No, you wouldn’t it. Mortal sin.”
She laughed. “No, I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t be so upset if you had a horrible car crash or something, plunge into a ravine, the car explodes into flame, fries your skinny ass to a cinder.”
Bean laughed. “You don’t care if I burn to death?”
“I love you so much that I don’t care if you burn to death.”
Their laugh faded into the lush trill of the saxophones, into a liquid flurry of piano notes up and down.
“A girl needs you. You have to get her home...to her mother.”
“Put her ass on the bus.”
“Jeremiah.” Her voice sharp, scolding.
“I don’t have time to rescue wayward girls.”
“Baby, I’ll be here whenever you get here. Tomorrow, next week, next year, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” She grabbed his eyes tightly, held his hand just as tight. “I’ll wait forever.”
The ballroom tightened around him. “There’s something else. What is it?”
How could her eyes be so brilliant, shining in a sea of mocha skin, when she had been dead so long? How could her hair still be as shiny as onyx?
“Someone’s coming.”
“For me?”
With a nod, she forced him to twirl her again. “Yes, Your Honor, for you.”
2
The finger shocked him.
It was nearly lunch time. The poker game, just another anonymous game with vague promises of Mariana’s hunk of tin, had run through the night, the players’ moods as black as the west Texas night, and had fallen apart amidst clenched fists and hot spittle and vows of retribution for the assumed cheating by the big winner. That had been six hours ago and ultimately there had been no word of her tin. Bean had walked out angry and tired and five hundred and sixty bucks lighter.
Now he was all those things AND seriously hungry.
Johnny’s Barbeque was on tap for lunch, then a quick meeting with a Barefield detective, an even quicker meeting with the delivery driver. Then Bean was back on the road to Langtry West and some sleep, the sleep he should have gotten last night for all the good the poker game had done him.
Troubled sleep, Mariana would call it.
It was all troubled anymore.
When Judge Bean walked in to Johnny’s joint, which he used as an off-the-books mailing address, a package waited. Inside the thick, padded mailing envelope was a small box and a note. Inside that small box was a human finger. At least a couple weeks detached and stinking to holy hell.
The note was a shitty photocopy of a Texas Ranger badge, and the words, They lied to you.
3
The hammer cocked. A metallic click explosively loud in the tiny room.
Hardly a room, just a flop for a cheap whore. Empty whiskey bottles and old pizza boxes. Smelled of menstrual blood and shit. Of piss and despair.
“Know that smell, baby.” Pressed the gun against the whore’s throat. “Now...how many times I’m gonna ask?”
It was a woman again. Made no fucking difference...man...woman...they all knew where the Judge was.
“Please...I swear to God—”
“This might sound kind of...I don’t know...but God does everything I ask.”
The whore cocked her head. “What?”
“The Judge, woman.”
“God? What?”
The gun nuzzled her neck, a metallic lover.
The whore’s eyes slammed closed. “Haven’t seen him since he did me a favor a couple months ago. In Barefield.”
“Done us all a favor or two, ain’t he? Should’a drowned himself in a fucking river. That would’a been a good favor.” A hefty sigh. “I sent a package to Barefield. Far as I know, he ain’t even picked it up yet. Those little boys told me you know where he is.”
“What little boys?” The prostitute’s eyes popped open and then she frowned, highlighting the aged map of crevices that made up her face. “Who you talking about?”
“All of them...they all led me here. Right to you, doll.”
The woman’s mouth flapped, like so many mouths had before her. Flapped and flapped. Sometimes they said something useful, sometimes they just begged.
Eventually, the woman spluttered, drool white and frothy, ran down her chin. “Yeah...well...they lied. People lie about me all the time. I’m just a pro. They lie about me and think they can get over on me or not pay or do nasty stuff to me. People lie all the time, how can I help what they say?”
Her words rushed, tripped over each other like drunks in a dirty gutter. The whore tried not to cry, but her tears came and smeared black mascara into long scratches from cheeks to neck.
“Your conversations are so petty.”
“What?”
“So petty...the World is about to end.”
“What? My world is about to end? Please...no.”
“The World, junkie whore, the World, and you’re gassing me with petty conversations.” A pause. “Where is the Judge?”
Confusion sat on her face as one of her fat tricks might have. “But...but why you need to see him? I mean, if the world’s about to end.”
“Because accounts have to be set straight. Now talk, you goddamn whore junkie bitch, or I’ll kill you right the fuck now.”
When the gun fired, two shots through the wall and into the next apartment, the hooker screamed. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t see him anymore.”
“Yeah, wrong answer, Gracie.”
4
They lied to you.
Resting his hand over his empty holster, Judge Royy Bean, II crunched ice. Cold shot through his mouth, a counterpoint to the damnable heat that dripped sweat down his back to the crack of his ass. His ice crunching had always driven Mariana batty. She’d berated him constantly for doing it. But always with a smile and a twinkle in her eyes.
Are my eyes sparking right now, Mariana?
Not in the least, baby.
Her voice was in his head but he knew it was only his heart wishing it so. She wasn’t actually talking to him or dancing with him or making love to him. Everything that was Mariana, for the last twenty-one years, was self-inflicted, a guilt-inspired fantasy.
He used the barbeque joint as a mail drop. Johnny didn’t mind, for the occasional cannabis consideration, and it was the one place Bean always visited when in Barefield. Today, as he ordered his two-meat combo, Johnny had casually given him the package. Plain, free of writing or addressing or markings of any kind other than Bean’s name.
Now the finger, blood dried to a crusty brown, sinew and bone ragged and peeking out from badly-cut flesh, sat heavy in his pocket. He had no idea who the fuck it belonged to or who sent it. But the note, four harsh words, They lied to you, scrawled in jagged handwriting beneath a bad copy of a Ranger badge, told him everything.
Except not quite everything.
A lie? From Mariana? Impossible. His wife had been no angel, she had been a cop in a world filled with the evil and the vile, with predators and corpses, with victims and the vanquished, and no one ever came out completely clean. Dirt and stains and blood clung to everyone, but lying? He couldn’t conceive a situation where she would have lied to him.
Did you lie, baby?
So the note told him nothing concrete, but it did make him ask a question or two, didn’t it?
And who, exactly, might know the answers? Tommy-Blue? Andy? JD?
