The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 28
Eventually, after seeing everyone on the patio, seeing the cars pass, hearing dogs bark somewhere distant, the Judge returned Bassi’s stare.
He says he’s not scared, but I think he is. I think, if I put that .380 right the fuck between his eyes, he’ll be plenty scared.
“You need to back up, Mr. Bassi, I’m not getting any fresh air.”
“What? You saying I stink? That’s what you’re going with?”
The Judge didn’t hesitate, didn’t play coy about his pistol. He yanked his jeans, shoved his hand into his boot, felt metal, and—
“Should’a fixed it, you son of a bitch.” Bassi drew from his lower back.
At the same time, he hammered the Judge with a hard left to the chin. Pain exploded like a ball-peen hammer cracking his teeth and the Judge hit the ground hard.
This is how it ends, Mariana. In a puddle of my own blood and Johnny’s spicy sauce. A piece of shit gets the drop on me and this is how it ends.
Over the top of the detective’s shouted, “Shit,” was an explosion of gunfire.
At least I’ll be able to hold you again.
You ain’t done yet, lover. Get up, Jeremiah. If you die now, I will not be waiting.
But Mariana, I—
No, you have work to do.
The man with the mustache.
GET UP!
The Judge rolled, tried to get his gun. Bullets thunked the concrete, peppering his face and hands with stinging shards.
Bassi and the detective fired, their guns barking, while screaming customers dove for cover under tables and through the doors back into the restaurant. Two men, dressed alike in the uniform of Jehovah’s Witnesses, hopped the short fence and disappeared down the street into the summer heat.
Shots tore open everything. The soda machine and its tanks of syrup and CO2, bottles of runny red ketchup and thick yellow mustard, jars of jalapenos and relish, containers of barbeque sauce. Tumblers of soda and plates of food exploded, covering the patio.
The Judge tried again to get to his gun, but couldn’t get his jeans up while dodging the shots or while fighting the damned vest that fit him like steel sport coat one size too big.
He jumped to his feet as the warmth of his own blood streamed from his mouth. Without a word, he ran for the truck. It wasn’t going to take the cops long to get here. He didn’t want to be found and he sure as hell didn’t want the truck found.
It was a short block to the truck but the Judge’s boots slipped on the asphalt. Like a dream where he ran and ran but never moved. A car came around the corner and the horn squealed. The driver slammed his brakes but the car continued, smoke pouring from the rear tires. The Judge dipped his shoulder to absorb the collision but somehow missed it.
Instead, the car ran into a storm of bullets. They thunked a trail from hood to trunk as the thing got stopped. The driver yelped and threw the car into reverse and again the tires smoked as he blasted back the way he’d come.
Ducking and dodging, trying to avoid Bassi’s shots, Bean made it to the truck’s door. A quick yank open, two steps, and his ass was deep in the seat.
A bullet hole stared at him. One bored in through the driver’s window and exited the far back side of the sleeper wall. Delicate shards of safety glass dotted the dashboard.
Someone else already shooting at you?
Bean cranked the hell outta the truck’s big motor. The engine screamed and thick clouds of black smoke filled the air.
So who was shooting?
Stanton? Or, given Bassi’s tastes, someone else altogether?
“You fucking dumbass,” he said, berating himself. Why had he ever thought Bassi could make a delivery? He’d known for years what Bassi was all about and what kind of baggage he brought with him. “Damnit, Bassi, what’d you do?”
A bullet answered. It tore into the door just behind the Judge. He heaved the truck into gear and got it moving. Inches at a time.
From the patio, Bassi kept shooting. Bullets hit the trailer and the engine housing. One bullet shattered the entire front windshield while another tore through the radiator. In the outside mirrors, the Judge saw the trailer and his balls tightened.
Smoke poured from it.
“No, no.” Bean hit the steering wheel. “Damnit.”
Bassi hopped the knee-high fence around the patio and bolted into the street, waving his arms. “That’s my weed. You ain’t getting it.”
The Judge blasted the horn. The truck kept moving, a decent bit of power now in its belly.
Bassi jumped onto the nose of the rig, catching the hood ornament and hauling himself up on top of the thing.
“Are you crazy?” Bean said.
“This is my shit.”
Bean jammed down the accelerator. The truck lurched and bumped as though taking a deep breath. Then it jumped forward.
Bassi whipped his gun onto the hood and leveled it at Bean.
Bean jerked the wheel left. Bassi slid to one side and his gun skittered across the hood. When the Judge yanked back hard right, Bassi went the other direction.
“Get. Off. My. Truck.” With each word, Bean jerked the wheel back the other direction, tossing Bassi side to side, loosening his grip.
“Fuuuuck yooouuuuu.” Bassi howled. He slid off the hood but managed to keep his hand tight around the ornament. Somehow, he got his head up over the edge of the nose again. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
“What the fuck’re you talking about?”
The air was full of sirens now. Cops called to a shootout and a burning truck and who knew how far away they were.
“Tell Faith I’m sorry.”
Guiding the truck down Big Spring Street, cars parting like he was Moses in the fucking Red Sea, Bean yanked out his cell phone.
“Faith, I’m sooooooorrrrryyyy.”
Then Bassi was gone. He’d ripped the ornament off the truck when he went down. The cab bumped over Bassi’s body.
Bean pushed the thing harder.
6
Less than a hundred miles from Barefield, just a little south of Lubbock, the smell of gun oil, and fear-stink, filled the space between duo.
Only four lonely bullets left. But if the ammo ran dry, there was always the Kennedys, wasn’t there? And the Nazis after that.
Damnit, clear the shadows and confusion outta your head. Sing a song. Dance a jig. Draw a fucking picture.
None of that ever worked. The shadows were always there, light or dark, drugs or whiskey be damned.
This time it was a man. Probably a different one, even though his face was pudgy and drawn and scared and sweaty, just like the guy in Albuquerque...or maybe the one in Sierra Vista. “You’re all the same.”
Same man, different man. All scared and babbling for mercy. Same men, same women. Their fear all had the same funk to it. Boobs or dicks, high society or dog shit, fear smelled and tasted the same.
“When it comes to fear, everybody bleeds the same.”
This guy—too-tight jeans strangling his balls, fake silk shirt unbuttoned to the bottom of his too-hairy chest—saw the gun and immediately dropped to his knees. Just like a Southern Baptist preacher at tent revivals, on his knees, begging for coin.
Except his hands weren’t out. How them saved souls gonna drop silver in that palm if those hands aren’t out?
“Beg...” Touched the gun to the man’s forehead. “Beg.”
Head bobbing like one of those dolls, spittle all over his lips. “Sure...anything you want. Hell, everything you want. Just let me and the sun wake up together tomorrow.”
“Or at least long enough to get some clean skivvies, huh?”
The man had pissed himself. “I don’t want to die.”
“Who does?” A pause. “I been running short of bullets.”
Hope flared in the man’s eyes.
“But I know the Kennedys. Personally.”
“What? The who?”
“Whoooooooo...are you? Great song.” A cough, a hesitation. “Let me ask you this: how can you put a man in charge whose family sold bullets to the Germans in World War II?”
“The fuck are you talking about?” the man asked. From his knees, he backed away, tried to stand. “You’re crazy.”
The gun smashed hard against his skull. “How ’bout I crazy your brains all over the fucking wall?”
Now his hands came out. The full Southern Baptist picture.
“No, no.” Voice high and scared like a school girl’s. “Ain’t what I meant. What I mean was...that yeah, you’re right. He can’t be in charge. World War I or II, or III or what the fuck ever.”
The gun sagged. “Dude, agreeing with me ain’t gonna help. I mean, nice try, grabbing whatever you can, but you don’t understand me. You don’t have the intellect.” Tap-tap-tap of the gun against skull. “So stop embarrassing yourself and tell me where the Judge is.”
“What judge?”
“Bean. With two y’s.”
The gun caressed his ear, barrel along his lobe, then dragging a line along his throat, as though through the ease of touch the information would come pouring from this rat of a man. There had been rats up and down the hot part of America, the brown part of America with all those Mexicans, and the touch had worked with most of them.
Yeah, those people were all dead now, ’s why the magazine was running short, but the touch had mostly worked. Never totally, no one gave up the Judge’s precise location, which they all obviously knew, how could they not, but the circle was drawing tighter, wasn’t it?
When it was tight enough, a noose so elegant even a hangin’ judge would love it, the air would be bathed in the nasty stench gunpowder and blood, of piss and the man’s shit.
“I want the Judge.”
A giggle leaked from the man’s thin lips, just like the piss had from his dick. “We all do, gangsta.”
“Maybe, but I’m gonna get him. Where is he?”
“Swear to God, I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in months.”
“Goddamnit, are you people all so fucking stupid? All of you know where he is. Why is everyone screwing with me? I am not to be screwed with. I am dangerous. I’m a killer.”
His hands came out again. “Easy, gangsta. I’m on your side. I’m saying, the Judge screwed lots’a people. Jesus Christ, I think any of us would dig getting a hand on him.”
“Careful, gangsta, blasphemers don’t do well with me.”
“I get’cha. No problem.” Slowly, the man stood. “I’ll help you find him. Let me get a few bucks outta him, and I’ll hand you more bullets...long as you put one in his brain.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
The man shrugged. “Five, maybe six, months.”
“Who saw him after you?”
“How the crap would I know that? But I heard he was in Barefield.”
A laugh floated out from behind the gun. A scratchy, sloppy sound. “I sent a package there, asshole. He hasn’t worked in Barefield since Joseph P. bought the White House from the mob in Chicago.”
The man’s eyes flashed. “Not working, at least not wearing the robes. Way I heard it, just a couple days old, Bean was hot and bothered about a poker game. Thought maybe he’d finally find whatever the fuck it is he’s been pissing about for four years.”
Smiled. “Well, we all make sacrifices in one way or another. But not Moses and his ageless wives. It was all of a piece, wasn’t it?
“Uh...sure.” The man nodded. “Listen, word was, a few days back, at some other game in Victoria, he was getting all worked up about some chick. Kept saying just wanted to be done, wanted to get back to her. Freaked the guys at the game out.”
“Her...who?”
The man shrugged. “I guess his dead wife. I hear he talks to her all the time. Guy is completely buzzfucked.” He raised his hands conspiratorially. “Find a guy called Echo. A smoke hound, runs stolen shit outta his garage. West side somewhere. The Judge grew him up, kept him straight and narrow when Echo’s mama was dead or dying or some shit.”
“Grew him up? He Bean’s kid?”
“Might as well been, way I heard it. Don’t really know the details of that shit, I got eyes other directions.”
The gun hesitated. “Is he still in Barefield?”
“Gangsta...please, the Judge don’t run his schedule through me. I got no clue about when exactly.”
A tired sigh. “Yeah, wrong answer, Gracie.”
Back to TOC
Here’s a sample from JB Kohl and Eric Beetner’s Over Their Heads.
1
CLYDE
If Madeline didn’t go into labor we’d be eating steak tonight. In a restaurant. Because I would have enough cash to take her out for a change. I’d have money for dinner and clothes and a vacation and enough left over for the baby’s college and graduate school—anything else our kid could want.
I rummaged through my sock drawer for a pair that matched. A wife at nine-and-a-half-months pregnant didn’t feel the best. In the past Madeline had been meticulous about organizing my sock drawer, folding and pairing them in neat rows. Those days were gone now, along with the days of creased khakis and starched shirts. My kind and beautiful wife had changed to someone pasty, swollen, and, yeah I’m gonna say it . . . bitchy.
For now, at least, she was asleep, hand resting over her protruding belly, mouth slightly open. In these moments, before she woke up and started to cry over her swollen ankles and nag me about the long hours I spent at the rental lot, before she opened her mouth and swore at me and the dick that happens to reside between my legs, which was clearly responsible for getting her in this predicament in the first place, marriage vows or no . . . in these moments when it was just me digging in my sock drawer for a mate to the only one I could find, when I picked up my khakis from the floor and shook out yesterday’s wrinkles . . . I would watch her sleep and she was just my wife, the woman I fell in love with.
I saw this movie once. It was one of those chick flicks I took her to on our last anniversary. Normally I don’t go in for that sort of thing, but it was our anniversary and that’s a time she tends to get sentimental and I’m almost always guaranteed sex. So I figure on those nights the least I can do is take her to a movie she wants to see, even if I have zero interest in it. I don’t even remember what the movie was about. Well, it was about a couple, that’s for sure, but the thing I remember is that the woman was pregnant. I mean hugely pregnant. And in one scene, the guy in that film bends over his just-about-to-pop pregnant wife and kisses her stomach. When that happened on the screen, next to me, in the theater, Madeline sighed and put her hand over her heart, and her breath hitched just the tiniest bit like it does when she is just about to cry or like when she watches those dog food commercials. That scene really got to her. I always remembered that moment, the moment in that movie when Madeline was moved by something so simple. We didn’t know it at the time, but she was already seven weeks pregnant and when we found out a week later and realized it was really, really real, I remembered that scene and played it out a hundred times in my head. I knew there would come a time when I’d lean over her and kiss her belly because it would make her happy. And, I don’t know, I guess I imagined myself whispering something profound and kind to her. So I had been biding my time, waiting until she was tired and heavy and hating being pregnant, because all the books told me that was exactly how it was going to be. I wanted it to be perfect. I guess the time never seemed perfect.
Because today I watched her with my socks in my hand, and just felt . . . tired. So I turned and walked out. I tiptoed so she wouldn’t wake up and I shut the door behind me as quietly as I could. Hollywood and that damn movie could kiss my ass. And so could the goddamn actress with the rail thin legs and a belly with no stretch marks. Madeline was a real woman. Despite it all, despite being Misery’s Deity at the moment, she was a real woman, the mother of my child. She was mine. And while this filled me with pride and gratitude, mostly these days I was filled with fear.
I toed through the pile of shoes at the front door, settling on a pair of bland loafers, and mentally ran over the day’s plans in my head.
ONE: Get to work, open the rental lot. If I was honest, this was my favorite part of every day. I liked the lot. It was mine. I had named it after myself, hadn’t I? Clyde McDowd Rentals was, in a way, my first kid. And now, after marriage and with a real, actual kid on the way, it was the one thing that was entirely mine. It was clean, organized, filled with files and the smell of the pink cleaning solution the janitor used late at night. It was white tile floor and fluorescent lights. It was the roar of airplanes taking off and landing at Richmond International. It was business men and families. And somewhere along the way, it started to bring in a lot more money than it should have. Which is why I really, really needed to be at work on time today.
I looked down at the scuffed loafer I had pulled from the pile of shoes. How could one couple own so many shoes? Even my shoes were something Madeline picked out for me. The house. The carpet. The paint. The towels in the bathroom. But Clyde McDowd Rentals? Not so, baby. Not so. I drifted into the kitchen and sank into one of the rickety wooden chairs at our vintage table and pulled on a sock.
TWO: Check to make sure the Chevy Tahoe was ready to go. The ceiling seams needed to be perfect, the packets had to be laying right, behind a soft, thin layer of sponge. I always put a pack of Winstons in the glove compartment for the driver. Never hurts to kiss a little ass, just in case. I froze with the sock halfway on. Shit. I forgot the Winstons.
THREE: Stop and pick up Winstons.
The mattress in the bedroom groaned as Madeline pushed herself up. The giantess hath awakened, I thought, not unkindly. Hell, if Madeline had been her normal, petite, good-humored self, she would have laughed too. And some day, I was sure I’d tell her my vision of her at nine months pregnant—an angry, towering woman crushing all in her path, and she would laugh and punch me in the arm and say she loved me.
I’d tell her about all of this one day and not just how grouchy she was. I’d tell her about everything I’d done for her, about everything I sacrificed, the risks I took, the plans I made for us, for our family.
