Kennick, fiction by Nelson Stanley

"They picked on the wrong fucking Gyppo this time," roars the man my little cousin Nattie is to marry. I think about pointing out that, technically, he's Pavee, so some might argue he's not in the strictest sense of the word a Gyppo, but seeing as I've just got him out of bed and his eyes are rolling in two different directions and he's waving a shooter about his head, now is probably not the time. Despite the soft drizzle, sweat's sloughing off him like an ice cube melting in hot weather: I can still see white powder crusted around his nostrils. His gut hangs heavy and hairy over his belt, cinched to a degree he's not required since puberty.

"You might want to put on a shirt?"

"I'll put on no fucking shirt," and he pushes me out the way of the trailer door, goes wobbling across to where his Merc's parked in front of the lock-up.

Auntie Fiance is trying to shepherd the children inside a trailer but it's not every day you see a shirtless man screaming his head off and waving what looks like Judge Dredd's gun about as he fails to operate his own car's door. At least, not first thing on a Saturday morning.

"Francie mate," I babble, backing away, "We've got a dentist's driveway to tarmac, the machinery's been butchered-"

"I shall be doing the fucking butchering!" He falls down on his arse in the mud.

"Well, yeah, but we've got a Bomag with all its hydraulics smashed, we've got a-"

"I shall rip that fucking Duchie cunt's head clean off," he bellows, scrabbling to his feet, "and I shall piss in the hole for luck."

"You might not need a shooter, if you're just gonna rip his head off, Francie mate," I say, getting ready to fling myself behind the thin aluminium of the trailer door, for all the good that'll do me. "I mean, accidents happen-"

"I'll fucking accident you, you fucking Kennick cunt," he screams, wheeling away from the seemingly impregnable door of his AMG. He waves the piece at me, or at least, in my general direction. "Come over here. I need a fucking driver, and you'll do as well as anyone else."

I struggle with the mental equivalent of a slipping clutch.

"I- I don't think I'd be insured, Francie," I manage. "German car interiors always make me feel sick, too. It's the smell of the upholstery-"

"Get in the car, hedge-mumping cunt." The awful hole in the end of that ridiculous gun swings toward me again. The Merc starts with a purr. I fiddle helplessly with the complicated foot-operated parking brake. "Get me to Duchie's, Kennick. And don't crash me fucking motor on the way, or I swear to Jesus, Mary and Joseph I'll spray your fucking brains all over this here car."

***

I'd only gone down for my little cousin Emma-Louise's christening. In the church, Emma-Louise shit herself when raised up to the font. Nattie clung to my arm, burying her face in my shirt to stymie her laughter. We both agreed later that the clergyman had done well to make it to the end of the invocation. We all repaired to a pub to start the serious business of getting hideously drunk. While old men lined up to karaoke the standards of long-dead crooners, Aunt Kathy took me to one side.

"Kind of hoping you'd've got in there," she said.

"Eh? What? Me? With who?"

"Our Nattie." She regarded me seriously, as if over the top of a pair of glasses. She doesn't wear glasses.

"Nattie? B-but... She's me cousin!"

Aunt Kathy looked suitably horrified. After all, almost all of my relatives married someone they had a genetic relationship with: keep it in the family, like, or at least the tribe. My mother and father were, I think, second cousins. If that.

I grimaced, looked away around the room. Old men, supping pints. Small children dressed in posh but outdated Sunday best.

"Anything'd be better than the dinlo she's gone and got engaged to," said Aunt Kathy, sipping her gimlet and adjusting her hat.

"Who's that then, Auntie?"

She tilted her head and indicated the swollen bulk of Francie, swaying behind the mic, belting out "When You and I Were Young, Maggie" like half of Foster and Allen, if Foster or Allen weighed twenty stone and looked like they were smuggling breezeblocks strapped to their arms.

"Fat steroid boy on the mic?"

"He's a murderer," she muttered darkly.

"Say what?"

"Well. Accessory to. Held 'em down then buried the corpse, didn't he?"

"Jesus." I blinked. "Whatever happened to choring the wheels off of a vardo?" I asked. "When did we start playing proper gangsta?"

She shook her head sadly, took another pull on her gimlet.

"It's a wicked world, my sweet little chavvo."

***

We drive. I think I do well, in the circumstances: I only stall the stupid overpowered car twice, and Francie doesn't blow my head off.

"I really love your fucking cousin," he says, when we slow down to negotiate a cattle-grid somewhere, fat low-profiles clump-thunking over the grate. I keep my head fixed front but my eyes slide sideways toward him. "I mean, I really love fucking her, too. But I also love the girl. She will make me a fine wife."

I pull up to the deserted little industrial estate, park outside Duchie's unit, which is on the end of the row of three, the one with the least number of smashed windows, conspicuously graffiti-free.

With his free hand he reaches across and pulls the electronic starter out of the dash, stuffs it into his trousers.

"You wait here, get me?"

Relief passes through me in a wave of warmth, a tingling dream of ecstasy strobing up from my toes to the crown of my head.

"Here? Right-o Francie, no problemo like—"

"This is an AMT Automag, Kennick. I got five shots. That gives me two spare. Don't do anything that'll lead me to wasting one of them on you, eh?"

I nod.

"Good." Out the corner of my eye I can see his gut heaving; the sweat pours off his chest and mats the wild hair in the deep valley of his pectorals. He gives my head a friendly push with the gun, then climbs unsteadily out of the car.

I watch him wobble across the buckling, weed-strewn car park. The breath goes out of me in a long stream. I cannot imagine how this day can get any worse.

A tapping, on the tinted window to my right.

One of Duchie’s little helpers, Baz or Chris—I can't tell them apart—is leaning on the roof. He scrapes the barrel of the shooter he's been tapping the window with across my field of vision, makes motions I interpret to mean "Get out of the car." Outside, I shiver in the drizzle. His gun, I note with interest, is rather less compensatory than the one Francie was waving around, but is doubtless still big enough to ruin my life.

Ruin it some more, I mean.

Out of sight, around the corner of the lock-up, I hear Francie scream.

***

I ended up staying after the christening. Within a week I was out on the crew with Barry and Tommy and Vanni. Up at four, pile into a Transit van held together by rust and filler, drive to the arse-end of nowhere. Then ten, twelve hours laying asphalt.

"I'd let you on the mini-roller or the layer," said Barry, wiping a thick black smear across his sweating forehead, "But from the way you handle that rake I'd fear for me fucking life and for that of every other man on this site."

Then down the pub to drown whatever brain cells remained. It'd be digs in some flophouse if we were away on a job and when we worked closer to Francie's lock-up—upon which thirty or forty caravans were arrayed—Barry gave me the twins' old trailer to crash in. I'd collapse into sleep, hands shaking and numb from incipient nerve damage, burned all over and tired further down in my bones than I'd ever known possible. But it was good, it was good: family who I'd hurt and turned away from had opened their arms and welcomed me back, out of nothing more than the goodness of their hearts and my willingness to bend my neck over a shovel.

Tommy joked that Francie didn't like to get his hands dirty. He hawked a few cars on the side without bothering the taxman about it, via discreet adverts in the local paper. Every time he snaffled one up—part exchanges off dealer’s forecourts, mostly—he’d send the motors out to Duchie's, and they came back waxed and buffed, primped and shining. Upon their return, each one went straight into Francie's lock-up, a task he was fanatical about seeing to himself. And every morning, no matter how he reeled, bleary-eyed, from the previous night's excesses, he'd have the van started and warmed up before we'd swallowed our paint-thick tea and bacon butties, and he'd hump the toolboxes out from the lock-up and stash them carefully in the back. Always sniffing, red-faced, wild-eyed, even in the driest weather.

"You watch the Kennick doesn't chore those toolboxes, Tommy," he'd chide us. Tommy would grin and nod and mug, but he made sure, I noted, to keep the keys to the padlock chained to him at all times, and when someone needed something he'd walk over himself to dole out the tools.

We were contracted for a month's work in Cardiff, on a big crew laying a new call-centre car park: Vanni shadow-boxing and boasting of the time when, as a boy, Uncle Cyril and Uncle Jack had taken him to see Howard Winstone lose to Vicente Saldivar for the undisputed world's title; up to Doncaster to do a private job on a man's farm, where Tommy regaled me with tales of the days when Uncle Charlie and Uncle Durri would attend the races just after the war and Charlie once got into an argument with a man over a 10-1 shot and got a straight razor across his hip for his troubles.

I grew muscles I hadn't seen since I'd boxed and my "th"s all turned back into "F"s; I shaved more often and ate a lot of Joey Grey. I'd sit with the women, at a discreet, respectable difference from the men, and share a joke while the boys grumbled into their pints. Nattie would laugh with her head thrown back like a sword-swallower and chore roll-ups off me when she thought Aunt Kathy wasn't looking and I tried not to stare down her low-cut tops and stepped away when she moved close against me to whisper something conspiratorial that she didn't want the boys to hear, which was twenty times a day.

***

We'd got up that drizzly Saturday morning and found someone had broken into Francie's lock-up during the night. We'd all been out on the piss even harder the night before, celebrating getting the cash-in-hand work to tarmac a local dentist's driveway, a huge thing more autobahn than access route. He was going away for the weekend and wanted to return to find all the potholes turned into an asphalt billiard table.

I struggled out of bed to find Vanni, Tommy and Barry arrayed around the open door of the lock-up, wearing expressions you'd expect at a funeral. Someone had got in during the night. They'd jimmied the door, smashed the locks off the toolboxes, scattered tools all around the rough concrete floor; picks and shovels shattered, the mini-roller still on its trailer, sitting in a pool of hydraulic fluid, flaccid hoses hanging down like dead snakes. I set to helping Barry clean up: lots of stuff had been broken but weirdly nothing had been nicked.

"Gadjé bastards," said Barry, over and over, tears in his eyes. It wasn't just what it'd cost to fix the hoses, it meant we were down a roller, and that meant a day sorting another. "They'd burn us if they could get away with it!"

A crowd of relatives, near-relatives and assorted hangers-on had formed. No-one had seen anything, but everyone had an opinion that the next time some Gadjés from the local estate came calling, there'd be Hell to pay. Others counselled that we should move on—that, as ever, we had outstayed our welcome locally and should relocate.

"I can see the point in choring things," said Vanni, with what I thought a surprisingly philosophical tone, "but just smashing stuff up? Where's the sense in that?"

Tommy looked uncomfortable.

"Uh... I'm gonna go tell Francie that someone's knocked the shit out of his lock-up." He paused, big blue eyes fixed on me. "Actually, I'll go phone the man about his driveway, tell him we might be taking more time to finish than I thought. Why don't you go give Francie the good news, cuz? Cheer him up."

***

I'm sat next to Francie. My front teeth have been knocked through my bottom lip, but apart from that I'm okay. I'm sitting on an old metal oil can, attached by a tow-chain you could moor a battlecruiser with to the Irish Traveller equivalent of Mechagodzilla and over in the corner Baz (or is it Chris?) is doing something to a big crowbar with what I assume to be an oxy-propane cutting torch. It fills the air with sparks and the reek of burning grease and hot metal and ozone, but I think it's just for show.

"Holy Mary mother of fuck, Duchie, there's no need for that shite," says Francie, who evidently doesn't believe that it's just for show. "I can tell you to the very ounce where your stuff’s been going, like. If you was to have a word with my man Tommy-"

"Tommy?" I snap, "What's our Tommy got to do with this?"

"Shut up, Kennick," says Francie, squinting at me through purple swellings that render his eyes even more piggy-ish than usual.

"You sell out Tommy I'll fucking kill you myself," I snarl, spitting out blood. "Pavee piece of shit."

"Now now, boys. Inter-Gyppo racism is a terrible thing to behold." Duchie, a leathery Gadjé with something about him that reminds me of an ageing roadie for a heavy metal band, runs a hand through his greying mullet and grins a nasty gappy grin at me. "It's tearing apart your community. You'd think the oppressed could learn to all get along together, eh?"

"Traveller." I snap. "Inter-Traveller."

"Is it now? I don't know what you'd have to say about that, being a fucking Kennick of all things," mutters Francie, nearly lost in the spit and roar of the cutting torch.

One of Duchie's boys—whichever one isn't playing blacksmith over in the corner—lamps me around the back of the head. Francie has calmed down, but through the swellings and the drying blood glowers at Duchie with all the hate in the world.

"Got anything else to say, Francie?"

Francie holds his peace and flexes his shoulders, his huge meaty arms clanking the chain tight behind him, an action that drags me painfully to one side.

"That this morning wasn't nothing but a warning shot across your bows, Francie. You don't fuck about with me, I told you that." He shakes his head, a passable impression of a man gripped by a terrible and soul-deep sadness. "I know your lot's all in it together."

I start to say something and Baz or Chris steps around the front to punch me, having got bored of hitting me in the back.

"We're going to get all you boys in, eventually. One at a time. And we're going to sit each of you here and Chris over there-" the mush in the corner shuts off the cutting torch and turns around, the crowbar glowing before him in the gloom of the lock-up, smoke from his heavy welding gauntlets curling up into the air— "Is going to do to each of them what I'm about to get him to do to you, which is to ram this crowbar so far down your throat you'll be shitting sparks out your ringpiece like your arse was a fucking dragon."

From the look on Francie's face, I can only assume that Duchie is not the sort of fella who'd joke about this sort of thing.

"Then we'll get your little blonde piece in," continues Duchie, "And see what she's got to say about my missing fucking cocaine."

At the mention of Nattie I can't help it, a switch is flicked within me and I try and rise. Baz smashes me across the side of my face with the butt of his handgun.

I've been in a few decent street fights (and have run away from some really, really awesome ones). I've come off the back of a motorbike doing sixty round a bend and skidded for two hundred yards into a ditch, shredding my shoulder and busting my arm in two separate places. I've even had my heart broken a few times. Nothing I've ever done to myself or had done to me by an uncaring world has ever hurt quite so much as getting smashed in the face by that gun. I'm not sure if it's the heaviness of the thing, the oily hardness of it, or merely that it's just a terrible death-dealing device that should never be brought near a human being. It hurts like fuck and I proceed to squeal and yammer in a most unbecoming way as the entire left-hand side of my face fills with blood.

Through the explosion going off behind my eyes and my brain pinging about the otherwise empty expanse of my skull, I see Duchie kind of put his forehead in his hand and massage his brow, like a man with a nasty headache coming on; I see Baz throw back his head to laugh, hands on hips and beergut wobbling below his stained Polo shirt; I see Chris pause and join in, smoke still pouring from his welding gauntlets. I see Francie slip his chains and rise from his oil can beside me with blood streaming from his wrists like a suicide who's just decided ending it all is a bad idea, after all.

No-one is more surprised, I think, than Baz when Francie cops hold of his shooter and wrenches it free and proceeds to use it to batter seven shades of shit out of him. The look of horror on Duchie's face is a wonder to behold.

Chris, to be fair, is made of sterner stuff, and swings the crowbar around with both hands, legs braced, like he's felling a tree. The glowing end of it comes around and when it hits Francie it does indeed make a bit of a mess of the man's shoulder. Despite the horrific sizzling noise and the smell—hideous, like when you drop your lit fag on the upholstery of a car crossed with the worst barbecue fuck-up ever, exploding proteins and boiling fat and skin—he seems to remember that the thing he's been using as a club can be employed in a more efficient manner, and he shoots Chris right through the forehead.

I've never heard a gun go off before. No-one ever told me that they were so shockingly, world-endingly loud. I'm suddenly thankful for all the damage I've already done to my hearing at bad hardcore concerts. Chris goes over backwards with half his head gone to bloody ruin.

Duchie pulls out Francie's gun from somewhere. I cannot possibly imagine where he's had it stashed. I'm impressed he can heft it without keeling slowly forward under the weight. Francie appears to weigh up his chances; then he smashes Baz in the mooey one last time with the gun then lets it drop to the floor.

Duchie says something I don't catch, what with the tinnitus and all, and he thumbs something on the gun I presume must be the safety. Then it strikes me that the chains that previously held me are slack after Francie managed to wriggle out of them and almost without conscious volition I lurch forward—chain and oil can and all—through the intervening space and hit Duchie as hard as I can on the side of the jaw. We go down in a tangle and behind the cold hard bite of the adrenaline something inside me is cowering, waiting for the explosion of light and pain that's going to end the one attempt in my entire miserable existence to play the hero, waiting for the bullet that'll rip through muscle and blood and bone and the fat links of the chain are oily and cold and slip in my hands as I bring them down again and again and again on Duchie's head and as my hearing comes back I think "Who's making that fucking high-pitched shrieking noise?" and I realise that it's me and by then Duchie's head is just so much blood and matted hair and with a shudder like coming inside someone I love I finish and look up, nausea roiling against the earth-shattering world-ending pain in my head.

Francie is picking at the huge eschar—like a bad 90's tribal tattoo that's gone terribly wrong—on his shoulder, but he glances down and nods at me.

"That's not a bad job, for a Kennick," he says, conversationally, and I look at the blood on my hands and the bloody chain around me and my hands close on something else amongst the warmth of Duchie's corpse and I bring Francie's enormous handgun up, slowly, so slowly, it weighs a metric fuck-tonne, I've never felt anything so heavy but I bring it up steady and when I pull the trigger and shoot Francie right in the fucking face, he doesn't look a bit surprised.

***

You've got to put your back into digging, much like you've got to put your back into life. Feel the heft against your muscles. Feel the strain on your spine. Feel the sweat sting your eyes, the bitumen sear in your mucus membranes. The roar of the roller is the background static that clouds out your life, makes you lose sight of what you want, both for yourself and the people you care about. Tonight, it is joined by the rattle and gravelly churn of a cement mixer, one Tommy borrowed off a mush who owed him a favour over a horse or a girl, I can't remember which.

Laying a driveway properly is best approached as a craft: a technical problem to be solved by the materials available. It is not usual to dig down an extra six feet and fill the resulting trench in with cement before packing over the top of it with hard-core and then layering on the asphalt; men like Barry or Vanni or Tommy would, in the general run of things, call you a fucking dinlo for even considering such a thing, making such hard work out of a task that can be accomplished with much less effort.

This is not the general run of things. In this particular case it was needed, at least in Barry and Tommy's opinion, and I'd trust the pair of them with my life. In fact, I am trusting them with my life, and Vanni too, working the shovel beside me as we dig. I don't think the dentist is going to be disappointed with the workmanship of his new driveway which—when we've finished, sometime in the early hours of tomorrow morning—will be as smooth and black as the surface of an ebony lake, as an onyx horizon. Like a familial bond, it'll be solid and it'll go down deep, deeper than it strictly needs to. It will last that man—should he take care of it—a lifetime, and more besides.

Detour, by Tom Andes

As the plane circled New Orleans, Kachenko looked at his watch. They’d left Dallas an hour and twenty minutes late. He sipped the last of his bloody mary mix, rattling the cubes in the plastic cup.

He saw Jonas at baggage claim. At least he felt reasonably certain it was Jonas; years had passed since he’d seen the other man, and then Kachenko had encountered Jonas in a professional setting, also. Kachenko’s garment bag depending from one shoulder, the small attaché case with his personal effects dangling at his side, he brushed past a person who strongly resembled Jonas, at any rate, and who broke a grin and raised his white hat as he passed Kachenko and hurried outside. Waiting for the shuttle to the rental car center, Kachenko saw Jonas—or the man he took to be Jonas—at the cab stand a few hundred yards down the curb. With a hissing of air brakes, the shuttle arrived; at almost exactly the same instant, the white hat disappeared inside a yellow cab, and the race was on.

On the shuttle, Kachenko opened his flip phone. His contacts were empty. He dialed the number from memory.

“Yes?” the voice answered, with a touch of the familiar impatience.

“He’s here.” Kachenko’s voice betrayed only a trace of an accent.

“Who’s there?”

“Jonas,” Kachenko said.

“Are you sure of it?” the voice asked him, after a silence.

Kachenko considered the question. Was he certain? He thought of the white hat, the broad grin, the clear expression of recognition…“Yes,” he said.

“Very well,” the voice said, and the person on the other end of the phone sighed. “You know what this means, and you know what you have to do.”

Kachenko closed the phone. He held it in his fist for the duration of the ride, watching the lights on the runway in the distance as the shuttle trundled along the access road.

The kid behind the Hertz desk told him he’d been upgraded, free of charge, and led Kachenko across the lot to a gray Suburban. Kachenko tossed his garment bag in back; he set the attaché case on the passenger’s seat. He found the pistol attached to the underside of the dashboard with packing tape, just as his instructions had promised it would be, along with a silencer and two extra magazines, and he screwed the silencer onto the pistol and checked to be sure the pistol was loaded before he started the vehicle. Opening his notebook, he punched the second of the two sets of coordinates he’d written down before he left Los Angeles into the GPS; he’d already determined he would have no time to go to his hotel.

On the highway, halfway between Kenner, the suburb where the airport was located, and the city itself, there’d been an accident. All five lanes on the interstate had backed up, and red brake lights irradiated the night, filling the windshield with a spectral glow. Gripping the wheel, Kachenko scanned the backs of the cars in front of him until he thought he saw that familiar white hat through the rear window of a yellow cab several car lengths ahead of him in one of the passing lanes, though he couldn’t be certain, as the cab’s window was filthy.

Traffic progressed at something less than a crawl. Like the spine of some antediluvian creature raising itself from the primordial muck, the highway stretched ahead of him, eastbound traffic retarded to a trickle while oncoming traffic streamed past, headlights glaring in the darkness. Kachenko consulted his GPS. Alongside the highway, the flashing red and yellow lights on the rescue vehicles played across the surface of a canal.

At the next exit, Kachenko signaled, and he nosed across two lanes and turned onto Veteran’s Boulevard. Driving through the suburbs, he observed the speed limit. Box stores, plaza malls, and family restaurant chains flanked the dual carriageway; cross streets disappeared into darkness. Traversing another canal, he entered New Orleans: on his right was the Office of Motor Vehicles, a gray monstrosity of a building rising like a tombstone into the night.

Here, his GPS seemed to have abandoned him. He found himself navigating a subdivision, crooked paving blocks jutting from the roadway. The SUV bounced over the seams between the blocks; twice, the Suburban bottomed out, its brakes grating as they locked.

“Son of a bitch.” Kachenko smacked the wheel.

He’d come to a dead end. On the other side of a cyclone fence, a railroad trestle drew a faint charcoal line through the darkness; behind him, the residential homes with their pristine lawns and carefully tended hedges seemed to have been dropped into that devastated landscape from some other part of the world, perhaps from someplace where disaster didn’t seem quite so imminent. Kachenko threw the truck into reverse, and he nearly backed into a garbage can as the Suburban bounced in and out of a massive pothole, or maybe it was a sinkhole, Christ, Kachenko wondering he hadn’t snapped an axle.

As he turned, his headlights swept a DETOUR sign with an arrow pointing to the left.

Kachenko signaled—one had to retain some sense of order in the midst of so much chaos, after all—and he piloted the SUV onto an empty boulevard named for some dead French king (one of the Louies, he would remember later). After he’d gone three blocks, he understood this detour would be interminable: though he scanned the near distance for another orange sign that would point him back to the path he’d been on, setting him on the way to downtown New Orleans, he knew he would never find it.

He pulled to the curb, and he punched the same set of coordinates into the GPS. Orange barrels marked the periphery of the construction zone; he had to drive the wrong way down a one-way street to escape the subdivision. Recalibrating, the GPS repeated in a bland voice that nevertheless seemed to excoriate him for having failed to obey its directive. Signaling, he turned, and he drove toward the center of the city at exactly five miles per hour over the speed limit; under the streetlights, he glanced at the gun on the seat beside him.

He parked several blocks down the street from the hotel and convention center on Poydras, which was clogged with yellow cabs. Stuffing the gun in his trousers, he adjusted his suit coat to cover it, and he locked the Suburban, which chirped, flashing its lights. The Wyndham rose from Poydras in a pillar of light. Approaching on foot, Kachenko thought he saw that familiar white hat enter the hotel between the marble columns, though he couldn't be certain.

Inside, the concierge, a bald-headed man of about fifty, asked if he could take Kachenko’s bags.

“I don’t have any bags,” Kachenko said, his eyes scanning the crowd over the other man’s shoulder for that white hat, trying to glimpse the banquet hall through the massive doorway at the other end of the lobby.

“Perhaps I can help you in some other way, sir?” The concierge leaned closer, trying to catch Kachenko’s eye, barring his passage. “You are staying at this hotel, I presume?”

Kachenko fixed on the man’s small black eyes. A hooked nose protruded from the concierge’s face like a beak; he’d already reached the age where his ears and his nose had begun to outgrow the rest of his face. Though he stood several inches taller than Kachenko, they had roughly the same build.

“Yes, please,” Kachenko said, wringing his hands. “I only meant I needed your help. Come this way, please…”

Stooped, bent—in spite of himself, intrigued—the concierge followed. In the hallway outside the men’s room, with the other man close on his heels, Kachenko stopped, turned, and drove his elbow into the concierge’s windpipe. The concierge’s larynx cracked; staggering, he grabbed his neck, his face purpling as he drew a wheezing breath. Before he could fall to the floor, Kachenko caught the concierge around the waist, and Kachenko dragged the concierge into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

In the handicapped stall, Kachenko snapped the other man’s neck, and he propped the concierge up on the seat, removing his suit coat and his shirt. Where the clothing had fit the concierge loosely, hanging from his frame, it fit Kachenko snugly. Yet it fit, Kachenko thought, shooting his wrists through the sleeves. Beneath his undershirt, the concierge’s white skin looked like a turkey buzzard’s, and Kachenko thought of his own childhood, that distant village: he experienced a patchwork recollection of children with tear-stained faces (had he been one of them?) kicking a soccer ball in the dirt and making way for the military vehicles rolling through. He didn’t know where he’d come from, didn’t know whether the memories were his or something he’d invented after seeing the evening news. Regardless, the years between then and now seemed a blank.

The concierge gave a last tremor of life, and his foot shot out, catching Kachenko’s shin. Out of reflex, Kachenko punched the dead man in the face. He stared at the other man as though he’d come back to life; then, kneeling in front of the toilet, he began to remove the concierge’s trousers.

“That son of a bitch isn’t getting my money,” he said. “He’s not getting there first.”

The words echoed in the empty bathroom.

His nose curled. The concierge had already voided his bowels.

He left the concierge on the toilet seat with a copy of the Baton Rouge Advocate he’d found on the tile in front of the baby changing station unfolded on his lap. He looked at himself in the mirror, squeezing a blackhead and splashing some water on his face before he left the room. Dressed in the top half of the concierge’s uniform, Kachenko crossed the lobby at a brisk pace, whistling to himself as he walked. Chandeliers glittered beneath the ribbed vault of the ceiling. The room seemed to hold the voices of everyone in it, echoing, with an air of hushed expectation, like a concert hall before the symphony starts. In the dining room, Kachenko stood next to a tray of bread puddings, scanning the rows of pillars along the perimeter of the room for that white hat.

The candidate occupied a position of honor at the center of the room. Six foot one, hair graying at the temples, scion of some local political dynasty, he projected the kind of benevolent grandfatherly charm that might have appealed to a populist reformer at either end of the political spectrum, though whether he was running for president, councilman, alderman, city coroner, or for the school board, much less what his politics were, Kachenko didn’t know; he only knew that in order to get paid, he had to finish the job, and he had to do it before Jonas did it. The white hat appeared on the other side of a pillar at the end of the banquet hall; then it disappeared again.

His hand on the butt of the pistol, which he’d stuffed in the pocket of his trousers, Kachenko crossed the room, weaving between a pair of waiters who followed him with their eyes. At the far end of the dining room, that white hat appeared between the pillars—and there, closer at hand, he thought he saw that same white hat on the other side of the room, and he didn’t know how Jonas had moved so quickly. Blinking sweat from his eyes, teeth gritted, as he approached the candidate’s table, he withdrew the pistol from his pocket, and he fired three shots at point-blank range into the candidate’s heart. Muffled by the silencer, the pistol’s reports sounded like a set of flapping wings. Kachenko knocked over the headwaiter, upsetting a dessert cart, scattering silverware across the floor. The candidate had risen halfway from his chair, as though he meant to shake Kachenko’s hand; he pitched over backwards, blood spreading across the white ruffles of his shirt beneath the tuxedo jacket, blue eyes glazing as they rolled upward in his skull, as though he were gazing at the bandstand.

Silence fell over the room. Kachenko kept walking. He dropped the pistol in a tureen of crab and corn bisque on a buffet cart and proceeded at a calm but steadily accelerating pace toward the doors.

As he pushed the doors open, a woman—the candidate’s wife—shrieked.

Kachenko emerged into a long hall decorated with Chinese lanterns. At the end of the hall, a doorway opened onto the street. As Kachenko walked the length of the hall, he brushed past a man in a white linen suit wearing a hat similar or perhaps identical to the hat Kachenko had seen Jonas wearing in the airport; he saw several other similarly attired men lurking along the periphery of the hall, but none of their faces cracked open in recognition; none of them seemed to notice him.

He stripped off the concierge’s jacket as he descended the marble steps in front of the hotel and stuffed it in a garbage can by the curb.

Wearing his undershirt, he crossed the street, digging in his pockets for the keys to the Suburban. In the distance, a siren shrilled. Kachenko kept walking, and he didn’t look back; he didn’t want to know what was happening behind him.

Switchblade III, a review by Rusty Barnes

Switchblade Issue III boasts a number of contributors familiar to anyone who follows the small press crime scene, writers like Eric Beetner, Morgan Boyd and Preston Lang. As well, there are a number of writers I know mostly from their Twitter feeds and the occasional scuttlebutt. I realize it's still early on in Switchblade's career, but it's safe to say they've become prominent in a short time. All told, editor Scotch Rutherford has put together a well-done and entertaining issue here.

Some highlights include the aforementioned Preston Lang, who gives us "Press it Down," a story about a former musician turned mayhem artist, a granny who turns out to be skilled in the use of a golf club. I've found his stories always deserve more love than they receive: he's well-published, but merits further recognition, and kudos to Rutherford for recognizing that and giving him a spot in multiple issues.

In "Burning Snow," Morgan Boyd writes about how even a simple job like shoveling snow can become a criminal web of intrigue and violence. Told by our narrator Max, who's got a secret or two himself, the story ranges across the snowy landscape, artfully and simply revealed, to an unforgettable description of a fat man in flagrante delicto. The ending is a punch in the gut that  tells us what some of us could still stand to learn: some people never have the luck.

Eric Beetner's piece, "Family Secrets," about a child who witnesses a gruesome crime and is forced into a criminal act himself, is something I've found typical of Beetner, in novel or short story mode. His work is well-paced and  deftly written, always in service to the narrative, not flashy. It's solid prose exemplified by lines like "I didn't buy the fake sincerity in Mom's voice when she told me Dad would be okay. But beyond wondering if my Dad would live or die, I tried to figure out how in the world he ever come to be shot."

Other stories are largely successful but not necessarily my bag.  I recognize the effort each of the writers here, though, and I appreciate too the effort it takes to put out a quality journal several times a year. It's an often Herculean effort sustained only by the love you get from writers and occasionally from readers, and certainly not in monetary rewards. The kinks in the production process notwithstanding, I expect Switchblade to have a long successful career highlighting the best the small press crime scene has to offer for as long as Rutherford can keep the magic going on the back end.

The stories are out there waiting, and I see the job of small press crime journals like Switchblade, Pulp Modern and Tough to bring them to the forefront and provide an alternative--however the individual journals define that-- to the larger venue/larger payday every writer generally shoots for. Our job is to get large in vision, but stay small in practice, to highlight writers before they reach mainstream success, and to bring attention to those mainstream writers who still need the boost. Their success is our success. Every Switchblade issue, every Pulp Modern issue, every story, every time we get our names out there in the small press crime scene, is a success for all of us.

St. Girard's Ink Den, by Mark Rapacz

I woke up at noon because it sounded like there was a cat-fight in my yard. I went outside and instead there was a raccoon biting its tail. I didn’t know what to do. The sun was hot, and I was still sweating from a restless sleep. The raccoon was sick. Likely rabies. It foamed at the mouth and gnawed on its tail. It sounded like it was hacking something up, but at the same time it shrieked like a dying cat. It retched a bloody mess onto my driveway. I realized I was watching for a little too long, but my neighbor came up to me and said he could shoot it with a pistol he had. He was always looking to help since I cleaned his gutters last spring. I said, no, I’ll take care of it.

By the time I grabbed my shovel, a group of neighborhood kids had gathered in my yard. I swung and stabbed at the animal’s neck. I chopped down, again and again, and the resilience of its neck muscles was surprising. It shook its head back and forth, growled, and foamy mucus flew from its mouth. I kept hacking and I wanted the kids to turn away. My neighbor grabbed a bat and hit it in the side, but his swings only agitated the animal. Finally, as the sweat beaded off my forehead and dripped onto the little beast, its legs started twitching, and then it died. I buried it in my garden, and went back to bed.

Lying in the still sweat-soaked sheets, I rolled over to wake up Megan to tell her what happened. She pretended to sleep. It was twelve forty-five. I would get up at one o’clock and make some coffee. I would pour Megan a cup and make her breakfast, but she wouldn’t eat it. I would keep pouring her coffee, and I would tell her all about the raccoon, but she would just read the paper. We would stumble around until two o’clock when I would go to the parlor, and she would head off to work as a waitress. She would tell me she hates her boss, and that she needs a new job. I would agree with her. We would kiss each other goodbye and then we would tell each other we would miss one another. I would spend all day inking other people’s flesh, and then I would come home and be with Megan again, and we’d go to sleep. I would wake up the next day at one o’clock and then make breakfast.

***

I owned the oldest Tattoo parlor in the Bay Area, or so it said on our neon sign that didn’t work--St. Girard’s Ink Den, Oldest Tattoo Parlor in the Bay Area--but it was nowhere near the oldest. It was a burrito shop when I ended up on this coast twenty years ago. My shop attracted the younger crowd who got tattoos that didn’t mean shit. They’d be kids coming in after finals or after humping in a dorm room, wanting to put a name on their arm, or on their pelvic bone.

Between appointments, I’d work on my paintings. I never thought they were any good, but some artsy kid from university said they were something else, and he bought one. It was a dragon eating a blood-filled egg. The kid said there’s a market for this type of work. He also told me another time, “You have some natural skills,” after I finished up a chintzy Chinese symbol. I didn’t know what it said. The book translated it into meaning something like, “luck,” “providence,” or “god;” something like that. For all I know it could mean “sausage,” or likely, “idiot” for getting such a cheap tattoo. Although the kid wasn’t referring to his arm, he was pointing at a pencil sketch I did of a skeleton princess. She had bones for a body, and a rotten fleshy head, but I did my best to make her look beautiful. The kid went on and said I reminded him of an artist that started with an S. He asked if I knew the guy, or had seen the guy’s work. I said the only work I see is in my head or in these tattoo books.

I ran into the same kid, one late night, when I was heading to my car and walking by one of the college bars. He looked at me, and he was obviously drunk, but he wanted to talk. He was average-sized and good-looking too. He wore all black. Smart kid. He said he wanted another tattoo and wondered if I had the time to do it right then and there. It was a bone cross. Terrible, but he had done it himself on a bar napkin. I don’t ink drunken kids, so I told him he should keep the design and look it over tomorrow to decide if he’d want it. He looked off into the distance and started saying a lot of stuff about art and inspiration, the way that type does when they’ve had too much to drink. Then he looked at me.

“Where are you from? Chicago?”

“Never been, where you from?”

“No, I mean what school did you go to? NYU, LA? What?”

I’m a disheveled guy, wild hair, wild beard, ratty clothes, but I’ve never been mistaken for an artist before. I looked at the kid like I was his parent and I said, “Wouldn’t you like to know.” He smiled like he knew something, and I smiled like I knew what it was he knew, but I didn’t. “Later, man,” I said, and I kept walking.

***

Megan left me a burger and fries from the restaurant in the fridge. The ketchup on the burger reminded me of the raccoon remnants so I couldn’t eat it. I poured myself a 49ers souvenir cup of whisky and tea over ice and sat on the front step. It was late and Megan was already in bed. I watched the sporadic traffic drive by and the brown clouds skirt around the moon. Across the street my neighbor was watching television. He never slept. I wanted it to rain. I drifted in and out of a surreal buzz from the booze with thoughts of Megan sleeping alone in my room. Megan used to cut herself. I never actually saw her do it. Not once. She could have been over it, I don’t know. I tried not to spend much time looking at the scars. They were there, but she was too, and that was the important part. I met her at my shop. She wanted a tattoo, one of those tattoos that chicks get these days, the kind of Asian or Mediterranean thing at the small of their backs. I talked her out of the tattoo. I’ve seen tattoo fads come and go, and I didn’t want to mess up her perfect back.

“Man with the style of a hippie with a biker problem gives me advice?” was what she said.

“You don’t need to listen to me. You just have a nice back. Don’t want to ruin it.” I didn’t know if that was inappropriate.

Then she asked with a glint in her eye, “Really?”

We settled on a butterfly near her navel. Classic. As my needle approached she got this look in her eye. It was excitement and pleasure wrapped into one like the countless yin-yang tattoos I’ve inked on a lot of stranger’s bodies.

When I finished, she came out of a sort of trance and sat up.

The first thing she said, was “My boyfriend is such a cocksucker.”

Surprised, I tried to listen to all the pains this cocksucker had put her through--and they were many--but I was also more interested in dressing her tattoo. Before I knew it, I said, “What kind of cocksucker wouldn’t love you?”

She laughed. It was a fake laugh. “You don’t know him.”

Then she started to cry. She was distant and a mess, so of course she found me. I hugged her because I thought that was what she wanted. She didn’t hug back. She asked me to take her somewhere safe, so I made the mistake of bringing her home, and we didn’t do anything. She slept two days straight.

Back on my step, focusing on my neighbor’s television late at night with Megan still asleep, I thought of her past, and I thought of her as someone’s kid. She wasn’t too much older than the university kids, and I’m much older than that. Inappropriate, most likely. I went back in and topped off my 49ers cup to show them how big of a fan I am and went to bed and lay next to Megan. Her eyes were shut and drool was crusting on her smooth cheek.

“I think I need another tattoo, babe,” she mumbled. “Could we go soon?”

***

It was another week and it was full of Chinese kanji, barbed-wire armbands, and wiggly things that people drew themselves. People get tattoos with no meaning attached to them. Tattoos should mean something, it is a brand, and it is personal, and you sure as shit better want it on you for the rest of your life. These kids don’t imagine what their tattoo will look like when their skin goes soft and saggy, when the ink will fade and lines will blur. They don’t know their armband will look like a blue smudge years from now, and what did it mean? Still, I tell every customer that it looks great. They all leave happy.

A girl with a black eye came in with her bulldog-looking boyfriend, and he paid for her to get a tattoo high up on her inner thigh that said Chacho. I noticed she already had another name on her other inner thigh that said Nathaniel. I wondered who gave her the black eye, and then I told them to have a nice day as she walked out bow-legged.

The arty kid came back, and he had his bar napkin with the bone cross, but he didn’t want to talk about the tattoo. He wanted to talk art, so he reached into his backpack and handed me a book about an artist whose name I couldn’t pronounce. He told me to really look at pages 56 through 79 because they were his later works, and they reminded him of my work. He even told me some titles. Real dark shit. The kid was right. I did appreciate it. Then we talked more about art, inspiration, all that shit I hated, but with the kid it was all right. I let the kid roll himself a joint as he spoke endlessly about his professors and what they would tell him and how they’re all posers and dumbfucks. He offered me a drag. I told him I stayed away from the stuff.

“You do anything else?” he asked, like I’d be interested.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, other shit man. You know what I mean.”

“I do whisky.”

He looked at me--condescending. Disappointed that I no longer did other shit, whatever he meant by that. I called him on it.

“What do you got?”

“What do you want?”

“It’s not rocket science to get a prescription out here.”

“I’m not talking about weed. I can get everything else.” He chuckled, and he looked quick to my arms to tell me that he knew I knew he saw the few dimes of shiny scar tissue on my arms.

“Ah, I see,” I said. “You want a better look,” and I put my arm under the light so we could see a history I had intended to forget. “The skin is dead there from abscesses. Pretty cool, huh?” I said because the kid wanted me to impress him.

He was delighted. “That is what I’m talking about. Things are different now, though. Smoother kick--no needle. No spoon. No--” he waved his hand to dismiss my scars like they were nothing but pinpricks. “Whatever you junkies did in your day,” he said.

I took my arm from the light and we sat in that silence as if we were waiting for something to break. Maybe it did.

“Pills, man,” he finally said. “We’re flooded. If you want pills, I got pills for you. All I’m saying.”

I leaned back in my chair and thought about the many ways I would like to dismember the kid. I thought about my shovel and the raccoon and its shallow grave in my garden.

“Sounds a little weak for me,” I said to further delight this kid and see how far he wanted to take the mystery I was creating for myself--for him.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a prescription bottle. He shook it seductively as if he were jerking it or me off.

“People like it,” the dumb braggart said.

“I’m sure they do,” I said and he understood what I was saying and he graciously didn’t push it any further. He put the bottle in his pack and changed the subject back to art and the meaning of the squiggly mess upon his forearm. It took me a moment to realize it was supposed to be the bone cross on the bar napkin.

“I told you to wait on that,” I said.

“I was drunk.”

“They’re not supposed to ink when the client’s drunk. Illegal.”

“She was drunk, too,” he chuckled and wanted me to laugh with him. I didn’t.

“Think you can clean this up?” he asked.

“I can,” I said.

***

The first day Megan had off, we went to the shop. She wanted another tattoo and she had this idea. She always just tells me her ideas, and then I do them with as much care as I can. She has me do a tattoo when she’s not feeling right, when things are down, when she’s itchy. I know she needs one when she starts scratching her scars. She scratches until they bleed, and I ask her why, and she says because it’s easier to do it than to not do it. I try to understand it and tell myself that I do. I don’t.

She gets in her zone. She’s on my bench, and I am touching her, and I am inking her, but she’s not there. She’s not in the room. I hear her breaths, and slight wince of pain. I read somewhere that there’s a chemical that’s released in the blood stream when consistent pain is administered; it has a numbing effect like opium. Her toes are now the heads of her favorite birds, and her left foot is a wooded path up a mountain, while her right is a radiant sun either rising or setting over the sea. Both legs are full of mythical creatures, and dying things. Things are decaying, birthing, and some are being reborn. There’s a phoenix on her hip and an elephant trunk down her forearm that covers many of her scars. Her ears have tattooed earrings, and on the back of her neck there are four dots that are symbolic of something in another country. Her back is becoming my masterpiece. When things get bad, we work on her back. I finish, and she comes back to me. “Did you hear the rain?”

“That was the faucet,” I said.

“What?”

“I was washing my hands.”

***

A couple weeks later the kid was back in the shop with another sketch. He wanted it on his arm, up on the shoulder, where a lot of men get their most important tattoos. His was of a Christ-like figure being crucified on a swastika. Another cross. Kind of. He said it says something about society. When I finished it, I told him it was great and that I really dug the vivid imagery, like I really saw what he was going for. He explained a lot about what the piece did for him and what it said about everything and it all sounded like bullshit.

“So you’re the artist. You do all the tattoos, do you have any?” he said as he lingered with his backpack. If he opened it again, I planned to deck him in the mouth.

I only had one, and I never show anyone. It’s on the top of my pelvic bone. It’s a little butterfly with a flower near it. There’s a looping dotted line following the butterfly, symbolizing its flutter. The butterfly is headed toward the flower to drink its nectar. I thought it was really pretty. It’s hard to see with all the gray hair that has started to grow around it. I’ve begun to call them weeds in my flower garden.

He laughed hysterically.

“The master of tattoos has that? You must’ve been high when you got it. Tell me you were high.” This coming from a kid with a swastika tattooed to his arm.

“I wasn’t.”

“Why don’t you just remove it?”

“Right,” I started to put my equipment away. “Never thought of that.”

“Just get rid of it. I’ll help you with a new one, you know, something that says something, not that blah.” Then he stuck a finger in his mouth, fake retching.

“I’m fine with it,” I said.

Then Megan walked in with our lunch. She was always good at reminding me that I needed to eat. She didn’t come straight over to see me, which was odd. The kid quit being so gabby, and everyone stared at each other like they do when the air gets thick and tense. I turned to the kid, and I said, “I’d like you to meet Megan. She’s one of my best customers.” Sometimes she gets uncomfortable when I tell people we’re seeing each other because of our age difference.

The kid quickly got up, pulled his sleeve down and said, “Good to see you, Megan.”

“Yeah. Nice to see you, too, Chris,” she said.

I never knew the kid’s name was Chris.

I looked at them confused and thought the old man thought of how kids these days just somehow know each other from the internet and their Snapchat.

Kids. Just fucking kids.

***

Megan gave me some story about meeting the kid at a party somewhere after her shift at the restaurant. I decided to believe her and I also decided to close early. Canceling my appointments relieved both of us. Forgiveness was something I learned and it was easiest to get there if you didn’t ask too many questions.

We went to the Presidio and we had one of those picnics that people in love have where they sit in the sun, look at how blue the sky is, and say nice things to one another. We were both awkward. We weren’t used to going out in public together in the daylight.

Megan kept asking if something was wrong because when she’d talk to me I didn’t have much to say.

“Hey, how’d the day go, any really terrible tattoos that people wanted?--I mean beside that awful swastika Jesus crap Chris got.” I didn’t like her saying the kid’s name again.

“Nah, nothing beside the Nazi shit. But they’re all pretty awful.”

And then we didn’t say anything beyond what we saw right in front of us and I tried to find comfort in our discomfort as we watched Frisbee players run around on the grass. She was sitting cross-legged and I had my head in her lap. She looked down at my face. She looked sad. She pinched my right ear lobe and asked sincerely what was wrong.

“Nothing. Is there anything wrong with you?”

I got up and started walking toward the top of the bluff that overlooked the Bay. I looked at the Golden Gate Bridge and sun on the water and wished I were back home in the woods, far from the coast. Megan stood next to me. She got hold of my hand, and when my forearm rubbed against hers, I could feel her raised and bumpy scars. I noticed the wind.

“You ain’t cold?” I said.

There was a silence, and then a pause. “Not really. They should’ve called this the windy city, right?”

“Chicago must’ve had it first.”

“What’s Chicago like?”

“Big, populated, windy, kind of like this, but shittier.”

“Why don’t you tell me stories like you used to? You’re being quiet. What’s wrong with you, old man?”

“You know I was married before?”

Megan said, “No shit. You’ve told me about a dozen times.”

I knew I had told her before, but I had to make sure, so I said, “So you know how it ended and everything.”

She didn’t say anything I just felt her head nuzzle into my neck.

“I showed that kid my tattoo. He laughed.”

“Oh, babe,” she said and she stretched her arms around my body and laid her head into the pit of my arm. “Chris is a fucking asshole.”

***

My back hurt from leaning over this large drag queen all afternoon who wanted a tattoo the length of her spine. Painful for the both of us, and worse in the heat. An impossible wave of humid stink settled over the city and the Bay wasn’t taking any of it out to sea. People were all trying to stay cool and that meant business was slow. I closed the shop early and headed home.

When I got home, heat lines rose out of the tar in my driveway. I went into the house and opened all of the windows. I never realized how much of a mess my house was. I determined right then and there I would clean it and get things organized. It was time for a change. I didn’t expect Megan home till her shift was done around two, so I thought it’d be a nice surprise her if there weren’t dirty dishes in the sink and our bedroom had clothes that were folded.

For extra motivation, I first went to the kitchen and filled a souvenir cup to the brim with tea and whisky and organized my thoughts in the heat on my step. I decided maybe it was time Megan and I hit the road. San Francisco wasn’t good for her. Our future was north in Seattle, or maybe even further into Canada. I didn’t know for sure. The sky was yellowy dust. It looked like it so painfully wanted to be a nice clear day that it was stressing itself out. My feet ached. I looked at my truck. It had gone 200,000 miles too far. I started doing economics in my head. It was going to work out, I was sure of that.

When I went back into the house, I decided the bedroom was where I’d start. Megan spent most of her time in there, so I’d spend most of my time making it look good. The hallway had a peculiar cool dry feel to it and it felt dirty, because it was dirty, but dirtier than usual. It was in the air. Another thing I determined I’d somehow fix. I came to the door. It was only open a crack.

A morning light flooded the room even though it was five o’clock. Her foot with the bird tattoos hung off the bed. Megan lay there like a child. She looked nice, a young sort of nice, sleeping so peacefully in the mistaken dawn. I walked over to the bed and kissed her cold cheek. Her face was always cold, a circulation thing she’d say. She was sure to get shit from her boss at the restaurant for missing work like this. Like it mattered. We were leaving and she’d be happy to leave with me. I leaned down to kiss her again on her forehead. She was unmoved, oblivious. The bedspread was tangled a bit, so I adjusted it to tuck her in. When I pulled back the spread there it was: a pill bottle. Possibly Chris’s pill bottle. It looked like a trinket that should be atop an old woman’s piano. It was terrifying in its normality. I could’ve dragged her to the garden and buried her with the raccoon. But she breathed like a child. Slept like a child. She was a child. I was, too.

I checked her pulse, her temperature--as I had done for others--and then tucked her in. I pocketed the bottle to talk about it later and kissed her again.

I ended up outside on my step for I don’t know how long. The sky was closer. Trees that I’ve seen thousands of times were misshapen. Houses that once stood straight and tall now looked parabolic. It was dark by the time I left.

***

I spent the night in the shop. Not sleeping. Waiting mostly. I waited for dawn, pacing and watching for real living people to pass in front of my parlor. I kept all of the lights on and stared out the window. I could see my whole shop in the reflection: the barber shop chair that I liked to use for arm tattoos, the massage bench I liked to use for back tattoos, the same bench where I met Megan. There was my counter, my dentist table with needles and dyes on it, my crumpled handkerchief, and the overhead light. I could see some of my paintings shoved in the corner. I hoped the sun would come up soon.

I stayed up as long as there were fingers left in the bottom of my bottle. I was expecting a call from Megan, but I really had no idea how long she’d be out. I started to get anxious, like I did something wrong. I was paranoid, weak, sullen and drunk. I couldn’t stop fidgeting, so I called her, multiple times, but there was no answer. Near dawn I passed out.

I woke up to fists hitting my store window and a silhouette of a person at my door. For a moment, I thought Megan, but then I came to my senses. This person’s hands were big and ham-fisted and there were others with him. He started to pound again.

I struggled out of my chair and I felt my age course down my legs. I was no longer drunk. At the door, my stomach dropped. Cops. I didn’t want to know, but I already knew because the past is the real cocksucker.

After I did my best to convince them I had nothing to do with it; after I said I thought she was recovering and that I didn’t supply her the pills; after I said I had checked on her--really checked on her; after I said she seemed not OK, but OK for what she’d done; after I told them that I didn’t have any family in the city and she didn’t either; after I told them for tenth time I didn’t know why I said she was my wife because I meant girlfriend; after I told them I didn’t run and I wasn’t fucking hiding; after I said of course I knew my neighbor and it was not unusual he stopped by in the middle of the night; after I told them to leave and assured them I wouldn’t run because I was of course going to fucking go to the coroner’s--

After all this and other things I cannot remember, I went back to my stool. I sat like a statue in my shop that felt narrower, with a ceiling that was lower, and surrounded by needles that were larger than I remembered.

I prepared my kit, swabbed my arm and waited for that gentle whir when the needle would track my flesh.