Bumper, fiction by M.E. Purfield

 Miki humps the rear driver side of the car. Oh, is the poor baby okay? she moans. Will it live? I am surprised she does not slap it like a horse. Maybe she does not want to upset the driver more.

I cannot help but laugh and flap my hands. This is ridiculous. Since moving to Jersey City she has to park on the street. The house she bought came with no driveway despite being a three-level Victorian. Also, finding a paid parking spot led to a lot of dead ends. But changing the car to different sides of the street for the sweeper so that she does not get a ticket is not the problem. The problem is the dangers of parallel parking.

Miki and I had just gotten back from Newport Mall and found a perfect spot for her black Taurus. Just a few houses away from ours. Two cars sandwich either side, but that has never been an issue. Miki excels at parallel parking. I cannot imagine doing it when I am up for my license. If I am allowed to get one. Miki slipped in easily but accidentally tapped the silver Jaguar in front of us. Something that happens all the time when you park like that.

Hey, hey! the hefty Asian man shouted from the sidewalk. He wears suit pants and a baggy white shirt and red tie. We have seen him before. He always walks his tiny dog up and down the street and lives in the apartment building across from us. His wife or girlfriend was standing there too. A few feet away. Looking down. Kind of submissive. Pretty. Much skinnier than her partner. She wears a light summer dress and flats. Maybe they are on their way to a party.

You hit my car, the Asian man said and jerked his arms. He moved into the street and inspected the damage. What damage? It was a tap. Also, the Taurus bumper is so chipped and scratched how could he tell if we had damage. Nonetheless, the man took out his cell phone, and I guess, took pictures or recorded video.

Give me a break, Miki said and shook her head. This guy has to be a dream.

The man finished his inspection, and the couple entered the car. We must not have had damaged it since he did not say anything else. The woman with her head still down blushed. Was she embarrassed or mad? I imagined the man doing this a lot. Maybe she is embarrassed? If she is mad, she would say something mean to us, right?

Maybe we should call an ambulance, Miki shouts as she caresses the Jaguars rear. Call 911. She then kisses it and pats it like a burping baby.

I glance around to see if anyone else finds this funny. We are the only ones around. But I’m sure others would not find it funny.

The car starts up, and Miki steps onto the cracked sidewalk. The Jaguar carefully and perfectly pulls out of the spot as if giving Miki a driving lesson and drives off.

What a jerk, Miki says, and heads for the house.

I stomp my foot and point to our car.

She stops and tightens her eyes.

Oh, right, she says. The bags.

She must have been having too much fun that she forgot we bought stuff at the mall.

**

School does not start up for another week. I will start my freshman year at Nair High School. It is one of the few in Jersey City that takes autistic kids. I miss my old school the Gertrude Stein School in New York. And my friends, even though I chat with them all the time online. Mostly I spend my days in the house while Miki handles the renovations and updates the pipes and wiring with Julian. I cannot concentrate on my favorite movies. Not even the Argento movies. PS4 games bore me lately. Nothing seems to help the intense anxiety and over-thinking that haunts my head. Scenarios of how the teachers and kids will hate me keep me up at night and distract me during the day. I know that the kids are autistic too, and the teachers will have some kind of understanding, but my brain does not work that way. It always focuses on the negative when big change slaps me like a tsunami.

Prudence, Miki says at the door to my room. Paint stains her t-shirt. Not house paint. She has been working on a new series of paintings despite the house’s total chaos the last month. What are you doing?

It should be obvious. I am lying on my bed in the air conditioning and looking up at the freshly painted ceiling. I sit up and shrug and shake my head.

Why don’t you go outside and walk around? Miki says. Explore the neighborhood. Just be home for dinner. Miki has gotten better at making dinner. Not that the meals are fancier but more plane for my palette.

I nod again and slide off the bed.

Miki rubs my back as I pass her and asks if I have my phone. She bought me one with a speaking app so I can type in what I want to say, and the app shouts it out to neuro-typicals. I hardly use it. Then again, I have few people to talk to around here.

I step onto the paint chipped porch that wraps around to the side of the house. Despite being outside and suffering the abuse of weather and time, it is still in good condition and with no termites. At least that is what Julian says. So far, he has been fixing the house up nice, so he must know what he is talking about.

The air is too humid and hot. And quiet. It must be too ugly for people to hang outside. I walk down the broken concrete path to the metal mesh gate. I stand on the sidewalk for a moment and wonder how old a tree has to be to break through and reveal its roots.

Coming down the street I see the Asian man walking his little dog. I want to know what kind it is, but I always forget to look on the internet. Not that I want one. I am not a dog person. Then again, I never had a pet, so I do not know what kind of person I am.

I could ask the man what kind of dog it is.

No. He glances at me and then crosses the street. He must be avoiding us. He never did that before. The man enters his brick apartment building, and I am the only one on the street again.

With a few hours to kill, I walk up Palisade to Riverview Park where the action seems to be. From one of the benches under a tree, I watch little kids run around on the grass and mommies, or nannies push strollers and dogs walk people. After an hour, I grow bored and decide to go home but not without buying Italian ice from the cart on the corner.

Excuse me, miss, someone says from behind.

About to walk through the gate of the house, I turn around to see the Asian woman who lives across the street. I smile and stare at her chin. She smiles back but not as confident. Her meekness upsets me, and I do not know why. I am hardly a threat. No reason to be scared of my slight frame and pretty face.

Do you remember me? she asks.

I nod and point to her building.

Right, she says. You can’t talk. Correct.

I nod again and shrug.

That’s okay, her monotone voice says. I have something to say.

A sour feeling swirls in my stomach. Will she yell at me for Miki humping her car? Slap me? Push me down and kick me? Call me a freak? I better finish my ice fast. I do not want anyone to confuse it for my blood if I should bleed on the sidewalk.

I want to apologize for the other day, she says.

I raise my brows.

Phil is really a nice person, but he has been going through a hard time. I hope you won’t hold it against us. We do enjoy living here and do not want to make enemies.

I nod and then shake my head. I will not hold it against them.

She must understand what I mean and lightly laughs.

Oh good, she says. My name is Lele, by the way.

She holds out her hand. I eye it for a second. I know I am supposed to shake it, but what if it feels sweaty and squishy? Like I am holding a snail. It is so hot today that I do not even want to touch my own hands.

Lele takes her hand back and says That’s okay. I don’t like formality either. She waves and says, Have a nice evening, and thank you for listening.

**

I ran into Jodie today, Miki says.

Jodie Walker lives up the street with his parents in the blue house. He and Miki grew up together. So far, he seems nice and fills us in on neighborhood gossip. Miki says I can trust him. I often wonder if there had been anything serious between them before Miki moved away at fifteen to New York.

I flash her eye contact while I eat my chicken nuggets and corn. No sauce, please. Miki picks at her breaded chicken cutlets and corn and sauteed potatoes.

Taking my signal that I am listening, she says, So I asked him about that couple with the Jaguar. He says that Phil and Lele are okay. At least they have always been nice to him. When I told him about what happened, he said that he wasn’t surprised. Last month Phil had the rear window of the car smashed. Cops never found out who did it. No surprise there.

No wonder Phil is so sensitive about his car. Or is it? Based on that one incident, he seemed to treat the car better than his girlfriend. He totally ignored Lele, and when he did acknowledge her, he bossed her into the car.

Another thing I found out was that Phil is really a woman, she says. Or born that way, I mean.

I flinch.

No shit, Miki says. A transexual. I’m so used to seeing men to women, not the other way around. Fooled me good. Good for him.

I nod. Fooled me too. I assume Lele was born a girl. Now I am going to have to study her to be sure. But if she really is a girl, what does that make her? A lesbian or straight? Interesting. I will have to ask her one day.

But he’s still an asshole, Miki says.

I screw my mouth to the side and shake my head.

Well, he is, she says. It’s just a car. He’s not the only asshole in the world like that. You see these big brawny guys go all apeshit with roid rage about being tapped. Tapped. It’s like they’re connected by the nerves to them. Their heart is probably made of metal too.

I flip my palms out. Maybe. But if Phil has a woman’s heart, then would he be doing it for the same reasons as those brawny guys.

**

The next morning I sit at the kitchen table and eat a bowl of honey nut oats with no milk when the doorbell rings. I am surprised I could hear it with Julian working in the basement. All morning he has been sawing and banging.

I shove a whopping spoonful in my mouth and leave to answer the door. Miki is already in the hall and opening it when I arrive. A cop stands outside. He is crazy enough to wear long sleeves even though it feels hotter than yesterday. He seems short for a cop. Skinny too. He takes off his cap and has a shaved head like most cops have and tucks it under his arm.

Ms. Michelina Radicci? he asks.

Depends, she says. Who wants to know?

The cop frowns and sighs. Maybe his day has not been going well.

My name is Officer Reyes, and I’m investigating damage to a car on your street.

My car? she asks.

No, Mr. Phillip Fong’s car. A 1985 silver Jaguar.

Oh my God, Miki moans.

I come up behind her. I can not believe Phil called the police on us. Just after Lele apologized. Maybe he does not see the same way she does. And we are supposed to take her word that he is a nice guy.

Reyes pulls out a notepad and pen. So, you are Ms. Radicci?

Unfortunately, she says.

Where were you between the hours of 8 PM last night and 7 AM this morning? he asks.

Here, Miki says. And this is total bullshit.

He writes in the pad and asks, Is there anyone who can swear to that?

I was with my sister, she says, pointing.

I give a little wave and smile. He nods and returns to his notes.

And you are? he asks.

Her name is Prudence. Same last name, Miki says. She has nothing to do with it. She’s only fifteen. No license.

I feel the cop eye me.

Your sister has been in your sight during those hours, he asks.

I nod.

Yes or no?

She can’t speak, Miki says.

The cop tilts his head to the side. In doubt. Maybe.

Do you two sleep in the same room? he asks.

No, Miki says. We have separate rooms.

I was asking her.

I shake my head. Miki and I watched TV in the living room until 11 PM, and then we separated to our own rooms for bed. I bet if I say just that, he will think Miki snuck out between 11 and 7.

She has nothing to do with it, Miki says.

I understand that, the cop says. Reyes looks back at Miki. So you admit that you damaged Fong’s Jaguar?

There is no damage and I can prove it, Miki says. He took pictures right before he drove off. If I damaged the car while parking, then why didn’t he call the cops right then? I mean, why wait three days to call the cops on someone?

Reyes frowns. I think you should come with me outside.

**

Holy crap, Miki whispers.

My eyes widen.

Someone spray-painted on one side of the Jaguar: FUCKING QUEER SCUMBAG HUMAN WASTE. The rest of the car seems fine as far as damages.

Phil and Lele stand on the other side of the street by the police car. Phil steps back and forth like he wants to run over to us. Attack us or make the cop do it. No, he cannot be so uncivilized. Both are dressed nice for work. Maybe office jobs. Anger. No. Rage covers Phils face. Lele seems worried. Maybe she will have to reign Phil in. Maybe again.

So you admit to damaging the car? Officer Reyes asks.

No fucking way, Miki says and shakes her head. She points to the writing on the car. I had nothing to do with this. This. This is from a sick and angry mind.

I blurt a laugh and quickly cover it when Miki glares at me to shut up.

She’s lying, Phil shouted. She’s crazy. She had sex with my car.

As tense as the situation felt, I could not help but laugh again. I turn around and show them my back until I can control myself.

Reyes asks Miki, You have something to say about that? The fornication with the Jaguar?

Now you make it sound like bestiality, Miki says. They didn’t tell you what happened the other day.

I would like to hear your version, he says and prepares his pad.

Miki tells him what happened coming back from the mall that day. Reyes shakes his head and holds a straight face as he takes notes. I am impressed by his control.

I have no reason to do that to their car, Miki says. If you knew me, you would agree. Shit, I don’t even use spray paint. Hard to control.

Uh-huh, Reyes says. He probably has no idea my sister is a world-known artist.

I wave my hand to get the cop’s attention and point to my eyes then to Miki and then to the car.

Did anyone see your sister? Reyes asks.

I nod.

No. I have no witnesses yet.

There has to be something on camera somewhere, Miki says. Seems like if the city doesn’t have one capturing it, then the houses do.

We noticed that a lot of neighbors had them aimed at their porch since thieves like to take dropped off packages by mail carriers.

I’ll be checking it out, he says.

Reyes says we can go and will be in touch for follow up questions.

As he crosses the street, Phil shouts: You are letting her go. She vandalized my car. That’s a crime.

Lele glances at me and frowns as if in apology. I am not sure, but I think she believes that we did not do it. She appears embarrassed by Phil. Maybe his anger about situations is getting to her.

How am I going to drive that to the body shop? Phil asks. Everyone will stare at me. You think my life isn’t hard enough that I have to sit behind those words for the world to see?

Reyes holds his hands up to placate Phil and speaks so softly that I cannot hear him.

C’mon, Miki says and taps my arm.

**

Yeah, man, Jodie says. People are talking about it. But don’t let it get to you. They’re always talking. You should see them on the Jersey City Height Facebook page. Walla-walla and judgment all the time. And that’s just for the stupid stuff.

He sits in our living room and sort of watches a movie with us. Since we started it, all we have been doing is talking. Jodie shares the couch with Miki while I sit on the floor in front of them. They both have one leg on the cushion and face each other. He wears cargo shorts and a Joy Division t-shirt. I catch him checking out Miki’s body dressed in sweat pants and a Sonic Youth tee.

It’s insane, Miki says. I didn’t do it, and now you’re telling me that my neighbors have already made a judgment about Prudence and me. I bet the cop isn’t going to find any proof it was me.

Think someone is setting you up.

I don’t see how. I don’t know anyone in the neighborhood except for you and your mom.

Didn’t piss off someone before you left?

At fifteen, she asks. Who didn’t I piss off?

Pissed me off.

Jodie smiles and wiggles his brows.

So maybe it was you.

Maybe Prudy did it? She’s of that age. She probably drives you crazy all day.

Shut up, Miki mutters. Prudence is my best side. If she wasn’t there, I would have done more than hump the car. And I don’t mean spray painting his car.

I make a dirty face at him and stick out my tongue.

See, he says and points. Trouble.

**

For the next few days, it seems like Phil has not brought his car in to remove the paint. He covers it with a weather tarp made for the Jaguar. A big shiny silver blob. But he moves it for the sweeper. One time while walking around, I saw it parked a block away. He must be doing it at night when no one sees. Poor guy. I hear it is impossible to find parking in the AM hours.

Officer Reyes so far has not contacted us for follow up questions. Fed up Miki calls and speaks to him on the phone.

The incident is still under investigation, he says.

Did you check cameras on the street? she asks.

The incident is still under investigation.

She hangs up the phone and calls him a jerk.

**

To break up the monotony of my day, I hang out on the porch instead of taking a walk. School starts next week, and my anxiety has not lessened any. I am sure having my sister accused of gay-bashing a car adds to it. To pass the time, I work on a tiny Rubix cube.

Lele stands on the other side of the gate. Again she appears meek. As I walk closer to her, I notice that her eyes are purple with bags. Not that kind of purple. She probably has not been sleeping.

I am sorry to bother you, Lele says and glances at her apartment building behind her.

Will she get in trouble for speaking to me? Could speaking to me mess up the investigation? Or maybe she would suffer Phil’s anger? We are his enemy.

I wanted to have a small word with you.

I nod and focus on the Rubix.

The police still don’t know who vandalized the car, she says. So far, they checked the city cameras and a few of the house cameras that look out to the street. I assume they didn’t find your sister, so she is in the clear. I don’t know much more. Officer Reyes speaks to Phil instead of me since the car is in his name and Phil hardly talks to me lately. He gets like that when he bottles up his anger.

I nod and give her the thumbs up.

Lele yawns and apologizes.

With work and Phil going crazy, I haven’t been able to sleep, she says. I spend most of my time looking at the street through our window to see if anyone is coming to damage the car again. At first, Phil had been staying up all night. It make him angrier so I told him I would do half of the night for him so he could get some sleep.

I shake my head and frown. I feel sorry for them. This vandal has total control of their life. Maybe that is the crazy person wants.

I just thought you should know about the police investigation, she says. I do not want your sister to think that she’s to blame. Phil will come around once they catch the person. If you can, please tell her. Er, I mean, write to her. Is that what you do?

I nod.

Thank you, she says and turns to cross the street. At the corner, she suddenly twists around and holds up her finger. Oh, I also meant to say that your sister should be careful and stay away from our car if she can. Not that I think she is guilty, but Phil has a gun now.

**

Even though I do not like it, I use my voice app on my phone and relay Leles message about the investigation and Phil’s gun. I will probably be using it in school a lot, so I should get used to it.

Insane, Miki says. Total insanity. Well, he can count on me staying away from his car. Last thing I need is to be caught on camera by it. Cops will probably drag my ass into jail. I hate those tiny interview rooms they shove you in. That’s another thing. Interview room. Who are they kidding? Am I interviewing for a jail cell?

The holiday weekend arrives, and the neighborhood grows quieter. People are probably at the beaches or outside events, which there are a lot of in Jersey City — feasts and street concerts and markets selling homemade wares and art. Phil and Lele might be doing that since they do not see them around too. Yet I see his car parked on the street. They rented a car, maybe. Either way, I hope they are having a good time and not stressing.

Still not able to fall asleep, I decided to hang at my window. It looks out to the street, and I have a good view of the covered Jaguar two houses up. A branch from a tree that grows out of the sidewalk blocks the front of the car, and the street lights barely illuminate, but it is better than nothing.

Saturday night drops into failure. I wake up the next morning in my desk chair with a drool stain on my Hello Kitty t-shirt. To gear up for the following night, I nap through the afternoon. Miki does not notice since she is wrapped up in her studio on the third floor. I make an effort to show up at major meals, so she does not catch on to what I am doing. Sleep is important to me. It is one of the aspects that keep me from a meltdown. And we both do not want that to happen.

Sunday night, I sneak up a thermos of coffee. I hate coffee. Even with almond milk and sugar. The last time I had a few cups, I felt fragile and nauseous. But I am determined not to fall asleep until the sun shows up.

Once school starts I won’t be able to do this. It sucks. Miki will definitely put my butt in a sling as she likes to threaten. I will have to think up something else. Maybe get a web camera that looks out to the car.

Nothing happens on Sunday night despite staying awake. I spend Monday morning in siesta. Miki and I have no plans for the holiday. I do not like the beach because the way the sand makes me feel and the ocean’s sound drowns out my head. Crowds are out of the question too. Since Miki is not a people person and would rather work, it balances out.

Before bedtime, we watch a double-feature of Zombie and Day of the Dead.

I don’t understand why you prefer Day over Dawn, Miki says.

It’s the better movie, I say through the app.

But Dawn is the legend. The greatest zombie movie ever.

They were both made by Romero, so I do not see why they cannot be equal I type. Day has more of a plot to me than greedy people hoarding and fighting to defend their greed.

Miki flinches and says, Are you sure you’re fifteen?

I stick my tongue out at her and open the bag of popcorn.

Reluctantly we finish the movies by midnight, and I go up to my room. I check the street from my window before I pull the chair over. The car parked in the same spot all weekend seems untouched. The cover still on it.

At least I did not miss anything.

I adjust myself in a comfortable position on the chair and prepare for a long night. Sighing, I wonder when I will be able to sneak down for a thermos of coffee.

**

Men laughing outside wakes me up.

I curse myself for falling asleep and rub my eyes. At least I did not drool on my shirt.

Laughing again.

I lift the window screen and stick out my head. Two dark figures stand by the Jaguar. I run out of my room and down the stairs to the front door. Still wearing my sneakers, my feet pound the old wood. On the porch, I carefully step to the edge and crane my neck. The car is two houses down. One of the figures yanks the weather cover off and tosses it over the other person. The second figure complains and fights under it as if attacked by a squid. More laughter, and cursing. They seem fearless for people about to commit their third crime on the same car. Then again, I might be the only one around.

Prudence, she says behind my back. What are you doing?

My speeding heart stops for a second and pushes up my throat. I shove Miki wearing her pajama bottoms and tank and shake my head.

Sorry, she said. I didn’t mean to scare you but you are freaking me out by being out here.

I point to the car and the figures.

Miki cranes her neck and sighs: Oh, shit!

I pull her with me to the edge of the porch, towards the gate.

No way, she whispers. We are not going out there. We’ll call the cops.

Miki yanks from my grip and steps back.

Glass breaks.

I jump down the steps and to the gate. Miki harshly whispers my name. As I run down the sidewalk, she calls out: Get back here! Of course, I ignore her, and I know how stupid I am being. Those jerks could have a gun. Or I could get hurt in other ways, but maybe I can scare them off before that happens.

When I reach the car, the two figures are gone, but they left a broken side window and the tarp on the sidewalk. I have no idea where they ran off to so fast. Both corners up and down the street are a good distance away. I should see them just about to disappear.

Miki stops at my side and catches her breath. Let’s go, Prudence.

I point to the air and shrug my shoulders.

I don’t know where they are, she says, and I don’t care. Now let’s go and call the cops.

She is right. I can still be useful by telling the cops what I saw and heard. Maybe. At the very least, I try to take comfort that I scared them away.

I caught you.

Phil crosses the street and aims a small revolver at us. He wears shorts and a tank. Lele dressed in a pajama set follows him. Their skin glistens with sweat. Probably from running out of their apartment.

Miki and I raise our hands and move closer together towards the house behind us. Phil stands between us and the car. A smile across his maniacal face and the gun pointed at us. Lele, like me, bounces from foot to foot and wrings her hands at the front of the car. Although the gun is not pointed at me, it still scares me that Miki could get shot.

Don’t move, Phil says. I called the cops.

I didn’t do anything, Miki says, not at all bothered by the gun. Like it was just some non-threatening toy. Prudence heard the assholes and we came out here before the window was smashed.

Yeah. Sure. You can explain it all to them.

Miki sighs in aggravation and tightens her fists in the air.

I got you, he says. I finally got you. I can’t believe it.

I glance at Lele, hoping she can see the truth in my face. This has gotten so out of hand.

Phil put the gun down, she says. Please.

Not until the cops get here, he says. Finally, going to end this. Going to put her in jail where the rest of her psycho homophobic friends waste their lives away.

I am not homophobic, Miki says and almost throws her hands down. And I didn’t damage your car.

So sick of you people, Phil says. We came to this city because we thought people would be more accepting. Tolerant. But no. We moved onto a street of animals that are obsessed with our private lives and want to punish us for it.

Lele positions between us and the bullets’ possible path and holds up her palms to him. Please, she says with a shaky voice. Put the gun down. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.

Phil’s face tightens. He moves the gun away from Lele but still does not have a clear shot at Miki. It seems like he hates that as he tightens his lips.

Baby, please get out of the way, he says through a grim mouth.

Not until you put the gun away and calm down. They won’t run away. Right.

Um sure, Miki says. I won’t run away. I mean, you know where I live, and I don’t want a bullet in my ass.

Phil pants. His eyes shift around.

Prudence is only a kid, Lele says. You don’t want her to get hurt. I know you. You would never want to hurt a child.

Phil shivers as if a struggle is ramming the sides of his body. Oh, Lele. I hope you’re right. The gun lowers.

A man wearing a black ski mask pops out of the broken car window and grabs Phil’s shoulder. Surprise and confusion on his face as he screams out and falls back into him. The gun goes off. Lele with a yipe jolts to the side as if someone punched her in the shoulder. She falls to the ground after Miki and I do.

Lele! Phil screams with intense panic in his voice. His eyes wide and face flushed red.

The man holds Phil’s back to the car and reaches for the gun in his hand. From the other side of the Jaguar, a second man in a ski mask comes around.

I crawl over to Lele, who lays on her side and moans and bleeds onto the sidewalk. I feel weird, she says.

The second man stops in front of Phil and punches him in the stomach.

Faggot scumbag, he shouts.

Phil takes the punch and keeps holding onto the gun, pointing up the street.

Miki rams her side into the second man. They fall against the front of the car and bend over it. She punches him square in the face, then the groin. The second man falls moaning to the ground and nurses his privates.

Lele! Phil screams again in hysteria. His voice sounds like it is on its last cord. The first man has his arm around Phil’s neck. His other arm holds his wrist and shifts Phil’s arm around to try to loosen the grip.

Miki plows her fist into the man’s masked face. A crack from under the mask. He grunts but holds Phil tight. She then grabs Phil’s gun hand and shouts, Let go!

He does. Miki takes the revolver and steps back and points it at them.

Let him go, she says.

They both stop struggling. Phil’s eyes lock on Lele. Panting. The man in the car releases Phil. He falls to his knees at Lele’s side. He lies her head onto his lap and weeps.

Oh, Lele. I’m so sorry. Please don’t die.

Out of the car and down on the ground, Miki says.

Okay, okay, the man says as he opens the door.

No, Miki says. Crawl out the window.

The window with shards of glass lining it. The man growls in aggravation and follows the order. He moves out, head first with his hands on the street. While his lower half is still in the car, Miki kicks him in the stomach. He falls out the rest of the way and lands on his side.

Douche bags trying to set me up, she says.

When both men are face down with their hands behind their heads, she pulls off their ski mask to reveal their white and sweaty face.

Jesus, I don’t even know who you are, Miki says. Do you know them? she asks Phil.

He brings his wet face up and glances at the two men and shakes his head.

Please, he says. Call an ambulance.

She’ll be okay, Miki says as she takes out her phone. I saw the bullet come out of her shoulder.

A police car brakes next to the Jaguar, and two officers pour out with their weapons drawn. Panic rushes my heart. Images of them shooting Miki fill my brain. Miki drops the gun and places her hands behind her head before they can tell her.

She’s crazy, one of the men on the ground says. She tried to kill us. We’re just minding our own business.

An officer slams Miki into the car and spreads her legs and roughly frisks her. I keep still with my hands up even though I am kneeling in the victims circle next to Phil and Lele. I grunt out and try to tell them that the bad guys are on the sidewalk.

No, Phil says. She saved us. They’re the ones who damaged my car and attacked us.

The second officer calls for an ambulance and then cuffs the two men with plastic bands. They push Miki down next to them and tell them not to move or speak. She does not make a sound even with her face pressed to the concrete. Probably knowing that the cops would not listen anyway.

The ambulance arrives, and the street fills with noises and lights and people. Sensory overload creeps up. I stim to contempt my brain. I have no worries about Miki. Sure they will bring her in for questioning, but I am confident with Phil’s and Lele’s version of events she will be home to help me on my first day of school.

Phil, as if reading my mind, nods his head at me in assurance.

M.E. Purfield is the #actuallyautistic author of the long running and highly rated Miki Radicci series and the sci-noir Blunt Force Kharma series. He has had short stories in Broken Pencil, Unwinnable Magazine, and Norwegian American Weekly. He lives in Jersey City, NJ but you can always find him at www.mepurfield.com.

La Cocinera, fiction by Hector Acosta

Teresa stared at the food, wondering how much more of her spit she could include in the plate of rice, beans, and chimichangas.  Swirling the refried beans, she looked at the reddish-brown pool, a master painter studying their brushwork. The added layer of white cheese to the beans was a stroke of genius on her part, as they camouflaged the string of saliva she’d included to the order.

 “Ya apúrate con esa orden, mujer!” Juan shouted from the front of the restaurant, his voice barely audible over the music she had on.

If only she’d known who the order was for ahead of time, she thought. How easy would it have been to fill the contents of the chimichangas with anything she wanted before dunking them into the fryer! But no, she only realized who sat at the table when she came out to the kitchen to bring them the beer they ordered. The deep-fried burritos now laid neatly across the plate, sandwiched between the rice and beans, both of them packed with her special combination of spiced ground beef and chicken. The sides of the chimichangas bulged with the meat, like tumors on a golden body.

 “Dame un minuto!” she said, rushing to the back of the kitchen. Taking the sour cream out of the refrigerator, she started working on a glob of spit, pushing the saliva from one side of her mouth to the other.

“¿Que demonios haces?” Juan barreled into the kitchen, immediately turning off the music playing from the small radio she kept sitting on by the counter. “It’s a simple order,” he said in Spanish. “I don’t know what’s taking you so---” he stopped his rant mid-sentence, catching sight of Teresa standing in the middle of the kitchen, her cheeks puffed like those of a chipmunk and the lid of the sour cream container half off.

They stood in silence for a moment, then Juan’s brown eyes narrowed. “Chingado, Teresa,” he whispered. “Not this again.”

Teresa had three responses ready about why yes, this again, but answering Juan would mean swallowing the spit intended for the sour cream. Instead, she stared at Juan with bulging cheeks and furious eyes.

 “At least throw out the sour cream afterward,” Juan said before heading back to the front of the restaurant. Teresa heard him adopt the friendly, halting English he used for customers as he apologized for the delay, offering a free dessert for the inconvenience.

Depositing her hard work into the sour cream, she grabbed a spoon from the sink and swirled the cream around, making sure it retained a familiar-looking consistency. Once satisfied, she took a massive dollop and plopped it in the center of both chimichangas.  Taking a step back, she looked at the plate critically, grabbed a nearby towel, and did a last wipe around the dish. Just because the food was full of her DNA didn’t mean it couldn’t look nice.

Even if they were chimichangas.

Satisfied, she picked up the plate and walked out of the kitchen and into El Paseo Rico’s dining room.,

As always, the restaurant immediately assaulted her eyes with bright greens, reds, and whites. The colors were found on the paper streamers crossing the entire ceiling, on the tablecloths and napkins, and especially on the five-star piñata hanging by the large storefront window looking out into Concepción’s main street. Teresa walked the steaming plate of food right past the giant mural depicting a cartoon, brown-skinned man with a comically large sombrero and chanclas taking a nap beneath a cactus. Large Z’s floated above the man’s head.

Six months ago, when she interviewed for the cooking position, Juan told her how the mural had been created at the request of one of the other owners of the restaurant. Needing the job, she laughed away the painting, even saying how the sleeping Mexican looked a little bit like her abuelito, the one who’d shown young Teresa how to climb into the brick pig pens and what part of the animal’s throat to focus on as she ran the knife to end their squealing, soiled lives during her summer visits to his pueblito.

The first few months, she hardly even saw the painting. Sometimes she glanced at it when opening the restaurant alongside Juan early in the mornings, right before she put away her purse and brewed the coffee for the morning rush. At night, when they closed, she was usually too tired to see anything but the image of a beer and her bed. In between those moments, she was in the kitchen, slicing up jamon for tortas, grilling bits of pineapples to go atop the tacos al pastor, and mixing up some lengua with chorizo and chile chipotles while Juan manned the register and Maria served the tables.

Thinking of Maria caved in her chest and robbed her of breath. Her steps faltered, and she could feel the plate tilting in her hand. Then she saw him, sitting at the table closest to the window, and she regained her composure.

 “I figured you crossed back over to Mexico and got stuck trying to scale the wall back,” Calvin Brooks said, leaning against his chair and taking a sip of his Bud Light, a wrinkled, white shirt stretched over a belly built out of years of choosing deep-fried anything from lunch menus. A red stain rested on the left leg of his tan slacks, and Teresa couldn’t say if it were due to the bowl of salsa on the table or a previous lunch mishap. Gray hairs sprouted from the sides of his otherwise bald head, nose, and mustache.  His words lathered in a Texan accent Teresa had a hard time understanding sometimes.

 Calvin reached over for the bottle of Tapatío on the table, covering her cooking with a red layer of hot sauce. The sauce would make it harder for him to detect the extra ingredients Teresa added to his order, but she couldn’t help but chafe at the fact he didn’t even bother to taste her cooking before covering it in the stuff.

“You know, darling,” Calvin said, cutting into the chimichanga with his knife and fork, cheese and meat oozing out of the wound. “If I knew you were this good of a cook back when you were cleaning rooms for me, I might have never let you go.”
Dipping the cut piece into the sour cream, he brought it up to his mouth.

Teresa counted the number of times Calvin chewed the food, transfixed by the way his jaw quivered as it moved up and down, splotches of red marked all around his jowls, the victims of a rushed shave job. She tried not to smile as Calvin swallowed and went right back for a second piece of the chimichanga, scooping some of the refried beans along with it. If Teresa had her way, she would have stayed right where she was and watched him clean out the plate, but she reasoned doing so might make him suspicious.

Moving to a nearby empty table, Teresa pretended to busy herself by rearranging the hot sauce bottles and the salt and pepper shakers, every so often sneaking glances at Calvin, who noisily and blissfully continued to eat, breaking his focus only to take swigs from his beer bottle. Watching how more and more of the food disappeared off his plate filled her empty cavity with a warm, soothing sense of satisfaction. Even Juan’s disapproving gaze, thrown at her from his position at the cash register, couldn’t curdle this feeling.

If anything, Juan should have added a bit of himself to the dish, Teresa thought. After all, it was Calvin’s fault the restaurant was struggling now. There was a time, not too long ago, when the lunchtime crowd would have filled every table here, men and women driving in from the nearby farm and dining on plates of Teresa’s albondigas, or taking styrofoam containers full of her breaded milanesa back to work with them.  More came after their work shift, and the restaurant would fill with their laughter and clinking beers as they unwound from their workday, telling Teresa that not even their own madres cocinaban tan bien como ella.

And all it took was a single phone call para joder todo. A phone call and they came, packing the parking lot of the motel Calvin owned, knocking on doors and interrogating the guests who answered. They descended upon the farm, lining up the brown looking workers who plucked the lettuce and cilantro the entire state of Texas ate. In a couple of hours, the town on Concepción, Texas, three hours south of Houston and famous for nothing at all, lost more than one hundred residents, all taken out of town in gray buses.

“Hey, chica!” Calvin shouted, slamming his empty bottle on the table. He stretched
out the syllables in the Spanish words tumbling out of his mouth, setting Teresa’s teeth on edge. “I think your Jefé said something about a free dessert?”

“I got it,” Juan said, opening the cooler where the restaurant kept the beverages and desserts and walking to Calvin table with a pastel de tres leches encased inside a plastic container. “To take back to work,” he told him, setting the dessert and picking up Calvin’s plate, which, Teresa noted with immense satisfaction, had been licked clean (something she wouldn’t put past Calvin, el cochino).

In theory, no one knew who made the phone call. But ask anyone in town, and most would point to Calvin. Calvin with his red hat, currently resting next to him on an empty chair and who complained loudly and often about the farmworkers living in his motel. They, Calvin, would tell you, brought in crime, drugs, and prostitution to the fifty-room motel that stood on Interstate 45. Most galling to the motel owner, they always had more people in the room than what they paid for.

“If I didn’t know any better, Juan,” Calvin said, his eyes on the dessert placed in front of him. “I’d say you’re trying to rush me out.”

With a thin smile on his face, Juan said, “No, sir, no. I just know you’re busy.”

“Never too busy to visit two of my favorite people,” Calvin said, reaching for his wallet. “You guys are two of the good ones, have I told you that? Work hard. Keep your head down. Mind your business. Not like the ones staying at my motel. I swear they’re worse than the last batch.” Placing a twenty on the table, which covered the meal and drink, while leaving Teresa with a dollar for herself, he grabbed his red hat and added, “Though that said, Juan, I gotta tell you, I’m worried about my little investment here.”

“Just a little slow. It’ll get better. You’ll see.” The smile was etched in Juan’s face, betraying nothing.

Teresa hated this. Hated to see the way Juan groveled, apologized, and made excuses. Es tu culpa, cabrón, Teresa thought in Calvin’s direction, balling a napkin she’d been setting at one of the tables. Even knowing what Calvin carried in his belly wasn’t enough to quench the fury building in her throat.

“I really hope so,” Calvin picked up the dessert, the cake sliding inside the container. “When you came to me, you assured me this place would make me money. And to your credit, the first few months, you delivered. But last month,” he paused to open the lid of the container and dip his finger into the icing of the cake, “it wasn’t your best, was it?”

Teresa couldn’t track the entire conversation, her English not as good as Juan. But she didn’t need to understand to speak up.

“They still won’t come,” she said, stepping towards the two men. She hated the way her accent fractured the English words coming out of her mouth, how she had to consider each word, each phrase before speaking it aloud. “They know you own this.”
Calvin eyed her, then turned back to Juan. “The lease is coming up,” he told him, “and I would hate to have to pull back on our little venture.”

“Dile, Juan!” Teresa said. “Dile como nadie viene porque tienen miedo de el.”

“They’ll come,” Juan said, answering both of them at the same time. “They just have to hear about the place. Taste Teresa’s cooking.”

“We’ll see.” Adjusting the cap on his head, so the white font was clearly displayed, Calvin walked over to the exit and stopped, hand on the doorknob. “By the way, Teresa,” he asked, “Have you heard from Maria?”

Hearing him use Maria’s name filled Teresa’s ears with a loud drumming sound, the edges of her vision dimming as she stepped through the restaurant’s tables.
“It’s a shame we lost, her,” Calvin said with a head of a shake. “Had no idea she was an illegal. Her paperwork all looked good, but I guess they always do, right?” He paused to pick some a bit of grain from his teeth and continued, “I tell you Juan, you’d be surprised about the quality of the papers. They’ve even fooled my receptionist when they check-in.”

The knife from the table she’d been prepping was in her hand, the blade pressing against her skirt, the cool touch of it seeping past the thin fabric and kissing her skin. The world around her closed, and Teresa found herself in her abuelo’s pig pens, the old man straddling the wall above her, watching a young Teresa move towards the pig and smoking one of his thin, drooping cigarillos. The pig and its smell took up almost the entire enclosure, leaving Teresa with little room to maneuver. It stood blissfully unaware of its approaching death, its eyes staring at her. She heard her grandfather’s instructions, then and now—no pienses, soló hazlo, the grip on her blade tightening, then and now.

Her blade skimmed across the pig’s throat, the animal providing so little defense Teresa thought maybe she hadn’t done it right until she felt the warmth of the blood cascading down her entire hand. She remembered looking into the animal’s eyes and watching how they faded and grew smaller.

A low, guttural moan vibrated in Calvin’s throat, his blood spraying unto Teresa’s grease stained apron. He stumbled backwards, a wheezing noise escaping his lips as his back slammed against the door. A trembling right hand pressed against the wound on his throat, blood squeezing through his fat fingers and rolling down his wrist.

“Teresa!” Juan shouted, his arms around her waist. He lifted her off the floor and threw her back, the knife slipping out of her hand and sliding across the restaurant tile floor. Her head hit the edge of one of the tables when she landed, her vision doubling on itself.

 “¿Qué hiciestes, Teresa?” Juan asked, standing over Calvin’s body. “What did you
do?” he asked again.

***

Teresa kept the radio tuned to the local Spanish station.

The sounds of horns and accordions crammed into the small truck cabin alongside her, the instruments joined by a trio of baritone singers whose voices dipped and rose with each turn of the road.  Occasionally, the music was swallowed up by a crackling static spilling out of the one working speaker, like wasps coming out of their nests. During those moments, Teresa gritted her teeth, clutched the steering wheel harder, and resisted the urge to fiddle with the radio.

 “Esa fue ‘Mayores’, por Becky G y Bad Bunny,’ the DJ said, just as Teresa pulled into her parking spot in front of El Paseo Rico. Turning the volume up, she put the truck in park and listened to the DJ advertised his sponsors and brag about how quickly tickets were selling for an upcoming show in Dallas. Her heart pressed against her chest, and a tingling, nervous sensation bubbled up in her stomach.

Apúrate, she thought.

As if reading her mind, the DJ wrapped up his spiel on a car dealership guaranteeing no credit checks for the month of September and dropped his voice. The braying persona receded along with the background music. Teresa could almost picture the DJ leaning into his microphone to whisper, “Y porque todos quieren saber, no parece que nuestros queridos relativos nos visitan hoy.”

No relatives visiting today.

Unclenching her hands from the steering wheel, Teresa breathed through her nose and stared out at the restaurant’s storefront.  Tuvimos suerte, she thought. They’d been lucky. Luckily, there hadn’t been any people strolling past the restaurant that day, lucky how the opaque, tinted glass of the door obscured the splotches of blood she spent the rest of the day cleaning off, while Juan mopped the floor around them.
Afterward, Juan told Teresa to go home and stay there until she heard from him.
That’d been two weeks ago. Ever since then, she’d holed herself up in a small trailer in the outskirts of Concepción, keeping the shades drawn and her television on, sinking into the embrace of broadly acted telenovela, sitcom repeats, and cheap mota she bought from a neighbor kid months ago. She ate whatever leftovers she could scrounge up from her refrigerator. The only time she was tempted to disobey Juan was when she ran out of pepper and considered venturing across the Dollar Store across the street. At night, she laid awake in a bed which felt too big and thought of Maria. She would have approved of what she did, Teresa decided on the first night, after she had gotten home and taken, a long, lukewarm shower.

She slept peacefully ever since then.

Juan’s call came last night, just as she sniffed the heavy cream and wondered if it was still good to use. “Ven temprano mañana,” he told her, his voice cold, distant. Corre, a small and fearful voice, ordered her as she gripped her cheap cell phone and waited for Juan to say more. Run, run as far and fast away from here as possible. Squashing the voice down like she would squash a fly invading her kitchen, Teresa said she’d be there.

Besides, she had nowhere to go. What little money she and Maria have been saving was gone now, a portion of it first used to try to bring Maria back home, and then the rest sent to her via wire transfer, so she could at least make her way back to her hometown in Guatemala. And even if she had any money, she doubted she could get more than a couple miles out of Concepción before coming across one of the many checkpoints now loitering the roads of Texas, where men sweated inside of their neatly pressed uniforms, waiting to politely, but firmly, ask for proof of citizenship. Calvin—pinche mendigo podrido—might have been right about just how good a lot of the paperwork people used had become; however, if the recent raids were any indication, they still weren’t good enough to fool the United States government.
Unlocking the restaurant’s door, Teresa paused, her hand on the doorknob and her heart beating out of her chest. Pasa lo que pasa, she decided, turning the doorknob and stepping through.

The restaurant looked much like she remembered leaving it two weeks ago. Glancing down to the floor, she struggled to find any signs of Calvin on the tile. Flicking the lights on, she moved across the restaurant, setting the tables and slowly falling into a familiar rhythm consisting of smoothing out the tablecloths, refilling salt and pepper shakers, and topping up all the hot sauce bottles.  Reaching the front of the counter, she checked the beverage stock, making a mental note to remind Juan they needed to order more cans of Jumex. Plugging the coffee machine, she grounded some fresh beans and started a new batch of coffee to be ready when Juan arrived. She then made sure he had a new order pad by the register and walked over to her kitchen.
Teresa thought of the trail of blood Calvin’s body left behind as she and Juan dragged it towards the kitchen’s freezer. How heavy and unwilling the body had been, and the way Calvin’s head lagged from side to side, striking the edges of the counter. She spent the most time afterward in the kitchen, using every available rag to erase their hard work, and as she turned the kitchen lights on and slowly inspected her area, she felt she did an exceptional job.

She did such a good job wiping down the area, Teresa decided, running a hand through her grill, that Calvin would have been proud. Maybe even asked her to come back to work at the motel.

She laughed, too loud and for too long, her laughter frayed around the edges. For the last two weeks, she’d successfully managed to hold it together, surrounding herself with anything that reminded her of Maria. But now, far away from those items to buoyed her, waves of panic slammed against her.

 “¿De qué te ríes?”

The question stifled Teresa’s laughter. Turning around, she found an old woman staring at her, long wrinkled arms across a chest draped in a shawl. At first, Teresa thought she was una enana, the woman being that small, but no, she quickly realized the shawl hid the curvature of the woman’s spine. Black eyes, magnified by the wireframe glasses sitting atop a landmass of wrinkles, stared at Teresa, waiting for an answer.

“Who let you in?” Teresa asked, taking a step back and trying to think if the door was left unlocked.

 “I let myself in,” the woman said. Her Spanish was different than Juan and Teresa’s, every letter accented and strong. She pulled a cane from the depth of her shawl and pointed the long, bony thing towards the refrigerator. “That’s where he’s at?”
Teresa froze. She flashed back to the last night she was at the restaurant, how Juan and she each grabbed one of Calvin’s legs and dragged him into the kitchen’s walk-in freezer, setting him next to the ground beef.

The woman grinned, flashing Teresa two rows of perfectly white and lined teeth, like a wall that Teresa’s lies and excuses wouldn’t climb over.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, the cane dropping to her side. Clearing her throat,
she then shouted, “¡Está aquí, cabrones!”

Before Teresa could react, two men stepped into the kitchen. Or tried to, the space so narrowed and tight that only one of them fit, the second one poking a shaved head through the door. They were both big men as if making up for the stature of the small woman. The one who stood in the kitchen with the old woman and Teresa, a man with bushy eyebrows and a forehead you could cook salcichas on carried a large duffel bag and scowled at Teresa. “Muévete.”

Move.

The order shoved her away from the kitchen and back to her knees at Calvin’s motel, the cold linoleum floor of the bathroom of whatever room she was cleaning pressing against her skin, sweat pooling around her armpits as she worked to clean the mold from between the tiles, all the while Calvin stood above her and every so often pointed out, “You missed a spot,” nudging her with his boot.

After one too many nudges of his boot, Teresa finally had stood up, thrown the rag at his face, and said she quit. Said it in English nice and slow to make sure he understood.
Reaching into the nearest kitchen drawer, Teresa grabbed the handle to a large wooden spoon and pulled it out. “Hazme,” she told the man, raising the spoon above her head.
The man’s eyebrows furrowed and drew close together like fuzzy caterpillars coming to mate, while behind him, the old woman barked out a laugh, gripping her cane with both hands as boney shoulders rose and fell with her laughter. “Juan was right. Estás loca, muchacha,” the old woman said after she finished laughing.

Teresa kept her stance, her shoulder muttering an ache she feared would grow louder the longer she remained standing. “You know Juan?”

Pushing one of the men aside, the old woman limped forward, her walk slow and deliberate, placing the cane ahead every time she took a step. “He’s my nephew.” Reaching Teresa, she poked her with the end of her cane and said, “has he never talked about me?”

Teresa shook her head. Despite working together every day for the last few months, she suddenly realized how little she knew of her coworker. Part of it was that even though they spent eight to ten hours in a restaurant, for most of those hours, they were portioned away from each other, with Teresa sequestered to the kitchen while Juan manned the register and was the face of the restaurant. Even when business took a dive, and there’d be hours between customers. Each of them stayed in their sections, Teresa organizing and reorganizing the kitchen while wondering what Maria was doing, and Juan usually on the phone, his voice low and fast as he spoke to what Teresa assumed were bill collectors.

“Tráeme a Juan,” the old woman told one of the two men, who nodded and disappeared

Juan’s here?

Relief should have poured over Teresa when she found this out, but her body remained tense, the start of a headache crawling to the back of her head. The hand holding the wooden spoon remained raised above her head, something the old woman noticed. “Put that down,” she said, staring at Teresa with those black eyes of hers.

“Aquí está, Doña Clara,” the man who’d left to retrieve Juan said, reentering the kitchen and dragging Juan alongside him. Juan stumbled and almost fell, but was kept upright by the man’s hand on the back of his neck. He wore a loose pair of sweats and a ratty old t-shirt, a far cry from the pressed pants and collared shirt Teresa usually saw him in. His face had a sheen of sweat, the fluorescent lights of the kitchen highlighted, and there was a big, dark bruise, the color of the skin of an avocado on his right eye.

“She,” Doña Clara said, prodding Teresa with her cane again, “says you never told her about me, is that true?” Slamming the cane on the ground, she started to make her way towards Juan, who remained frozen. “Never talked about how your tía raised you when your mother couldn’t, how I taught you how not to burn the rice in too much oil.” She stood in front of him now, much as she’d done with Teresa, and prodded him with his cane. “How I’m the one who gave you money for,” she stopped, waved her cane high and around the air, to the point the men all flinched and stepped back against the kitchen wall, “all this.”

“Lo siento,tía” Juan muttered, flinching any time the cane came close to his head.

Leaning against her cane, Aunt Clara said nothing. One of the men approached her, placing a giant, callused hand on her shoulder, only for Aunt Clara to brush it away.

“You said you’d make me money, Juan.”

“I was,” Juan muttered, rubbing the spots in his arm where her cane had struck him.

“We were doing really good for the last few months, you know that. I was sending Carlos more than the agreed amount.”

“And then the payment stops,” one of the big man, the same one who’d told Teresa to move, said.

“I already told you why. The raids really hurt us. Hurt the whole town. But things were getting better.”

“No, they weren’t,” Teresa said.  She could feel everyone’s eyes on her when she spoke, and a little voice in the back of her head told her cállate. But she was suddenly so tired, and just wanted to get to what was coming, whatever it might be. “People were still afraid. Some just wouldn’t come out of their houses, but others knew who owned this building. And knew what that man did to us.”

“Is that why you killed him?” Aunt Clara asked.

“No,” Teresa said and didn’t elaborate. Wouldn’t, not to Juan or his Aunt. What she did was between her, Calvin, and Maria, if she ever saw her again.

Sighing, Aunt Clara adjusted her shawl and looked to Carlos. “Can you believe these two? One,” she motioned with her head to Juan, “es tan tonto that he signs a lease with a man who destroys his business…”

“He gave me a good price,” Juan muttered and flinched when his Aunt glared at him.
“The other,” now it was Teresa’s turn to bear the brunt of Aunt Clara’s gaze, “decides to kill the man. Which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing if she didn’t choose to do it in the middle of my restaurant.”

Teresa didn’t think it would help if she mentioned it was more at the front of the restaurant than the actual middle.

“Dime sobrino, ¿Qué hago con ustedes?”

“Burn the place down,” Carlos said. “With those two and the body inside.”

Juan’s eyes grew wide at the suggestion, and he took a step towards, “Tiita,” he said, his voice shaking, “you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

Aunt Clara said nothing, only put her cane up between her and Juan.

 “I can fix this,” Teresa said.

Aunt Clara looked at her with a tilt of her head. “Can you?”

Teresa nodded,  mind racing, trying to think of something, anything she could say or do which would correct everything. Bring business back to El Paseo, make this woman and her men go away. Remove Juan’s black eye. Bring back Calvin. Bring back Maria. Bring back everyone taken.

There was a good chance she was going to die here, Teresa realized. The thought should have sent her spinning, but there was an odd calmness to the realization. Looking around the kitchen, her kitchen, she thought there would be worst places to die. At least she made this place her own, as much as she could anyway.

No puedes morir aqui, Maria whispered, her voice kissing the back of Teresa’s neck. “I still need to you see you again.”

Teresa thought of Maria. The way she’d spent so much time with Teresa in the kitchen, tasting everything she cooked and telling her when it needed salt, balancing multiple plates to take to the front of the restaurant, or leaning against the counter and watching Teresa cook, sometimes humming to herself.

“¿Qué es todo ese tarareo?” Teresa often asked Maria, rarely recognizing the tunes she heard her hum.

Maria’s answers always proved to be diverse and eclectic. It could be something her mother sang to her as a child, a song Maria heard playing from a car speaker as she walked to work, or a tune from a musical. Maria loved musicals, even though she’d never seen one in real life. Sometimes, as they laid in bed at night, Maria would talk about driving up to Houston to see one. Or, if they were really dreaming high, talked about booking a flight to New York City to see one there.

Theresa never understood her love for them, tried listening to a couple, and couldn’t get past all the singing. It felt so fake.

Now, standing in the kitchen, trying to think of a way to save everything around her,
musicals came back into her head, stories Maria told her about them, about how they could be about so much. About revenge, death, joy, and happiness. And Teresa remembered one in specific.

***

“You’re going to burn the rice,” Clara told Teresa for the third time.

Teresa ignored her and tilted the large pan on the stove, all the golden oil she poured into it sliding down to one side, while Teresa used a wooden spoon to keep the mountains of rice grains on the opposite side.

“I never make it this way,” Clara muttered, her attention on the small strips of pink meat sizzling on the grill.

“My way is better,” Teresa said, moving the spoon as she slow introduced portions of the rice into the scalding pool of oil, watching and turning them over, waiting for them to turn the same gold color as the oil.

Clara flipped the meat, smoke from the grill filling the kitchen. Without saying anything, Teresa grabbed the pepper shaker sitting on the counter and passed it to Clara, who accepted it without taking her eyes off the grill. One hand continued to flip the meat, while the other hand flipped some corn tortillas lined up next to the meat.

The old woman could still cook and cook fast. The latter part had become especially important in the last few days. More and more people filled El Paseo Rico’s tables, all wanting to try the new dishes Teresa (with some suggestions from Clara) created.

“I still can’t believe that’s supposed to be your husband,” Teresa said, setting the pan back down on the stove and reaching for the blender and its soupy red mixture.

“Asi es como lo recuerdo, siempre era flogo,” Clara said.

Pouring the chicken broth and tomato mixture into the pan, Teresa thought of the mural out in the front of the restaurant.  She wanted to ask Clara if having her husband up there was meant to be a sign of love or hate. Before she could ask, Flora stepped into the kitchen.

The new girl came from Oaxaca and still didn’t know a lot of English, but she was learning and hardworking.  Seeing her do Maria’s job, didn’t sit right with Teresa, but they needed the help, Juan barely able to move from the cash register nowadays.

“Una orden de tacos de sesos porfa,” Flora said, placing the written order down next to the others.

“Te toca,” Clara said.

“Yeah, I know it’s my turn. Can you please watch the rice? And don’t add any more cayenne. It’s perfect as it is.” Wiping her hands down on the apron, Teresa lowered
the heat and walked to the freezer.
It took them a full day and night to break down Calvin. At first, it’d been the men who’d gone into the freezer with saws, butcher knives, and later, even a small portable chainsaw. But Teresa soon stepped in, first to direct the job, and then went in and stripped the meat herself. It was the only way to ensure a quality job; the men more focused on separating the body parts than making them cookable.

It wasn’t too tricky, Teresa found. It wasn’t Calvin anymore, just a big lump of meat, like the dead pigs in the pens after her abuelo killed them. The meat was tough to cut and cook, but she experimented, boiling and tenderizing the meat, adding spices like cilantro and garlic, mixing the stuff with hatch chiles and spinach.

The stuff which still didn’t taste great they grounded into beef and used for burritos
and chimichangas. The thighs made good strips of fajita meat, and despite Juan saying otherwise, Teresa was pretty sure she could make of good menudo out of Calvin’s tripas. The weather just had to get cold enough.

Opening the freezer door, she walked past the newly labeled plastic containers to the back of the walk-in freezer. After moving some more containers around, she found for what she was looking for: Calvin stared at her from a freezer shelf, frost around his cheeks and eyes.

Grabbing the head, Teresa put her hand around the scalp and twisted. The top portion of Calvin’s head gave way quickly, like a container already jarred loose. Teresa scooped a handful of Calvin’s frosted, gray thoughts, which she would then braise and lay atop tortillas along with some cilantro and onions. Out of all the new recipes, this was her favorite to make, as she could imagine all of Calvin’s memories and thoughts being burned away as she good the portion of his brain.

Ya mero, she thought, walking out of the freezer and shutting the door behind her.

She planned to save enough money to leave Concepcíon. She’d already talked to Maria, and they’d made plans to move to Mexico City, maybe start a small taco place there.

But before that, she was planning a trip. Up to New York, to see a musical for the both of them.

Teresa smiled as she prepared the fryer. Sondheim played in the background.

Hector Acosta is an Edgar and Anthony nominated writer, as well as the author of the wrestling inspired novella Hardway. He's contributed to several anthologies and is an editor of Shotgun Honey.

Worse Angels, by Laird Barron, reviewed by Thomas Pluck

Print Length: 335 pages

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0593084993

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons (May 26, 2020)

Publication Date: May 26, 2020

Here’s something real: Don’t buy the jive about violence as a last resort because I’m better than that. No. Violence is only a last resort when it’s a last resort. Realistically, it’s often a first, second, or middle resort. The Superflys of the world speak the language fluently. Besides, hitting a jerk feels good. It has to feel good, or else I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. That dopamine rush I’d gotten addicted to in the Outfit was difficult to kick, so I weaned myself slowly.

Crime and horror have been bedfellows since the beginning, when Edgar Allan Poe murdered a character in the Rue Morgue. Marketers split us apart for easier fleecing in the 20th century, but we had Charlie Huston, Elizabeth Hand, George C. Chesbro’s Mongo the Magnificent taking an abrupt dive into mad science with the infamous Beasts of Valhalla, and William Hjortsberg’s masterpiece of Faustian deviltry, Falling Angel (adapted into the film Angel Heart, but the book is even better).

A few years ago, cosmic horror maestro Laird Barron burst onto the crime scene with Blood Standard, the first Isaiah Coleridge novel, starring the half-Maori half-white hitman turned dirty-handed investigator in the blasted landscape of upstate New York. He followed that more traditional P.I. tale with the Pynchonesque government operator-serial killer story Black Mountain, and in the third and latest, Worse Angels, he takes us on a Lynchian dive into small-town corruption and modern blood cults that makes God is a Bullet seem like middle-class tourism in the underbelly.


The story is set plunk in the genre’s bailiwick. A young man working on a now-abandoned supercollider project run by two powerful local dynasties took a Peter Pan into the shaft four years ago, but his mother refuses to believe it was suicide. And her bad cop brother-in-law is off the force and wants to hurt the politician who betrayed him, so he hires Coleridge to dig into the covered-up death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt. As Coleridge explores the ruins of the project and the creepy town left in economic shambles with its closure, the bleak mountains and dark, enveloping forests of Horseheads, New York:

The town was named for the herd of sick and injured packhorses slaughtered upon General John Sullivan’s return from his triumphant campaign in the north against the Iroquois Nations in 1779. Natives lined the road with the skulls. Over two centuries later they referred to the area as the Valley of the Horses’ Heads.

A place where “Christianity and the old gods dance hip-to-hip during the witching season” will ring familiar to anyone who’s explored the towns of New England and come upon a pumpkin festival that locals pshaw-pshaw as old hat, but looks like the end of The Wicker Man to outsiders. But Coleridge runs into worse than ziggurats of jack-o’lanterns like glowing skulls on his investigation in Horseheads. The town is owned by the billionaire Redlick family, led by a Senator patriarch, with a creepy, marionette PR man named Tom Mandibole as its face and right hand. Our first encounter with Mandibole and his Lynchian street gang of meat-gnawing pancake-make-up thugs in cheerleader skirts and varsity jackets is chilling and strange:

The goons and the Mares were far less of a concern than the master of ceremonies himself. He impressed me as a spider, coiled and alert, poised to spring upon its prey. “What lurks in the darkness of interstellar space? The interstellar reaches of our souls? Terror.” Mandibole reclined, motionless, hands in plain view, yet his whisper emanated behind my left ear. Then, louder, “The emotion you’re experiencing. It’s terror. Terror ruled the indigenous tribes of the Valley. Terror motivated the white colonists. Of course, men fear the wilderness, the natural features of the land. That’s why men deface it at every opportunity—burn it, bulldoze it, hack it to stumps, and pound it to gravel. They desire clear lines of sight.”

I disliked how he said “they” in reference to humanity.

Coleridge is a hardcore skeptic, a Scully who cracks skulls. He’s experienced much that he can’t explain, but his sanity is kept in check by his ability to rationalize the world around him. Someone from a world of uncanny killers and powerful men who live by the fear they generate is the perfect investigator in a world where what matters is belief. If the boss isn’t pure evil, why not just whack him? If you have big enough ju-ju, you might survive. Barron played his cards very close to his chest in Black Mountain, which involved MKULTRA and CIA research into mind control and hallucinogens, and how such tools became lethal in the hands of a psychopath called The Croatoan. In this novel he is more confident that readers will accept occasional forays into the mythos he’s built over decades of award-winning short stories and the Pynchonesque thriller The Croning, even if his protagonist does not. And it works.

He doesn’t play games with our expectations or deny us satisfaction with smoke and mirrors:

The drive back to town blurred. My attention was repeatedly drawn to the rearview mirror. I experienced a “watched” feeling I’d sometimes picked up on in the Alaskan boonies. That very real sense the land itself wants you gone. Her immune system too reacts to perceived threats by sending agents after you— wolves, bears, blizzards, men deranged by cabin fever, anything handy. What kind of antibodies did this part of the country have at its disposal? Mate a genius locus with a partially constructed supercollider and gods only knew the result.

The supercollider, a quantum Ourobouros buried beneath the bedrock, its hypermagnetism twisting what lies above like the toxic fumes of a SuperFund site, is both symbol and actual as the altar and object of worship for which people will perform blood sacrifice, for both what it brings, and what it represents. When the Large Hadron collider was turned on, we held our collective breath that it wouldn’t create a micro-black hole and crush us and the planet like diamond in a titan’s fist. The architects behind this one have other things in mind, an apocalypse to save us from our own naïveté and curiosity as we cry out “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” into the great void and hope what hears us is friendly. This leads to an inevitable confrontation where our aging anti-hero may become the next sacrificial victim.

Coleridge is great company, a Warrior Poet who waxes violent when need be, and doesn’t try to baffle us with philosophical bullshit. He knows what he is, a killer, and he has turned his instincts into a living that those around him can tolerate. Laird Barron has given us my favorite new crime series, one that flirts with unanswerable questions best asked on dark nights under cold stars, but never loses sight that crime and violence are always matters of blood and the heart.

Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He is the author of the Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller Bad Boy Boogie, which was nominated for an Anthony award, and the story collection Life During Wartime, which includes "Deadbeat," chosen as a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2017 in The Best American Mystery Stories

The Cucuzza Curse, Fiction by Thomas Pluck

Reprinted from At Home In The Dark

The flames danced in Vito Ferro’s rheumy eyes as the intense heat blistered the skin black. The brick beehive of the Neapolitan pizza oven at full fire was as hot as a crematorium, and cooked a pie to perfection in under seven minutes. This gave the crust a crispness on the teeth but left chew in the dough, and melted the sliced rounds of bone-white mozzarella without boiling the bright acidity out of the tomato sauce, like a steel oven would.

“Looks about done, right Uncle Veet?” His grandnephew Peter worked runnels into his soft knuckles with his thumbs, kneading invisible worry beads.

Peter was smart, a college boy—unlike Vito’s stronzo sons—but he chattered when outside of his element.

Vito snapped callused fingers, and Peter slid the wooden paddle, the pizza peel, beneath the pie and brought it to the work counter, where he cut it into uneven eighths with jerky, hesitant thrusts of the roller.

Vito studied the pie solemnly.

His family proudly called themselves Catholics, but their true religion was food. Pizza, in particular. Vito had made a covenant with the god of the oven paid for in toil. In the oven he had built with his own hands, a transfiguration occurred, turning a little flour and water topped with tomato sauce and cheese into a meal that made customers line down the block for hours, and his family lived like barons had in the old country.

Vito slapped Peter on the shoulder. “Bene. Mangia.”

The kid pulled off a slice and bit into it with pride. “It’s good!”

Vito remembered when he’d made his first pie back in Napoli, and felt a little twinge in his chest. He took a slice and noted the droop of the the triangle. The center was the hardest to get right. Too often they were soft and watery. He closed his eyes and chewed slow.

The burning began as a small pill of pain at the back of his throat, then blossomed into fiery agony, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of hot coals from the oven. He ran for the galvanized sink and drank from the faucet like a dog to quench the grease fire in his mouth. Sweat ran down his face and he collapsed to the floor.


He woke to Peter fanning him with an apron. When he could talk without agony, he dialed the phone. Hoping he would get no answer. Vito didn’t know what frightened him more—the curse or Aldo Quattrocchi, the mafiosi who’d lent him thirty thousand dollars to open the restaurant, even though he was of an age where he shouldn’t buy green bananas.

 “Calm down,” The voice chilled his ear like he’d opened the deep freeze. “I’ll send the Gagootza.”

# # #

Stately, tanned Joey Cucuzza, resplendent in a tailored slate suit, pink shirt with its collar open to frame a red Italian horn pendant shaped like a dog dick, listened while the ancient pizza-man beseeched him.

Vito scratched his sunken, gray-haired chest through a sweat-soaked white undershirt.

“You burnt your tongue on a slice of pizza?” Joey fixed things for Aldo Quattrocchi, a captain in the broken family of northern Jersey crime. He had come directly from his no-work job at Port Newark, where he read the newspapers and day-traded when he wasn’t at the gym, out to lunch with the dock boss, or enjoying a nooner in the apartment he kept in Ironbound.

Or visiting Aldo’s Newark subjects, who expected protection for their payments of street tax.

“I explain.” Vito took a grayed rag from the pocket of his chinos and mopped his face.
Vito Ferro was a northern New Jersey institution, the first to make Neapolitan style pies, and had paid street tax on his first shop in Hoboken long before Joey and Aldo were born. Aldo could be sentimental when he wasn’t telling you to tack someone’s fingertips to a table with finishing nails.

He wouldn’t send Joey for that kind of job. They had apes for that. Joey was here because he knew people, and he knew people. Now touching forty, he had come up as a runner for an uncle who ran gay bars for the Jewish mob in Manhattan. He had a reputation as a reasonable if foppish good earner with an even temper, respected by men of violence and friendly enough to be a face with the citizens.

“Got any coffee?” Joey nodded toward the shiny pipeworks of the espresso machine.

“It’s not hooked up yet.” The nephew swallowed spit. College boy had locks of brown curls like a Greek shepherd, no ring, and a nice physique. Eyebrows tweezed, with intelligent eyes above a slack jaw. Hands too soft for labor.

Joey wondered how the kid wound up here.

“How exactly are you spending Mister Quattrocchi’s money?” They’d had the thirty grand for six weeks. You paid your first month on receipt, but they would be late for the next unless business picked up soon.

“I had the oven brought brick by brick from Napoli,” Peter said. “It’s the same one Uncle Veet used in his first pizzeria. It took me a week to find the place. They don’t speak the Italian I learned in school.”

Vito winced and sipped milk like he was nursing an ulcer.

Joey had visited Napoli to broker a deal with the Camorra for containers half-filled with fake Gucci handbags and half with young Slovenian women, and the mangled street Italian he’d learned growing up served him well. He’d also picked up a snobbery for classic Neapolitan pizza, and after Vito retired, no one else came close. His sons were clowns in comparison.

“They put up a wall around the oven, turned the place into some Irish pub.”

“My sons, they do this,” Vito sneered. “I retire, give them my business, and they do this to me. Disgraciata!” He drew into himself with shame, then curled back two fingers of his right hand and spat between the horns of pointer and pinky finger. “It is the mal occhio.”

The evil eye.

Joey touched the cornuto, the Italian horn at his throat.

His family was only three generations from the old country, where people were still killed over such things.

“I tell Aldo that, and he’s gonna say ‘Old Vito is pazzo,’ and you know what they do to mad dogs, Mister Vito.”

Vito spread the dollop of saliva into the black and white tiles with the sole of his black loafer. “I bite into the pizza from that oven, it burns me. Tell him, Pietro.”

Peter shrugged helplessly. “He looked like he was dying, Mister Cucuzza.”

Joey buffed manicured nails on his slacks. “Why don’t you make me a pie while you tell me the history of the world part one.”

Vito took a risen ball of dough from a tray in the refrigerator. The short old man was bent and his skin was crepe paper, but his forearms flexed as he tossed the dough. He made quick work of it, then sat to tell the story in the seven minutes of baking.

He wringed his apron in his hands. Embarrassed and afraid, sure of his fate.

Joey listened to the story, even though he’d read it in the newspaper. One son had sued the other over use of the name Original Vito’s Neapolitan Pizza. A reality show was pitched. It became a joke. Vito had enough, coming out of retirement to save his good name.

Except he didn’t have any money.

Like many who came over, Vito had no papers, never applied for a social security number. Everything legit was in his wife’s name, and when she succumbed to cancer, it went to their sons, Sal and Nunzio. When he retired, his boys took everything but the house he lived in, left him squeaking by on his wife’s social security check. No more new Cadillacs every year for Vito.

“Scumbari,” the old man said.

So he went to Aldo, who like most guys his age from Hoboken, loved Frank Sinatra, Fiore’s mozzarella, and Vito Ferro’s Neapolitan pizza.

Vito slid out the pie and cut it with quick swipes of the roller.

Joey folded a slice and took a bite. No fires of hell. Only fresh marinara, the tart milky taste of Fiore’s handmade mozzarella cheese, and Vito’s perfect crust. He grunted in appreciation.

“Have one, Mister Vito.”

Vito looked at the pie as if it were a rattlesnake coiled on the wooden pizza peel. “No, Giuseppe. I have the mal occhio on me. And it comes from my own sons.” He gripped his chest to remove the invisible knife from his heart.

Protection was protection. “We’ll help you, Mister Vito.”

# # #

In the air conditioned leather confines of his red Alfa Romeo sedan, Joey called his mother.

“Joseph.” Kitchen sounds and Animal Planet in the background. “To what do I owe the honor?”

He’d missed two Sundays in a row. She was probably getting ready to put a mal occhio on him. “Ma. I told you, the port’s open Sundays this month.”

It was, but Joey had been in Provincetown, eating littleneck clams and working on his tan.

“You could come Wednesdays. Your uncle comes over for pasta.”

They were both at the age where old stories played on repeat. Once a week more than enough. “Hey Ma, you remember the crier at great-grandpa Nick’s funeral? Witch Nose.”

His great-grandfather had raised goats. All Joey remembered besides the funeral was that he both looked and smelled like a billy goat, and from the family gossip, he was hornier than one.

“Angelina. She always liked you.”

“She still crying, or did she shuffle off to Buffalo?” Their family euphemism for death.

“No one uses criers any more.”

True. They’d hired them for her grandfather because he’d been a nasty old prick who gelded billy goats with knife and a pair of pliers, and beat his sons for growing bigger than him.

The criers had been unnecessary. All his mistresses showed up, a half dozen of the heftiest Italian widows of Nutley, crying like six operas going on at once. His mother had been mortified.

“She made the best pignoli until she got the arthritis. She’s still on the old street. Next to where Raffiola lived.” Old person directions. He knew the house.

“You got her number?”

“No, but where’s she gonna go? She’s all alone. Like how I’m gonna be when a crane falls on you.”

“Thanks, Ma. I’ll be there Sunday. Unless a crane falls on me.”

“Don’t talk like that.” She clucked her tongue. He could see her make the sign of the cross.


Joey’s old neighborhood of Avondale had been handed down by the Italians to the next generation of immigrants. The two-story, green or white siding homes were so close together that you could climb out one window into your neighbor’s for surreptitious infidelity. After his old man copped a croak, his mother sold the creaky hand-built house and bought a condo.

Instead of Bon Jovi blaring from the stereo of an IROC Camaro, “Despacito” warbled from an open window, but little else had changed. The men were away at work, the kids were in school, and the women worked side hustles in the kitchens, watched toddlers, ran a sewing machine. He parked on the sidewalk in front of a house with ancient grapevines strangling a trellis over the backyard.

The wooden front door was painted shut and dead-bolted. It had probably never been opened except to move in furniture generations ago. The skinny driveway held a lemon-colored K-car on four flat tires, cardboard boxes stuffed to the windows. Behind it, three cracked concrete steps with a railing made of lead plumbing pipe led to a storm door that left white powder on his knuckles when he rapped on it. He heard a voice, then steps.

He studied Angelina’s yard while he waited. A rotting wine press, a wooden barrel topped with greasy rainwater. Ivy covered the chainlink fence, and pale green baseball bats of Italian squash dangled nearly four feet to the ground.

Cucuzza.

His phallic namesake squash, which had led to the playground taunts that tempered his mettle. The early battles taught him into a peacemaker until a growth spurt turned him into a rangy bloodier of noses.

A hunched form opened the inside door, and a wizened face jabbed a pointy chin his way.

“Buongiorn Guiseppe,” she said, and shuffled back into the kitchen. “Your mother say you come.”

So Ma had her number, but wanted him to visit the old broad.

With arthritic fingers like the tangled white roots of a pulled root, she stirred the heady contents of a pot with a wooden spoon. A translucent crescent of squash rose to the top.

Cucuzza. Of course.

His father had loved it cooked with potatoes, hot peppers, and tomato sauce in a peasant stew called giambotta. Joey would sop up the sauce with bread, ignoring the watery squash until he took a cuff to the ear.

“Sit, eat.”

He dusted a vinyl chair with his pocket square and sat while she poured black coffee from a glass percolator and set out a plate of pizzelle, delicate waffle-shaped cookies snow-dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

He went through the rituals of politeness, asked of family, listened to her aches and troubles. Her hand was cold when she touched his wrist, her eyes bright.

“Angelina, I need you to tell me how to free somebody from the evil eye.”

Her eyes turned steely serious. “I show you.”

He left with a Corning-ware dish of stewed cucuzza and half of a long Italian loaf from Vitiello’s bakery.

# # #

Back in the kitchen of Vito’s Original Classic Neapolitan Pizza Pies, Vito stared at a steel mixing bowl filled with water. The kid was up front working the sparse lunch crowd, stumbling occasionally but eager to prove himself. Joey set a green bottle of olive oil next to the bowl.

“Three drops in the water. One at a time.”

Angelina had told him that someone unburdened by the fascina, the hold of the evil eye, would create three separate drops. He tried it himself in her kitchen.

Vito scratched at his belly, then tilted the bottle over the water.

One drop. Then two, three golden pearls floated atop the water in a lazy spin.

They leaned in close.

Slowly, the drops found each other and made a single orb that resembled nothing less than the yellow eye of the devil himself.

They hadn’t waited for the water to settle, Joey thought. But it didn’t matter. Vito thought he was cursed, and the olive oil affirmed his belief.

And he’d believe in the cure.

Joey handed him a can of Morton’s salt.

“Shake some in, say an Our Father. Do that three times.”

Vito beseeched him with his pouchy eyes. Joey prayed with him in Italian, silently hoping that he wouldn’t burst into flames.

“Now we do the test again?”

“Don’t tempt fate, Vito.” He gripped the old man’s shoulder, still strong. “Angelina says you are free of the fascina.”

Vito winced at the word, then hugged him.

Joey wished such wards worked, but in his experience human nature was stronger than magic. He dropped his flour-speckled suit coat off at the dry cleaner, and brought Angelina’s dish to the office at the port, where the boys scarfed it down.

“It’s Cucuzza’s cucuzza!” one gavone bellowed around a mouthful.

Joey grabbed the crotch of his summer suit. “Eat this cucuzza.”

They laughed as he told them the story. One asked him to put the mal occhio on his mother in-law. He went to his office to finish reading the papers and trade stocks before closing.

# # #

Aldo called him the next morning, crabbier than usual. Joey talked him down. They hadn’t met this week, and Aldo had a sit-down that afternoon, which always gave him the agita.

“I feel like I got hit with the mal occhio. You wanna drizzle some olive oil and find out?”

“After the meet. You got this. You’re a golden god.”

“I don’t feel like one.”

“You will tonight.”

“Speaking of evil eyes, you gotta see Vito again. He’s busting my balls. Why’d I give that old fuck my number? He should be calling you.”

“You wanted the quick vig on thirty gees. Doing street work, when you’re the big capita cazzo.”

“It’s easy money. That vig paid for your new coat.”

“When do I see this coat?”

“The apartment. Wear it today. Ciao.”


Joey wore the two-button pale blue silk Isaia sport coat over faded gray jeans and a matching snug shirt.

Peter stoked the oven, raking the coals with a shovel.

Vito stared into a bowl of oil-dotted water. “I can’t cook anymore. Tell Mister Quattrocchi to take my business. I die soon.”

“Talk to me.”

The old man flicked his eyes toward his grandnephew.

“Wait outside kid,” Joey said. “Go play on your phone.”

He flinched, but left under the withering stare.

Vito told him, in stuttering broken English. “Today, I see the face of the dead.”

Joey held back the look that said he was pazzo.

“My family is from Bari. My uncles, they were fisherman who go to America, but my mother and father run a little restaurant by the water.”

Joey prepared for more ancient history.

“We fed the soldiers. Italian, then English and American. Then the Germans raid the harbor with screaming bomber planes. One ship was full of mustard gas. The Americans say no, but the gas rolled in and kill my family.”

He looked down. “My mother put a wet towel over my face, but she breath in too much.”

“Condoglianze.”

“I am orphan. The Americans put me on a train to Napoli. I apprentice in a pizzeria, make good money. So I come here.”

That morning, he came to make dough and sauce, and was met with a blast of heat and a glow from the oven.

“The oven was flaming like the fires of hell. A young girl stirring the coals. She screams at me, tears gold chains from her neck and throws them in the fire.” His eyes went away, like he was talking about the past.

“She scoop up the coals in her hand and throws them at me.”

He held up his apron. It was scorched with a black mark, burned with a scatter of pinholes like a shotgun blast.

“I drive home, pray the rosary. Peter calls me, asks why I leave the door unlocked. I come back, everything is clean. The oven is empty.”

“Who was she?”

Vito pulled a gold chain from his shirt and kissed the large pendant of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns. “The evil eye, showing me my family in hell. Lies, to hurt me.”

Joey looked into the bowl. The gleaming oil stared back as one big eye.

“Make your pies, Mister Vito. I’ll fix this.”

Outside, he found the kid leaning on the bricks, one knee bent like a flamingo as he thumbed his phone. He looked too much of a chooch to be pulling one over on anybody. And what motive? He was partners with the crazy old bastard. If they couldn’t pay the vig, one of Aldo’s apes would break his clean-shaven arms.

“You like slinging pizza dough for a living?”

Peter shrugged. “Uncle Veet put me through college after my father died from 9/11. He was a fireman. Took a ferry over to help dig for weeks. It got into his lungs.”

Joey nodded. They had watched the towers go down from Newark harbor, helpless.

“You see anything when you got here this morning?”

The kid shook his head, eyes rattling like dice. “The oven was empty.”

“Think maybe your uncle’s got oldtimer’s disease?” Joey switched gears to dockworker talk. He liked smart people thinking he was ignorant and easily fooled.

“You mean Alzheimer’s? He doesn’t forget a thing, Mister C. He’s as good with numbers as I am, and I have a degree in Finance. I took a little psych, too. He’s got a lot guilt. My uncles broke his heart.”

Family shit. The only think Joey hated more than eating cucuzza was dealing with other people’s family shit.

He thought about it in the privacy of the Alfa Romeo as the Beastie Boys rapped about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego on the stereo.

Guilt meant lies. He could lean on the old man, but vecchioni could be stubborn. What scared people of that age was more frightening than pain or death.

The sons would talk. They couldn’t want Vito’s competition. There were a thousand pizza joints in Jersey, but one more Original Vito’s Neapolitan Pizzas diluted the brand. And the old man had public sympathy.

Joey killed a few hours at the port listening to the dock boss complain, then drove over the black steel dinosaur skeleton of the Pulaski skyway into the lesser hell of late morning traffic. An hour later he emerged in the labyrinth of huddled four-story brick buildings that was Hoboken. The neighborhood had gentrified into a sixth borough of New York, a haven for frat boys and trust fund kids who skipped Williamsburg after draining it dry of cool.

He parked in front of a hydrant next to a beauty spa and walked the block. Four old men held court at a card table next to a stoop and watched the neighborhood. Ground down by life, sandpaper stubble chins defying their morning shaves. Two of them tightened up at his approach, another puffed a black cigar that smelled like feet.

“Joey C,” the last one said, with a respectful nod. A retired shipping man. “Good to see you.”

“Buon dia, Skippy.”

“What brings you here? Can’t be the ah’pizz.”

“That bad?” Joey nodded toward Vito’s first pizzeria, rechristened Gavones.

The smoker laughed. “Fiore won’t even sell him mozzarella no more.”

“He sells this thing called a Garbage Pie,” Skippy said. “The kids line up for it. Puffing the marijuan right on the corner with those vape pens, clouds like someone oughtta be playing ‘Harlem Nocturne.’”

The men shook their heads.

“I’ll talk to him.”

The new sign depicted a spike-haired guido caricature straight out of Jersey Shore, gripping a slice in a pumped fist dripping grease onto a muscle shirt. Joey pushed open the door, and heard the smoker mutter finocchio before it closed behind him.
Inside, the place did a brisk early lunch business, mostly young people on phones yammering over pies smothered with everything from chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks to pineapple rings and bacon slices. The menu on the wall listed myriad combinations that made Joey’s head hurt.

Worse, Lou Monte sang “Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey” on the speakers. In September.

 A spray-tanned guy with stretch marked shoulders worked the oven, a beehive of checkered ceramic tiles with the color baked out of them. Vito’s first.

Joey skipped the line. “Nunzio here?”

“In the back, bro.”

Past another kid working a deep fryer was an open door. Inside was a big refrigerator and a flour-scattered work table where the presumed Nunzio worked the dough. He flicked his eyes at Joey but kept rolling, setting softballs of pizza dough on wax paper-lined trays.

Joey watched for a minute. “How you doing, Nunzi?”

“You mind? Some of us gotta work for a living.” They were off Aldo’s turf, but the attitude took some balls. He admired it over the ass-kissing he usually got.

“You seem to be doing all right. But your father, something’s got him upset.”

Nunzio rolled his eyes. “When’s he not upset? He retired ten years ago. My mother, all she wanted was a vacation in the old country. She had to go alone on a Mario Perillo cruise. He wouldn’t leave the business alone for that long.”

He paused for a quick sign of the cross, dabbing himself with flour. “May she rest in peace, sixty years with that stubborn vecchione.”

Joey could smell the spite. A cheap, perfectionist father who hewed to tradition. He knew the sting well.

“So Vito’s cheap. He took care of you and your kids.”

“He’s tighter than a crab’s ass, and that’s waterproof.” He slapped a dough ball down.

“You gotta bust his balls with this stoner shit? Calling it a garbage pie? He thinks you put the evil eye on him.”

Nunzio laughed and started on a new bowl, mixing flour and water. “He’s always been superstitious. I heard he had the new place blessed by a priest. He  cries the blues, but he wants for nothing. His problem is he’s got to run everything, and it’s not like the old days. We tried staying traditional, and almost sank like the Titanic. The ‘merigons want gluten-free crust, vegan cheese. Crazy toppings.

“He wanted money to open his own place, but it isn’t there. It all went into my brother’s fancy-ass place in Millburn and the grandkids’ college. My daughter and her husband make good money, but they can’t make that nut alone. Vito got to retire. Me, I’m gonna keel over in front of that oven before my day comes.”

Once the steam settled, Joey went in. “He owes Aldo thirty large. One of you is either playing games with him or he’s losing his marbles. Either way, when he can’t pay, you know who we hit up.” You inherited street debt from your parents, your children. It was a curse you couldn’t dispel using salt and olive oil.

“My little cousin couldn’t lend it to him?” He punched down the dough. “That’s who you should hit up. His partner?”

“The kid can’t even afford to dress right.”

“That’s how they all dress these days, like bums. He’s got cush, believe me. How you think he’s got time to make pizzas with Cheapo Vito?” He wiped flour off his hands, and Joey stepped back to avoid getting the dust on his new coat.

“Kid thinks his shit don’t stink, just like my brother with his villa out in the ‘burbs.” Nunzio carried a tray of dough to the icebox. “My son saw him with a hot broad all over him at the club. Me, I’m working seven days a week, I haven’t had my ashes hauled in a month.”

Joey left Nunzio to his dough. If he was too busy to get laid, he wouldn’t have time to prank his father over old grudges.

On the walk back to the car, he let the past creep in.

Joey’s uncle on his mother’s side came for coffee every morning once his father left for work. Weary-eyed after the New York bars closed, he walked Joey to school before heading home to sleep. Taught him to laugh at life, introduced him to Mel Brooks movies, gave them a VCR when they cost a grand and weighed fifty pounds.

After a bottle of red at Sunday dinner, his father would jab young Joey in the chest.

You turn into a finocchio like your uncle, and I’ll put a bullet in your head.

Joey thought the word had something to do with Pinocchio. His uncle did walk like he was on strings. When Joey grew older and his disinterest in girls became obvious, he took a beating from the old man. His uncle gave him the couch at his flat and a job as a runner. By then he learned that finocchio was Italian for fennel. The root looked like a man’s genitals, so the word served double duty as a slur toward gay men.

At the card table, the smoker grinned at him around the stub of his cigar. Joey slapped it out of his mouth and sprayed him with embers. The other men cringed and shouted in surprise. “Next time the lit end goes up your ass.”

Joey wiped the ashes off his jacket and squealed the Alfa’s tires up the street. He felt like hitting a heavy bag, taking a cold shower and a nooner. He headed towards the highway to brace the other son.

What Nunzio said about Peter bothered him. If the kid was loaded, why did Vito go to the street for money? Maybe he spent the loan on tail, and this was his way out  of it.
The stereo played Boz Scaggs, and Joey smiled. His uncle called him Scuzz Baggs. He had a funny name for everybody. Barry Manilow was Barry Cantaloupe. He loved wordplay and old euphemisms, like getting your ashes hauled.

He called Aldo on the bluetooth. Before the sit-down, he would hit the sauna to steam himself of the poisons he drank to sleep. Alcoholism galloped Aldo’s family like a mudder at Monmouth racetrack.

Aldo picked up without a word. Just heavy breath.

“Babe. I’m sorry. I’m handling the Vito Ferro bullshit. Tell me who handles his trash?”

“Off the top of my head?”

“Save me a trip back.”

“Maybe you should be back at the apartment in an hour. Bring me a prosciutto and mozz from Fiore’s.”

“Love to, but I’m stuck on 280.” He wasn’t on the highway yet, but he was following a scent, however faint, and didn’t want to leave the trail.

Besides, he wanted Aldo hungry and sharp for the sit-down, not sated and logy.

“Tonight we’ll celebrate with a steak at Arthur’s on the water. I made reservations.”

Joey touched the cornuto at his throat. It was the anniversary of their trip to Capri, where Aldo bought him the pendant made from the local coral.

A low grumble as Aldo’s gears turned. He was no good with dates, but he’d know who hauled trash for the people who owed him money.

“Exo carting. Terry Peru’s thing.”

“Thanks babe. Pick you up at eight.”

He looked the number up on his phone, weaving a little on the road.

They had spent two weeks in Italy, including a trip to Sicily to find Aldo’s family village, where they learned Sicilian stiletto fighting from a ‘Ndrangheta knife master. Joey had bought them matching handmade stilettos as an anniversary present. Eleventh was steel. He fingered the abalone handle of the stiletto in the pocket of his new coat. Silk was twelfth. Aldo miscounted.

Joey smiled and tried to convince the gravelly-voiced receptionist of Exo Carting to put him through to her boss.

She said he’d call back.

# # #

Interstate 280 turned into a parking lot in the hills. He made his way to the shoulder and rode it a half a mile, ignoring the horns of cars in the right lane that he sprayed with kicked-up debris.

Angelina would be home. He wasn’t angry that her evil eye cure hadn’t worked, but he needed her to come up with a spell or something to keep Vito from giving himself a heart attack over globs of olive oil in a bowl.

He tailgated a bus in the afternoon idiot traffic, the road clogged with harried mothers in minivans and Q-tip-headed old fucks with boxes of tissues in their rear windows. He kneaded the wheel. His even temper took work.

His phone buzzed.

“Terry. Thank you for getting back so quickly.” His overly polite tone begged  for discourtesy, so that he could retort.

“Anything for Joey C. What you need?”

“What days you pick up on Mulberry, down by the Rock?”

“Uhh….” Paper flipping. “This morning.”

Fuck. It was his own fault for not checking the trash after Vito said the oven was empty.

“I need to look in whatever truck picked up Vito Ferro’s dumpster this morning. They still out?”

Terry huffed, a laugh cut short. “No, they get done by noon.”

“I need you to get them on the radio before they dump.” Newark had a trash incinerator. Not everything got burned, but once it was in the system to be sorted, he’d have no way of finding their trash.

“I could try, but…”

“You think I’m asking ‘cause I like rooting through other people’s shit?”

A pause while Terry swallowed the response in his mouth.

“I’ll radio them right now. What you want them to do?”

“Have them meet me in the Meadowlands where you dump your hazmat trash when you’re short on the vig.”

Terry didn’t chuckle at that one. He was into Aldo for six figures for fantasy sports bets. “Can they just dump and go?”

A Lexus truck stopped to double park. Joey stomped the brake and the Alfa Romeo shuddered. “Your sister’s ass!”

“I’m sorry Joey. They’re on the clock.”

“Not you. Some bucciacca cut me off.” He swerved into the oncoming lane and gunned past. “Tell your guys to wait. You think I’m sifting through that shit?”

In the silence, he saw Terry lick his fat lips.

“Make ‘em punch out. They’ll get paid.”

“Gimme an hour.”

“Make it two.”

# # #

Joey hit the gym and took a hot shower before he rapped on Angelina’s door. She didn’t come. He flicked open his stiletto and popped the storm door’s lock. He found her sprawled on an easy chair, mouth open, eyes closed. Chest not rising.

He leaned in to listen for breath. She smelled like sharp provolone. He squinted at the fine gold chain below the marbled wattle of her neck.

A Star of David dangled on it.

Joey didn’t know until high school that it was possible to be both Italian and Jewish. He thought his paísans were all Catholics until his English teacher, Ms. Stolfi, mentioned celebrating Passover. He had been incredulous, insisting she couldn’t be both. She made him read Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and give an oral report to the class. He’d been so nervous.

The snort of a warthog interrupted his reverie.

Joey jumped back from Angelina, knocking an African violet from the window sill. He caught the pot before it hit the floor.

She squinted at him. “Joey? I fall asleep. I make coffee.” She heaved herself out of the chair and shuffled to the kitchen.

Over fresh coffee, he told her about Vito and the olive oil.

“That one? He cursed himself.” She sneered, her face a white prune. “How you think he come here with money?”

Joey sipped espresso from a tiny cup and let her talk.

“No one has money. Mussolini, he suck the land dry, sfachim!” She raised a bony fist. “My family, they make Aliyah to the Holy land after the war. Who want to live with ratti who sell you out to fascisti? Nothing to eat, but Vito Ferro, he come to America, build a pizzeria.”

“Maybe the mala vita?” The bad life.

Angelina pursed her lips and poked him with a finger. “You ask me?”

Joey shrugged, sheepish. She was right. Vito paid his street tax, but never bought the olive oil the port boys jacked and sold by the truckload. He stayed clean.

“The mala vita make money from the war too,” she said. “Blood money. You no come to America with money. You come to make money. You have money, why you leave?” She pointed a gnarled finger and nodded over it, as if answering her own question.

# # #

Joey took the bridge over the dirty Passaic and weaved into the Meadowlands, a swamp so clogged with bodies and pollution that if zombies existed, they would have risen from its poisoned muck. He passed a tall radio tower with three blinking red lights, then cut down a rutted road hedged by reeds on both sides.

The Alfa bounced along, scraping on the grass, and stopped nose to nose with a Mack garbage truck. He stepped around the truck and found two men in sooty worksuits spreading the truck’s dumped load over the flattened reeds using long poles.

“We’re looking for ashes,” he said, and stood back to watch.

“That’s over here,” the squat bald one said, and jabbed at pile of trash bags that had melted and torn.

Between the reeds, he caught the afternoon sun sparkling on the water, and the SuperFund site looked beautiful if you ignored the fish and birdshit smell of the flats bared by low tide. The white underbelly of a dead crab raised its claws from the mud like a pair of praying hands.

His thoughts turned to his father.

After the beating ruined his Roman nose, Joey had learned to pass among straight men. They weren’t that different, but many would only freely express themselves through anger or desire. If you wanted something from them, you translated your needs into their pidgin.

He didn’t need to explain himself to the garbage men, they would dig because they feared him. But they would work harder if they imagined he was the devil-may-care, unfaithful piece of shit they wished they could be.

“We’re looking for my goomar’s chain,” Joey said. “Dumb broad threw it in the fireplace because I’m taking my wife to Punta Cana. Now she wants it back.” He rolled his eyes for the convincer.

They muttered about girlfriends and wives as they kicked through the ashes, and marsh birds cried and swooped overhead.

“I got something,” the tall one said, and bent to thrust his gloved hand into the ashes.
Joey walked closer. The worker brushed soot off the coil in his palm.

“Thought gold would melt into nothing.” He held up a blackened mess of burn spaghetti.

Joey took it in his handkerchief. “You think that bucciacca is worth gold?” He snickered.

The necklaces had melted. Any gold coating was long gone and the amulets were unrecognizable. Gimcrack for a parlor trick to scare an old man. He wrapped the mess into his pocket.

“Thank you fellas.” He gave them each a hundred.

# # #

He pulled into the radio station’s driveway and stared at the dead neon letters of the white WMCA hut and thought about who would want to torment Vito Ferro to death.
He had killed for business, and for personal reasons. Personal got messy. You wanted them to know why.

Do things like cut their hands off with bolt cutters and throw them, still zip-tied together, for the crabs to eat in the swamp. Hands that could never hit you again.
He called the pizza joint in Millburn that the other son had opened.

“Vito’s Neapolitan Pizza and Italian Specialties,” a young woman answered.

“Sal please. Tell him it’s Joey Cucuzza.”

He spent a minute listening to Mario Lanza. No corny Lou Monte for the rich ‘merigons.

“Sal here. Who is this?”

“Joe Cucuzza. I’m a business associate of your father’s. I need to find his partner, your nephew Peter. He still at home?”

“Why don’t you call him then?” Cocky.

“It would be a lot easier if you told me where he lives, Sal. I’m calling as a courtesy. If I drive out there, maybe those imports you sell get held up in customs until they rot.”

“Whoa, easy. I’m just protecting my family.”

“I understand, Sal. He’s not in trouble. He’s the finance wiz, right? He’s hooking me up with some hedge funds.”

“He’s got a condo in Jersey City,” Sal said. “With his fiancée.”

Joey committed the address to memory.

# # #

Vito’s Original Classic Neapolitan Pizza Pies was nearly abandoned by five o’clock, after the downtown Newark commuters fled and before the gentrifiers came out for dinner. Peter leaned on the counter, playing on his phone.

The scent of tomato sauce filled the restaurant like a siren song. Joey followed it, snapping his fingers for the kid to follow.

Vito stirred a huge pot of sauce, a bubbling blood red witch’s brew.

“Mister Vito,” Joey said, and spun a chair backwards to sit facing the old man. “I’ve found who’s giving you the evil eye. And they won’t be bothering you any more.”

Before Vito could talk, Joey said, “You have a ghost. And my strega says the only way to exorcise a ghost is to set them to rest. So tell me the real story of how you came to America.”

The kid put his phone down.

Vito frowned. “I tell you. I made money in Napoli, everyone know my pizza.”

“If you were flush, why’d you come here?”

“It is America. My family was dead.”

“The country was in ruins, but you were selling pies? Why don’t you tell me where you got the money.”

“I do not have to explain myself to mafiosi. You bleed us dry!” Vito stood and made a fist. The scarred skin of his forearms stretched over old muscle.

“Easy, Uncle Veet,” Peter said.

“I spoke to my strega, Vito. She’s Jewish, you know? We had a lot more Jewish Italians before the war than after it. Their neighbors ratted them out. Took everything they owned. And when the war was over and Mussolini was strung up by his balls, people took revenge on those no-good rat fucks. That ring any bells?”

Vito shuddered, fists at his sides. “They do not belong there!”

Peter gasped. “Uncle Vito.”

Joey shrugged. “Your uncle’s not the nice guy you thought. But you know that already, don’t you kid?”

Peter let his jaw go slack.

“Don’t play dumb. Make us a pie. Margherita. And no hot sauce this time.” Joey took a bottle from his pocket and set it on the table.

Peter stammered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Houshmand’s NastyVicious Hot Sauce. They make this at Rowan college.” Joey turned the bottle around. “You went to Rowan, didn’t you?”

“Pietro?” Vito stared.

“Uncle Veet, he wants to turn us against each other. Take over your business.”

“Aldo owns the building. It’s in his interest for you to make lots of money, so he can jack up your rent. Try again, kid.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You two talk this out. That pie had better make me lie back and think of Napoli.” Joey walked to his car and returned holding a young lady by the nape of her neck. “Good of you not to run, bella donna.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The pie was in the oven, Peter cowering as Uncle Vito jabbed his finger and swore. “Vaffanculo! You do this to me?”

Vito screamed and grabbed his chest when he saw the girl.

“Meet Peter’s wife-to-be,” Joey said. “I found her in the Jersey City condo she shares with your nephew.”

Vito scrunched his face. “Peter, you said you live at home, you have no money.”

“She’s a stage manager. She used Peter’s father’s fireman gloves to scoop the coals. They’re rated for twelve hundred degrees.” A fireman told Joey that once on a date. He nudged her forward. “Give him your best vengeful ghost act, honey.”

She grabbed a pizza slicer. “I don’t need to act, this Nazi motherfucker robbed my family and sent them to the camps! My nonna remembers you.”

Vito held up his hands in shock.

The girl was a ringer for her grandmother. She’d shown Joey the photo while she begged for her life at stiletto point.

Peter exchanged his dumbstruck act for a sneer of loathing. “Valeria’s grandmother told me everything. How could you do that?”

“You don’t know what it’s like to starve!” Vito snarled. “None of you.”

“My nonna does,” Valeria said. “You took her gold necklace. From a little girl! You made them hide in your oven from the secret police. Was that some sick joke? Then you turned them in. She saw a picture in the paper of you arguing with your sons, and she nearly had a heart attack.”

Joey rapped the hot sauce bottle on the counter. “My pizza is burning.”

Peter quickly scooped it onto the peel. The cheese bubbled, the edges of the crust were a little dark.

“It’s all right, I like it blistery,” Joey said, and turned to Peter and Valeria. “Now, what do I do with you? You tried to kill a man under our protection.”

Joey flicked open his stiletto. The seven inch blade gleamed with the oven’s fire. He waved the tip at Valeria, who set down the pizza slicer.

Peter held up his hands. “Technically, we’re the ones under your protection, Mister Cucuzza.”

“How so?”

“We’ve been paying the street tax,” Valeria said. “Our money. Not his. He’s broke as fuck.”

Joey slowly closed his stiletto. “This is between you, then.” He took the roller and cut the pizza, folding a slice, taking a bite. “Not bad, kid.”

Vito growled, “Kill them. He is not my blood, marrying a Jew. We are Italian, Guiseppe!”

“This is for my nonna!” Valeria snatched the pizza slicer and lunged at Vito.

He stumbled back. Valeria gave chase, with Peter trying hold her back in vain.
Joey ate his slice while the tree of them disappeared into the kitchen. A loud crash gonged and a scream gargled out.

More screams. Then the crying gave Angelina a run for her money.

His phone buzzed. Aldo.

“How’s my Apollo?” he answered.

“I hope you liked Napoli,” Aldo huffed. Excited. “You’re going back. They asked for you, said you’re ingamba….”

Ingambatissimo, probably. It meant he knew his shit. Which he did.

“In Gabbadone!” Aldo laughed.

Hung like a horse. That was correct, too.

“Can’t wait. See you for dinner, babe.” Joey finished his slice to the crust and walked into the kitchen.

Sauce covered the floor, the stove, and Vito. He twitched and bubbled, mouth open and filled with his famous sauce, face unrecognizable with the skin boiled off.

“We should have stuffed him in the oven,” Valeria cried, hugged to her fiancé’s chest. Peter looked relieved and exhausted, now that the man he’d once idolized had paid for his crimes.

Joey felt a pang, recalling the feeling.

“Ciao for now,” he said, and boxed the pizza, took it to his car. The port boys would be grateful. On the drive back, he wondered if the kids could make it work with a death between them.

Joey patted the gift box with the matching stiletto, and thought of his man using it to cut into a juicy rare steak.

It took a strong love, but you could do it.

Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He is the author of the Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller Bad Boy Boogie, which was nominated for an Anthony award, and the story collection Life During Wartime, which includes "Deadbeat," chosen as a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2017 in The Best American Mystery Stories.