Kwik Krimes (31 page)

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
O
UT OF THE
G
UTTER
.

Nicola Kennington is a pseudonym. She is based in the United Kingdom, but has a soft spot for San Francisco. She gets inspiration from news and songs, and conversations that she overhears on trains and buses. She wrote her first crime story just to see if she could do it, and is now scared that others are clamoring to get out of her head. Still, as her mother says, better out than in.

John Kenyon

10…

We were so close that her heart and my heart were touching, as if fused together. She looked up at me, her eyes clouded with confusion.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I have a confession,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s going to tear us apart, but I can’t keep on like this.”

“Oh God. I should have known,” she said. “Too good to be true. What, you’re married?”

“No. Remember when you said it was the worst thing and the best thing to ever happen to you? Well, please keep both possibilities in mind.”

9…

It was the first time we had made love with the lights on. It wasn’t teenage apprehension or the shame of flabby thirtysomethings gone to seed. There were simply things she didn’t want me to see. I knew they were there. They didn’t affect me. At least not the way she thought. She was worried about the surface, how she looked. But I was in love, and appearances didn’t matter. She was beautiful, and the flaws did nothing to take away
from that. She was baring herself to me. I felt like it was time to reciprocate.

8…

“I really don’t mind the scars.”

She stood looking at herself in a full-length mirror affixed to the back of the bedroom door. She turned this way and that, twisting to find the right angle to take in another part of her body. In bra and panties, the scars were clearly visible. They snaked up her forearms, made red splotches on her lower legs and angry welts along her neckline.

“You don’t mind them, do you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Now come to bed, and this time let’s leave the light on.”

7…

“I don’t know how I would have gotten through this without you,” she said.

She sat next to me on the couch in my apartment, her legs up under her, her head on my chest. I didn’t respond, simply ran my fingers through her hair. It had grown out into a bob that made her seem younger.

“I kind of feel like I’m falling for you,” she said.

“That’s not a surprise,” I said, taking her by the shoulders and pulling her upright. “I’ve been taking care of you.”

“No,” she said. “It’s something more.”

6…

Mr. Jennings paced back and forth across the back room. I caught a glimpse of collegiate flesh through the door to the front of the tanning salon.

“Is this going to be a problem for us?” he said.

“No, sir. It’s under control. It’s strictly professional.”

“It had better be,” he said, stopping directly in front of me. “There’s no room for guilt in this business, David.”

I nodded. “It was my mistake. I’m just trying to make it right.”

“Just don’t make it any worse.”

5…

“You’re doing what?”

Chris had just gotten back from picking up payments. We were sitting in the back of the salon.

“It’s only until she gets on her feet. I’m responsible, so I thought I’d help her out.”

“Well, she is hot. Saw her picture in the paper,” he said. “What did the fire do to her?”

“She has scars, but the doctor said they’ll fade with time.”

“Guess she won’t be coming in here anytime soon,” Chris said with a laugh. “These piece-of-shit beds would finish the job.”

4…

“Did you get that from me?” We were on my couch, watching TV. She had pulled aside the collar of my button-down to reveal a small, red scar in the shape of a heart.

“I guess. It’s just like yours,” I said, pointing to her neck. “Your necklace must have heated up in the fire and branded both of us when I carried you out.”

“I still don’t know how to thank you.”

“There’s no need,” I said. “Right place, right time. I was lucky.”

“No,” she said. “I’m the lucky one.”

3…

I wheeled her to the hospital door and then helped her up and led her to my car. “You’re sure you want to do this? I’ll be getting in your way.”

“Nonsense. I have plenty of room.”

“Okay,” she said. “I guess I should expect no less. You didn’t miss a day the whole time.”

“Figured you could use the company. Now I figure you can use the help.”

“My guardian angel,” she said, rising onto her tiptoes to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“Something like that.”

2…

I rushed in, pulling my jacket over my head to repel the flames already licking along the walls. The screams were coming from a bedroom in the back. I kicked in the door and found her trying to open a window that had been painted shut. I grabbed a blanket and picked her up in my arms. Holding her tight against me, I rushed back through the blaze and toward the sanctuary of the front yard.

1…

I packed the explosives next to the natural gas line that fed the furnace. It needed to burn so hot that no one could determine a cause. Mr. Jennings had made that clear. I wasn’t sure if it was an insurance thing or something more. He assured me the house would be vacant.

I stepped out to my car parked halfway down the block, and whispered a countdown under my breath. I fingered the trigger, heard a muted blast, and then everything was aflame. Then I heard the scream.

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
T
HRILLS
K
ILLSN
C
HILLS
.

John Kenyon is executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization, edits
Grift Magazine
(
GriftMagazine.com
), and has contributed crime-fiction short stories to a number of publications. His story collection,
The First Cut,
is available from Snubnose Press.

Jonathon King

T
his morning was the first and only time I ever lied about it, and wouldn’t you know it, the falsehood could have gotten me killed.

I’d always told friends, acquaintances, my mom, the cops, anyone who asked if I carried a gun on the job: “No. It’s not worth it. It would only cause more trouble. Screw the NRA. You pull one, they’re gonna pull one.” So why lie today?

Mine is a unique occupation. I work for an independent ATM company. I fill and fix cash machines in Miami-Dade County. I do this alone; no partner, no armored car, no uniform, no box or bag. I walk into Kwik Stops, 7-Elevens, Brotherhood Grocery, U-Gas, the Pink Pussycat, and dozens of other joints with thousands of dollars in unmarked twenty-dollar bills in my pockets. I open the machines with keys on a ring, the safe doors with combinations stored in my head. I try to be unassuming when I take the bricks of cash from my cargo pants pockets and transfer it into the interior dispensers. But who am I kidding? Everybody who takes two seconds to notice me opening and crouching down at an ATM knows what’s up. The guys hanging out at 60 Liquors in Liberty City call me “money man,” as in:

“Sup, money man? First of the month,
papi
. Load it up good.”

Incognito? Bull. Not in this world. So I do what I do two dozen times a day. And even though some people say I’m a fool, I say it’s an honest job. Or it was until this morning, when I lied.

I pull up at ten a.m. I’ve stopped at this store a hundred times. It’s the corner business of an old strip mall on a street used more as a pass-through than a destination. The locals come here. Off-brand cigarettes, malt liquor by the can in plastic buckets filled with ice, extra-long T-shirts in black or white, toilet paper by the roll, canned food, junk food, processed cheese food, and a permeating odor of industrial-strength cleaner poured on something gone bad that probably wasn’t so good to begin with. It’s called, simply, “the Market.”

On this morning I walk in, nod at the Indian counterman as usual, and do a quick scan. Nobody else in the place. Just the way I like it. The ATM is in a direct line to the glass front doors, so I can see anyone arriving while I’m down on one knee, the open safe door shielding my hand full of money while I load. It won’t take two minutes. But what do they tell you about how long two minutes is when the shit hits the fan?

The stickup guy walks through the door, and when I look up I notice two things—one perplexes me and one scares me.

First, he’s wearing his baseball cap the way they were meant to be worn—the bill of the cap is forward, shading the eyes. In this neighborhood, hell, in every neighborhood these days, guys from six to sixty wear their caps turned backward like what, avoiding a sunburn on their neck? Secondly, he has his right hand tucked up under his shirt at his waistband. We don’t make eye contact because I can’t see his eyes; the cap brim and the sun coming in through the doors behind him leave his face dark. He’s a shadow figure, no details but for that damn hand concealing something he doesn’t want to show, not yet anyway.

He takes two more steps in, glances once at the counterman, dismisses him, and takes another toward me.

“Stand up! Gimme what you got!”

The line comes with a jerk of whatever’s bundled in the shirtfront.

My employers have gone over this. Give up the money. It’s insured. It isn’t worth it. Back off and let ’em have it. And that was my philosophy before they ever said it.

So why am I a fool this morning? Why don’t I stand up with my hands in the air, step away from the machine—even turn my back so I don’t see the face—and tell this asshole to go for it, take the money and go?

But I don’t. I stay right where I am, crouched behind a three-foot-tall iron door, nothing but the upper half of my face showing. Instead I lie.

“Hey man. I got nothing behind this steel door but a racked nine millimeter. And I ain’t standin’ up.”

I’m as surprised by the words coming out of my mouth as the robber, who seems silently befuddled, or the clerk who takes advantage of the stunned air to instantly duck into some hidey-hole behind the counter.

“You fuckin’ hear me?” the shadowed guy manages to say, but now the anger in his voice wouldn’t convince a schoolgirl. He’s five yards away, but doesn’t move.

“Just turn around and leave, man,” I hear myself say again, with a remarkably steady voice that I do not recognize. “If you’re going to shoot me with whatever’s in that shaky hand, you better be able to hit my forehead ’cause I ain’t standing up from behind this steel.

“And if you take another step at me, you got a lot bigger target right on your chest, and believe me, I can use this nine, man.”

Silence rules. Maybe two seconds, maybe five, maybe that eternity they like to talk about. He doesn’t show the gun he might have, and I don’t have anything
to
show.

“Fuck you,
papi
,” the guy finally spits out, but he delivers the curse while his left foot moves back toward the door. His hand never comes out from the folds of the shirtfront. He repeats the epithet, maybe all he has left of his bravado, and in the parlance of the cop who shows up twenty minutes later to take a report, flees the scene.

Edgar Allan Poe Award–winning author Jonathon King is the creator of the Max Freeman crime series set in the Everglades and urban South Florida. He has also self-published a historical mystery,
The Styx,
which won a Florida Book Award and his latest series book,
Midnight Guardians,
was published as an e-original by Open Road Media.

Andrew Klavan

M
y friends, I tell you, only a miracle could have saved this sinner’s soul—and a miracle is what it was. I had come to Brother Jeremiah’s healing service as a mere mocker—a scoffer—a seeker of curiosities. I thought that, after the many attacks against this man of God—the exposés on television and the Internet—no one of any sense could take his promises seriously. And so imagine my surprise when none other than Amanda Gallagher rolled her wheelchair down the aisle of the auditorium toward the stage.