Kwik Krimes (36 page)

“T
hat will be a few minutes, sir.”

“I’ve got six bullets and a trigger finger that say it will be sooner.”

The young girl shrugged and looked past me. “Can I help the next person in line?” Either the green dye in her hair affected her hearing or I’d lost my touch while I was in the stir.

I hoped it was the dye.

Standing there like some kind of idiot, I watched the pimply kids behind the counter bump into each other while buzzers buzzed and beepers beeped. Only one guy seemed old enough to drink, and he looked like he’d been hitting the bottle since breakfast. He also had a ring in his nose.

So this was the fast-food revolution I’d heard so much about.

There used to be a diner here, the Silver Room. Steak and eggs for four bits served by a waitress named Mabel who didn’t take shit from nobody. I once saw her chase a guy out into the parking lot with a meat cleaver, and all he’d done was stiff her on a fifty-cent check. She never did like cops.

“You’re all set, sir.” Miss Green Hair pushed a tray toward me: burger in paper, fries in cardboard, and soda in plastic.

“This is my meal?”

“Napkins are over there.”

I skipped the napkins and grabbed the booth that had the best view of the office building where Terrance worked.

The diner where we planned the robbery was long gone, but Terrance had a job right next door.

A kid toddled up to my table, handed me a ketchup packet.

“Thanks. Now make like a witness and disappear.”

His mother scooped him up, glared at me. I tried to smile, but I must have been out of practice because she beat a hasty retreat. Fuck her.

Pushing the tray to the other side of the table, I thought again about Mabel. What I wouldn’t pay to see her approach with my slab of rare steak, black coffee with a shot of Jack, some wisecrack fresh from the gutter.

The bank job had gone smooth as silk until someone tripped an alarm and the cops descended like flies on a corpse. By the time the newspapers tallied up the score, I was behind bars, Walters was dead, and an unidentified third man was wanted by the FBI.

Through a prison guard, I slipped Terrance a single note: “Save my share.”

He should have done like I asked.

The front doors of the office building opened, and a steady stream of suits and dresses came pouring out onto the sidewalk.

Terrance hadn’t aged a day.

Tracking Terrance through the windows, I was out of the booth and heading for the exit. I crossed the parking lot, quickly closing the distance.

Even if Terrance did manage to slip out of my sight, I knew I wouldn’t lose him. Twenty years of long gray days and longer dark nights I’d thought of little else but meeting up with my ex-partner.

Terrance stepped around a bum holding up a can, took a left into a parking garage.

I followed.

The stairwell smelled like prison without the bleach.

I caught up with him on the third level.

There was no one else within sight, not that it would have made any difference. “Terrance.”

He paled as soon as it clicked who I was. “You got out.” His eyes dropped to the gun in my hand.

“I thought it was time to take advantage of this Internet thing, use my share from the bank job to seed an e-commerce business.”

“Look, I’m going to pay you back. I just need to get all my ducks in a row.” Terrance stepped to the side so he’d have the option to bolt.

I countered the move, keeping him trapped between me and the car. “Speaking of waterfowl, how does the phrase ‘dead duck’ grab you?”

“I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“And how do you figure to do that?”

“I could deal you in.” He glanced around. We were still alone. “After the bank job, I went straight.”

“So did I. Straight to jail.”

“I took some classes, learned the business. I might have started at the bottom, but I have my own office now.” Terrance stopped as if waiting for congratulations.

“I process appraisal forms for a large insurance agency. I know everything that’s worth stealing in this town. I even know what kind of security the owners have installed on the premises.”

I had to admit the situation had potential. “So what?”

He lowered his voice. “I keep a list of the best places to hit, sort of an insurance policy. It’s sweet.”

“Keep talking.”

“The list is in my desk back at the office. I can take you there right now. I’ve just been waiting to put together a team. We knock
them over one at a time. Bang, bang, bang. Then we split. It would be like old times.”

“For some of us, old times weren’t that good.”

Terrance licked his lips. “Look, nothing I could have done would have made any difference, but I’m sorry you were caught.”

“I’m sorry you spent my share. I asked you nicely not to.”

His eyes were skipping around, looking for a way out. “A lot can happen in twenty years.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The past is the past.” Terrance didn’t realize that he was adding salt to the wound. He was talking fast now, trying to sell me. “This is better than a bank job. It’s a sweet deal.”

“Not as sweet as this.” The first bullet flung Terrance back against his car, the second two pinned him there long enough that I was ten feet away before I heard him hit the ground.

I should have asked him first if he knew where I could get something decent to eat. I hated to break and enter on an empty stomach.

Stephen D. Rogers is the author of
Shot to Death, Three-Minute Mysteries,
and more than seven hundred shorter works. His other mysteries of under a thousand words have appeared in the anthologies
Blood Moon, Border Noir, Dime, Discount Noir, Hardboiled, KnitLit (Too), Quarry, Seasmoke, Short Attention Span Mysteries, Small Crimes, Windchill,
and
Year of the Thief.
His website,
StephenDRogers.com
, includes new and upcoming titles as well as other information.

Cindy Rosmus

“C
ome on, baby!” Tony said. “You can’t mean that.”

Giulietta just smiled.

“Torn up by a tiger.” Tony shuddered. He appealed to Lou, the bartender. “No girl would let her man die like that.”

“’S only a story,” Lou said wearily, “in my kid’s eighth-grade reader.”

“But it’s timeless,” Giulietta said. “‘The Lady or the Tiger?’ is all about human nature. Obsessive love, and…”

The back door buzzed open, and two giggly blondes came in. One short, one tall. The tall one caught Tony’s eye.

“…
Jealousy
.” Giulietta dug her nails in his arm.

Bitch
, Tony thought.

The blondes sat far enough away not to look suspicious. Maybe too far away.

Here at Royal Flush, Giulietta called the shots. It was the classiest bar her family owned: shiny hardwood floors, top-shelf booze. Swarming with cougars and wiseguys. And the occasional model-svelte blonde.

If you knew, he thought smugly, who I fucked last night.

“She loved him to death,” Giulietta said. “Literally.”

“It’s the old man’s fault,” Lou said, after he’d served the blondes. “The fuckin’ king’s. He made her choose.”

“He made
him
choose,” Giulietta said. “Lowlife scum. Daddy was pissed he loved his daughter.” With a side look at Tony, she said, “Can you blame him?”

“No,” he said, wearily.

Like that king, Giulietta’s dad would kill Tony if he knew they were fucking. “Nino the Ice” was a tiny mobster whose pinky ring boasted a diamond twice his size. You could see your face in it.

But “the Ice” didn’t stop there.

Tony shivered. Nino was the coldest fuck out there. He’d order a hit with his morning coffee, want it done by the last bite of breakfast.

Nino’s
look
could freeze you to death. Even if he liked you. And
I don’t like you, shithead
, Nino told Tony more than once. God knows why Nino kept him on.

’Cos I shut up good, Tony thought. Like about fucking his daughter. Besides fucking every…

Again he eyed the tall blonde, who pretended not to notice.

“Can you blame
her
?” Giulietta asked Tony.

“Huh?”

“For choosing the tiger.” Her smile unnerved him. “She’d rather see him get torn apart than be happy…with some
blonde
.”

Tony’s chest felt tight.

“Wait a minute!” Lou swung around from the register. “It don’t say that.” On his stubby fingers, he began counting. “Number one, shithead loves princess. Number two, king finds out. Surprise, surprise!”

Tony wiped his sweaty forehead.

Lou kept going. He ignored customers waving for drinks. By the time he got to “One of the fairest damsels in the king’s fuckin’ court,” Tony wished he were on a plane to fucking Cancun.

“In other words,” Lou said, finally, “the story don’t say nothin’ about her bein’ a
blonde
.”

An uncomfortable silence followed.

“You’re right.” Giulietta had the Ice’s chilly blue eyes. “It
don’t
.”

Shit, Tony thought. She knows.

He forced a smile. “It’s a dumb story,” he said. “No girl who loves her man, like…” He slid his arm around her stool. “Like you love
me
, would hurt him. Not on purpose.”

She smiled up at him. “No?”

“If I were a chick,” Lou said, “I couldn’t do it.”

Giulietta didn’t see Tony wink at Lou. “She didn’t do shit,” she said stubbornly. “It was the tiger.” Bracelets jangling, she held up her hands. “
Her
hands were clean.”

The moment Tony saw the blonde texting, his cell vibrated.
Oh, yeah!
he thought, in the midst of all this. Pictured those luscious pink lips around his cock. His pants felt unbearably tight.

“Louie,” Giulietta said. “Buy the house.”

As Lou set up free drinks for everybody, Tony peeked at his cell. His heart leapt:
CUM OUTSIDE 4 A
BIG
SURPRISE
! the text read.

He slid off his stool, flashed a Marlboro. “Smoke,” he told Giulietta.

Usually, her icy stare would’ve sat him back down. But tonight his cock was doing the thinking.

“No jacket?” she said. “It’s cold out there.”

He turned, suddenly, to Giulietta’s strange smile. Her bracelets jingled as she stroked his leather jacket on his stool. It was butter-soft leather, a Christmas gift from the Ice himself.

As Tony passed her on his way out, the tall blonde didn’t look at him. Again she was texting.

Now what? he thought.

But it wasn’t for him.

Outside the back door, the Ice’s boys were waiting.

“Shii—” Tony said. Before he found the
t
, he was down.

Never felt the next shot.

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
Y
ELLOW
M
AMA
.

Cindy’s a Jersey girl who talks like Anybodys from
West Side Story.
She works out five or six days a week, loves peanut butter, rare meat, and Jack Daniel’s. She’s been published in the usual places, such as
Hardboiled, A Twist of Noir, Beat to a Pulp, Pulp Metal Magazine, Shotgun Honey,
and
Powder Burn Flash.
She is the editor of the e-zine
Yellow Mama.
She’s also a Gemini and a Christian.

Jim Spry

T
he bloated gypsy stamped around like a hippo with a hard-on. Twenty-four stone of cheap booze and fast-food, he pumped his fists like a TV wrestler, hacked a ball of phlegm onto the concrete floor. His cocaine gaze bored into me like maggots in dead flesh. He dragged a thumb across his tattooed throat.

“I’ll rip yer foken head off,” he screamed, shoving a fist in the air like he already had me beat.

The Chinese, pikeys, and assorted violence junkies outside the circle brayed their delight at the fat man’s showboating. Bookies took bank notes like fry cooks taking orders. Donny Yip, arms crossed and face impassive, stared at me with Arctic cool.

Malone made his move a second before the bell. Dropped his lard arse into fifth. Trampled the distance between us. Looked to knock me flat with a shoulder barge.