“Everybody flat on the floor if ya don’t wanna get plugged!” The kid waved his pistol at the glum, threadbare crowd lined up at the teller’s barred window. Compliance came with murmurs of irritation.
     “Jesus Christ,” said Gunselle. “I just bought this dress, and I don’t think the floor’s been swept since Coolidge was President.”
     “Cut the wisecracks,” said an unshaven older man by the door. He pushed his hat up off his forehead with the barrel of his pistol. “And get down before I put you down.” He tossed the kid a leather satchel.
     Gunselle set her handbag on the floor, then dropped to her knees after lifting the hem of her new dress, a pink shirtwaist model with black buttons. It wasn’t her bank. She’d driven a safe distance to Sausalito to exchange a couple dozen fresh C-notes for twenties. Something done for a printer when she didn’t have a contract to fulfill. She already visited two banks. She kept twenty percent.
     The kid ran around to bust through a gate at the side of the teller’s cage. The other robber kept lifting a window shade to peek at the street. He was as nervous as a man jumping into murky, shark-infested water. The kid started throwing things around. He sent the middle-aged teller and two glowering clerks out to lie down with the others.
     “Hey, Glamour Puss,” said the older man, pointing his revolver at Gunselle. “I told you to get down. On your tits.”
     “I’m okay here on my knees,” said Gunselle, “but these are silk stockings, and it’s gonna gripe my middle kidney if I get a run in one of ‘em before my lunch date.”
     The man walked over to stick the barrel between her eyes.
     “I’m telling you for the last time, Doll. Get prone. And quick. One slug from this gat will ruin that pretty face of yours. Forever.” As a second thought, he cracked her on the side of her skull with the butt of the grip.
     Gunselle fell to her hands and knees. The blow hurt, and she could feel something oozing down around her left ear. She just had her hair done. Fifteen bucks. Washed. A permanent wave. Then the man pushed her over with his foot.
     “Some gunman you are,” she said, lying on her side. “Scared to pull the trigger?”
     A customer not far from the door scrambled to his feet and darted outside. The bell made a happy ding-a-ling sound as the door closed behind him. Gunselle chuckled.
     “Aw, shit,” said the man who just clobbered her. “Huey, let’s go. The cops are gonna be here any minute.”
     The kid seemed to be taking his sweet time filling the satchel with cash. The bank must be flush. Gunselle heard him slam a drawer closed.
     “Right, boss.”  
     A voice blared into the bank from outside. 
     “Drop your guns and come out with your hands up!” The escapee must have found a policeman stuffing finger buns into his mouth at the bakery next door.      A siren wailed in the distance.
  Gunselle could see the shadow of the officer’s cap at the bottom of the window shade. A real thug would just blast the squatting fuzzy through the thin lower panel of the door, then skedaddle. The siren had to be ten blocks away, but the stupidity of men rarely surprised her.
     “Now you’re screwed,” she pointed out.
     “Get up.” The man grabbed her arm, pulling her to her feet. His hat fell off as he jerked her into the teller’s cage. Huey cowered there, his gun shaking. The older mug pushed her down against a cabinet door behind them. She could feel her right stocking give way.
     “God damn it,” she said. It was an ugly run.
     “What’ll we do?” the kid asked his partner.
     “Better send the others out,” Gunselle suggested. “It’ll be the gas chamber if one of ‘em gets drilled in the crossfire. Don’t worry, though, boys. They’ll let the cops know you’ve still got me to deal with.”
     “Everybody outside!” screamed the older man through the teller’s window. The lobby emptied in a hurry. “Now what?” he asked Gunselle, settling down to face the door again. 
     “Stalemate.”
     “Thanks. I was hoping you had a better idea.” 
     Gunselle reached into her purse for the little Savage .32 she carried to protect herself against the vagaries of the day. After shooting each man in the side of his head, she emptied half the contents of the satchel into her purse, moved Huey’s revolver to the hand which corresponded with his new bullet hole, sighed at the dark spots on her lovely pink dress, put away her pistol, then scrambled out of the cage, across the lobby, and into sunshine.
     “It’s all over!” she screamed, clutching the purse tight against her chest as officers hurried her away from the horrible scene. “The damn fools had no idea what to do, so they just up and blew their brains out.” After a gentle cop helped her to sit on a bench outside the bakery, Gunselle pulled up the blood-stained skirt and lifted a shapely leg to expose the torn stocking. “There I was, minding my own business. Running errands on a pretty day. It wasn’t my fault the bank got stuck up.”
     “No,” said the officer.
     “Do you think they’ll pay for a new outfit?”
     “No.”
    “I bet they will,” said Gunselle, getting to her feet, trying to remember where she parked her car.

​
​​About the author:
​
Russell Thayer received his BA in English from the University of Washington and worked for decades at large printing companies. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana.

     The staccato whomp of the helicopter made the spotlight bathing Ronald bounce. Blue and red police lights danced before his eyes. Some of the flashes revealed the silhouettes in officers' hands of guns, hammers cocked, the steel cyclopean eyes staring Ronald down from the dark. To his right, in the valley, city lights shimmered in the summer night, and for a moment he felt suspended between two starry skies. It calmed him.
     Parked cars sat empty to both sides, doors akimbo. The other kids cleared out when the cops showed their iron. A fat one in uniform, face flush with excitement, demanded Ronald hug the ground. Ronald stayed behind the wheel, ignoring him. He was more annoyed than intimidated. It was all so dramatic. 
     Maggie was still in the passenger seat, mortified, her perfume wafting on the breeze. The indignity needled him. He worked so hard for this, to woo and win her affection. She was standoffish, uncertain of his intent. It was as honorable as any young man's, intoxicated by love. When she finally came around, her father rose up to forbid it, as fathers do. It transformed them, Romeo and Juliet given flesh, until her father,  in a rage, sent her away. 
     Ronald believed she was lost to him. When he found her again, it took forever to summon enough nerve to take her out. Now, this disaster. She would never speak to him again. He wanted to leap on the fat cop, beat the tint out of his cheeks.
     Cheeks. He looked at Maggie. Red lipstick smeared onto her so-soft cheek, a gaffe born of the police surprise, taunted him. He didn't want her to face them unkempt. He wanted to fix it for her, like cleaning a smudge with spit and the pad of a thumb, as his grandmother did for him some mornings, waiting for the bus.
     For her dignity, to spare her the extended embarrassment of being caught here with him, he gave in. Such was his love. She deserved to be thought better than cheap, the kind of girl who would go park in public in the dead of night. He heeded their call to lay in the dirt. Even as they twisted his arms, and tightened the handcuffs until they pinched his flesh in their teeth, he was cooperative, limp.
     As they pulled him to his feet, he shuddered to see them carry in the black rubber bag, zipper open like a hungry mouth. He kicked then, kicked and thrashed and screamed Maggie's name until they slammed him once more to the ground. He tasted earth for the third time in a day.
     Monsters. Devils. They were going to put her down in the dark again.

​About the author:

Doug Lane lives, plays, and writes in Salem, OR. He'd tell you to visit
www.douglasjlane.com, but the place is haunted.

     Our cat Pickles held the thumb in her mouth, and I said, "What the fucking fuck?" 
     My man said, "That's Bobby Patterson's."
     "How can you be so sure?" 
     "Who else's?"
     He was right. Pickles was an indoor cat and though my man and I had our scars, neither of us was missing a thumb. We were sitting on the couch getting high when Pickles put the thumb down in front of my man, and damn if that cat didn't look like it was smiling.
     The thumb was dry like a prune, had lint on it, but you could still tell it was a thumb because of the broken nail. Other girls might’ve been grossed out, but I saw worse. Like the time my stepdad got his eyeball knocked out into his beer cup and he still drank from it.
     "I thought you sent that as proof of life. Did you not use enough stamps?" I giggled, but my man didn't think it was funny.
     "Fuck you! I did send a thumb! His other one. I cut this one off first. Thing is, soon as I cut it off, it kind of flew out my hand and disappeared into thin air. I looked for it for hours. I fell asleep on the floor looking for it. It must have rolled behind something and now your fucking cat found it."
     “Our cat,” I said. 
     The thing with Bobby Patterson happened months ago, before I finally hooked up with my man. I had to wait until his clingy old lady, Jenna, lit out. I moved in two weeks ago and brought my perfect little kitty with me. 
     "The cops was looking if Bobby was here,” my man said. “They’d found this thing, my ass would be in Pollunsky today. Fucking cat."
     As I hit the bowl, I tried to recall what my man told me and what they said in the news. Bobby Patterson went missing, and my man was prime suspect number one because, frankly, he was sloppy, had been the last person seen with Bobby, called Bobby's parents from a phone booth outside a bar he (meaning my man) was known to frequent, thought Bobby's parents had money when they were just as poor as he was. In the end, he had to kill Bobby and get rid of the body. The cops never found Bobby and my man was never charged.
     I exhaled and said, "They can get Bobby's DNA from that."
     "Darling, the cops ain't coming back. I could turn that into a Christmas ornament and we'd be safe."
     The idea of this made him laugh so hard he about peed. 
     "That’s gross. We’re not doing that," I said. "Not on my Christmas tree." I took Christmas seriously, and I didn’t like his joke at all.
     I noticed he said, "we'd be safe," as if I had anything to do with it, as if I would do something as fucked up as kidnap a friend of mine for ransom. 
     "Just fucking with you. Who says you'll still be here come Christmas time anyways?" He laughed again, but that comment set me to crying, and to stop it my man hauled off and hit me, and we screamed at each other for a while, then we both cried about not having anyone else in the world, and then we ended up having sex on the couch in front on Pickles and the thumb.
When I woke up, Pickles was still there, and my man was getting back from somewhere without his pants on. The thumb was gone.
     "Where is it?" I said, knowing he knew what I meant.
     "I chucked it into the woods. Racoons'll get it."
     “You go outside without your pants on?” I giggled at the idea.
     “Ain’t nobody next door on either side,” my man said. “Fuckin’ relax.”
     That night we were asleep when I felt Pickles on my chest. I didn’t want to wake up my man, so I peeked and saw Pickles had the thumb in his mouth again. He placed it gently on my chest where it threatened to roll into my mouth.
     I tried to move without waking my man, but he’s a light sleeper.
“What the fuck?” he said, and he grabbed the thumb and kicked my cat and me off the bed. 
     “Shit. Shit. Shit,” he kept saying, and this time I followed him outside. He tossed the thumb into the grill and set it on fire. 
     “There,” he said. 
     “Did you leave the backdoor open? I don’t want Pickles going outside.”
     “No. I did not fucking leave the goddam backdoor open. I… I tossed the thumb in the garbage and the fucking cat musta got in there. Fuck.” 
     “Jesus Christ.” 
     I had a moment, just a moment, where I thought maybe I moved in with my man too soon.
     But things went back to normal after that. I worked at Fiesta Mart, and my man did what he did, and we ate and got high on the daily. Every night I made sure the backdoor was closed because I didn’t want to lose Pickles. One time he got out and was gone ten days.
     Come a Sunday afternoon I was too high to move, watching TV, and my man was in the kitchen. My man always loved to cook.
Pickles put something on the floor, right at my feet. It took a while to come into focus. This time it wasn’t a thumb. It was an ear, with an earring still in it. 
Right away I knew. Jenna.
     Good kitty, that Pickles, looking out for me.
     I knew I had to leave. I was about to tell my man I was going shopping when he came in from the kitchen with a knife in his hand. 
     ​“What’s that?” he said, squinting to see, bouncing the knife in his hand. “I said, ‘What the fuck is that?’”

​About the author:

Kate Show works as a freelance writer and editor, splitting her time between Toronto and Brooklyn. She edited the erotic poetry collection Shiny Avocado of Lust and its sequel, 50 Shades of Avocado. Her writing has appeared in Asinine Poetry, Poetry Toronto, Not One of Us, and far too many IMDB reviews. 

     Lasher handed the gunsmith his Saturday Night Special.
     “It jams. Can you fix it?”
     “Yes. I can make it better than new. Who filed the serial number?”
     “Who cares?”
     “The cops.”
     “My worry.”
     “Mine, too. Not on my books.”
     “If I pay you enough?”
     “Three hundred. Up front.”
     “I could buy a new gun for that.”
    “You couldn’t. You’ve been inside. If you don’t want to go back inside, you need this to work. Every time.”

     “Three hundred?”
     “Okay, leave it. I’ll fix it. Tomorrow morning we’ll talk money.”

      The shop was empty again the next morning.
     “It’s ready. I polished the ramp, chamber, action, and lightened the trigger pull. I removed the rest of the serial number and the maker’s marks, the front sight, rounded every corner, and polished every surface. It’ll slip in and out of your pocket like a jade egg.”
     “You refinished it, too.”
     “The steel slide went into my hot blue tank. The aluminum frame I blackened with cold chemicals.”
     “Okay. Now what?”
     “My landlord. He wants to put me out of business since he opened a new sporting goods store downtown. Raised my rent twice this year. He always carries a lot of cash on him, at least a thousand. I’ll tell you where and how to do him and we’ll split the take. Put him out of business… and all the cash is yours.”
     “Partner.”
     “Now listen.” The gunsmith held up the pistol. “See this little spring-loaded hook on the right side of the slide, the extractor? It snaps over the cartridge rim to eject the fired case. The primer is in the rim of these twenty-twos, so you have to be careful loading the first round and only use safe ammo. Otherwise, it might fire prematurely when the extractor hits the rim.”
     “Why wouldn’t any good ammo work?”
     “Some twenty-twos have softer, thinner brass. Good in most guns, not safe in this gun. Listen to the gunsmith.”
     “Okay.”
     “Now, here’s a box of fifty safe rounds. Take these out back, down the path to the river. I test-shoot tin cans off the logs on the bank. Nobody will hear you down there. Come back after you’ve used all the ammo.”
     “What about no front sight?”
     “Just sight along the top of the slide. Good to twenty feet.”

     The gunsmith met Lasher at the back door. “Well?”
     “I can’t believe how smooth it feels and works.”
     “I promised you. Now, about my landlord.”
     The gunsmith told Lasher all he would need to rob the landlord.
     When the gunsmith finished, Lasher said, “I didn’t use all the ammo. Saved two rounds.” He shot the gunsmith twice in the forehead.
     Lasher was in the back room looking for more cash and ammunition when he heard the shop door open. He hustled down the path to the river and followed it into town. In the hardware store, he bought a box of their best twenty-twos.

     The landlord gave up his cash without a shot fired. Then Lasher robbed a dozen more in different towns. He never had to shoot because his threat always worked: “I’ve already killed with this little gun. Do you want to be next?”
In another town, Lasher saw a woman step out of the bank into the sun. Shading her eyes, she didn’t see him watching her. Expensive clothes, rings, big purse, old enough to value her health.
     “Into the alley.” His voice and the thing pressed into her back made her comply.
     “What do you want?”
     “We’ll talk in that area under the stairs.”
     She faced him. “Please.”
     “Your purse and your rings. I’ve already killed with this gun.”
     Reaching into her purse, “My pills.”
     “Leave them in —”
     He saw the snubby thirty-eight’s muzzle clear her purse just before the shot slammed into his lung.
     Falling, he pulled his trigger. His first shot went high over her shoulder. The remaining six shots left his gun in a full-auto scream, each shot higher than the last. His gun empty, he lay bleeding out. She hurried away while he tried to remember what the gunsmith said.

​About the author:

Jim Guigli has been a gunsmith, trained at Gunsite with pistol & shotgun, designed and supervised firearms competitions, and toured Quantico as an FBI Citizens Academy graduate. www.jimguigli.com

     Gunselle turned the key. Nothing. She turned it again. Nothing. Again. Nothing.

     Kicking open the Studebaker’s door, she stepped into the lingering mist outside the garage. She looked at her wristwatch. The target would be stopping for his lunch in thirty minutes. No time for a cab. She looked across the street. A man weeded the garden above the sidewalk in front of his house. Shirley Temple peonies were in full bloom. Gunselle trotted toward him on sensible flat soles. She hadn’t primped for today’s job. It wasn’t a cocktail lounge pickup. And the pay was better.

     “Hey, Frank,” she said, smiling up at the gardener from the sidewalk. He stood politely, brushing dirt from the knees of his soiled trousers.

     “Mrs. Turner. How are you?” Though she wore sunglasses on a gloomy day, and hid her dark hair under a drab headscarf, he clearly remembered her from the time they spoke on the sidewalk when she was at her best in a tight summer dress, blazing like two sunny afternoons.

     “Well, now that you mention it, Frank, I need to get to an appointment in half an hour and my car won’t start. I’d call a cab, but I really need to get going right this minute. May borrow your car?”

        The man kicked at the dirt.

     “I’d be happy to drive you, but my daughter’s birthday party starts right after lunch, and we’re taking the kids to the movies.”

     “Just toss me the keys and I’ll have it back in an hour.”

     “I don’t know. It’s a brand-new automobile.”

     “Fuck you, Frank. I’m an excellent driver,” she said as she turned back toward her house.

     Stepping off the curb, she noticed the old man on his corner porch. He was a mean bastard, always yelling at kids and dogs to stay off his half-dead lawn. He’d eyeball her from his rocking chair when she went out for walks in the evening. He lived alone. A rusted pickup waited at the bottom of his steps.

     She turned down the middle of the street and headed up to his scruffy porch, watching his eyes grow wider as she approached.

     “I need your truck, old man. Right now. What do I have to do?”

     He stood with a comic leer, then opened the screen, motioning her into the house. Gunselle brushed past him into the living room.

     After five infuriating minutes, she burst out the screen door and spit the mess in her mouth onto the weedy lawn. The old man had pulled off her scarf to run his fingers through her hair, so she grabbed his worn fedora off the knob of the rocking chair. Placing the hat on her head, she noticed Frank watching from across the street. Lifting the keys, she shook them, then raised her shoulders. It was his loss for having children and birthday parties.

     At the bottom of the steps, she walked around the old man’s truck, stopping to brush the heavy grime off the license plate. When she was satisfied that the numbers could be read, she climbed in and started it up. 

     The truck sputtered and backfired all the way to the center of town. Gunselle felt like Ma Kettle bringing eggs to market as she rattled her way through the business district, eventually turning onto a side street. After a few blocks, she spotted the detective’s unmarked cruiser sitting at the curb. Pulling up beside him, she reached across the passenger seat to roll down the window. She made it just in time, as he crumpled the burger wrapper in his hands and tossed it out onto the street.

     “Hey, mister. There’s a fine for littering,” she said as she removed the revolver from her bag and shot him in the face. He’d almost finished chewing. A car came to a screeching stop behind the truck as Gunselle squeezed two more rounds into the cruiser for effect. With the roomy hat down over her ears, she slowly puffed and clattered away from the scene. 

                                                                           *

     Standing in the shadows of her open garage, Gunselle watched the activity on the corner while eating a bowl of canned peaches. Five police cruisers were parked at odd angles in front of the old man’s house, men with pistols and shotguns squatting behind open doors. A take-charge fellow with a bullhorn ordered the occupant of the house to step outside with his hands up. The fedora hung on the knob of the rocking chair where Gunselle left it after returning the keys and demanding her scarf. Eventually, the door opened and an angry old man stepped outside, waving a spatula at the line of cops. It wouldn’t have mattered if he raised his hands in surrender. The blood splattered against the front of the house after the smoke cleared explained why it was never a good idea to kill a police detective.

     As officers raced to the porch, Gunselle strolled across the street, happily spooning at her peaches, then set the bowl on top of the concrete wall and pulled one of Frank’s peonies down toward her nose. The scent was elusive. Gunselle looked up to see Frank and his wife staring out a large picture window, the heads of five pretty little girls below them in a line, like tulips, taking in the carnage. One of the girls laughed as she silently clapped her hands together. That made Gunselle smile. Frank looked down at her after his wife herded the children away. He glanced at the old man’s house, then back at her. 

     She put her index finger to her lips, then pointed it at Frank like a pistol. 

     Frank nodded as Gunselle picked up the empty bowl and started back across the street. It was a pleasant neighborhood. She was finally getting to know her neighbors.

​​About the author:
​
Russell Thayer received his BA in English from the University of Washington and worked for decades at large printing companies. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana.

     The television studio was bigger than I imagined, and busier than I expected. People scurried in all directions, each seemingly on a life or death mission. I didn’t know why I was there, only that I was looking for Marvin Stone, a producer for Foodie Television who asked the police commissioner for a favor.
​     
​     A young woman with a clipboard stood by the doorway muttering.

​     “Excuse me…” She ignored me. I tried another tack. “Police,” I said, bringing up the badge hanging from my neck. She looked up, eyes wide.

​     “Are you crazy?” a voice asked.

​     A small, balding man in an immaculately cut suit appeared as if from thin air. His face wore a mixture of dismay and anger. “I asked Brampton to send someone with discretion!”

​     I cleared my throat. “Marvin Stone?”

​     “Yes. Detective Smulders?”

​     “I’m Mark Smulders.”

​     “Come with me.” He led me to another part of the building. This area was dominated by a raised platform on which there were enough shining chrome ranges and refrigerators for a small army of chefs. Painted on the rear wall of the set was a logo reading KITCHEN PUZZLES. Lying face-down on the floor in the middle of the “kitchen” was a body. It might have been a man who just stumbled and fell, but from long experience I knew it wasn’t.

​     To one side of the platform, two men and a woman were seated in canvas chairs, looking uncomfortable. Four beefy guys in security uniforms surrounded them, two behind and two in front, ensuring none of the three were going anywhere.

​     I opened my mouth, but Stone beat me to the punch. “I know, we should have gone through normal channels when we found Chef Roberto’s body, but we can’t afford bad press. I’ve known Commissioner Brampton for years and asked if we could handle this quietly. He said he’d send his best detective and that you’d find the culprit and take them away quietly. What do you need to get started?”

​     The commissioner was a flamboyant man who knew a lot of media folks and was always getting his face on TV or in magazines. More of a politician than a cop. I wondered what favor he owed Stone.

​     I mentally sighed. I didn’t like this off-books tit-for-tat stuff. I said, “Give me a rundown on the situation.”

​     Stone said they were supposed to film the pilot for a new reality-show this afternoon, in which three amateurs attempted to replicate celebrity chef Roberto Orsi’s recipes simply by tasting them. Orsi was well-known for his culinary skills, especially his off the cuff improvisations, and equally for his temper. The network hoped that people would tune in more to see how he dressed down the contestants than how they dressed up their dishes. The pilot’s three contestants were chosen from a cooking competition at a local mall: Michael Moulton, Raphael Flores, and Amelia Carter.

​     “There’s already been a lot of friction,” Stone admitted. “Roberto resented having anyone in his kitchen, even for the show. The practice runs we’ve done have been volatile, which is what we wanted, but we never thought it would come to this.”

​     “Anyone butt heads with Roberto more often than the others?”

​     Stone shook his head. “Unfortunately, Chef Roberto was pretty hard on all of them.”

​     I sighed aloud this time. “Let me look at the scene.”

​     The set was a functioning kitchen. The ranges and ovens worked, and the refrigerators were filled with ingredients. There was also a large pantry stocked with dry goods; the door stood open and white powder covered the floor between it and a paper bag clutched in the outstretched hand of Chef Roberto. Nearby was a frying pan, apparently the murder weapon from the dark stains on it.

​     I studied the tableau for a few minutes before I stepped down to the floor of the soundstage.

​     “Well?” Stone asked.

​   “Ask your security guys to hold Mr. Flores while I get a tech-team in to process the scene.” Before Stone could protest, I said, “They’ll be discreet, I promise, but to make this arrest stick, we’ll need evidence and when it comes to due process, there’s no such thing as too many chefs in the kitchen.”

​     “Wait,” Stone began. “How do you know it was Mr. Flores? I mean…” Words seemed to fail him. I had a feeling it was a new experience.

​     “I don’t remember much from high-school Spanish, but I do remember that ‘flores’ is flower.” Gesturing towards the sound-stage floor, I added, “Orsi made one last improvisation in the kitchen, trying to cook Mr. Flores’s goose.”

​     ​In his canvas chair, Flores squirmed uncomfortably, but he didn’t deny it.

About the author:

Brandon Barrows is the author of several novels, most recently 3rd LAW: Mixed Magical Arts, a YA urban fantasy, as well as nearly one-hundred published stories, mostly crime, mystery, and westerns. He was a 2021 Mustang Award finalist and a 2022 Derringer Award nominee. Find more at http://www.brandonbarrowscomics.com & on Twitter @BrandonBarrows

     He didn’t notice her until she got up to dance. She was big. You might say fat, if you were that kind of person. He wasn’t. Chalk it up to a lot of experience. And a disdain for cliché. 

     She wore ragged cutoff jeans and a t-shirt that said DANGEROUS in rhinestones. Cute. But she was more than cute, if a lot less than dangerous. She moved that big package like it was floating on the ocean, twerking it, rolling it. An unmistakable message. She wanted it. He wanted her. 

     It was what he did. Pick out a woman for the night. Take her back to whatever midrange Travelodge he was camping in. Screw her brains out. Then get a good night’s sleep—alone. Uber made the job a lot easier. Harder for them to cling and no excuse to hang around.

     Sometimes they were up for it. Sometimes they needed persuasion, and he was always generous with the drinks. If they needed more coaxing, he kept a little bottle of persuader in his pocket.

     This one would come easily. He knew it. Which was fine, because he wasn’t up to working hard for it tonight.

     Dancing wasn’t his thing. He waited until she sat back down with her friends, two other women who were more attractive, if that was your thing. It wasn’t his. He liked them a little desperate. The wing-women would make it a bit harder to talk to her. But he was so good at this.

                                                                  *

     It worked like it always did. No illicit substances necessary, just three tequila sunrises. In his car on the way to the motel, he pushed up her skirt and pushed his hand between her legs. She spread, and her right hand found his hard-on. By the time they crashed through the door of his room, her panties were down around her ankles.

     He traveled down this road so many times before that each move was instinctive. Right now, they were at a fork in it. If he didn’t manage expectations, there could be demands. He didn’t like demands. The thing was to maintain total control.

     She broke away to slip her backpack off her shoulder, headed toward the dresser. He grabbed the pack, slung it to the floor and pushed her onto the bed. 

     The whole thing was a scramble. She seemed up for everything, so he kept pushing her. And she kept going there. In fact, she wasted him. So much that he had to take a minute, when it was all over, before he started the disengagement process. 

     She crawled to the foot of the bed and rummaged in her purse. Good. Maybe she was going to get out on her own. Then she climbed back on top of him. Again? She straddled him and he started to push her off, not too hard at first.

     There was a knife. What the fuck? He thrashed, but the blade slashed. Blood spurted so fast his muscles turned to water.

     He stared through dimming eyes, croaked out a word. 

     “Why?”

     “Sorry,” she said, not sorry. “It’s what I do. Besides, it’s my birthday.”

​About the author:

Susan Kuchinskas mixes genres with impunity from the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s the author of the science fiction/detective novels Chimera Catalyst and Singularity Syndrome.

    I feel bad so this must be a confession, except it’s not about me. It’s about Steve and his son. Steve and I went to school together. To the other kids, he was known as the boy whose dad was in prison. We never talked about his dad’s absence. Unrequited curiosity was a small price to pay for the friendship.
     We went in different directions as adults without ever losing touch. Steve married, had a child they named Vincent, and became the manager of a grocery store, all before he was thirty years old. Meanwhile, I chased Chicago theater dreams and never really grew up. What I lacked in material success, I made up for with commitment. The bedroom in my apartment in Rogers Park was so stuffed with costumes and props I had to sleep on the sofa. 
     Steve’s son Vincent was a chip off his grandfather’s old block. The boy was always wild, but I didn’t know what I was seeing on my visits to their house when he was little. Steve told me once, “I’ve known how he was going to end up since he was four years old.” I thought he was kidding at the time, but then the years went by and the evidence began to speak for itself. Vincent went from vandalism to shoplifting to the family tradition of armed robbery by the time he was eighteen. 
     You could say he graduated last month. That was when shots rang out and a body fell down dead in the South Loop. Vincent made off with a black bag full of uncut gems, but not before a witness saw him at the scene. Vincent had enough bullets left over for her, but he didn’t have enough heart. 
     He ran straight to the grocery store in Portage Park where Steve worked. Knowing Steve, he behaved as he thought a father should. He listened to the boy without anger or judgment. 
     “I can’t do prison, Dad,” Vincent told him at the end.
     Steve said he knew that. In that way, the boy was built like his grandfather. Hard time would have driven Vincent to suicide. Something had to be done about the witness if Steve was going to save him. It was either the life of his son or the life of some stranger he never met. No choice at all.
     Steve tried to take Vincent’s gun away but Vincent wouldn’t give it up. He was too scared to be without it. 
     Steve left him in the storage room of the grocery store and drove his truck to where the shooting occurred. Sure enough, there was a CPD patrol car parked in the front of the witness’s basement apartment. Steve didn’t have to think long about what he needed to do next. He went looking for me.
     I hadn’t heard the news about Vincent. I never paid attention to the news. It was always depressing so why bother?
     I was pleasantly surprised to see my friend on a weekday. 
     “Hey, what are you doing here?” I said. “Playing hooky?”
     Steve shook his head and my smile fell away. When we were young, Steve would get this expression on his face whenever the subject of his dad came up. He had the same expression now.
     “What do you need?” I said. 
     He left my apartment wearing a Chicago policeman’s uniform we used for a production of Windy City Blue, a silver star with the rank of Officer on his chest and everything. The gun in the holster was a prop, of course. 
     He left at two o’clock. I estimate forty-five minutes for the commute so he must have spent another hour working up the nerve.  
     It was close to four when he talked to the cops in the patrol car as if he was one of them. They didn’t think twice as he went to check on the witness. She let him inside and he strangled her to death in her kitchen. 
     He went out the back way. His regular clothes were still at my place, but Steve wanted to tell his son the news first… 
     I think of Vincent, out of his mind with worry, a gun in his hand. He saw a cop coming through the door at him and he fired. The first bullet blew out his father’s spine, just above the belt. The other one caught him in the throat. 
     Eventually, Vincent must have looked beyond the uniform at the man who was wearing it. He had one bullet left in the gun. 
     Yesterday, the police had me identify the bloody shirt as my property. I thought I’d get treated like a criminal but the cops seemed glad to talk to somebody. Why not? All the other people involved were dead.

​About the author:

Regan MacArthur is the author of a son and a daughter. They live in the Chicagoland area. His criminal background is mostly imaginary. Mostly.

    “Bruno, you don’t have to kill him.” I was wasting my time. If Bruno wanted to kill someone, nobody could talk him out of it, least of all me.

    “Shut the fuck up or I’ll start on you next.” Bruno was the enforcer in this part of town. He was somewhere around six-foot-five and built like a brick shithouse. He spent at least an hour a day in the gym, so one punch was usually all it took to put most men on the ground. They banned him from cage-fighting for being too violent.

    My job was to drive him around. Bruno was in a constant state of road-rage, so the people who paid him paid me to drive instead. That was the closest thing to control anybody exercised over Bruno. He tolerated it because he got to sit in the back seat yelling and cursing at me while he worked his sports-book app. Saying “sorry” fifty times a day was the best way to stay on what passed for his good side.

    Today, the guy on the ground was a new community organizer. He was a do-gooder, here to help clean up a neighborhood where rich suburbanites could buy drugs without getting out of their car. Everybody was happy with the arrangement except the people who lived here. They complained to the new organizer, so he promised to take on the dealers. He played football for some little division three college so he thought he knew rough stuff. He was finding out the hard way just how rough it can get on the street. 

    We saw the guy walking past some abandoned factories. I pulled into an alley and Bruno grabbed him as he passed. Soon, he was in the basement of an abandoned factory with a busted arm.

    “Quit crying, you pussy.” Bruno kicked the guy in the kidney to emphasize his point.

    I tried to distract him. “Bruno, you said to remind you we’re supposed to collect from the bakery guy next.” Bruno liked collecting from the bakery guy because he’d help himself to a box of donuts.

    “Okay.” He looked at the guy on the ground. “Crawl back to your mommy, asshole.” He gave the guy a hard farewell kick right in the chest. The guy’s body jerked like he was hit with a live electric-line. He gave an agonizing gasp and went still.

       I watched the guy for a few seconds. “I think he’s dead.”

    Bruno was looking at his phone. “Tough shit for him.” He began walking away. I followed.

    As we were ready to walk out, I heard crying. There was a kid, a young girl, hugging the dead guy on the floor. I was so startled that I stopped. It was a mistake, but too late to fix it. Bruno turned and saw where I was looking.

     “Shit.” He turned and started towards the kid.

    “No, you can’t kill a kid.” I wasn’t exactly a moral person, but killing kids was too much.

    “No witnesses.” His hand went to his gun.

    I saw an old four-by-four sitting in a trash pile. I knew what I was doing was stupid, but I grabbed it and went after Bruno. My problem is I’m old and I’m slow and my footsteps are loud. He heard me before I was close enough to take a swing, so he turned and put one in my stomach. As he turned back to the kid, I pulled my phone out to call nine-one-one, but I didn’t expect what came next.

    The kid stood up so suddenly that even Bruno wasn’t ready for her move. She pulled a gun from behind the dead guy’s back and shot Bruno point-blank in the face.

    It was a little revolver, maybe a twenty-five or thirty-two. Bruno looked like he was smacked with a Louisville Slugger. He staggered back, confused. He leaned against a pillar with his gun still pointed at the floor. The girl walked right up to him, as calm as if she were ordering an ice-cream cone. Bruno started to raise his gun but she stopped him with two shots in the neck and chest. He bled out fast.

    I didn’t move. I just stared. 

    She took Bruno’s wallet and put it in her pocket. Next she took the cash out of the dead guy’s wallet, wiped the gun, and put it in his hand. Then she came over to me.

    “Thank you for trying to save me. Give me your phone and I’ll call an ambulance.” She held her hand out. 

    I couldn’t understand how she could be so calm after killing the nastiest bastard I’ve ever known. Something seemed wrong, but my hand was shaking so bad I handed her my phone.

    She looked at it and asked for my PIN. She typed it in and the screen lit up, but, instead of calling for help, she walked over to Bruno and took his picture. I yelled, “What are you doing?”

    She looked at me with eyes that were flat and devoid of emotion, the kind of eyes Bruno had before she shot them out. “I need a picture and the wallet to collect the reward.”

    This conversation seemed surreal. “Reward?”

    “The people in the neighborhood set up a GoFundMe page for anyone who takes care of the ‘rat’ problem. I need proof to collect.”

    I stared at her, speechless.

    I guess she thought I needed more of an explanation. “It’s enough to get me and my mom out of the shelter.”
    I looked down at my stomach. My shirt was soaked with blood. “Call me an ambulance, hurry.”
    She looked at me for several seconds then put the phone in her pocket. “Sorry.”
    She started to walk away but stopped and looked back. “No witnesses.”

About the author:

Al Kanach wasted many years building things like power and pharmaceutical plants – and sometimes knocking them down. Now he’s gotten down to some serious writing and has had stories appear in Yellow Mama, Close to the Bone, Shotgun Honey, Mystery Tribune and Pulp Modern. He’s sending out his first (crime) novel and finishing a political thriller.