Mister Bunny and $88.01

By

William Kitcher

I was lying on the couch, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in and dozing off due to the heat, a hangover, and disinterest in the ball game on TV because the Jays were pummeling the Yankees for the third day in a row.

My cat Henry was napping on my chest, and we were both startled awake by my apartment buzzer. No one ever buzzes my apartment. People call first. Actually, no one ever comes to my apartment. I meet people outside.

I staggered to the buzzer. “Hello?”

“Is this James Yates?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Police.”

Police? What the . . . “How can I help you?”

“Can we come in?”

“How do I know you’re the police?”

Silence.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll come down.”

I pulled on a T-shirt and went downstairs. Sure enough, it was the cops. Two uniforms, one plain clothes. I assumed the plain clothes was a cop, because she did all the talking. She introduced the three of them by name, but I didn’t really pay attention.

Looking at her notes, she said, “Where were you on the night of January seventeenth?”

Jeesh, what a question. Some random date five months ago. Would she expect me to remember that?

“How the hell would I know?”

“Listen, Mr. Yates, can we talk in your apartment?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

She looked at her shoes. The two uniforms looked at each other. No one said anything.

“Ah, never mind,” I said. “Come on up.”

They made so much noise coming into my apartment that Henry scurried into his cage and burrowed into his stuffed animal friends.

She said, “Do you know Peter Baxter?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t think so. Who is he?”

“He was murdered January seventeenth. In a house not far from here.”

“Oh, that guy. I remember that happening. No, I didn’t know him.”

“We think you did.”

“What can I say?”

“Can you tell me where you were about nine on that night?”

“Probably not. That was five months ago. How would I . . . Oh, wait a minute.” I opened up my laptop and went to the website of my credit card company. On January 17, there was a posting from the Terrier and Rats for $88.01. “So,” I said, “if you go to that pub, they’ll be able to pull up that receipt. I remember now. I was trying to figure out the exact tip percentage to get it to exactly eighty-eight bucks. I couldn’t do it. I wanted eighty-eight coz that’s how many points the Raptors scored that night. They lost. The game would’ve been over about nine-thirty or nine forty-five, so my receipt will be ten or ten-thirty. The receipt will have the time on it. So that’s where I was all night.”

She made a few notes, looked at me, said, “Thank you, Mr. Yates. Sorry to have bothered you.” And they left.

Henry came out of his cage, sat beside me on the couch, and we watched the end of the ball game. Then I figured I’d go to the Terrier and Rats for a hair of the dog. I reached into Henry’s cage, pulled out Mister Bunny, unzipped his stomach, and took out a roll of money. I peeled off a hundred-dollar bill from what I’d taken from Peter the night I killed him for trying to rip me off on a heroin deal. I use my credit card only on special occasions.

Just because you have proof you paid at ten doesn’t mean you were there the whole time. I wonder if cops know that.

Free Key Day

By

William Kitcher

For no reason I could discern except for the fact the three of us were drunk, Eddie picked up a rock and smashed the window of the back door of the store beside the bar in which we were drinking and outside which we were smoking.

Eddie knocked the remaining shards of glass out with his elbow, put his hand through the window, and unlocked the door.

Our drinking companion, whose name I think was Annie, backed off and shook her head. I agreed with Annie. “What the shit, Eddie?” she said.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon; the store was still open for business. I figured that was the worst time of day to rob a place. But what do I know? I’m not a robber. My business is more dispersal of stolen goods, but I was a little intrigued.

Eddie went inside, and I went in after him, more out of interest in what would happen than any potential windfall.

I looked back at Annie. She took a couple more drags on her smoke, threw it away, and followed us inside.

Eddie had already moved into the front of the store. He had the storekeeper, a man about sixty, in a headlock.

“Jesus, Eddie,” said the man. “What are you doing?”

The guy knew who Eddie was. This could not end well.

“Shut up, old man,” said Eddie.

Eddie wrestled the old guy into the back room. “Annie, get the money,” he said.

This was stupid, but at least I was now sure of her name.

Annie shook her head. “Oh, good job, man. You idiot. That’s not my name.” Annie lit another smoke as she went out the back door. Annie wasn’t a burglar from what I’d heard. She was more of a pickpocket and scammer.

“Bill, get the money,” said Eddie.

I was kind of stunned by this point, especially considering my name isn’t Bill, so I went into the front of the store. I had no idea how to open a till.

A customer came in, and all I could think to say was, “May I help you, ma’am?”

“I’d like this key duplicated.”

It was a shoe store. I was confused. Pathetically, I called out, “Eddie?”

Faintly, I heard, “What?”

“Customer wants a key duplicated.”

There was a pause, then the old man came out of the back room, took the woman’s key, and went back to the back.

I smiled stupidly.

A couple of minutes later, he came back with two keys, gave them to the customer, and said, “No charge. It’s ‘Free Key Day.’ Please come again.”

The woman left, and I stood there with the old man. OK, not old, he was about sixty, as I said.

Eddie came into the store from the back. We all looked at each other.

The storekeeper turned to Eddie. “Swear to God, Eddie,” he said, “and you know I don’t believe in God, why do you do shit like this? I asked you to replace the entire back door. I have three sons and two daughters who could do this without being dramatic, but I chose you, and this is how you start?”

“Hey, Dad, you know me. It’s more fun this way.”

I was still standing there, stupidly.

When Eddie and I went back to the bar, we discovered Annie had drunk the rest of our drinks and stolen our coats.

The Classy Woman

By

William Kitcher

You don’t usually meet classy women smoking in the grungy alley beside the grungy bar in which I sometimes drink. I don’t, anyway. Maybe other people do. I don’t know what other people do.

I’m normally confused by classy women. That has to be my fault, not theirs. I have no idea where classy women generally go for recreation—

probably a part of the world I don’t even know about.

Anyway, I met Vicky. As I’d seen her in the grungy bar (and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she was doing there), I thought it’d be OK to say hello and perhaps just say I’d seen her inside. I did that and we soon got into a conversation that, in the space of a couple of smoked cigarettes, went around music, history, current events, and the weather. The details are unimportant, mainly because I don’t know much about any of those things. It’s enough to say she was informed, intelligent, modern, and classy as I said. Well-dressed but casual, smart and sarcastic, attractive and not overly made up, everything you’d ever want in a woman you meet in a grungy alley.

As we stood there smoking and talking, a street wastoid came up to us, took out a knife, and said, “Gimme your money.”

Vicky said, “You know, no one carries cash anymore. It’s all debit and credit. Fifty years ago, you might’ve got some money, but now? No.”

The kid stood there, dumbfounded.

Vicky then stepped forward and kicked the knife out of his hand straight up into the air. The knife somersaulted down, and she caught it by the handle and pointed it at the kid.

“Dangle,” she said, using a term I knew from 1930s Raymond Chandler stories. Man, was I impressed. The kid dangled.

Vicky flipped the knife to her other hand, and underhand, threw it backward and it lodged into a wooden beam above the bar’s garbage cans. So cool.

We went back into the bar, and she asked me to sit with her. She started laughing and I asked her why. She took a wallet out of her pocket, flashed it open. She had at least $500 in fifties.

“If that kid had forced the issue,” she said, “I probably would have given it up.”

“You have fast feet,” I said, “so, probably not.”

Vicky laughed at that. “Next round is on me,” she said. “Maybe also the one after that. And then . . .” Her voice trailed off and she just stared at me, her sparkling brown eyes telling me nothing I could understand.

A couple of drinks later, she went to the toilet. She touched my hand as she left.

I thought about things for a moment or so, then took her wallet out of her coat pocket, extracted two credit cards, one debit card, and the five hundred dollars. I threw a hundred on the table and scrammed out of there.

By the time I tried to use the cards, they’d already been cancelled. The five hundred paid my bar tab for a few weeks, but not at the grungy bar. I figured I’d take a hiatus from there for a while just in case.

But when I finally went back about a month later, Vicky was waiting for me when I went for a smoke in the alley. She was all class, as I said. She took all the money I had and didn’t kick me in the nuts.

Bill Kitcher’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches (and one poem!) have been published, produced, and/or broadcast in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Czechia, England, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, and the U.S. His stories have appeared in Horror Sleaze Trash, Rock and a Hard Place, Shotgun Honey, Guilty, Mystery Tribune, Yellow Mama, and many other journals. His novel, Farewell and Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep, was published in 2023 by Close To The Bone Publishing. 

Also, his prehensile tail,which never caused him any problems, has now started lengthening.