Robb White

The Day before the Custody Hearing

Robb White

Brian had to understand I was in control. At Camp Delta 1, where the non-compliant prisoners in orange jumpsuits were held, it always worked that way. You bark the order, even in pigeon Arabic, and they do it. All hajjis learned that sooner or later. Few of us are made for torture, physical or mental. Psychological terror is worse. I’ve seen brutal men handle enormous pain with defiance, but get a worm of fear into their heads, you own them.

I pushed LeeLee’s husband into a chair, pointed the Taurus at him seconds after he walked inside the house. I’d been there for an hour already, preparing my props, drugging his mother’s wine. The ported barrel is for target re-acquisition, but it makes a big impression leveled at your nose. Monica, his mother, bought my story without hesitation that I was from Brian’s office, a gofer sent on an underling’s errand; my one and only suit, polished shoes, and attaché case from the local Goodwill convinced her as much as my syrupy flattery about her son, “my boss,” whom I despised more than anyone on Earth, the exact inverse proportion of my love for LeeLee, lying in her Caribbean grave in Charlotte Amalie.

Monica had been looking over amuse-bouche recipes in a gourmet magazine and sipping her expensive Bordeaux when I knocked. She went down fast, thanks to the Zolpidem I slipped into her glass when I sent her off in search of spreadsheets I was there to collect for Brian. I undressed and positioned her body on Brian’s bed where my other props were strategically placed among the swirl of bedsheets.

Sitting at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, I parted the sheers, watching for Brian’s Spyder convertible to pull up the long, horseshoe driveway.

“Where’s my mother? If you hurt her—”

“I ought to hurt her for shitting out a weasel like you.”

He cut his eyes from side to side, jumpy.

“Fight me, you’ll get one in the stomach. I have nothing to lose.”

He stopped threatening and cursing me, and began babbling about money. People like Brian believe money will buy anyone.

“Keep it. You’ll need it for child support.”

I lit my Chef’s torch for browning meringues and crème brulét. His pupils dilated as the flame came close enough to the skin of his face to hurt.

“I’m not going to use this to melt cheese. I’m going to make you beg to be put out of your misery. You just entered the portals of hell. Abandon hope.”

Cornpone lines borrowed from contractors back at the base in those special interrogation rooms.

I torched a small sirloin positioned beneath his mother’s arm. The hissing, like a basket of snakes, filled the room with the smell of burning meat. Reaching under the sheets for the gauze, I wrapped her limp arm. His imagination convinced him I was the monster I said I was.

“I always knew LeeLee was a low-class, cum-swapping slut, but how did she hook up with someone like you?”

Tied by wrists to the posts beside her, he begged for me to spare his mother.

“People say it burns like ice at first. Let’s see.”

I ripped away his shirt. I lit the torch but did nothing for a few seconds, letting his mind work on the incredible pain he was about to experience. Putting on a glove, I touched his bare back with a chunk of dry ice I’d palmed, another prop in the charade.

His scream could have shattered glass. I did it again—and again. His body writhed and jerked away from me. I added threats—how long I could do this, where I could burn him, and when I’d charbroiled every inch of his flesh, including his genitals, I said I was going to start on his mother’s teats.

A sadist’s work but no fun for me. We were taught to make it convincing. Destroy them mentally and you own them, according to our psych ops specialist.

I jerked him upright while he sobbed, peeling away the rest of his clothing, and cutting his bonds. He didn’t resist.

“Take your cock in your hand and place it on her lips.”

“What?”

“Do it now.”

I pointed the torch at his crotch.

Without another threat, he walked around the bed to her, holding his flaccid penis. Botoxed, lipoed, enhanced by several cosmetic surgeries, she was an aging beauty fighting time with her husband’s money. I pulled the sheet away from her augmented breasts.

“Make yourself hard.”

“I . . . I can’t!”

Before she died, LeeLee told me his mother would allow Brian to crawl into bed with her and nuzzle her breasts. Her own words to me: It didn’t stop until high school, how sick is that?

I never realized it at that moment, but when LeeLee killed herself, that germ of my revenge for how he destroyed her emotionally and mentally, the forced incest, burrowed into my skull like a worm.

Holding my cell close for detail, I videotaped his penis rubbing his mother’s lips—her half-lidded eyes could pass for erotic bliss by any viewer. The drug wouldn’t last much longer. As if to assist me, she moaned. I zoomed on a spider strand of gossamer cum connecting his cockhead to the philtrum above her upper lip. With luck, she’d never know what happened after she passed out. I doubt that Brian would confess what I put him through. I’m past the point of redemption. Too much violence has numbed me.

“You try to do anything about this, I’ll upload it to YouTube faster than rats can fuck. Show me you understand what I just said.”

He nodded.

“Only the judge will see this. He’ll award your daughter to LeeLee’s parents, those low-class people you despise. If you contest it, I’ll upload the video to every name in your mother’s address book.”

Another nod.

The mother made gurgling noises as I closed the door on them.

-END-

Bobbie Gets Her Divorce

by Robb T. White

“Don’t leave me . . . begging you . . .”

“You thought I’d go along with the crappy settlement you offered. Bill, dear, I’m not the kind of girl to weep and moan. I thought of adding antifreeze to your morning Bloody Mary. Then I thought of something better.”

“Choke you . . . bare hands . . . snap your windpipe . . . like a twig.”

“Well, here I am. Come get me.”

Bill writhed on his haunches in the dirt, his movements no more effective than a marionette’s, with its strings cut. His center of gravity shifted, and he toppled over, did a face plant in the foul black muck.

He lifted his head, sputtering, cursing. “Kill . . . you, bitch—”

Bobbie checked her watch. “Ten more seconds, I’m going to undress you.”

She tugged his clothing off, ripped whatever she could reach. His arms were stone clubs too heavy to lift; his fingers no longer grasped. She moved like a matador out of reach of a bull’s horns. The cocktail of drugs she’d researched on the web and watched him ingest in his whiskey flask made him limp and immobile. Off went shoes, socks, underwear. His frightened penis hid, in its pubic nest.

“Not cocky, are you now, so to speak.”

He made gargling sounds; spittle flew from his mouth, making tiny wet circles in the dirt.

“Goo-goo baby talk, honey. See if it works on them.”

“. . . Them . . .” Thick-tongued, it sounded like Thum.

“Why do you think I made you take me on this Jakarta trip, demanded this excursion to the Lesser Sunda Islands? Do you think it was to look at sea turtles? When you came home smelling of pussy and demanding a divorce—on Valentine’s Day of all days, you prick!—that was when I began planning . . . this.”

“Bob-beee—”

“They’re ferocious, run faster than a dog. They can kill water buffalo.”

“Before I leave, one more thing to do—”

She took a perfume bottle out of her belly pack and sprinkled him, in his hair, on his back, and the genitals.

His face transformed from hatred to fear.

“Deer scent, a doe in estrus. Too bad they don’t sell water buffalo scent back home. You won’t be making fun of them as fat and lazy once they come charging through the brush when the scent reaches the river.”

Bill gargled sounds at her, ropy spit drooled over his chin.

“What? I can’t hear you. Just so you know, I’m going to spend your money on that silver Lamborghini Aventador with the gull-wing doors you were eyeing in the Hamptons last summer.

Bill made more goo-goo sounds. He stopped trying to get up.

* * *

Bobbie stretched out on the couch, flipping through the pages of the inquest report sent from East Nusa Tenggara. The papers came in a small, neatly wrapped box cluttered with colorful stamps and the official letterhead of the POLRI, which she assumed was the office of the national police in Jakarta. Bill’s Rolex was included with the papers. Thank God, he didn’t take the Cosmograph Daytona, worth a quarter-million. The facing was cracked and there were claw marks on the band. The hands had stopped at 6:02. She’d left him there at exactly 2:52 and had to rush to make it to the boat dock in time. Three hours alone in the baking heat, naked, too drugged to move, listening to every sound and movement in the undergrowth.

Knowing they’re coming . . .

Remembering what the guide said about the contaminated mouths of Komodo Dragons, she picked it up with tongs and tossed it into the wastebasket. The Day-Date with Champagne Dial a mere $35,000. The money had cleared probate two weeks earlier. Home free.

Someone, fluent in English, had translated. Bill’s clothes were found where the attack occurred. “If the Bu kartini wishes, she may claim these items by writing to the address at the bottom of the letter . . .”

The thought of those keepsakes shipped from Indonesia made her smile. That—and the twenty million she had inherited.

The Girl from the Sweater Factory

Robb T. White

We called it the “Sweater Factory.” No one remembered which of us gave it the name. A hulking, derelict of a monstrosity looming at the end of our block and taking up half of Hulbert Avenue, the last place in the harbor to hold on to its brick street, wobbly and buckled as it was. Our parents forbade us to go anywhere near it, which of course was a guarantee we would go as often as we wanted.

The long-abandoned textile factory had been quietly rotting for decades. The faded masonry lettering at the top of the third floor preserved its owner’s legacy, whoever Hosea S. Johnson was but his name preserved in Railroad Gothic style seemed both pathetic, given the decay, and enduring, still defying time’s passage even as the entire structure caved in beneath it.

None of our parents could remember relatives working there. We kids from the neighborhood weren’t the only visitors, however. All the broken glass, rotted floorboards, and Norwegian rats the size of housecats darting in and out among the debris hadn’t deterred generations of post-Depression homeless men and alcoholics from using it as a place to share a bottle of Thunderbird or Mogen David wine. This was a time before junkies and discarded needles, a time before the contemporary political correctness demanded that every shifty-eyed panhandler be declared “a transient” or “homeless” person. To us, the few we encountered lurking in the weeds were called bums and avoided.

Cigarette butts and broken bottles littered the ground beneath the camel humps of creeper vines we had to push through to get to the back of the building out of sight of traffic. A graffiti-scrawled plywood door out front not being the preferred mode of entry. Evidence of nature’s relentless attack on the premises increased yearly as the sumac that sprouted right next to the foundation had, over the years, pushed branches through the empty panes of the upstairs floors—very few were left unbroken for our own missiles to vandalize. In the summer, the foliage gave the upper floors a lurid green cast as the sun moved around the building.

In August, the stultifying heat stuck our tee-shirts to our backs and soaked the brims of our baseball caps. The squalid interior of the upper floors with a row of black mechanical looms for spinning and tufting made an ominous impression at first sight. We always gathered on the second floor to plan whatever games or adventures we had in mind.

The tall, skinny girl who showed up one day in summer said her name was Mallory. She gave no last name. None of us knew her. Johnny O’Kurran, the youngest of our gang, hadn’t reached that stage of puberty that makes boys both obnoxious and curious around girls; he didn’t hesitate to challenge her on her right to be there.

“This is our fort,” Johnny told her. “No girls allowed.”

That led to the challenge.

We had all performed it once, a rite of passage—with the exception of Johnny, who compensated for his size by daring—would show off by creating his own twists on the challenge, which was to enter the factory’s upper floor from a window. The means of access were the sumac trees growing close to the building; you had to pick one, shimmy up it, grab a branch and swing hand-over-hand to a ledge. Position yourself on any ledge, all of which were sloped for runoff—all this while dangling or perched twenty-five feet above the mounds of rubble below: cement blocks, bottles, rusted cans, and other sorts of debris too slimy or jagged to enumerate.

The trick was the “the leap”; you had to swing your body toward the building at an upward angle to catch the ledge with your heels and hope you had enough momentum in your swing as you let go of the branch. Even then, you had to be careful how you crawled through to jump about eight feet to the floor. All the windows on that side were busted out, most with shards of glass that could cut your hands or your flesh if you slipped on the ledge and grabbed the metal frame.

Some panes were better than others. Most resembled the jagged teeth of an old man’s mouth. The slender trunks of the sumac were not the best for climbing and their branches, sodden with gummy sap, not as thick as typical trees like the ash, cottonwood, and maple surrounding the factory. Ironically, the best trees for scaling also had the most dangerous windows opposite them with shards of broken glass that made me think of jack-o’-lantern fangs. Because I was older and heavier than most, I had little choice but to take the biggest tree and the worst window for my challenge. A livid tapeworm of white scar loops my shoulder and stretches across my back to remind me of that day. Washing the blood out of the shirt didn’t fool my mother but I lied and said I slid into second base over a piece of half-buried glass.

Mallory didn’t hesitate to accept her challenge. While she surveyed the sumacs, Johnny picked one out for himself; we knew he planned to embarrass her.

“This’ll be great,” someone said, using a common word that described everything from snow days canceling school to a new episode of Johnny Yuma, the Rebel or The Rifleman.

Mallory was definitely a tomboy, not like our sisters who grew up with Barbie dolls and liked to play house before graduating to make-up and nicer clothes. She was taller than all but my cousin Mike and I. She looked older but she was scrawny, absent the telltale bumps and curves of puberty. My vantage gave me a good view of her long, thin arms taut with ropy muscle encircling a slender sumac too far from the building, one never used before, and before a word was spoken, she was ascending faster than Johnny on his.

She’ll fail at the leap, I thought. I watched her hanging from a branch midway down, swaying, pretending to be a monkey making eee-eee-eee noises and scratching her armpit with one arm while we watched below, our mouths opened in awe. I’ll admit that I secretly wanted her to fall. This was a deep humiliation for all. We stared while she hung there goofing off, kicking her legs out in midair as if she were in no danger at all, shrieking cries of fake distress. A minefield of accumulated glass, shards glittering in the sunlight, chunks of cement, and bricks waited for gravity’s final tug and that slender branch—no thicker than her bicep—to snap.

Tired of performing, not hearing any encouragement, she made her entrance through a window with more panache and daring than we’d ever seen. She tucked her body at the height of her swing and flew through a window without touching the ledge. All this time, Johnny was panting to catch up, still negotiating the last few feet toward a ledge. We all heard the thud of her landing. As if our heads were joined on twin pairs of swivels, we looked at one another in pure amazement.

After that, Mallory didn’t ask to be accepted; she assumed it. We had years of running as a pack and we knew one another’s strengths and weaknesses regardless of age or size. Johnny’s older brother Joe, a lower-ranking hyena in the pack, didn’t possess Johnny’s status when it came to determining sides. Mallory, however, had the physical traits and daring that put her up front in everything going on. Even more impressive to us, she didn’t try to boss anyone. She was accepted without any formal recognition we were “voting” her in.

Each floor held different kinds of machinery: the offices of the first floor were mostly trashed and reeked of urine from the winos who used to congregate there while the massive looms and spinning machines were on the second floor. The third floor was empty except for the broken glass. Depending on what we felt like doing that day, we’d pick a floor to occupy ourselves. Often, no matter where we spent most of our time, we’d head up through a fire escape to the roof where we had a panoramic view of the harbor from the breakwall to the east to the old Finnish section of the harbor in the west. Sometimes my cousin Jimmy brought along his Super 8 camera to film our fantasy or war games.

The first floor was the dirtiest and smelled the worst. Water damage had rotted huge chunks of floorboard we dropped down to crawl through like soldiers tunneling out of our prison camp or commandos sneaking up on an enemy fortress. Oblivious of rats and snakes, we’d crawl along bellowing out names of friends and enemies, obscenities too risky to utter in anywhere else in public, or call out whatever we’d been watching on TV. In those days, Twilight Zone and Outer Limits were favorites. We watched shows like Leave It to Beaver and I Love Lucy with our parents, but no one brought them up unless it was to mock the show’s two brothers.

Mischief was easy to find in the upper floors, such as a five-gallon buckets of some petrified chemical at the bottom to give it weight for rolling down the fire escape or tossing off the roof onto the canopy of sumac trees that surrounded the foundation and had taken over portions of the building where rain and snow had rotted the roof.

The extraordinary thing, to all of us, was that none of us had a parental prohibition to stay away from the place, even though my cousins’ house and my house was at the end of the block and my other cousin Tommy’s and Danny’s houses were right across the street at the top of Hulbert Avenue. Our other friends, like brothers Joe and Johnny, were midway down the block. In those days, kids left the house in the morning after breakfast and didn’t “check in” like today’s kids; we roamed, went fishing, swimming at Walnut Beach, or dove off the Pyramids down by the Norfolk & Southern Railroad yards by the coal docks.

As the summer days shortened into that familiar autumn feeling, Mallory began proposing more of our activities. She was a good enough first baseman we didn’t mind her joining in. She always quarterbacked one of the teams. After one pickup game, she gave my cousin Tom a bloody nose with a stiff arm and Mike wore a black eye home from her churning knees when he tried to wrap his arms around her hips. Mike later told me she had a strong body odor, which I took to mean from her clothing. She always wore the same cut-off jeans, bobby socks, gray tennis shoes with holes. Her baggy sweatshirts often had the names of taverns on the front or back. Only once did she wear a girly blouse—a red-checked kind I associated with Lawrence Welk’s dancers. After a Sunday of drinking at the kitchen table, my parents sat down to watch The Lawrence Welk Show, and I hated it because The Rebel came on at the same time. Mike whispered she was “white-trash” and said she was older than the 14 she claimed.

I was mesmerized by her. I knew her secret. Her real last name was Boone and her father was a cop killer. It was a day stuck in my head forever: blood pooled and dripped off the end of a front porch of a house on Third Street. A cop had been shot in the head when he arrived at the Boone house for a domestic violence call. The Boones were a noisy clan notorious for fights and criminal activity. My father said the words from the Herald-Tribune—“no stranger to the police”—were invented for the Boones. The fight between spouses was over cigarettes. Ray Boone dropped his deer rifle and ran, but he was captured and executed in the state pen in Lucasville a few years later. His mugshot tripped me to Mallory’s real identity; she had those same piercing eyes and razor-lipped scowl. Raymond Boone murdered in a time before death-penalty lawyers grew wealthy filing appeals. His execution was announced in the paper the same day the memorial stone was dedicated to the slain officer in front of the county court house.

But three years ago, on my paper route on Third Street, I had stood in the street along with dozens of other rubberneckers. I saw a small figure looking out an upstairs window when the cops were driving up, sirens blaring—a young girl my age, I thought. I didn’t connect her to Mallory for weeks after she showed up but it was her. She was that little girl in the window.

I kept it to myself. Mike was right: she was getting bossier. And she did smell. Her fingernails were always black. A goatish odor wafted from her skin, not just her clothing. Her stringy blonde hair was always unkempt; in the dog days of August, her head smelled rancid like butter left out too long. Hanks of it were steam-pressed to her neck. Her legs beneath her cutoff Levi’s were scabby, crisscrossed with dirt-streaked cuts. If it weren’t for the mad violence of her energy in everything she did like her reckless dives off the Pyramids into the slip, sailing like an osprey diving for a perch, and just missing the rusted spike of a bolt sticking out from the wooden dockside, she likely would never have confronted water that entire summer.

Mallory’s vocabulary, never genteel, was laced with profanity. She surpassed any of us in cursing and went way beyond our limited vocabularies, all of which were inherited from our parents, a World War II generation that did not embrace the casual obscenities of today. Mallory, I suspected, was privy to some things the rest of us were only aware of in our dreams and nightmares. When Billy LaForge mocked her for mispronouncing a common word, she knocked him to the ground with a leg sweep, blew her nose into her hand and rubbed it into his face until he cried for her to stop.

“Here’s some jism for you, knucklehead!”

I went to my older friend Jerry and got a crash course on the facts of life—insofar as he knew them. No one after that wanted to take her on in a verbal or physical fight.

As August drew down and school became more real to us, Mallory grew more urgent in her demands for our collective obedience. The rough-and-tumble democracy we once enjoyed had devolved into a ruthless matriarchy. More worrisome to us, she upped the risk factor of pour outings. But knowing our time together was also coming to a close, with the prospect of new classmates, teachers, sports, and “important” subjects on the horizon, we weren’t willing to foment a palace revolt with time so short.

When we arrived at the sweater factory that last day in twos and threes, we followed our routine of slinking to the back among the sumac trees. Mallory was there alone—until three others came out from hiding. My heart sank when I realized who they were: Sammy Boone, a boy around sixteen who had spent months in juvenile facilities and was known as one of the worst of the Boone clan. His neighbor Dale Sweeney, who adopted the “hood” look with his duck’s-tail hair, the white tee-shirt, the pack of Winston cigarettes rolled into the sleeve to the shoulder. Worst of all, for me, was Ante Ente, my private nightmare stepping out from behind a thick tree draped in Tarzan vines.

To this day, I don’t know his real name. That’s how Danny said it and he was closer to the public school crowd than the rest of us Catholic boys. I’d seen him once, a few feet away, and he terrified me: a blond-white Finnish boy in a flattop, not that big but crazy in the eyes. If my dog Buster hadn’t been with me, I think Ente would have chucked me into the slip or worse. He carried a knife and cherry bombs that day, which he shoved into the mouths of dead carp and sheepshead rotting on the banks of the slip where I was fishing. Danny told me how Ente would challenge boys in high school to fight after school. Then Danny would act out being Ente, swooping low and springing up with an uppercut. Even the tough Joikiniemi twins from Tivision Avenue, Arnie and Mikko, didn’t mess with Ante Ente.

I was already having a bad week at home. My father had been arrested for hitting a neighbor’s teenaged son because he’d shouted something obscene to my mother. My oldest sister, a high-school senior, had announced her pregnancy. My parents despised her boyfriend. They drank and argued more loudly than ever after drinking a case of Stroh’s beer. The only good thing was that I was ignored and could come and go all day long without being questioned.

I was trying to grapple with the appearance of this trio when I heard a rush of noise behind me, feet clambering through rubble, and then Mallory spoke: “Let ‘em go, Dale, the chickenshits.”

Danny and I remained alone. The others, my cousins and friends, had abandoned us. I saw Mallory for the first time as something different, something dangerous, not a skinny girl I used to trust in our games.

She saw me glancing behind, guessed I was about to bolt too. I barely saw her move before I felt her hands pinning me where I stood, her fingers digging into my shoulder blades.

“He ain’t afraid, he ain’t no rabbit like them others, are you?”

I stuttered I wasn’t a rabbit, but feeling very much like one trapped in its hop.

“Better not fuckin’ be,” Ante Ente said. He moved closer to me, approaching sideways like a predator.

“Youse rabbits try to run, I’ll fuckin’ gut you both with this,” Dale said.

He flashed a long-bladed knife in his hand and made a roundhouse, neck-slashing movement in the air.

“Shut up, Dale,” Sammy told him. “They ain’t going nowhere.”

Danny answered for us both: “Hell no, man.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Danny’s bravado posed its own risks.

With Dale and Sammy walking behind us, Ente in front, we were escorted to the third floor from the rickety fire escape. The place seemed different—no longer mine, safe, but a filthy sty of mold and dirt littered with glass and smashed machinery. Mallory, however, was firmly in control.

She explained the plan. Her deep-set ferret eyes glittered in a column of light pouring through the broken windows and buzzing with insects.

It was all about robbing a family-owned variety store on Bridge Street below Hulbert. We bought our orange and cherry sodas from that place. A surly, acne-scarred teenaged son ran the cashier and drilled us with his eyes every time we entered. He watched us as we moved about, giggling at men’s magazine covers, scowled as we fingered the cheap household goods. Danny went out of his way to mock the boy and draw his ire.

Dale and Sammy would commit the robbery using Dale’s knife to hold the cashier in place while Sammy looted the register. Mallory and Ante Ente would ransack the place for whatever they could scoop up. Danny and I were to be posted outside as lookouts.

“Any adults try to come in, you get in their way, hear me?” Sammy ordered.

“Whistle, you see cops,” Dale added. “You punks know how to whistle.”

Danny put three fingers in his mouth and blew a shrill single note. His father was a dockworker who whistled Danny home the same way from his sloping backyard overlooking the railroad yards. You could barely see him on the hillside but you could hear that whistle all the way to Flat Rocks past the Pyramids.

“We meet back here. You two hang around in the street, act like you’re not with us,” Mallory said. “Come back and let us know what’s going on.”

“They ain’t with us,” Dale mumbled.

I stood with my back to the store, my heart knocking in my chest. Danny seemed to enjoy his role in the heist. He pranced back and forth in front of the store as soon as the others entered, Sam and Dale together, followed a few seconds later by Ante Ente and Mallory. Nobody in disguise, no one except Ente attempting to hide his identity with a Chief Wahoo baseball cap jammed low on his forehead and a red bandanna. He had drawn clumsy tattoos of Navy anchors on his biceps in a ballpoint pen.

Traffic on Bridge Street was heavy. Whenever someone walked past, I held my breath. Time slowed to a molasses crawl. Danny maintained his agitated gait back and forth, speaking nonsense and doing anything but keeping inconspicuous.

Then shouts—Dale’s thick voice. A long minute passed before I heard the sounds of things crashing to the floor, glass breaking.

Danny stopped in his tracks. I couldn’t make myself look. I thought of the pimply-faced boy inside with Dale’s filleting knife against his throat. I imagined gouts of blood spouting from his neck.

Ente was out the door first. I couldn’t see what he held in his hands but sacks of potato chips flew out. Mallory raced out on his heels. She was a blur running past. Dale and Sammy, like two clowns tumbling out of a circus Volkswagen, hit the doorway at the same time—and stuck. Most of what they held scattered to the sidewalk. I remember the grunts, the curses—and they too were racing up the sidewalk toward Hulbert.

Danny and I exchanged a look—and we both took off in the same direction as if we had sparks flying from our shoes.

The cops knew everything in minutes, of course. Even where Danny and I both lived. When the police officers pounded on the door, I was sitting on my bed sobbing.

I gave up everyone including Mallory.

The weeks that followed were ghastly. I was pointed out at school as one of “the robbery kids.” I was punched on the playground by some older boys, ignored by most of my peers. Being new to high school as it was, I felt sick to my stomach every morning getting up to go to school. I had destroyed what little happiness my family had after all that had happened that miserable summer.

A man in a dark suit with greasy hair plastered across the top of his head told me I wouldn’t have to go to jail or even a juvenile detention center. My family’s reputation might not have been sterling but there were many of us in the harbor all related and that was enough to prevent worse consequences. My grades and altar boy past helped, he said, although the parish priest refused to write a letter attesting to my character for the judge. My father was bitter about that. “They take the goddamned money every Sunday fast enough!” he exclaimed to my mother.

Sammy Boone and Dale were rounded up and sent off to an adult prison in Chillicothe, a place I’d never heard of.

Just as things began to settle down, Mallory contacted me at school. A boy in a class ahead of me tossed me a note in the cafeteria. It was written in pencil; some words were misspelled:

You betrayed me. I trusted you! I liked you a lot. I thought you likked me!!!

I saw her outside the school yard near the bus stop behind the cyclone fence a week later. Her fingers gripped the chain links like talons, and I thought immediately of their strength when she dug them into my shoulders.

I ignored her, knowing she was watching me with her deep-set eyes—a rodent feeling the owl’s eyes measuring its back.

“Leave me alone, damn you!” I shouted. I broke into a run.

She could have run me down if she wanted. For all her personal ungainliness, she was a gazelle on the savanna when it came to speed.

When she wasn’t at the fence the next day or the day after, I began to breathe more easily. I felt a glimmer of hope that life would get better. The odd thing is, however, I can remember the sirens wailing down Bridge Street, not an uncommon occurrence considering the number of bars and late-night brawls that occurred there. Instead of a diminishing warble, the sound shifted a decibel higher, and then I knew something had happened on Hulbert. I’d just gotten home from school and was debating whether to do math homework or turn on the TV.

The next day’s paper explained the sirens: Mallory May Boone, aged seventeen, had committed suicide. Her body was found lying on the first floor of the sweater factory, which the paper referred to as “the site of the former Hosea Johnson textile plant midway on Hulbert Avenue.”

I was at that peculiar age where recrimination was difficult but sentimentality came easily. I waited until Thanksgiving week vacation before going there alone. Shreds of yellow crime scene tape still fluttered like Christmas ribbon on the overgrown pricker bushes where we had crawled through.

My intention was to lay wild flowers and cattails gathered from the wetlands near the breakwall on the floor where Mallory had chosen to die. Gossip at school said she committed hara kiri with a knife like Dale’s. I knew she’d hanged herself. The Northtown Trib account said it, for one thing, and included a description of the rope tied off to a ceiling bolt. My flashlight beam lingered on the section of rope where a paramedic or a police officer had sliced through to cut her down. I imagined Mallory’s weasel-slim body dangling from the taut rope, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, just as Danny said happened in hangings.

She’d chosen a spot beside the gaping hole in the floorboards. I shone my light down there and saw a rusted 5-gallon bucket that she might have used before stepping off. I’d gone down into that hole many times on our forays, once with Mallory when we were teamed up. Unafraid of rats, we sat together quietly breathing the rank dust—escaped prisoners, we were—while German soldiers composed of my cousins and Danny searched for us with pellet guns.

I thought it would be the right place to lay my bouquet. I jumped into the hole and got on hands and knees, flowers gripped in one hand, flashlight in the other. I crawled along the tunnel as I had done so often and found what I thought was the place where we had sat together.

I had just placed the flowers on the dirt and was considering a prayer for her soul. Owing to some freakish yearning for forgiveness, I clicked the light off thinking my prayer would rise through the ether all that much faster in pitch dark.

I heard the word as distinctly as any word ever spoken to me in my life. One word: Traitor! Said with a husky malice—

I lost my grip on the flashlight and swept my hands about in the gritty soil to locate it.

Traitor . . . I trusted you . . .

Crying out, bumping my head on the floor above me, I reversed position and scrambled back to the hole, my heart pumping all the blood in my body as every foot of progress in that horrible darkness seemed to be going nowhere at all.

A milky light ahead exposed the hole. I didn’t climb out of it so much as leaped upwards like a fish breaching. I skidded across the floor, kicked out the plywood over the front entrance and ran home. Unseen by my siblings or parents, I made my way upstairs. I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, staring at my shocked, white face. The burning sensation of my inner thighs I was only then aware of had come from the urine stream released in my terror.

For days, I never thought of it. I convinced myself I had created Mallory’s voice in my head out of sheer guilt. The only cure, I thought, was to go back—never again in that hole—but stand there and face my fears, listen to what the dark had to say. Just a need to prove to myself I had only imagined her voice. I chose a time close to supper and slipped out of the house.

Making my way to the back of the sweater factory, I looked above through the dappled canopy where fern-like fronds had already turned a crimson red. Smaller bushes of sumac grew among the taller trees with their rust-red, furry branches covered in hairs.

The image I had suppressed so long since I’d heard of her death, one that cored me, came flooding back. Mallory had leaned over to kiss me in that darkened tunnel. I had never kissed a girl until then. When I reached for her to kiss her back, she giggled and shoved me away. We never spoke of it.

I saw nothing, heard nothing other than the gentle rustle of the sumac fronds overhead.

Returning to the front of the building, I scooped up a handful of dandelions growing in a crevice of broken cement blocks. I was going to redeem my cowardice, if not my betrayal. I stood above the hole looking down into the darkness, smelling that unmistakable odor. I threw the dandelions in and turned to go. When a scuttling behind me sent a ripple of fear up my back. Rodents. I headed toward the plywood covering over the entrance.

Footsteps, slow footsteps. A dragging, not the clicking of rodents this time. A sharp intake of breath—then a measured cadence of footfall, one after the other, a slow gliding across the floorboards from the darkened portion of the building. Coming my way . . .

Mallory—behind me—

Once more, I fled home as fast as I could run.

That winter I caught the flu; it turned into pneumonia. In my fever dreams, I saw Mallory beckoning. I ran, as ever, but she followed and appeared everywhere I went in the crazy logic of my dreams. Her footsteps were a steady smack-drip like the silent saline bag attached to my arm.

I never went back to the sweater factory. By that year, we had outgrown it. No one mentioned the place when we got together to play basketball in Tommy’s backyard. If I happened to be in the car with my parents, I turned my head away as we drove down Hulbert past the factory. I feared seeing Mallory’s shadow moving among the broken windows. The sound of her gliding across the floorboards filled me with an exquisite terror and sadness.

I slept with a light on until I went off to college. Footsteps on the creaking stairs of our house at night would send an icy ripple of fear up my spine. My mother heard me whimpering under the covers once, delirious and soaked in sweat. I went to the college’s health center to get medication for night terrors. The drug left me dopey but it kept Mallory at bay even if my grades and social life suffered.

I’m a grown man now with a wife and kids of my own. My job as a CPA for an international company has involved two out-of-state moves, once to California. Last week, I called my cousin Bill on New Year’s Eve. He told me the city tore down the sweater factory years ago. We never spoke of Mallory Boone.

I’m still waiting for her to call my name again. I listen at night for her footfall wherever I am. Traveling and staying in motels is worse. She sometimes appears before dawn. Like some mythical creature who disappears the moment you try to look at it, she hovers at the edge of my waking and sleeping. It’ll happen in an unfamiliar place when I’m alone and away from my family. I’ll turn around and she’ll be there wearing the severed rope around her neck the way she was when they carted her out of the sweater factory. Those glittering, feral eyes sunk deep in her face will bore through me. I don’t know what I’ll do. I might fall to my knees and ask her forgiveness even while I watch her raise that filleting knife to strike home.

“The Girl from the Sweater Factory” was a finalist in The Dark Sire Magazine’s 2020 awards.

Lying in Wait

Robb White

“Not much longer now, sweetcakes. Promise.”

Laughing in the background. Sharing motel rooms.

“You said four days,” she said. “It’s been six.”

It rained all day, two days straight, he told her. You can’t shingle an A-frame church the size of a coliseum in a downpour—

“I checked the weather, George.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning Chattanooga’s dry as driftwood—that’s what.”

“Rained cats and dogs three days straight. Dries out, ain’t gonna be no more’n two, three days tops.”

Now it’s three days . . .

“Better not be no girls in that room with you.”

Uh-oh, old Georgie’s gettin’ the silent treatment! More yuks around the room.

She imagined them slouching against the headboard, work boots on the bedspread, holding beers by the necks. Younger men now, muscled, whip-slender, strong as bamboo; they’d skip like goats over rooftops. He wouldn’t admit he was getting too old to go high, carrying a beer gut, too. Too proud to cut plywood with a table saw. Said he’d quit first.

“My honeygirl ain’t pouting on me, is she?”

Playing to his friends. She remembered him on the beach that first day, tanned from roofing but his ankles pasty white from his socks. The rest of him nut-brown, glistening with sweat and tanning oil.

“You don’t miss me, maybe you miss Betty Sue. She didn’t eat that last batch of mice from three days ago.”

“Oh Yeah?”

“Yeah, but she’s following me around the trailer all day. Probably lookin’ for you like you’re hiding in the closet on her. Dumbass snake.”

The first time she saw Betty Sue, she took a stutter-step backwards. Lying in her rabbit pen, coiled up like a giant custard. Betty Sue stared at her, flicked her tongue, tasted air. Tastin’ you, babe. That’s cuz you’re so goshdarn sweet . . .

She’d never seen a Burmese python up close. Twenty-two feet back then, bigger now. George said she weighed about four-hundred pounds. He couldn’t lift her now. She talked to Betty Sue, complained about George to her when he went on his out-of-state jobs with his crew.

“She stopped eating?”

“She misses you. She crawled up in bed next to me last night. Damn air-conditioner’s on the fritz again.”

“Hon, listen to me. Baby . . .”

“So hot, I laid there sweatin’ until dawn. Just me and your big-ass python.”

Planting an image of herself, nude and sweating. Maybe raise the trouser snake, git him on home faster.

“Where you at right now?”

“In bed,” she purred. “Betty Sue’s stretched out beside me like last night. Just the two of us girls all alone.”

“Hon, get out of there.”

“Yeah, just us girls, all alone. Marcie’s been beggin’ me to go to the Rooster Tail with her—”

“Babe, get out of there! Right now!”

“ . . . to go line dancing—what?”

“Get out now!”

“What the hell you talkin’ about, George?”

“Betty Sue,” he replied.

His deep voice quavered, rising a notch. It alarmed her.

“She’s measuring you.”

-END-

Slow-Cooker Fondue

Robb White

The experts argued over whether Rexford Tallmadge III was an idiot savant or afflicted with Asperger syndrome. He told his ninth-grade teacher the Book of Revelations would make an excellent French farce and showed him a sample libretto he had penned for a comic opera version.

“I’d cast Sumi Jo for Jezebel,” he told the teacher with a straight face. “I like Jim Carrey for the Apostle John and the director can have his choice for God. That’s just a voiceover anyway.”

He told his literature teacher that Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made more sense if you started it backwards. They finally settled it in favor of Asperger’s, more or less a coin-toss because he was brilliant in both math, languages, and music, although a difficult passage in Beethoven’s Fur Elise at his expensive prep school recital made him stumble; he abandoned piano from that day on. He mastered Danish during his first summer break in college and told the department chair of languages that glottal stops in Danish were overrated in difficulty. His aloof interactions with fellow students and professors in and out of classrooms kept them at bay. A common response from anyone who did approach him was similar: “He gives me the shivers” or “I felt he was looking right through me—and didn’t like what he saw.”

When he demanded his parents cease bringing him to “their therapy sessions, not his,” they were relieved but said nothing. For years, their son’s reputation had socially embarrassed them in their exclusive Connecticut enclave. Moreover, these neuropsychology clinics they’d been bringing him to since he was five were the equivalent of an extra college tuition. By the time puberty rolled around, even these experts in psychopathy and aberrant psychology failed to fully comprehend the depths of his character. His last session involved hypnotherapy at an Upper East Side clinic recommended by some woman in his mother’s reading circle. When he came up from the depths of his pleasant sojourn in what he called his “Red Chamber,” where Rexford’s deepest secret life and most abhorrent fantasies mingled happily, he saw the look of sheer horror on the female psychiatrist’s face and realized he’d given her too long of a peek into his private room and decided, for his future safety’s sake, to force an end to these sessions.

His sister loathed and feared him. At fourteen, she caught him peeking at her masturbating in the shower. She slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor. “Rex, you sick little perv!”

A veteran surfer of porn sites at eleven, Rex picked himself up and smiled at her. He walked away without saying a word. A month later, she twisted her ankle going down the stairs. Rex removed the invisible fishing line with a set of weights and pulleys he’d designed and hidden behind The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant on his bookshelf.

He deserved his own chapter in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. One of his reading pleasures was to watch how these witch doctors updated their thinking over the decades. Like hogs that come running because somebody banged a stick against the swill bucket. One year, everyone is proposing new theories of multiple personality disorder; the next year they’re all disavowing its existence. Someday, time permitting, he promised himself he’d pick one out at random and kill him or her.

He'd been planning to kill his parents and older sister by the time he was twelve. Not because he hated them, but because they were obstacles to his freedom. Confident he could outwit any forensic investigator of car crashes or house fires, he had to give up plans to get them all at once because parents and sibling were like rogue comets orbiting the sun at different angles. He could never count on having them all in one place at one time to get it done properly.

So, he did them one by one. First to go was his brainless slut of a sister. He was a sophomore at MIT by then, having transferred from NYU. Although computer work bored him, he chose IT as a major, having decided that cryptocurrency’s infancy as a largely unregulated industry allowed the quickest route to accessing money without having to produce anything. She’d picked up some lunk of a weightlifter at the beach and was banging him steadily on weekdays while her fiancé from the family social circle was off at Stanford finishing an MBA.

When he scoped the apartment loverboy shared with two other roommates, he wondered why nature hadn’t stepped in to save him the trouble. The apartment was a jerry-rigged, three-level dump with a history of code violations. Rex figured the landlord made them go away with a fat bribe to the housing inspector.

He’d hacked her computer and knew she was meeting Musclehead that evening. He had plenty of time because his preparations were already made and waiting for the go signal from her laptop. He drove to the concrete-block apartment in Bridgeport n a rental van with his homemade HVAC logo on the side. Accessing the outside HVAC and furnace room took seconds with his lockpick and jimmy. One look at the VRF system’s refrigerant piping and communication wiring told him what he needed to know—except for one possible glitch: the apartment unit’s VRF’s users might have app-based access to the system, which meant he’d only be involving the bachelor pad he was targeting, not the entire unit. From the looks of the jerry-built complex, he doubted the owner went for a device-based mode, which would be costly. His spatial sense was phenomenal. From that outdoor unit, he could fix the set points for the on/off, fan speed, temperature, and cooling/heating. With a wrench, needle-nose pliers, and wire cutters, he’d done the job in less than five minutes.

He returned to his van and removed the three cases of beer and four liquor bottles with a note from the landlord “thanking them for being good tenants.” The liquor was modestly spiked with an exotic tasteless, odorless neuromuscular blocker he ordered from the dark web and had sent to a post office box in Bridgeport with a phony name he used for some of his more exotic purchases. He left the beer and liquor on the front stoop. The landlord herself would not be able to distinguish his masterful forgery of her signature. The booze was what folks in New Orleans called “lagniappe,” a little bonus, but not in this case a gift of thanks to these three worthless dopers but to further his deception. Having the tenants drunk and passed out increased the odds to 90 percent, he figured, as opposed to relying solely on his adjustments to the furnace.

“Goodbye, Sis, nice knowing you,” he muttered to his reflection in the rearview mirror as he drove off. Padding on his tools hid the tool marks. The odds were against this second-rate beach town having anyone in law enforcement who would remain suspicious once the pink-hued corpses from carbon monoxide poisoning came rolling out on their gurneys. Imagining her dullard of a fiancé rushing back for the funeral only to be stymied by any reasonable explanation from her parents how she came to be in that fuck-pad in the first place brought a smile to his face. Rexford Tallmadge was not known to smile often.

His father, six months later, was easier. He stayed in Manhattan during the week and visited his family on weekends, an arrangement that satisfied his wife. A workaholic who liked his dirty martini after toiling all day in his skyscraper office moving amounts of money large enough to crash a third-world economy, he resorted to his favorite club for a couple dirty martinis. Every third Thursday, his father availed himself of the services of a very exclusive escort service and a certain, discreet hotel in Brooklyn.

Designing a copy of his father’s key fob for his father’s Benz was child’s play. While his father was inside frolicking with his Asian tart, as his mother called her, although she never said whether his father’s escort was Chinese, Vietnamese, or some other Asian nationality.

Rex used a scalpel to shave the skin from a potato to exactly the right dimensions needed. He jammed the peeled potato inside the tailpipe and took his post for surveillance. If his father were consistent, he’d be leaving the room sixty-five minutes later. His longest dalliance was seventy-two minutes. He knew the exact mileage the car would travel before the jammed exhaust system would cause the Benz to stall out. He’d tested his father’s car three times while he was home enduring his family on weekends to ensure the distance was accurate.

He knew the old man’s route on his return trip to his hotel in the Upper East Side. It never varied. The twenty-two miles would see him to Lenox hill before the engine started sputtering. Then it was a matter of five or six blocks between East 59^th and East 61^st before it would stall out.

“This is the price to be paid for strict routines and habits, Dad,” Rex said to his image in the rearview. Traffic was light and he had no trouble keeping his father’s Benz in sight.

When he saw the coils of black smoke from the tailpipe thicken, he watched the car ahead the way a cheetah on the savanna watches a gazelle with a limp. Instead of pulling over, his father continued up Madison Avenue, the Benz chugging like an exhausted marathon runner.

“Pull over, Dad,” Rex said, eyes fixed on the increased traffic of Manhattan’s night life kicking in. Yellow cabs flowed around his vehicle and the Benz ahead like water flowing around a rock in a streambed.

The Benz pulled over, finally.

“Change of plans, Dad,” Rex said, getting out.

His father’s furrowed brow held the tension of his frustration—a familiar sign Rex understood from his youth. First consternation, then the explosive temper. Rex tapped on the driver’s window.

Streetlight glare prevented Rex from seeing inside. A hiss, then the window rolled halfway down. “My God, Rex, what the hell are you doing here? My car stalled. Why are you wearing latex—”

“Change of plans, Dad.” His father didn’t get to finish the sentence, although his exasperation was already at full tilt, which sign Rex recognized from the high color in his cheeks and his squinted eyes. The phone dock was empty, but he relaxed when he saw the cell phone in his father’s other hand. He hadn’t called for help yet.

Rex put the four-shot Derringer to his father’s temple through the window and pulled the trigger.

The interior of the vehicle and his father’s head absorbed most of the noise. The .22 short, low-velocity bullet wasn’t meant to exit or even penetrate the hard skull bone; instead, it slid along the skull cap, flattened out at a shallow angle and formed a thin, oval lead disk before settling in the occipital area. Had the car stopped short in the first block after crossing the East River, where it was supposed to die and where lights and traffic were minimal for the planned kill shot, Rex’s weapon would have been the .357 with the metal-jacketed slugs that would have converted his father’s brain matter to mush before exiting. Ho-hum, another crime victim in dangerous New York.

Reaching into his father’s suitcoat jacket, he pulled out the billfold and pinched off a wad of bills. He scattered some fifties around his father’s lap with the empty wallet and tossed a few more onto the passenger side floor.

“So long, fucker,” Rex said, heading back to his car, an unobtrusive beige Honda he’d bought for this one occasion.

That left one. He was impatient to get it going but wisely understood that three family members’ deaths in the space of months would pique the curiosity of even the dullest-witted cop.

Nature did step in to lend a helping hand in her case. Four months after his father’s funeral, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Two weeks later, Rex served her a cocktail of drugs from her own medicine cabinet, a mini-pharmacy for the modern, anxiety-prone middle-aged suburban woman. He chose a combination of Lorazepam and Xanax for the heavy lifting and added dollops of crushed Gabapentin and Meloxicam, her nerve-pain meds, for the finishing touch. He wasn’t even remotely concerned about autopsy findings in her case. His acting skills were up to the task of playing the anguished son whose mother’s severe depression over her diagnosis and the recent death of her husband caused her to commit suicide.

Within weeks of the final obstacle removed from his life, Rex was in full swing with his newfound wealth. He used his math skills to add to the bounty through day trading in futures and options on the Chicago Merc.

###

He met her at a sex party on the UES, after a night out clubbing. She wore a gold metallic, split-neck dress. She resisted all the male advances to talk to him. Watching her rebuff another male, Rex recognized the epicanthal fold of skin of her upper eyelid and knew she was of Asian descent. When he heard the whisper of her accent as she introduced herself to him, he knew at once she was South Korean.

She was extraordinarily eclectic in her knowledge. A graduate of Columbia and Cardozo Law, she spoke five languages and could talk about everything from Hoplite military tactics to General Giáp’s “steady fight and advance” strategy that won the Vietnam War.

By the end of the night, she had gradually moved closer to him on the sofa until their thighs touched. Naked, copulating bodies were taking over the living room. A wheat-blonde woman lay writhing on the floor in a loud ménage à trois involving double penetration and fellatio.

“Tantric sex is wasted on her,” he said casually.

“It wouldn’t be on me,” she replied.

Rex invited her to his hotel in Midtown for a drink. She understood what he meant and agreed. They did more than have sex. Rex hated paid sex because it tasted like ashes, he said, but he had never met a woman that he desired a relationship with until he met her. Before dawn, he knew he’d found a soul mate. She was every bit as amoral as he was. His chest was covered in love bites. She used filthy English slang and Korean slang while they made love.

“I don’t believe in wasting time,” he said to Ha-eun Sum in the shower. “I want you to prove we should be together.”

“How do I do that, Rex-ford Tall-madge?” she asked teasingly, grinding her pubis against his thigh and making red circles around his nipples with her fingernail.

“Kill someone,” he said.

She stopped circling and looked up, her deep brown eyes glittering like a feral cat’s.

“Where?”

“The Bowery,” he replied.

“Who?”

“The place is full of transients sleeping in alleys under cardboard. Let’s find one and kill him together.”

They dressed in silence and left the apartment together.

“Take me home,” she said suddenly.

His lip curled, his automatic reaction to discovering a failure or a human weakness.

“You change your mind so soon?”

“Fuck no,” Ha-eun replied. “This dress is an Oscar de la Renta. The sandals are Gianvito Rossi from Saks. They’ll get soiled.”

He drove. “There’s a good prospect,” he said, pointing through the windshield. The morning sun shot spears of light between the grimy buildings.

“I see it,” she said.

He parked across the street from the alley and they got out. She’d changed into black yoga pants, sneakers, and a gray hoodie. From behind she looked like an adolescent; her agility and speed were from years of power yoga. He had to trot to keep up with her.

At the mouth of the alley, he stopped her from entering. “You haven’t asked me how yet,” he said.

“I assume you brought the weapon.”

He flipped his dark jacket aside to show her a beavertail sap and a black Ka-Bar combat knife.

“Let’s go.”

Halfway down the alley, they watched rats scuttle ahead of them, crisscrossing and squeaking in a frenzy. “Have you ever seen a rat king?” he asked her. “Rats in a burrow with their sticky tails ensnarled—quite a sight—”

She held a hand to his chest to stop him from talking.

“There,” she said in her whispery voice from the party, “see them?”

Two shoes extended from a cardboard lean-to against the alley wall ten yards ahead. She has eyes like a cat, too, he thought, admiring her even more. The garbage-filled stench of the alley with its overlay of urine and excrement didn’t faze her.

Her one character flaw—forgivable, Rex thought—was her enthusiasm for cosplay, one of their many subjects the previous night. He told her he considered it more infantilizing than decadent. Her eyes grew brighter and she explained the subset of psychological pleasures one achieved from the costumed role-playing. He wasn’t convinced intellectually but he was so sexually drawn to her at that point, he didn’t want to torpedo any chance of sex at the end of the night.

Approaching closer, they heard sounds from within the cardboard. The man’s feet shifted, and he scraped one heel against the ground back-and-forth as though rubbing an itch.

“He’s dreaming,” Ha-eun said in her girlish whisper.

“He might be high or sleeping off a drunk,” Rex replied. He spoke too loudly, charged with the adrenalin of the hunt.

“How do you want to do this?”

Instead of a reply, Rex stepped around her and kicked the cardboard off the sleeping man.

“Hey, I’ve got something for you,” he growled to the prostrate man, who was coming around but not in a threatening way, more like the twitches of an addict who doesn’t know or care who’s talking to him. Rex had once driven to Kensington Avenue in North Philadelphia to scout for potential victims. So many to choose from, it was a cornucopia of potential victims. He finally settled on one raggedy-assed woman carrying a frilly purse over her crotch area, a streetwalker’s code the female prostitutes used in the neighborhood. He enticed her into an alley with a ten-dollar bill folded between his fingers. The punch dagger he slammed under her jaw snapped her head back. He had a hard time shaking her head and limp body free of the stuck blade.

The man on the ground made moaning sounds, growled curses, and scooted against the wall. Rex stepped forward and slammed the sap on the crown of his head.

“Let me,” Ha-eun said, grabbing the sap from him.

She beat the man on the head and face in a frenzy that made Rex tumescent despite the hours of sex back at his place.

“Let’s go,” she said, wiping blood spatter from her face.

“Not yet,” he said and gave the man the coup de grâce with the knife by ramming it through his left eye into his brain. For good measure, he twisted the knife before withdrawing it. They both stood there watching the last of the muscle spasms before the man slumped, his battered head lolling on his chest in the final death throes.

“Now we can go,” Rex said.

Two weeks after their first “bum hunt,” as he called it, he begged her for more.

“You have to do one thing for me first,” she said.

At times, she could drop that diamond-sharp, icy brilliance and degenerate into a schoolgirl.

“What?”

“My cosplay group is having a fondue party, and I want you to go with me as my plus-one.”

“When hell freezes over.”

But she was iron to his steel and wore him down as the day of the party approached. He agreed.

Apparently, it was more than a party. One of the group owned an island off the coast of Maine and they held their annual retreats there—a mix of play and meditation involving yoga and whichever member of the group was most thunderstruck by whatever celebrity healer or mystic happened to be in vogue.

“We’re all going as Borderlands Three characters,” she told him while they dressed for lunch downtown. “I’m Tyreen Calypso and you’re my brother Troy.”

“Fine, whatever,” Rex replied. “What’s he like so I know how to act?”

“You already have his two main qualities,” she said. “Cocky and sadistic.”

Over dinner at Sans Souci, she tried explaining the rules and characters of the popular video game. He considered the whole idea depressingly trite. This place, Pandora, a hellhole with its mix of flesh-eating bandits, sirens, robots, and mercenaries. Names like Mad Moxxi, Sir Alistair Hammerlock, and Butcher Rose. He mocked her gently. His genius applied to all the hard sciences, but he disdained those disciplines that involved any so-called science of “people,” like psychology or sociology. How her voracious sexual appetite and intelligence managed to coexist with this infantile obsession over role-playing actually astonished him.

He was annoyed the wine was off, too corky, and he planned to give the sommelier a tip about storage when they left. At the moment, she was enthusiastically explaining some of the bizarre features of the moronic game like trees that posed as double agents.

The hors d’oeuvres arrived. “Have some,” he said, hoping to cut off her insipid eloquence.

“They call these ‘angels on horseback’ in England,” she said. She’d done a summer at Oxford as an undergraduate.

“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere you can’t have these morsels,” he replied, and deftly removed one of the hot bacon-wrapped mussels to his plate.

She scooped the tender meat out of its shell with her prong fork. “You know, Tyreen sometimes eats the diminutive Tinks like popcorn shrimp.”

They flew to the island in a private jet he sometimes rented. She kept her ear buds on the entire way and studied her cell phone. He read Wittgenstein, a philosopher to his taste. The dour philosopher had once done a short, brutal stint as an elementary school teacher and killed a slow-witted boy with a blow to the head for failing to learn his lesson. Wittgenstein’s wealthy family made the crime disappear.

When they landed, she spoke for the first time since the jet took off: “We’re having fondue tonight. Everyone’s dressing up.”

“Great,” he replied. “Are we getting matching tattoos since we’re siblings?”

She gave him that smile she showed when she didn’t intend to answer, as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s.

He slept in their assigned cabin while she ran around meeting and greeting old friends.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come, Rex?”

“I’ll come later,” he said and gave her his own familiar smile, a randy one.

“Really, Rex,” she said. “You mock me for my cosplay but what’s your silly double-entendre if not juvenile?”

With all the garb they were expected to wear and the fake tattoos she insisted they slather on, no one would see her bruises. He planned to mark her up before the fondue party with some role-playing of his own. He even remembered to bring the special salve for wound care afterward.

They all had a festive drink in the communal dining hall the witless owner bult just for this foolishness. They toasted and drank. He tried to be convivial for her sake, but he was afflicted with a logy feeling and a dullness. The freshness of Maine’s ocean breeze was overrated like everything else in life. She hugged and kissed her way down the line with air kisses and European cheek pecks toward him.

“Time to go,” she said. Her Mona Lisa smile was back.

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

Halfway to this hexagonal, domed structure in a procession of costumed revelers where the fondue party was being held, he stumbled.

“Rex, are you alright?”

“Fine,” he said. In fact, he wasn’t fine. He was nauseated. His vision was blurry and he couldn’t distinguish the shapes of trees, cabins, people’s faces along the way.

Inside the small building, the gatherers formed a tight circle. Dimly, he realized that he and Ha-eun were isolated.

“Tyreen Calypso, Tyreek Calypso, step forward and take your places on the throne.”

Goodie gum drops, Rex inwardly fumed. We’re royalty now.

Before he realized what was happening, two pairs of arms grabbed him hard by the triceps and pulled him backwards. He tried resisting but he was too weak.

“Succinyl chloride,” Ha-eun whispered in her silky voice.

Rex’s mind was on a trip of its own. He could barely move or speak.

“What’s he saying?” Someone close to them asked.

Ha-eun responded: “He said ‘C Four, H Four, CL Two, O Two.’”

His mind burped out the chemical formula for the drug just nanoseconds before he realized what he must have ingested the white, odorless crystals in the “welcome drink” they gave him at the hall. He would be aware of everything but unable to move a muscle. A line from Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rippled across his neocortex: “Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

He heard tittering laughter like the young schoolgirls in his prep academy he wanted to have violent sex with. He was unable to concentrate on a face or a voice. He seemed to be floating in a colorful vortex of comic-book characters with halos over their heads.

“Like . . . angels,” he mumbled, slurring his words.

“Ha-eun, what did he say?” Some giggler close to him; he couldn’t tell. “Oh dear, I hope they didn’t give him too much.”

“It’s nothing,” she replied.

Someone in the back in a basso-profundo voice called out: “He’s ready. Light the fondue pot.”

Images blurred all around him. He was carried by several men to a stone table that made his back itch. He was lathered and shaved with a scalpel by someone over his chest, arms, legs, and groin, although he didn’t feel the blade. It made a whispering sound like Ha-eun’s voice.

Pain came later, especially when the filleting of his skin began. He felt the tanner’s knife, however, when it re-scraped his flesh and scudded out excess liquids before the actual cutting commenced.

His other senses were keen: an animal in a kill chute knew its fate even if it could not reason. The sights and smells, the sizzling of the massive fondue pot, the excited jabbering of the guests.

Pieces of him went from everywhere. They were like greedy children pressing close for presents. He tried to flail his limbs when bone was scraped.

It seemed to go on for hours, days; his mind finally went numb.

Ha-eun appeared once or twice by his side to whisper in his ear. Once she said only a single word: “Yum.”

The last thing she said to him that his functioning brain was able to record was this: “Your father despised you. He called you a sick, disgusting pervert. He promised me one-hundred-thousand as a parting gift when he couldn’t perform. I never got the money thanks to you.”

Rexford Tallmadge III tried to shape his lips into the form of a mocking smile but nothing was functioning by then, the citadel all but abandoned except for a faithful retinue of soldiers like the funeral ceremony of the privileged, where an elite guard stands with backs to their fallen leader on a catafalque.

He heard the words “wonderful fondue” coming from someone far away and then he closed his eyes for the last time.

-END-

The Parcel

Robb White

Vinnie Delmonte stared at the thick letter the postal clerk handed him. “Next,” the clerk said. Vinnie took his time moving aside despite the impatient tongue clicking of the woman next in line.

His grandmother from Bangor sent it. He hadn’t seen her since his altar boy days at St. Luke’s. He’d spent half a miserable summer at her cabin in the woods when he was sixteen, staying out there in the boonies with her while his friends back home in Portland were reveling in summer vacation. They sent him their selfies with their grabby hands innocently touching the undersides of the girls’ breasts. He vaguely recalled his depression from that long-ago wasted vacation when he wandered in the woods chucking rocks at blue jays and masturbating behind a stand of pitch pine trees.

Smirking at the spidery handwriting on the envelope, he tore it open. Forget cell phones, she never heard of texting. Anxious about his soul, the fanatical old bat. He wished she sent him money like a normal grandmother. The temptation to drop it in the wastebasket on his way out the door tugged at him.

At the same time, he didn’t want his mother bugging him about whatever her mother sent. Even at 27, he wasn’t free from the apron strings owing to his failure to hold down a job longer than eight months. She always handed it over, rarely complained about his failure to pay it back. Once she compared his excuses for being short to some cartoon character named Wimpy whose catchphrase was “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” If only it was hamburgers he was short of instead of bourbon and beer with the occasional blunt, not that high-impact shit but dope you could reason with. He was a boozer, not a druggie.

He opened the letter in his car and read the first page before he let out a whoop that made the woman in the car beside his open stare at him.

“Yee-haw,” he burbled, gaping at his grin staring back at him in the rearview mirror. It was genuine excitement in contrast to the repertoire of studied looks and poses he mastered for the public, depending on where he was at the moment.

“The old girl’s finally done right by you, Vin.”

Talking to himself was a lifelong habit. He skipped through the rest of her letter, careened past her stage-4 pancreatic cancer, her new residence in a hospice facility in Bangor, blew past her hopes for his redemption and her own hope of “receiving angel wings,” and skip-hopped to the end where the deed was folded in with the letter.

Vinnie perused the deed’s legal mumbo-jumbo to settle on her jerky signature at the bottom of the page. “Don’t hold your breath on that visit,” he mumbled, envisioning the medicinal smells, the odor of elderly people, and the tear-wringing farewell his elderly grandmother would certainly inflict on him.

“No way, no how, Grammy,” he said to the rearview mirror while adjusting his hair.

He wadded the pages and tossed them over his shoulder to the back seat. He kept only the deed. Vinnie Delmonte—thanks to his frugal grandmother—who doted on him was now the proud owner of a cabin in the woods he had loathed visiting as a boy, not to mention the surrounding one-hundred-sixty acres of woodland.

The word money rippled throughout his neocortex like a white rock at the bottom of a shimmering pool. The big question: How much was it all worth, cabin and land? First things first: Vinnie had to get out there and check out what he was calling “my estate.”

If anything, the intervening years had aggravated his disdain for nature and anything that smacked of camping or hiking. Leaving the concrete skyscrapers, foul smells, and harsh sounds of the city behind was like leaving Paradise for that other place his grandmother quaintly referred to as “H—e—double toothpicks.”

“Only one way to find out, Vin, old boy.” Spoken with the confidence of the newly rich while fluffing his hair and throwing a wink at the face in the rearview.

* * *

The old girl hadn’t renovated the place much. The same boring landscapes, family photos, and ceramic bric-à-brac on the shelves he remembered from his youth. He’d worked the internet to get a baseline estimate and $90,000 didn’t seem unreasonable. Add in the value of land and prime timber, and yessirree Bob, Vinnie D. was holding a ticket to Easy Street.

He brought along a sleeping bag for the upstairs loft. Vinnie was superstitious and believed sleeping in her bed downstairs was bad luck. He had five six-packs, a bottle of 90-proof vodka, and a bottle of Hornitos to help pass the time, although he had no intention of staying one hour longer than necessary. He didn’t bring gas for the generator, however, and didn’t think of it until he flicked a light switch. He cursed himself for stopping at that roadside juke joint off State Route 9 to check out the ladies and quench his thirst on the ride from Portland. If he’d stayed on the road, he could have walked his property line before it got dark. Too late now, even with his flashlight and his father’s old pump shotgun in the trunk to take along. He didn’t like the woods in the daytime. White-tail deer, bobcats, and raccoons were one thing, black bears, rattlesnakes, and moose were another. After sundown, every cry or shriek from the forest had an ominous ring to it in the forest.

An hour of rummaging among her things helped pass the time. He grabbed fistfuls of her clothes off the closet poles, stuffed them into garbage bags, half-gagging on the sachet bags she placed in with them. Frilly things like doilies and samplers with homey sayings stitched into them went straight into the trash can. The night was long and he was bored. Cell service out here was sketchy and didn’t last long enough for sex conversations with two girls he was dating. Both had turned down his invitation to accompany him “to the great outdoors.”

He’d forgotten how the pitch-black dark outside the cabin windows fell on everything like a black wall. Night sounds of screech owls, yips and cries of nocturnal animals that had once disturbed his youthful sleep now frazzled his nerves. He sipped vodka with beer chasers, and finished with three shots of tequila to dull every sense so that he wobbled climbing the ladder to the upstairs loft.

He swept the flashlight beam around the small space. Two pairs of red eyes stared at him. He screamed, nearly falling off the ladder in his agitation. The raccoons scuttled noisily back through the hole under the eaves; he heard their nails on the roof.

Raccoons, Vinnie . . . Just raccoons.

The flashlight beam showed where the hole under the eaves where the raccoon had entered the loft. Vinnie wanted to laugh at his fright but his limbs were shaking so hard he could barely lift himself over to the floorboards. He stuffed the sleeping bag into the hole and fell backwards into a boozy sleep disturbed by nightmares. He sat upright at dawn, banging his head on the sloping rafters. His bladder ached. He dreamt huge snakes with tea-colored eyes and diamond patterns slithered over the floor below, some tangled in a ball just below the ladder. Tongues flicked out, probing the air, sensing his presence above them.

* * *

Cotton mouth and the hangover headache knocked his mood from sour to grim. One quick survey of his property, he told himself, and he’d hit the road. Escape this jungle and get back to civilization, which for Vinnie D. was chasing women and bar-hopping.

With his dad’s shotgun in a cradle-carry, he set out. After a half-mile, he felt himself a quarter of the way back to normal despite the morning sun burning his eyeballs before he saw it ahead on the path. Sunlight streaming through the forest glanced off its metal shape and scattered the light all around the clearing. No mirage, a 1960 model camper—one of those airstream jobs shaped like a silver tube.

Shit-on-a-shingle, what was this crap?

In front of a dead campfire surrounded by small rocks were four of those fold-out camper chairs. Empty beer cans, a bottle of Grey Goose with a half-shot left inside, and styrofoam cups lay scattered about.

Vinnie’s situational awareness improved a notch. His shotgun struck him as ineffective if a bunch of jacked-up criminals came charging out of the camper with high-powered weapons. Boyhood flashbacks of Sleepaway Camp and Jason Vorhees horror films fought with contemporary news accounts of illicit marijuana grows and cartel gang members armed to the teeth. That latter realization overrode his anger toward the trespassers.

He approached the camper and called out in a quavering voice to anyone inside.

No response. Just nature sounds including a loon’s cry. Maybe they were off swimming or fishing in one of the small ponds dotting the forest.

The feeling of being an abused landlord returned and urged him to open the door and peek inside. He swiveled his head and saw four berths in the back, a tiny kitchenette, and the driver’s cabin—but no people.

He finished his walkaround and returned to the cabin, brooding dark thoughts about those invaders of his land. He wanted to go home but he couldn’t leave thinking about strangers taking advantage of him. He couldn’t get cell service to call the nearest Sheriff’s Office, wherever that might be.

Instead, toward twilight, he paced inside and got hammered on his booze. He drained the last of the vodka, slugged down the last beer cans, and loaded with liquid courage, he grabbed his shotgun and marched out the door, a soldier heading into battle. Twice he tripped over a varmint hole and was lashed by brambles. Nearby wildlife scurried out of his path. Even the clicks and wing flicks of cicadas ceased and grasshoppers stopped in mid-buzz at his noisy approach.

Pushing low-hanging branches aside, Vinnie beheld a sight that stopped his breathing. There they were, sitting around a campfire drinking, not a care in the world. Two twenty-something females and two males. Shorts, tank tops, and Levi’s with fashionable rips in the fabric. Dumbass college kids, that’s all.

Get off my land, you sonsofbitches!

Vinnie did what he thought was a fairly good impression of a cowboy film from his pre-teen years. He strode out from the woods into the bright clearing, racking the shotgun as he went, a sound guaranteed to pucker the sphincter.

They spotted him at the same time. Then chaos. Yelling, screaming, running in all directions. Their terror at seeing him charge them kicked his own excitement into high gear with an additional adrenalin surge. He fired, racked another shotshell, fired again. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Too drunk to see straight, staggering on his legs, he fired without aiming while they scattered like fish. Deafened by the blasts, he stood alone in the clearing. Enough brain cells fired up to tell him what he had just done.

Oh God, what have I done?

He fled back to his cabin, dropping the shotgun as he stumbled, and falling every hundred yards like the clichéd scenes of fleeing females pursued by killers in every horror film he’d seen in the eighties. Jumping into his grandmother’s bed, he pulled covers over his head and whimpered a mix of cursing and garbled prayer that ended in an appeal to his grandmother’s beloved Virgin Mary: “Holy Mother of God, Oh, Mother of God, save me,” over and over.

Vinnie didn’t know how long he lay under the covers babbling incoherently. He thought of the vodka bottle, convinced he’d taken it up to the loft last night. He was halfway up the ladder when he remembered he’d finished it downstairs but in reversing course too abruptly, his foot missed a step and he fell backwards to the floor, landing on his back. He lay groaning, too hurt to get up. He must have passed out on the floor because, when he came to and his vision cleared, he was surrounded by pairs of legs.

They’ve come to kill me, Vinnie thought.

“Oh no, please don’t hurt me,” he wailed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to shoot anyone!”

“Get up!” a deep male voice commanded.

Vinnie rolled over, tears spattering the boots of the stranger. Vinnie had bluffed and talked his way out of bar fights. Now, all he could think of was pleading for his life.

A girl in shorts leaned down to wipe tears from his cheeks. He stared at the vee of her crotch for the first time in his life without a sexual reaction while she gently wiped his face with a wet washcloth.

“Get up!” The same voice ordered from above. “You’re coming with us.”

He was holding Vinnie’s shotgun.

Standing on shaky legs, Vinnie looked at him and the other male beside the girl who had wiped his face. He implored mercy with his eyes. Both males were over six feet. He hadn’t noticed their size when he did his John Wayne impression back in the woods.

They escorted him with hard grips on his triceps. He couldn’t walk straight. They’re taking me into the woods to kill me. Animals will gnaw on my bones . . .

They hustled him to the camper, pointed to a hole in the skin of the door, then dragged him to over to the right wheel of the camper to see a bundled lump on the ground. Vinnie knew what it was before he saw it—a dead body.

She lay on her side covered in blood. The other girl he vaguely recalled before his charge. A massive wound to her pelvis and a hideous neck wound showed where two of the five slugs churned their way through her tender flesh. A pool of crimson blood, drying at the edges to rusty brown, drew corpse flies.

That did it. Vinnie whirled, doubled over, and vomited up a foul-smelling drool.

The other girl rushed to him, patted his back, and spoke soothing words. He wasn’t sure what she said. They gave him something to drink that calmed him; in fact, it almost turned him to stone but left his brain free to process the words they spoke. He could have wept with joy when he understood they weren’t going to murder him. They said they weren’t even going to turn him in. His pinwheeling brain couldn’t process his salvation. They made him understand he wasn’t going to spend the next twenty years in a steel cage inside violent Mountainview Correctional if he did the right thing.

“What . . . what is the right thing?”

The girl smiled at him and rubbed her thumb against the tips of her fingers. Vinnie knew that sign. Everyone knew that sign. He was going to have to pay for their collective silence. He murdered their friend in his drunken rage. They took cell-phone videos, pointed at the place where her dead body lay in the dirt. They told him they would bury her in the woods where no one would find her remains. They even made a recording of his confession. Vinnie asked her name.

“Angelica,” the girl said, weeping tears. “She was truly an angel.”

* * *

Vinnie told the male voice on the phone he had sold the cabin and the land. He would be getting his money.

“No mistakes, Vincent,” the voice said. “You know what’ll happen if you do.”

“I do,” Vinnie lamented. “I’m so sorry—”

He sent money to various Western Unions around the country. Finally, broke and drunk, he told them on the phone he couldn’t send another dime. He had no more to give. He was back to living at home under his parents’ scowls and constant complaints about his drinking. Every day, he waited for SWAT to come crashing through the door of his bedroom.

Eight weeks later, another parcel arrived, addressed to Mr. Vincent Delmonte. No return address. He thought it was another parcel from his grandmother.

His heart hammered as he tore it open with his fingers. Plastic tubes of makeup, rubber wounds—trauma makeup. He held the bleeding prosthetic of a gaping wound in the palm of his hand. Under the theater cosmetics, he found a photo. They smiled beneath the frond of a large palm tree. Aquamarine waters lapped the shoreline behind them. Sunshine made electric sparks on the water.

Not three. Four. The dead girl was there, too. No, not her, it can’t be!

She stood in the center. Bold and big as life. One hand on her cocked hip where the deadly wound had exposed bright bone against the stew meat of blasted muscle. Her right hand extended toward the camera, toward him, smiling with perfect teeth, her middle digit a throbbing arrow straight into his heart.

Vinnie Delmonte fell to his knees, a sob like a huge gas bubble climbed up his esophagus. He slithered along the carpeting of his old boyhood bedroom like those snakes in his dream.

-END-

The Breakwall

Robb White

The only people around were teenagers in swimsuits and flip-flops heading for the rusted steel ladder some Good Samaritan placed against the boulders so people can reach the top slabs of granite without having to maneuver up to the top. My age rendered me invisible while they passed, gabbling their slang and giggling.

Two old men farther down relaxed on camping chairs drinking beer. They used crevices in the massive slabs of granite wall to hold their rods. To my left, the beach had thinned out except for a few families with kids teasing gulls, hovering above their blankets and the kids’ outstretched hands holding potato chips. An older couple with their pants rolled zigzagged the shoreline, bent over, water lapping at their ankles, searching for glints of beach glass.

Sunset was an hour, judging from the shimmering red disc poised a few inches above the horizon. Locals like to watch the fuzzy red ball sink into Lake Erie. You’d think it offered a therapeutic balm to the soul. Maybe it did.

I was jaundiced. I’d caught that “green wink” of sun going down and nothing good happened to me. I used to fish off the wall. At fifteen, a rogue wave knocked me off it into the stagnant pool at the base of the wall. I spent a week in the hospital coughing with bronchitis from sucking water into my lungs. Some friends and I walked the mile-long breakwall to the Coast Guard station at the lighthouse. You have to pass a gauntlet we called “Flat Rocks,” where the boulders were lower to the water. Waves arced over our heads in rough weather. I stole a Playboy pinup from a sailor’s locker and fantasized over her tawny pubic ruff for weeks. Growing up in a drunken household with parents fighting like dinosaurs turned me into a mouse about to be trampled. In a small town, everyone knows your family.

The spot where the wave tossed me over was near where I stood waiting for Kurt, my contact. He was going to blow the whistle on an iron-ore smelting plant coming to town. The company’s PR team had done their job reassuring the town with charts and graphs explaining the particulate matter release were well within EPA guidelines.

When the Herald-Tribune took me back, I was grateful and still ashamed. My story on a corrupt alderwoman turned out to be a hoax—opposition research planted to make her look like a grifter, and I took the bait. Adiós, byline. Adiós, reputation. Even my girlfriend dumped me. Hello, hometown. I thought I’d scraped the shit from my natal place off my shoes.

Checking my cell phone for the tenth time proved useless. He’d call, he said, if he was going to be late. A blind man could see this exposé was going to be big. I’d barely adjusted to the low pay and my rinkydink apartment above Bridge Street, where the din from the bar crowds lasted until three in the morning. I couldn’t take covering street festivals and spelling bees, interviewing snotty teenaged athletes, morose farmers, and chatty grandmothers with recipes. The paper’s senior reporter caught anything worthwhile. He disliked me and would as soon share a fondue fork with me as share a tip. He’d written a puff piece slavering over the prospect of spin-off dollars to be produced. Above the fold was a photo of the owners and city big shots with silver-plated shovels at the ready, beaming for the camera.

He was late. The skeleton of the plant was already visible from the breakwall beyond the harbor mouth where Great Lakes freighters bulging with coal and taconite pellets used to tie up in winter near Pinney docks.

The chemical factories near the lake had collapsed like dominoes when China snapped up most of the Midwest’s heavy industry. The town’s leaders were eager to reinvigorate heavy industry in our rust-belt town, now dependent on cottage industries and specialty shops that opened and closed like crocuses in a spring rain. The beach once resembled a 1960’s Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach film with hundreds of sunbathers in my youth. At night, junkies roamed the scrub behind the concession stand for places to sleep and stumbled around the sand looking for loose change or lost sunglasses. A woman chased a trio of teenagers down here to the breakwall after they stole her son’s bike; one of them pulled out a gun and took a shot at her.

When I met him in a bar on Bridge street, Kurt was mumbling on the stool next to mine. I wanted to ignore him, another middle-aged drunk, but bar protocol nixed that and I was curious about his accent: South African. We began talking. He said he was part of the advance team in town to train new workers.

“Those morons sold out the city for a couple dozen minimum-wage jobs,” I said. “This part of town will reek worse than the cat-piss smell of a meth lab.” I’d had some familiarity with that as a crime-beat reporter back in Chicago.

“Worse than you think, mate,” he said. “Name’s Kurt, by the way.”

“I’m curious,” I replied. “Tell me more.”

I told him about Northtown’s history of pollution. The posters of black, upside-down Smiley Faces an activist group planted in the yards of households where a family member died of cancer. When I was in high school, the Northtown River had to be dredged for PCBs; it took a decade and we were still ranked on the Superfund map. The big orange water towers at the coal storage facility below my house sprayed the mountain-sized piles with water from the river where billions of molecules of Polychlorinated Byphenyls lurked like trap-door spiders waiting for prey. The lake breezes wafted droplets into our backyards as far as the breakwall. I got out of town with sparks flying off my shoes.

He half-turned in his chair and opened his hands to show me.

“What the—what is that?”

I’d never seen anything like it. Red and blue fibers sprouting out of the palms of both his hands.

“Morgellons,” he said, drawing it out into three syllables with a hiss at the end. “It’s a disease that causes fibers to grow out of my skin. I have them everywhere on my legs and back, too.”

I googled it later: Morgellons was a neurological disease that caused red and blue fibers to grow out of skin. Something akin to radiation poisoning from cesium. Its affects on the brain were lethal, progressive mental and physical neurological deterioration. Kurt knew he was a goner and had little time left.

He wanted revenge on the owners and shareholders of the conglomerate that owned his company after the company’s lawyers were victorious in defeating his lawsuit claiming responsibility for causing the disease.

“Thirty years, and I’ll never see my pension,” he said. “That plant will do it here too. They’ll take their profit and move on once the damage is done.”

Love Canal came to mind—the toxic landfill caused by dumping chemicals in the seventies that killed dozens and harmed hundreds of people living near Niagara Falls. All the male members of my family had jobs in Electromet Corporation, Union Carbide, Reactive Metals, and a list of companies that were here and now gone. Big defense contractors making tons of money who paid high wages. Left in their wake were dozens of harbor families with dead relatives from stomach cancer, brain cancer, all sorts of blood and bone diseases.

Nothing like the uncouth smash-and-grab robbers on the TV news, these were sophisticated, financial buccaneers sporting Rolexes, driving Ferraris and Lambos, relishing their stock options from their big estates.

“There’s not much time,” Kurt said. “As you say you’re a newspaperman, I can get you proof.”

Meeting at the breakwall was to be the exchange drop. When we spoke the following day, he told me he was being watched by “company goons.” He refused to meet me at my place, a parking lot, or anywhere he couldn’t see them approaching. I suggested the breakwall. It gave him an excuse if he were to be seen in public standing with someone admiring the lake view.

No answer: my calls went straight to voicemail.

The view from the top of the breakwall revealed more cars coming to watch the sunset. I climbed down the ladder to head for my car, kicking myself for not providing him a backup in an emergency.

You didn’t have to be a crime reporter to recognize crime scenes. Drag marks in the sand were obvious to a blind man. Two tracks led off into a narrow path into a thick stand of cattails. The city built an observation deck behind the breakwall for people to look out over an inlet where geese, swans, and ducks flourished. Coyotes prowled the perimeter hoping for an easy score; they weren’t the only predators. City council had that path roped off when two homeless men ambushed a female jogger and sexually assaulted her.

The hackles on my neck told me not to go in there alone. I’d been there once. You couldn’t see anything from the deck—not even the breakwall a hundred feet away. Cattails and invasive phragmites overwhelmed the path and most of the surrounding area. I pushed the stalks out of my way, unable to see anything but green in front of me with bars of light filled with flying insects. Fronds from the phragmites waved like pennants over my head. I stepped on cattail cobs and broken stalks. A dozen yards in, the drag marks disappeared in the muck trying to suck my shoes off my feet.

No one on the deck the moment I broke through into the clearing. Scuff marks resumed on the lip of the deck and led to the part extending over the inlet. I followed them to the railing. The water was murky, scummed at the pilings. Sun made rippling designs on the surface. Despite my heart thumping like a bongo, it looked peaceful. A flock of mallards cruised past, squawking at me, their teal heads glinting.

Looking down over the deck boarding, I saw Kurt’s face looking up at me from the shallow depth; his eyes were open and his teeth bared in a grimace. No air bubbles from his mouth. Tendrils of crimson blood spooled out from behind his head. I ran. Fronds whipped my face as I stumbled through the cattails whipping across my vision.

My hands on the steering wheel shook and my vision was blurred from the adrenalin surge.

The story took me half the night. By dawn, I’d fully relapsed with shots of vodka but I had the story. Unshaved and unshowered, still wearing my shoes caked with swamp muck, I burst into the conference room where the staff was meeting and tossed the report in front of my boss.

He looked up at me. I looked around the conference room at a dozen shocked faces. A single thought in the cartoon bubbles above their heads: Our big-city reporter has gone completely off his rocker . . .

“You’ve been drinking,” he said.

Too late for mouthwash or toothpaste, I agreed.

My nemesis in the chair beside him cut his eyes from mine but the snicker greasing his face stayed.

“Go to my office. Right now.”

An hour later, I left his office, jobless again. The chief of police had called to say there was no body there or anywhere near the deck.

No paper will touch my story. I’m written off as a loser and a drunk.

My new job is unloading trucks on the graveyard shift at a DIY store. I’m being followed there and back. A man lurks in the shadows of the vape shop across the street from my apartment. He’s not a midnight reveler. He’s watching my place. I keep an eye out for tow motors and pallets of cement bags. Accidents can happen wherever you look. And sometimes when you don’t.

-END-

Robb White has published several crime, horror, and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies. A forthcoming private-eye novel featuring Raimo Jarvi will be published this summer. “The Girl from the Sweater Factory,” a horror tale, was a finalist in The Dark Sire Magazine’s 2020 awards. Two more recent horror stories are “The Backyard Digger” in The Yard and “The Tick Bite” in Black Petals.