I Don’t Know

by Bill Baber

Late last night when Tommy dropped by

with a bottle of Mad Dog and a joint

laced with dust

I was on the couch in my underwear

watching some crap on TV

I don’t know what happened next

but when I awoke in the morning

there was a girl, kind of pretty,

in bed next to me

Tommy was gone

but the TV was still on

and the news was all about four dead

in what they said was a ritualistic murder

there were dried reddish-brown flakes

under my nails and scratches on my arms

I smoked the roach and

I don’t know what happened next.

by Bill Baber

“How’s Melissa?” My boss asked. I hadn’t seen him in months, but the bastard had been in town. He should know how Melissa was doing; he’d been banging her for six months.

I don’t know what she saw in him. He was ten years older than me, short, balding, not an attractive guy. He made more money than me, but that couldn’t have been it. We had a custom home with a pool and two almost-new cars. Took a couple of real nice vacations every year. Maybe he was hung like a horse. Who knows what goes on inside a woman’s head?

There were two ways I could play it, confront him with the truth, or play dumb. I figured that would really fuck with him, so that’s what I did.

“Were getting divorced,” I said as we pulled away from the airport.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I didn’t detect any attempt at sympathy.

I glanced at him like the son-of-a-bitch knew I would. He was looking out the window.

It was time to throw the first punch.

“She was screwing around.”

“That sucks,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Really sucks for the guy when I find him.”

Must have been something really damned interesting out that passenger window since there wasn’t much to see between the airport and downtown Phoenix. I didn’t see much but a steady stream of commute traffic.

“You need some time away?” he asked.

“No, I’m good. Got an apartment in Scottsdale, I’ll be all right but I feel sorry for the prick that did this. Nobody is gonna break up my family and get away with it. No one else is going to raise my kid, you know what I mean?”

We rode in silence, traffic inching toward the downtown skyline.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“Hired a private dick.” I thought about the old line from Barfly, the movie about Bukowski. Then I used it myself, laughing a little.

“Hired a dick to find an asshole. Now somebody’s really going to get fucked.”

I looked at him again. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. I was enjoying this more than I had thought I would.

We passed the exit for Seventh Street, where he had a room booked at a hotel. Probably thought it would be a little love nest with my ex later that night. He thought wrong.

“Hey, where we going?” he stammered.

I had played this scenario out a thousand times since the P.I. showed me pictures of the two of them.

I pulled the .357 from the space between the door and my seat. 

“Taking a little ride.”

This time, when I looked at him, there were tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Look,” he said, “what do you want? A raise? A promotion?”

“Fuck you,” I replied. “No way you can undo this. What I want to know is, why? Why me, why Melissa? Actually, I don’t want to know, I just want this whole damn thing to be over with.”

He began to cry. He begged, then pleaded, so I hit him in the face with the barrel of the gun—that made him howl.

When we reached Buckeye, I headed south on 85 toward Gila Bend. After fifteen miles I turned east on a gravel road that led toward a range of cactus-covered hills. I stopped when the road petered out.

“Get out.” I prodded him with the gun. He pissed himself. Glad he waited until he was out of the Lexus.

“I can give you money, anything.”

“Quit embarrassing yourself and just keep walking.”

We came to a draw between two hills. I had dug two graves, one was filled.

He started to sob uncontrollably. I shot him in the back of the head; he fell face first into the hole. I covered his body with rocks to keep the coyotes from tearing him up. I threw the gun on top of him and shoveled dirt on top of the whole mess.  Now they could be together forever.

I walked back to the car and when I reached 85, turned south toward Mexico.

by Bill Baber

The midnight blue Dodge Charger Danny Naughton drove westbound on I-10 was as hot as a freshly poured cup of McDonald’s coffee, the brunette with cherry-red lipstick in the passenger seat even hotter.

He had stolen the car in downtown Tucson; he hadn’t planned on it, but he never was one to pass up a crime of opportunity. He picked the girl up in a Northside bar. Neither action required much effort on his part; the keys were in the car. The girl was drinking a margarita and looked bored, like she was just waiting for something to happen. She decided Danny might be that something.

He drove just under the speed limit even though he had switched out the plates. He liked that the girl didn’t talk much, didn’t ask a lot of questions. He neglected to tell her he had stolen the car. Cracking the window, he lit a cigarette.  He planned on taking the car to a chop shop a guy that he knew operated in Glendale, figuring he’d get a couple grand for it. Thought him and the girl would hop a flight to Vegas.

She played with the radio as he fantasized about what might happen with a little champagne and a Jacuzzi suite at the Bellagio, when he looked in the rearview. Three black Suburbans followed him, looking bigger than shit as heat waves danced off their shiny hoods. What Danny didn’t know was that he had walked right into a drug drop. Someone had been watching the Charger when it got left in Tucson, waiting to be sure no one had followed it. There were twenty pounds of heroin sewn into the back seat.

He took the exit for I-8 that went west toward San Diego. It didn’t get the traffic that the 10 did, and once clear of Casa Grande, he put his foot into it. The girl looked amused. The Charger pulled away, the pursuers becoming small dots in the distance. There was nothing but seemingly unending saguaro-covered, rock-strewn hills and a deep blue sky in front of them. Danny thought he’d stay on 8, then take 85 into the west side of Phoenix. The girl applied another coat of lipstick. He started to get hard thinking about Vegas.

Ten miles down the road, one big rig attempted to pass another, the one in the fast lane not doing much more than sixty and struggling to get past the other truck. Danny watched the mirror. The Suburbans, like desert vultures, swooped in on him in seconds. One got right on his ass while another pulled alongside him. He thought about braking hard and trying to switch directions. The third vehicle laid back, ready to thwart that kind of escape.

The one on his left turned into the Charger, causing him to lose control. The car spun and when it caught the soft desert sand on the side of the road, it rolled twice, coming to rest upside down. Danny scrambled out first and instantly met a burst of gunshots.

Two men quickly grabbed the dazed and bloody girl, roughly tossing her into the back of one of the vehicles, while two others sliced open the Charger’s seat, removed the drugs. and doused the car with gasoline. One stood back a bit, lit a cigarette.

Danny could hear the muffled screams of the girl as two of the Suburbans pulled away. He watched as a slow stream of gas sought its way from the car toward him. He saw the evil smile of the man with the cigarette. Saw his blood mix with the gasoline. And lastly, saw the man flick his cigarette toward the car.

But Danny Naughton died with a smile on his face, because the last vision he saw was of him and a beautiful brunette doing nasty things in a Vegas hotel room.

by Bill Baber

Lou Boldrini only screwed up once. In our business that was it all it took. He paid for his mistake with a life sentence in Sing Sing.

A bunch of gangbangers started moving crack in Bed Sty. That was Charlie Rossi’s territory. Charlie didn’t like competition. But the warnings were ignored, and an order was issued. They hung out in an abandoned set of flats just off Lexington. I drove that day, Lou and Tommy Stella went in. There were eight of them passing a pipe and packaging product. One went for a gun. They never stood a chance. Just as they were coming out, I saw a car with a Housing Authority logo pull up. A pretty young blonde got out. Tommy started to raise his gun but Lou pulled him away. He had a daughter about the same age.

The cops knew who ordered the hit and who to round up. The next day the blonde fingered Lou in a lineup. She wasn’t sure about Tommy. Lou was stand up; he took the full jolt himself. The girl went in the witness protection program but not before I learned all I could about her. Who her friends were, her hobbies, anything that would help me find her. She was from Long Island but went to school in California. Her parents were retired in Florida. She had an ex-boyfriend in Connecticut. But every lead was colder than the Hudson in January.

I spent three years looking and began starting to think I’d never find her. Then I got a break. Tino Falcone was visiting a cousin who had a restaurant in Tucson. He called me on a Tuesday night the beginning of December. He said he thought he’d found her. If it wasn’t her, it was her twin, he reported. He went on to say she was a regular at his cousin’s restaurant.

I was on a plane west the next day. I ate a week’s worth of pasta waiting for her to visit the restaurant. When she did, I was ninety-nine percent certain it was her. But I had to be sure.

I waited for her to finish a plate of carbonara and a second glass of wine. She lived in an apartment complex down the street from the restaurant. I put her to bed and was back watching the place early the next morning. Twenty minutes later, she left on foot. I followed her to a gym a block away. I walked by a few times, before I spotted her running on a treadmill. I went in and told the guy at the counter I was interested in joining. At 9:15, the place was empty, except for the girl and the guy working there. The adrenaline started to kick in. I’d been waiting a long time and wanted this to be over.

A large sign proclaimed cell phone calls were only allowed in the lobby. The girl was running at a pretty good clip as the guy started explaining how the various machines worked. Just then, she slowed down before starting to talk. She had earphones on, and at first, I thought she was singing. I guess she thought the rule didn’t apply to her.

I heard a distinct Long island accent. My heart started to race the way it always did just before a kill. Yeah, it’s been a long time she said. I’m in the witness protection program out in Arizona. You should come and visit me.

No one was going to pay her a visit. I walked up, smiled, then shot her three times.

And I didn’t make the mistake my brother did.

I killed the witness too.

by Bill Baber

I had been in love with Suzy Foster since second grade. Now, we were seniors in high school, and she still acted like she didn’t know me, despite the fact that we were in the same homeroom and shared a history class together.

Suzy had always been one of the popular girls. When we got to high school she became a cheerleader. Over the years I had only mustered up the courage to speak to her a handful of times, I was extremely shy, and her beauty tied my tongue in knots. Each time she ignored me. Each time it felt like she plunged a knife into my chest. Couldn’t she tell by the way I looked at her how I felt? Didn’t she see me in the front row of the bleachers at every football game, watching her do her cheer routines?  Didn’t she notice that I walked past her house over and over, or that I followed her doggedly through the halls at school?

I didn’t know what else to do to get her to notice me.

Not long after the school year started she began dating Dan Coates—the quarterback on the football team. He was everything I wasn’t. I was short, skinny, and had a bad case of acne. I rode a bicycle to school. Dan was tall, strong, and extremely handsome and drove a Camaro. He was like a lion everyone admired and I was a feral cat no one wanted.

The night of the homecoming game, they were voted king and queen. That really stung. I had always considered her as my princess. There was a party after the game that night. The Grove was a wooded area out on the edge of town. My parents were out that night, and I took my father’s pistol from its hiding place in the closet, tied a flashlight to the handlebars of my bike, and rode there.

I stashed the bike just off the road and snuck through the trees. In a small clearing, a bonfire illuminated the scene. There were fifty or so kids there, more boys—most football players—than girls. Led Zeppelin played from someone’s car. All the boys and some of the girls were drinking cans of beer.

Suzy and Dan stood near the center of the gathering.  Dan had thrown a touchdown pass late in the game to seal the win. He and some of the other boys kept replaying it while Suzy clung to him, all the while gazing at him with unbridled admiration. I was so disappointed in her. My princess couldn’t be that shallow, could she?

After an hour or so, the party began to break up. Soon, Suzy and Dan were the only ones left. They stood face-to-face near the fire, entwined in one another’s arms.  It was supposed to be me holding her. They began to kiss. Those lips were supposed to belong to me. I could feel the anger rise in my chest.

They made their way to his Camaro, clumsily climbing into the back seat. In the flickering light of the fading fire, I watched them kiss some more. Then I saw her head bobbing up and down in his lap. For a moment I thought I would be sick, but another wave of anger pushed that feeling away. She was supposed of been pure.

Moments later, Dan was on top of her, pumping away. I could hear her animal-like groans.

This shouldn’t be happening, I thought. She was supposed to be mine. She was supposed to have saved herself for our wedding night. I hated her now. The thought of what she had become repulsed me. She was a dirty whore.

I walked up to the car. The passenger door was open. I pointed my father’s pistol at the back of Dan’s head and pulled the trigger. Suzy and I were covered in his blood.

She looked at me and screamed. She sure as hell knew who I was now, but I no longer cared.

“You were supposed to be mine,” I said quietly.

I pulled the trigger again and repeated, “You were supposed to be mine.”