THUGLIT Issue Twelve (12 page)

"
Chill, Denton, chill. He said it was cool." Connie's hand rested on the doorknob awaiting any opportunity to open it and vent the cops back into the Kansas night for good.

"
I fucking care what he says." Denton couldn't resist.

"
We're good," I interjected. "You officers gave us more than a fair price." They didn't. "I think we are all satisfied with how this went." We weren't. "And our night is complete."

I
t wasn't.

Connie turned the knob and the two police officers left, barely fitting through with our bags. After closing the door, Connie stared through the peephole and I, in turn, stared at the pistol ha
ndle pressing against the back of his shirt.

I heard three distinctive thumps, the trunk no doubt, followed by two doors closing.

"What a bunch of pricks," Connie said, mouth to the door, waiting for them to pull away. "Can't believe how badly they ripped us off too."

Outside we heard wheels spin and gravel spray.

In between the silence in Connie's words, I crept closer until I was an arm's length away.

He kept staring as the sound of their tires di
ed on the damp air. "One thirty-five ain't gonna go far after we split—"

I made my move.

Connie's breath caught in his throat.

It
's happened to me plenty of times, and always because of the same type of circumstance. But unfortunately for Connie, anytime a gun was pointed at me, I still made it out alive.

"
The fuck you doing?"

"
Agreeing with you."

"
Agreeing with me? Looks like you just stole my fucking gun from me."

"
You're right Connie. One thirty-five doesn't go very far after we split it."

"
You assholes came to me. I set this entire thing up for you."

"
I know, and I appreciate all that you've done. Regrettably, I'm going to need a lot more than forty-five grand."

The bathroom door swung open. Tate emerged, shotgun in his hand but
slung low, the barrel at his knee.

"
The hell you doing, Franny?" His eyes swam repeated laps between Connie, the pistol and me.

I shifted the gun to Tate. I aimed high, so there was no mista
king where the bullet would go.

"
Sorry Tate, it's just the way this has to go down."

"
What? But me and Connie—"

"
You're my dealer Tate, that's it. And no offense, you're a fucking moron. But when a guy comes across a shitload of merch he can't move, his dealer is the first person he calls."

He looked to Connie, eyes pleading, unable to make a decision without
a grownup telling him what to do. I almost felt bad. He epitomized everything about modern youth just then. Outspoken, sheltered, and utterly incapable of knowing what comes next.

"
Let him take the money, Tate."

I took a step towards the bag on the bed.
"Yeah Tate, let me take the money."

I forgot one other thing he reminded me about young people. They
're spoiled fucking rotten.

"
No, that's our cash! You can't just take it."

"
Tate don't!" Connie yelled, but he and I and all the quiet ghosts in the room knew it was already too late.

Tate lifted the shotgun to his hip. But he still needed to cock it. He still needed to aim it. He st
ill needed to pull the trigger.

I, h
owever, only needed to squeeze.

It took just one shot, the bullet spinning nearly supersonic through the air, slicing into the left side of Tate
's neck and exploding out the back, neatly imbedding itself in the wall behind him. The shotgun clanked to the floor while his two hands clasped the wound. He looked like a restaurant poster, the one of the cartoon man choking and the Good Samaritan behind him, performing the proper Heimlich maneuver. Only tonight, Kansas was all out of Good Samaritans. The blood ran in rivers down his arms and he stared at me, the color draining from his face, until his white eyes went blank and he fell face down to the floor.

I turned back to Connie. He shook hi
s head at the kid on the floor.

"
It didn't have to be this way." I shrugged a semi-sincere apology to him.

"
Yea it did. These things always end up this way," he said to me with the exhaustion of a lifetime's worth of deals gone wrong.

"
I guess you're right."

When I left the motel room, I placed the duffel bag on the doorstep before clicking the door closed and making sure it locked. Then I used a towel to wipe my prints from the doorknob. Inside the room, I had used the same towel to wipe down the gun before placing it in Connie
's cold hand and wrapping his finger around the handle and trigger. The placement of everything wouldn't hold up to a thorough investigation very long—and failing that, a cop would immediately realize they were both killed with the same gun. But I figured it would be confusing enough to give me a head start. Besides, there was no one left who could place a third person at the scene.

"
That's it, huh?"

Startled, I spun on a heel. Instinctively my hand went to the small of my back, but there was no weapon there.

"You scared me," I said. I slung the bag over my shoulder and brushed past her to the van. I could feel her eyes; her smile was gone, those beautiful teeth covered by a sad frown. "You been out here the entire time?" I asked a question I already knew the answer to.

She stood as a weather vane; dug into the ground so firmly by disbelief her feet stayed pointing at the motel door even as her torso tw
isted to watch me load the van.

"
What happened in there?" She responded with a question she too already knew the answer to. This amused me; the two of us parlaying via a verbal do-si-do.

I slammed the sliding door shut on the van and stuck the key
in the driver's side door.

"
Where you headed now?" She tried a different tack to get an answer out of me. It worked. I stopped and considered the question a few seconds longer than I should have. Those cops probably hadn't gotten very far. Regardless of how crooked they were, they'd be the first on the scene if someone had already called the police.

"
What's behind there?" I asked pointing to the fields abutting the back of the motel. "Beyond all this corn I mean."

She looked at the cornfield, her feet still cemented in place
. "It's just one farm here. He owns something like eighty acres. His farmhouse is somewhere that way. A road runs in front of his barn. You take that a few miles west and you'll hit Route 7."

I mounted the driver
's seat of the van with considerably more ease than Connie had. He was dead now. The thought appeared alongside his ghost, floating there with the rest of them.

"
Thanks, Launderer." The irony of her name struck me when I glanced over my shoulder and saw the bag of cash sitting in the back. I could take her with me. Give her undisclosed sums of money to go out and buy the stuff of life. The money would cycle through the many and varied transactions of commerce and come back to me clean, untraced, and wonderfully ready to start a new life.

"
I heard gunshots."

I wiped my mouth with my hand.

"Where're you headed?"

"
I don't—" with great effort her feet pulled free from the earth and she turned to face me.

"
Come with me."

"
With you?"

"
Yeah. Come with me. The van's not as scary as it looks. Especially after you see what I have in this bag back here."

"
But my friends."

"
Screw 'em."

"
I don't think I could do that."

I looked at the clock on the dash. I was wasting time. I put the van in reverse and wheeled it around. I stopped beside her, so close I could lean out the window and touch her forehead if I wished.

"Remember that story you told me. About the murders?"

She solemnly nodded.

"There's nothing special about it. People have been murdered everywhere, all over, and for all time. Whether in illness, in anger, in war, or in chains. The entire country is just like this backwoods, Kansas motel. I'm old, girl. I don't look it, but God I'm old. I've seen too much of this dark republic to think that scorn and hate don't fill every goddamned corner of it. I've seen it in Augusta, Montana and Blacksburg, Virginia; in Springer, New Mexico, on Medford, Long Island and even in the dewy morning fields of Ashburn, Georgia. Blood and murder everywhere I've been."

Her head rose and she met my eyes for the first time since I left the room. They contained the only color left in my world.
"Because you're the Salesman."

"
That's right. Because I'm the Salesman."

I shifted into drive and slowed past her, careful not to spray gravel as I pulled away. I left the Starry Nite Motel in the opposite direction we had come from. In my rearview, I watched her shadow fade from view, obscured as she was by the darkness. She could place me at t
he scene. She could ID the van.

I checked the mirror once more
, but she was long gone. Gone to the ghosts. Gone to dust. Murder stalked all four corners of the world, I thought then.

An intersection
without a light was just a half-mile away. I turned and began following the road as the cornfield consumed the van from either side. The green stalks stretched and yawned in front of me; growing at the tips, pulling away for what seemed like forever and the fog and the mist and the ghosts broiled around the van like smoke as the metal bullet I was in shot down the barrel of a cornfield and straight through the heart of the country.

by
T. Maxim Simmler

Truth is, if it weren
't for me, Geoff would've kicked the bucket three months ago, so one might be inclined to think he'd milk his new lease on life, carpe the bloody diem and show a bit of gratitude instead of being an obnoxious, parasitic haemorrhoid and fuckmonger. So, given the opportunity, you can bet your right testicle that I'd do it different this time. I'd stay in the pub half an hour longer, and the one and only time I'd have heard Geoff's name then would've been in the local news section of the Mirror; a little paragraph about some sad tit who caught his ride into that good night under the last train from Lime Street and had his tribe scattered halfway to Piccadilly.

Everything
's a fucksight easier in hindsight, innit?

My day had already been one huge cluster of black shite and buggery. I had spent ten hours trying to tweak and salvage a financial analysis we had managed to botch up so badly, it was begging for a mercy shoot. An epileptic toddler, banging his head randomly on the keyboard, would have come up with better figures
. I had drawn the short end of the stick and had to call our biggest customer, breaking him the news that by the end of the week, his portfolio was going to buy him a pint and a hole in the sand in Zimbabwe. Three generations working hard and honest, investing wisely and warily, each one passing proudly a stately asset to the next to preserve, and we fucked it up in five minutes flat. Just because someone was too busy getting his pole waxed by the new research assistant to notice a sudden, steep drop of the index swap curves. A few minutes later, a money shot worth seven-point-four million was dangling from the girl's nose.

If the customer hadn
't been quite the annoying cunt and the blowjob so stellar, I would have been devastated. Also, to survive in the world of high finance risk management, it helps to be a bit of a sociopath.

But I knew that we were looking at a long dry stretch now. A lot of our clients would stop returning our calls and
pull out their investments. Our competition would make sure that within a month, even the one or two prospective punters who came back from a long holiday under a rock had a detailed report and a snarly
Forbes
column in their inbox. This might explain some of the more bewildering things I did in the next weeks. I was in dire need of cheering up.

I was in dire need of booze, too, so I went into the first pub I could find
—a derelict shitter with a beer pump and bottles of cheap schnapps covered in dust. Four brandies and three pints later the world looked better. After two more brandies I figured the hen next to me quite dishy and started to chat her up. Another pint later I reckoned that, come daylight and sobering up, the swanky minge was probably as attractive as a carp with a wig and swayed outside for a quick smoke. The distilled piss was giving me heartburn and it sure wasn't worth the money they charged, so I took a few careful steps to the left and legged it. I ran through the park and past a small churchyard. If I squeezed myself through a hedgerow and crossed the tracks, I could be home in less than ten minutes. My jacket got stuck between two thorny twigs and while I tried to yank it free without causing a pricy tear, I heard a long sigh blending into a high-pitched whine. I squinted into the darkness and made out a medium-sized grey sack wreathing between the rails.

That
was how I met Geoff.

I wiped a few ragged, hard leaves from my trousers, fiddled a Chesterfield from the pack and lit it. The sack wriggled and cursed.

"You alright there, mate?" I asked.

"
What? Am I what?" he answered in a nasal, verge-of-sobbing vibrato.

"
Now I was wondering if you've slipped there, y'know, seeing you flat on your arse on the gravel."

"
Please. Go away." He sounded like a weepy five-year-old begging for a slap.

"
Can't do that, I'm afraid." I crouched next to him. "It's not that I'm conscience-smitten, I'm so fucking bevvied up, I won't remember a thing. But if I let you kick the bucket here, my karma gets arse-fucked back to pre-evolutionary status and I can't have that."

"
Please, go away. Please."

I
've got to admit that the sound of his voice almost made decide to let fate and Northern Rail run their course. The tit wants to top himself? Genius. And quite likely what nature had intended anyway.

"
Look, mate. What's wrong with pills? Or a razor straight over the wrists? Maybe a plastic bag over the napper? I get the appeal of lying here—slam, bam, mincemeat, man—but just think for a second about the poor cunt driving the train. Mental crack-up and post-traumatic stress disorder. He hears the whistle of a train, he starts shitting his skivvies and all that's left for him is a life on the dole. That'd be quite the pisser, right?"

He sat up slowly
, and in the pale, flavescent light of the street lamps behind us I could make out a puffy, reddish face with a tiny knob of Plasticine for a nose and huge, sticky-out ears. It looked like his brain had satellite reception. Add a pair of pouty fish lips and slicked-back, thinning hair and he eerily resembled a blown-up fetus. Meeting that mug in the mirror every morning might make me suicidal, too.

I stretched out my hand and, though he hesitated a bit, he finally grabbed it and pulled himself up. Of course there was no civil way to bid him adieu now. You save a guy
's life and you're stuck with him for a time. So we took a detour and headed for a round-the-clock kiosk. Well, I was heading, Geoff scuffled behind, soles dragging over the pavement, punctuating every second step with a soggy snuffle. Obviously the time to listen to his sad tale had now come—and assuming it would take some time, I bought two huge cans of Elephant beer and wiggled one in front of his Play-Doh beezer.

"
I don't really drink."

Who said never to trust a guy wh
o doesn't drink?

"
Getting run over by a train may be a bit more hazardous to your health than a brew, pal." I said and took a long draught, while Geoff stared at his can like an alien artifact before nipping some. Immediately his face contorted. It was the strangest sight—his features all seemed to skid and then tighten in the middle as if someone was trying to Hoover up his mug. If I still did coke, I'd be laughing my tits off just looking at him. Some Sunday morning cartoon must be missing a featured character.

"
See. That's the proper way to deal with a shitty day. Two guys, sitting together, drinking a beer." I patted his back encouragingly. "Silently." I added, sotto voce.

"
Thanks." he said, doodling little spirals with his fingers on his leg. "Sorry I spoiled your night."

"
No biggie."

I felt generous. It
's not always easy for me to find the right, generally accepted emotions towards things that happen to other people.

"
We don't need to talk about it, if you don't want to. Right? Cause it's none of my business, being a stranger and all." I suggested.

"
Oh...no. Sometimes a stranger can understand you better than your so-called friends."

Fuck.

"Not that I have any friends." Cue another long sigh.

So he told me his story, interrupted by groaning, nipping his beer
, and some tears.

I
t wasn't a short one. I downed two more Elephants and had to buy a fresh pack of Chesterfields before he reached the final sob. It was funny enough at the beginning, I admit that. How he got a chemistry kit for Christmas from his parents when he was five, secretly kept on toying with it well after his bedtime and the shit the kids gave him for that at the orphanage. Turns out, people are somewhat reluctant to adopt a boy who blew up his Mum and Dad, so he had to live there till he was seventeen and everyone had grown bored of bullying seven shades of shit out of him.

But
it got redundant fast. The Cliffs Notes version was that Geoff was the kind of guy who managed to fuck up fucking up. Girls either left him cause they couldn't stand his constant whining or grew tired of seeing him losing three jobs a week. Traumatic stress is one thing, but the hard truth is—that after some time—even the most charitable chick's compassion over his grim nights as an involuntary bumboy for the orphanage's clerical staff will wane. And then a psychological erectile dysfunction is nothing more than a mere limp dick.

Keep in mind,
we're talking about women desperate enough to consider Geoff, the blobfish boy, a catch in the first place.

At least he had kept the same job
for the last three years; a lowly drone in front of an Excel sheet, entering data and updating profiles eight hours a day. The kind of work that slowly grinds down your gyri cerebri, till your brain looks like a big, soft gob of old gum. I can't say I was surprised to hear that he liked it, never called in sick, never turned up late. It broke his heart when the company outsourced the Excel brigade after they decided that a bunch of semi-literate teenage Paki girls were qualified enough for the drudgery and could be paid with shiny marbles. The funny thing was that the company was part of a business conglomerate we counseled in financial matters. I even remembered sending the memo with the stern advice to dump as many branches as possible into some former colonies. Small world, eh? Geoff didn't think it was funny. Geoff was a bore.

His voice, droning out his stream
-of-consciousness biography, dabbled like elevator Muzak. I found myself missing a few chunks of his story, soothed by the monotone sound-waves and dozy from the alcohol. It was easy enough to fill out the blanks later by inserting random mishap, and assertive nodding every few minutes seemed to be all the endorsement he needed. His looks got boring too, once you wrapped your mind around the fact that in a few cases evolution obviously had gone straight from marine animal to man. Geoff even smelled boring, like a pH-adjusted, no-name soap.

What kind of a name was
"Geoff" anyway? It's not something you call a human being. It's the sound a sweaty, fat guy makes after slumping into his easy chair.

Despite all this, when we finally parted, I handed him my card, made him promise not to run back to the tracks and gave him a quick hug, though the awkwardness of the gesture constricted my muscles. Because, deep down, I
'm a pretty decent guy.

Nah, I
'm shitting you.

I did it because the onslaught of squalor, dreariness and exasperation made me feel better. Yes, I had screwed up a huge business deal. Yes, I was looking at a somewhat shaky financial future. Yes, if someone really investigated the way we fucked the quid away over the last year,
I'd face a future where a seven-foot, tattooed black dude would call me Cherie. But it could be worse. I could be Geoff.

It
's something I had to tell myself quite often during the next days. All customers, bar one, had withdrawn their portfolios when I logged into my laptop the next morning. Some of those fucks had made profits that would buy you a cozy Caribbean island thanks to us, had invited us to spend weekends on their yachts and shared old booze, coke, pills and their wives with us, stopping short of offering us a blowjob for our efforts and success.

Wait
…

O
ne hotel chain heiress
did
suck my dick while shoving a finger worth five thousand quid in manicure up my arse.

None of them would touch us now. Our acquisition managers came up with nothing. For some time we could dodge the bullet and dabble around by speculating with our estimated net worth, but apart from being semi-illegal and a pretty desperate and stupid thing to do, our estimated w
orth was plunging towards zero.

Geoff, however
, didn't phone me. The police did, scaring me into touching cloth before they told me they hadn't called on behalf of HM Revenue and Customs, but because a certain Geoff Phlebs had named me as his trusted person.

That little, pathetic bag of fart.

I grabbed the bottle of Glenfiddich from the cupboard, took a solid swig straight from the bottle and pinched the number the filth had given me. I was greeted by a hollow, solemn, teary voice.