Nick Stephenson - Eight the Hard Way

“Upstairs.”

They go upstairs, the man leading Julio with Tyshawn bringing up the rear. Like the first floor, it’s spotless.

“How long you been living here?” Julio asks the man.

“Two years.”

“You sure you ain’t gay?”

The man pauses. “What?”

“This place is so clean, looks like a faggot lives here.”

The man looks back at him. “You want the money or not?”

Tyshawn says, “Get your ass movin, motherfucker.”

The man keeps walking.

He brings them to the master bedroom. He points at the closet, says the safe is in there. Tyshawn keeps the gun close on the man as the man opens the closet and pushes away the shirts and slacks on hangers.

Julio looks around. There’s a bunch of jar candles scattered around the room, making the place smell like cinnamon. He doesn’t know why, but it reminds him of something, another house they’d robbed years ago.

He glances back at the man, sees the man has now revealed the safe, putting his fingers and thumb on the dial.

A picture frame sits on the nightstand. It’s the only picture in the bedroom. The only picture in the entire fucking house.

As the man moves the dial, left to right, right to left, Julio walks away from the closet and goes to the nightstand. He picks up the frame. A woman smiles back at him. She has blond hair and straight white teeth, and Julio doesn’t know why, but something about her is familiar, just like that cinnamon smell.

Tyshawn says, “Fuckin-A,” just as the man opens the safe, and right then Julio remembers where he’s seen this woman before.

He turns suddenly, already reaching for his gun, but the man has opened the safe, reached inside, pulled out a .38. The man turns back around and places the gun to Tyshawn’s head, pulls the trigger, steps past his falling body and shoots at Julio.

The first bullet misses Julio.

The second doesn’t.

It hits him right in the shoulder, and he loses his grip on the gun, the piece falling to the floor.

He tries to grab it but he’s too slow and the man is too fast, this Mr. Mockingbird Drive who has visited the same ATM every other day for the past month, this man who is now hurrying toward him.

“You recognize her, don’t you?” The man kicks Julio’s gun away, crouches down and puts the .38 right into Julio’s face. “Her name was Melanie. She was your second victim.”

He whacks Julio in the face with the gun.

“She was my wife.”

Julio tries standing back up, he tries pushing the man away, but the man hits him again with the gun. He hits him right in the head and the world goes blurry and Julio can’t see straight at first, he can’t see anything, but then the man puts the gun to his gut and pulls the trigger and it isn’t pain that Julio feels but a sudden warmness, a sudden bright light, like he has never felt before.

“The police wouldn’t do anything about it,” the man says, “so I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. No way could you know this, but I was in the army. Served six years. Got out and wanted nothing more to do with any killing. Never wanted to kill anyone ever again.”

The warmness getting warmer, the brightness getting brighter.

“But then you two fuckers had to come along. I was away on business. Didn’t even find out what happened until two days went by and the police finally managed to contact me.”

Julio tries to speak, tries to say something, but blood is in his mouth, blood is dribbling down his lips.

“The ATM cameras never could get a good shot of your faces. Cops said there wasn’t much they could do. Didn’t matter to them, wasn’t their wife that was murdered. So I studied the cases. I knew what you guys looked for. And I became your perfect mark.”

Blood all over him, pouring out of his body, soaking into his clothes.

“And you stupid arrogant fuckers, you should’ve stopped when you were ahead.”

The man shakes his head, stands back up, takes a deep breath. He walks to the nightstand, grabs the picture of his wife, comes back to Julio. He crouches back down, holds the picture up in front of Julio’s face.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“Fa ... Fa ... Fuck you!” Julio manages, and the man once more whacks him in the head.

He holds up the picture again. “Say you’re sorry.”

Julio tries crawling away but the warmth is too much, the brightness is too fucking much.

“Doesn’t matter,” the man says, standing back up. “She wouldn’t forgive you anyway. Neither would I.”

The gun, he spots his gun underneath the bed, and he reaches out for it but it’s a mile away, ten miles away.

“Know the most painful place to get shot?” the man asks. He has the .38 pointed at Julio’s face but starts to lower it down Julio’s body, settling it over Julio’s crotch. Says, “Right here,” and pulls the trigger.

Julio screams, or he thinks he screams, and the warmth and the light melt into one, and he still sees the gun but it’s so far away now it’s like on another planet, and as the man walks away, leaving him, Julio thinks about those jar candles, he thinks about that cinnamon smell, and how the night they’d invaded that woman’s house a candle had been burning, and how the smell had filled the house, and after they had killed her and taken all the money and jewelry and everything else, that candle had still been burning, the flame reaching toward the ceiling, the wisp of black smoke rising up and up and up into the air until it disappeared into nothing.

_______

Robert Swartwood is the USA TODAY bestselling author of The Serial Killer’s Wife, The Calling, Man of Wax, and several other novels. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast, Chizine, Space and Time, Postscripts, and PANK. He created the term “hint fiction” and is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania. Visit him at www.robertswartwood.com

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Ladies’ Weekend

By Ryan King

Cathy needed a drink. More than she needed to get out of the van. More than she had ever needed anything in her life.

She could actually feel the world crushing in on her like a black wave of despair. Her stomach roiled and her skin wanted to crawl right off her bones. Her hand shook slightly as she pushed the hair out of her eyes. The van ride to the beach seemed like it was never going to end.

“You okay back there, hon?” Ruby asked her daughter-in-law.

“Probably didn’t sleep right in my upstairs bed,” said her sister Martha. “I’ve been trying to get Greg to replace that set for years, but you know he don’t listen to me.”

“It ain’t the bed,” rasped the third sister Dolores. “It’s the damn heat. Can’t you turn up the AC just a little bitty bit?” She immediately followed this up with a coughing fit.

The van became quiet, and the women tried not to look at each other or Dolores. She had made a good run at it, but the cancer was starting to get to her now. It was only a matter of time. This weekend was supposed to be about enjoying some time together while the oldest sister was still able to enjoy anything.

Dolores’ daughter Trish reached up between the two front seats and cranked the air conditioning all the way to full blast.

Cathy who was already shivering, degraded to full-fledged shaking. Oh, how I hate these women. Couldn’t they have driven in separate vehicles at least? Why did all six of us have to cram into one mini-van for God’s sake? They all wanted to do everything together, but why do I have to be a part of it? I’m not a Biddle after all. I just married into the damn family. That would be over soon enough if everything went as planned. The image of Ruby’s face when she finally discovered what her daughter-in-law had done made Cathy smile despite her agony.