by Benjamin J. Kirby

When you get old like me, all you got is your routine and the same cafones I’ve been seeing for the last ten years.  Myra died seven years ago.  Two of my kids don’t even talk to me anymore, and the other two live out in L.A.  They call around the holidays, which is nice.  

So it’s just me.  I wake up early.  Get in the car and head over to Kay’s Diner for an early breakfast.  There’s a couple of old fellas spooning in runny egg and toast past their dentures, sipping weak coffee.  We’ll talk about the weather or maybe how the Yankees did.  An hour and a half there, buy a paper out front, then back to the apartment for some juice, the front section of the Times, and a good shit, which at my age can take a while.  

After lunch there’s a group of us guys who sit near the park and look out at the bay.  Most folks think we’re there because we’re old and it’s under an awning and it’s near the shuffleboard court nobody uses.  The truth is it’s right on the path where all the young stay-at-home moms bring their babies.  The best are the bouncy gals with those sporty strollers.  I don’t know who in the hell invented spandex and the sports bra, but God love ‘em.

The only night I do dinner at home is Sunday and it’s always spaghetti, meatballs the way Myra used to make ‘em, tomatoes, garlic, some fresh oregano I buy at the market, basil, onion, a little tomato paste, little water, and red wine.  Let it simmer most of the afternoon.  By five it’s ready.  

Other nights I go out, usually just down the strip.  There’s a seafood night at the Casino for retirees, I’ll hit that sometimes, see some of the boys from around.  I like the Mexican place.  Who woulda thought it?  Me, a good Italian boy, born in a little town you probably never heard of.  

Santeramo.  Not far from Bari.

I had always figured I’d worked my last job years ago.  It’s why I moved to Florida – done with work.  Of course, the kind of guys I worked for, you don’t exactly fill out retirement papers.  

I love my routine.  Eggs and old union retirees from Michigan in the morning.  Waterfront view and big tits at lunch.  Mexican food and waitresses that flirt with me at dinner.  

The outfit must be in deep shit to call me out of retirement.  The stugots on these guys.  

Of course, I have a special way of working.  No guns.  Don’t like the goddam things, and I like the kin d of people who use ‘em even less.  Noisy, messy.  Easy to trace, too.
I have a better way.  Cleaner.  Easier.

The job wasn’t going to be tough.  A woman in Tampa.  Same amount of money as always, which I kind of thought was bullshit given inflation, but I didn’t argue the point.

I know what you’re thinking.  How can he do this to a woman!  Listen, I started in this business with my father when I was thirteen years old.  I’ve seen a lot, okay?  My conscience has absorbed a lot.  I’ve seen women go down, men go down.  I’ve seen some young ones go down, too.  

Let me tell you something.  They were all bad.  All of them.  You think the people I work for are bastards?  Forget it.  These are liars.  Cheaters.  Thieves.  The scum of the earth.  They’d kill your mother for a quick buck.  The people I worked for?  They got nothing on some of these figli di puttana stronzo…

Sorry.  Sometimes the old Italian comes out when I get worked up.

My work takes two weeks, never longer.  Drive up to Tampa, find the woman.  Pretty easy to do, since the boys in the outfit have had one of their stooges drop of a little packet of information at the apartment on her.  Picture, address, where she goes, what she drives, what she likes to eat.  

This one won’t be hard.  I’ll watch her from a good distance, not too close, verify what the boys have told me.  Somewhere in this damn file is a list of the places she likes to go to eat.  Buy a gift card there for a meal on a Monday or Tuesday, when you know they have the slow staff working.  Just mail it with a letter I typed up before that says come in on Friday and bring a date and his is free, too.  

I always thought that was the weak link in the plan – what if the cops find the letter?  What if they asked about the gift card?  Still, the dumb bastards never put it together.

Works like magic.  The mark shows up on Friday, usually around seven.  You don’t want to go into the place until they’ve at least gotten their appetizers, so I usually just sit in the car, or find a place across the street to have coffee.  It should be the A-game staff on the clock.  

The bar is a good place to get situated, especially if you can get down towards the end where the waiters and waitresses come to get drinks.  You’re anonymous in the bar, a ghost.  Nobody sees you in the bar, especially an old Italiano like me.  

The woman and her man will have found a quiet corner, which is good.  If it’s near an exit, even better.  You got to wear your nice white shirt, your black tie, black blazer and pants.  Shine the shoes good, and when there’s a break in the action at the bar, just slip one of those towels into your lap.  A napkin will do in a pinch.  

This is the trickiest part of the operation.  I used to steal the pitcher of water from the bar when the bartender wasn’t looking, but that got too risky.  Especially now.  I’m not as fast as I used to be.  Too many close calls.  

Now I bring in my own pitcher, which works better.  It’s smaller and I can tuck it under the jacket, hide it behind the towel, nobody sees it.  

Poppa always said a few drops would work, but I never took a chance.  Quarter bottle.  They say it’s enough to kill a small army, but who knows.  

This is the best part.  Quarter of the bottle from the flask in my inside jacket pocket.  A little water from the glass of it I ordered with my Campari.  It’s the perfect amount.  And a little on the towel, facing out.  

There’s something about the stuff.  Something that just makes you… thirsty.  You even just get close to it, your mouth dries out, your lips are suddenly parched.  Nothing will do but water.  I got used to it a long time ago.  

The mark gets thirsty, every time.  Fill up his glass with the mostly empty pitcher, apologize to the date for not having more, and you’re done.

In more than seventy years of doing this, I’ve had one guy – one guy – not have water on the table when I walked up to him.  One guy.  And when he saw me, he asked for water, so I just found an empty glass, filled it, and it was done.

A few have been brim-full, or have been that sparkly shit.  When that happens, it’s easy.  Just pour into it, anyway, like an idiot.  Big grin, the works.  They’ll make a fuss and draw a little attention, but just apologize a whole lot in Italian and mop up what you can with the towel.  

I know what you’re thinking: it’d be easier to shoot ‘em.  But I already told you: I don’t work with guns.  

The stuff works slow.  Takes a full twelve hours.  But once you’ve taken even a sip, it’s done.  And there’s no going back.  There’s no antidote for what Poppa called “the manna”.  

She’ll see the towel on my arm, I’ll pour the water.  She’ll take a sip, not even look at me.  I’m in and out, all in less than thirty minutes.  

Whoever’s running the outfit now must know I’m down to my last bottle, that this is my last quarter I’m using on a bitch who slept with a married capo, stabbed him in the eye, fucked his friend, and – the worst part — ripped him off.  They don’t say it, but my guess is she’s got something on the capo, too.  Something the police would love to see.  

It’ll all be over soon.  I’ll be back in the car headed south to my eggs, mid-day tits, and Mexican food in no time.  I may even remind those guys that I used all the stuff – Poppa said it would probably happen in my lifetime.  No more manna.  

Well.  No more they know about.

© 2013 by Benjamin J. Kirby
All rights reserved.

Originally published at terribleminds for a flash fiction challenge.

by Benjamin J. Kirby

1.       A Missing Corpse

How do you lose a body on a plane this small?

It was all he could think.  Not the time.  Not where they might be in the world.

How do you lose a body on a plane this small?

He’d heard her the first time.  And if he hadn’t, he could have read it on her face.  One of her best features: she couldn’t keep a secret.

“What?” he said again, anyway, the husky voice nearly lost to the heavy thrum of the Curtiss-Wrights roaring outside the fuselage.

“Gone!  It’s… he’s just… gone!” She threw her hands up into the air and tossed her lush, auburn hair from side to side, looking up and down the passenger cabin again.

She was panicking.  He would panic, too, in time.  For now, though, he could see: she was right.  The upper bunk, not five feet away, empty.  Missing was a large body wrapped in yards of industrial gauze, carefully placed inside a white pine box, sanded smooth like the water where they departed only a few hours earlier.

“Where in the hell is he?  Where’s Quintano?” Standing, the remnants of bourbon-induced sleep fading.

“I don’t know!” she said, her eyes going wide, palms up again. “How do you lose a body on a plane this small?”

1.     A Half-Burned Notebook

“This is it?  This is your lead?” He held the half-burned notebook in his hand like a turd.

“I told you, Mr. Emerson, this job would not be easy.” The Man in the Crisp White Suit said, drawing deep on the Cuban, the smoke swirling up past his gray head like angels dancing away from a demon.

“It’s barely readable,” Emerson said, leafing gently through the charred pages and brushing back the black, flaking cover.  He examined each page carefully.

A map.  List of names.  Sketches.

“Barely readable,” Emerson muttered again. “I don’t know.”

But he knew.  He’d take the job.  Knew he would take it even before the Man in the Crisp White Suit mentioned the money, which was considerable.  He knew it.

The Man in the Crisp White Suit, leaning back in his chair, the smoke haloed around him, the slant of the late evening sun cutting through the dark wood shutters, said nothing, because he knew it, too.

III.    An Indestructible Tree

They had found him by what the notebook called the Indestructible Tree.  Upon first glance, Maddy thought it looked pretty well destroyed.  Then she peered closer, gingerly brushing a brown curl out of her face.  The tree – a gnarled tangle of ancient roots and knots plowing through surprisingly lush earth – was bent heavy to her left, still sprouting small green sprigs along tired branches.  It begged to be let to the ground.

“It’s real,” she said before she saw him, looking at the mound of stone and brick, hidden only a bit by the tree, water clear as spring air gurgling, soaking the lush, mossy grass around its base.

But when she saw him, she forgot – just for a fleeting moment – what J.B. Emerson looked like, and somewhere deep in her full, generous heart, something broke forever.

1.    An Ancient Curse

The earthly delights of an ageless body.

The terrible supremacy of a timeless mind.

The power of sentience across endless millennia.

This is not the ancient curse to which the prophecy speaks.  Nor is it the unbearable loneliness, though straying too far from the wretched fountain brings years like the merciless waves of the angry Atlantic, ne’er to be undone.

I live now with this tortured tree.  And with this fountain, her cool, clear, awful water as clean, as blessed as the day it first touched my naïve tongue, the mouth of a young man.

I live here.  Until God, great in His Glory, sees fit to set upon me peculiar circumstances only which may free me from the curse.

For I live with that demon as well.

I live with that most horribly of all.

1.     A Sudden Storm

Emerson sat on the floor of the small bodega, doors opened to the outside salt air, cradling Maddy in his arms.  He barely felt the burn of the bullet hole in his left shoulder, swallowed the salty blood in his mouth and worked for half a second on a loose molar.

Maddy was out, but he knew she wasn’t dead.  Could see her breathing, angelic wisps of flowing brown hair falling up and down around her open rose lips.  He gave her a quick pat-down, check for anything he missed.  A bullet hole could be smaller than you thought, and two minutes ago, there’d been plenty.

Long legs, fine.  Hips, fine, and he had enough discipline to keep his hands off her ass which seemed to look good in anything.  Pulled the fabric of her shirt against her abdomen – soft, so soft.  No blood dotted the fabric.

Each arm was limp, fallen to her sides, scratched but fine.  He took a moment to breathe her in, and as he brought his hand up — past her breasts — to touch her hair, it stopped, caught in the vice of her grip.

“Don’t you even think about it, you cad!” her eyes were puffy and dark, and there was a bruise forming on the side of her perfect temple.

“Just checking for any damage,” he smiled as innocently as his sinful thoughts would let him.

“We did it,” she breathed out. “We’re alive,’ she breathed again, letting him fall into her. “Kiss me.”

They sat there for hours in the open bodega, waiting on the next adventure, looking out past the body of the Man in the Crisp White Suit towards the sudden storm coming in off the bay.

1.    An Unborn Child

The curse.

The curse not of untimely death.  The curse of eternal life… but not my life.

When I am born to them, the Curse of Man will only just begin.

© 2013 by Benjamin J. Kirby
All rights reserved.

Originally published at terribleminds for a flash fiction challenge.

by Benjamin J. Kirby

On the porch.  With a drink and an Ybor City cigar.

You listen to me, now, you’ll be fine, just fine.  Listen here.

I know about him.  He come from out west, California.  Gonna make it.  Big time.  Could write.  Wrote all kinds of stories.  Sure was gonna make it.  

Things don’t always work the way we think they gonna work.  Things change, some for better.  Not always.

Now he live out what we used to call Osgood Point.  Call it Clam Bayou now.  

Like I say, things change.  

Folks’ll laugh when I tell ‘em that.  They say, who can live out that-a-way, ‘mongst the snakes an’ fire ants an’ spiders an’ fruit rats an’ Lord know what else.  He can.  He do.  Say it ain’t that big a place, an’ that’s true.  He can hide.  Go on out there, see yourself.  Get on your canoe.  Get on that brackish water, you tell me you can see ten feet past the tree line.

He’s there.  Somewhere.  Waiting.

‘Course he moves around at night.  That’s when he… well, does what it is he do.  Plenty of places to move at night in this place.  Slide through that water, not make a noise.   

More back alleys in this town we know what to do with.  He’ll scamper down one of those.  Jump a eight foot fence like nothin’.  Skip across a road faster than you can blink.

They say it’s coyotes eat those small dogs or your ol’ housecat that got out.  

Coyotes ain’t been down these parts in years an’ years, friend.  No, sir.  

Like I say, I know some about him, but it aint’ right to use his name, who… what he is now.  So I jus’ call him Coyote.  No kinda name for a man, but I’d be lyin’ if I didn’t say it only seem proper.

‘Course, what happened to him in L.A., shouldn’t happen to no man.

A dark room in a dark house near Agoura Hills, off the Mulholland Highway.     

Two figures in the doorway, a broken figure behind them.  Smokey voices.

Throw him in the room with the others.  Shouldn’t take long.  He looks hungry.

The front porch.  The drink.  The burning cigar.

What they did to him was only the start.  It was what he had to do to get out made him different.  

He ain’t like us.  

What they say… irregular.

A cold shudder on a warm night.  Silence.

How he got from there to here is a story for another time.

Now he he keeps to himself, mostly.  Gets cold, he finds somewhere warm.  Gets hungry, he finds some food.  

See somethin’ he don’t like, though, well.  He gonna get something done about it.  Had this boy up the north part of town, speeding around, running drugs.  Damn near killled a little boy, left him crippled.  Police figure he skipped town, couldn’t find nothin’ but his car.  Call it a case of missing persons.

Ol’ boy older’n me down that apartment complex, hurt those little children?  Didn’t read about no police arrestin’ him, did you?  He’s what they call a ‘missing persons’, too.  Same with that ‘missing person’ lady who hit those two college lovebirds with her car, drove off.    
I expect someday they dredge up some old bones down there in the bayou.  But it’ll be long after we’re all passed.     

‘Course, for most folk, it’s all jus’ talk.

You all enjoy our fair little city.  You be safe.  You be good.  You do that.  You do right, an’ if you hear something rustle in the trees, well…

Drinks.

…least you don’t have to worry about no coyotes.

A car, nice.  Late, the smell of liquor, Marlboros, and awkwardness.      
 
Should I apologize again?

“I’m sorry, I am.  It’s just that I’m not feeling very good, and I really have a long week.”  

I’m not that sorry.  This guy is a douche and when I get to Kelly’s apartment, I’m going to call Abigail and ask her what the fuck is the deal with setting me up with this guy.  

I liked the car at least.  Mercedes, very nice.  Sporty.  But the minute I shook his hand I could smell the smoke.  I even asked him if he smoked in the email the other day, and he was, like, yeah, but only when I party.  I didn’t think this was a party.  I thought it was a blind date.  

Dinner was good, Italian at Pia’s.  He was pissed we didn’t go to La Fogata, but I really like Pia’s, and goddamit, he said I could choose anything.  

Actually, I think he was pissed about coming down from Old Northeast and not dragging me back that way, at least to downtown St. Pete.  I don’t care.  

No response.  Now he’s not even looking at me anymore.  We are in front of Kelly’s apartment, under the tree that hangs down, dark, in the corner of the lot.  I wasn’t keen on him picking me up in front of my house — just didn’t feel comfortable with him knowing exactly where I live, though I guess it wouldn’t have been too hard to figure out.  Besides, I want to dish with Kelly on how it went.  She practically insisted on it.  At least there’ll be plenty of material.

Really, I don’t feel very good.  In fact, I feel pretty sick.  

Wait… something is not right.  

My arms aren’t moving though I’m trying to reach for the door handle.  Shit.  

His look.  It’s off.  He’s saying something, but I don’t hear it.  Just ringing in my ears.  What does he think he’s doing?  He’s leaning over the seat, over the shifter.  I can feel his hot breath, a shitty combination of lasagna and cigarettes and too much wine.  He’s got his arm on my throat.  

Still, the only thing scaring me more than being crushed into my seat is the dark, heavy shadow I see pouring through his window.  Looks like a coyote.

© 2013 by Benjamin J. Kirby
All rights reserved.

Originally published at terribleminds for a flash fiction challenge.