Rival Sons

by Aidan Thorn

  Tom cowered on the floor as the shots rang out. Jim emerged from another room along the corridor.

  “Frank, what the fuck?” he called out.

  Frank spun around and shot instinctively at Jim. The bullet caught him in the chest and he went down hard. Frank walked slowly, his only speed these days, towards Jim’s wheezing frame and put a bullet in his head just to shut him up.

  He had two shots left. He only needed one. He put the gun in his mouth and fell where he stood.

  Ryan and Kyle passed a taxi heading out of the car park of the Bed and Breakfast as he pulled in. There were no passengers.

  “Keep the motor running, I won’t be long,” Kyle instructed as he stepped from the car and pulled the gun from his trousers.

  The bar area of the Bed and Breakfast was deserted as Kyle walked slowly through the room. He heard a whimpering from upstairs and made for its direction. As he came to the stairs he saw a man sitting on them, clutching the banister. The cowering man flinched and his whimpering turned to crying when he spotted Kyle.

  Kyle ran past him.

  He saw Frank first, a gun at his side. One of Graham’s sidekicks lay a few metres away. He looked through the open door into a bedroom. What remained of Graham was slumped inside and splattered all over the bed.

  Kyle fell back against the wall and sobbed. His tears weren’t for the men in this house.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Ron Earl Phillips at Shotgun Honey for taking hold of this book and putting it out there in the world. I’ve been a long-time admirer of the books Shotgun Honey put out as well as a fan (and occasional contributor) of the online short fiction they publish. I’d also like to thank those people that read the book along the way and helped me make it what it is today—thank you to Chris Black, Sam Turner, Christopher Davis and Christine Harrison, without you it couldn’t happen.

  I would also like to thank the close community of dark fiction writers and editors that I’ve met over the years for their continued encouragement, support and inspiration. There are so many good writers out there in the indie presses, go find them—you’ll rarely be disappointed!

  And thank you to Charlotte, for your patience and understanding throughout everything.

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  Aidan Thorn is from Southampton, England. His short fiction has appeared in Byker Books Radgepacket series, the Near to the Knuckle Anthologies: Gloves Off and Rogue, Exiles: An Outsider Anthology, The Big Adios Western Digest, Shadows & Light, Hardboiled Dames and Sin as well as online in numerous places.

  His first short story collection, Criminal Thoughts, was released in 2013 and his second, Tales from the Underbelly, in 2017. In September 2015 Number 13 Press published Aidan’s first novella, When the Music’s Over. In 2016 Aidan collated and edited the charity anthology Paladins for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, working with 16 authors from the UK and USA to deliver this project.

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  BOOKS BY AIDAN THORN

  When the Music’s Over

  Tales from the Underbelly

  Criminal Thoughts

  Rival Sons

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  Here is a preview from The Bad Kind of Lucky by Matt Phillips, published by Shotgun Honey, an imprint of Down & Out Books.

  Click here for a complete catalog of titles available from Down & Out Books and its divisions and imprints.

  1

  Remmie Miken heard the voices through the wall, two loudmouths shouting at each other in the studio apartment next door. Something about a skinny girl named Veranda and a used Dodge Charger with low miles. Remmie caught bits and pieces, put together that the girl was gone, but somehow the Dodge might still be around, maybe in Tijuana. Who-fucking-knew?

  Thing was: Remmie couldn’t sleep.

  Not with the shouting and the stomping and the constant back and forth about the goddamn car. Whether the girl and the car were in Tijuana or not, Remmie was tired after ten hours on fryer duty at Big Stop’s Roadhouse, a grease pit burger joint smudged beneath a freeway overpass on the outskirts of downtown. He worked six days a week and all he wanted—besides a timely fucking paycheck—was a few hours sleep before his next shift.

  How to get some quiet in this rundown apartment building?

  He started by banging his fist against the wall and smothering himself with a lumpy pillow.

  The conversation coming through the wall was the scumbag version of the scientific method:

  Could be the girl got picked up by the cops, no? Would have been out by now, that’s right. Okay, so she didn’t get picked up, but maybe the girl took the Dodge up north? What’d the raspy-voiced guy think? Well, he thought the skinny bitch was too lazy to drive herself. No, she maybe sold the car to a gringo down on the border, used the money for a flight to Mexico City. The Dodge had leather interior, a decent sound system. Some nice fucking rims.

  Big loss. Too big. They had to find it. And Veranda, too.

  This fucking car. This fucking skinny girl who runs off without a word. Remmie wanted to burn the car and kill the girl, drown these two loudmouths in their own toilet bowl. He tried some deep breathing exercises, a thing he learned in his anger management courses—it was no good.

  He couldn’t fucking sleep.

  He got out of bed and put his ear to the wall. He noticed how bare his apartment looked. Sad. Pitiful, in fact. All he had in the place was a mattress on the floor, a cell phone plugged into the wall, and a mini-fridge filled with cheap beer next to the electric stove. He had a stack of paperback books, too. Old mysteries he found in a cardboard box in the alley outside his apartment building. Moody covers. Tough guys with five o’clock shadow and loaded pistols. Naked women clutching wet sheets in dingy motel rooms.

  For all Remmie knew, the books could have belonged to the skinny girl.

  He listened while the two men talked:

  “Veranda couldn’t find her own reflection in a mirror.”

  The raspy voice said, “Trust me, that girl knows what kind of money Leo Action pulls in. Don’t think she doesn’t have the balls to rip him off.”

  “If she took the car, she did it because it was easy. That’s all.”

  “Fuck if I believe that. She’s smarter than you give her credit for.”

  “She didn’t know about the cop.”

  More from raspy voice, “She does now.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Remmie banged on the wall again and said, “Can you two shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep over here.” Before he could scream at them again, a blast slammed his ears and Remmie stumbled backwards, sat on the cheap carpet. It was like being shot through a cloud; he didn’t know what was happening. His ears rang and pain started in the front of his head. What the fuck? He wiped particles of dry wall from his face, brushed dust off his hands and arms. He squinted through the darkness, tried to stand up, fell onto his knees. After a few deep breaths, Remmie stood and stared at a gaping crevice in the wall, just below where it met the ceiling; it looked like his apartment was yawning. He could see the two-by-four wall studs and some red and green electrical wires dangling through the slit. Across the room, in the far wall, he saw the splattered, pockmarked surface of a shotgun blast.

  Those scumbag motherfuckers: They shot a hole in his wall.

  Looked like Remmie needed to pay his neighbors a visit.

  Remmie Miken was starting over after a bad run.

  Divorce.

  Lost custody.

  Ten thousand dollars in gambling debt.

  Here’s a bit of advice: Know what the fuck cricket is before you start laying bets on the sport—it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than you think.

  What happened to Remmie could—he was sure—happen to almost any high school graduate. You start out alright, but you get bored. You get sick of frying catfish and mixing mayonnaise into tarter sauce. Everything starts to
feel watered down; your snot-nosed kid cries a little too long each night, your wife asks a few too many questions, and your mother-in-law won’t stop talking about Oprah and her favorite reality tv shows. The double-wide starts to feel too much like a cell in the county jail.

  Next thing you know, you’re sipping from a toilet bowl in a dive bar down by the mud flats, a thick slab of hand holding you by the neck.

  Here’s the gist: They want their fucking money.

  Of course, later, there’s a whole arson plot when it comes to the double-wide. And insurance fraud. Too much bail money to think about. And collateral, what little you have. Another bit of advice: Those class rings aren’t worth a solid-shitty-half of what you paid for them. Oh, and they’re not real gold either.

  Just so you know, you know?

  Point is, Remmie Miken needed a fresh start after the first thirty-six years of his life. He thought he’d try to make it in the Big City. Give it the old junior college try. Why not? All his shit was burned up and he’d never been loved.

  Not for what he was, at least.

  How much worse could life get?

  The apartment building was low-rent, a two-story place next to a freeway on-ramp, refurbished with cheap carpet and mismatched paint. No credit check required. The property manager told Remmie not to cook meth or grow marijuana. Everything else, from Remmie’s experience in the building, was fair game. That included prostitution—the skinny girl’s vocation.

  Funny, Veranda was taking a vacation from her vocation.

  Rolling around TJ in a stolen Dodge Charger.

  Not a bad way to do it if you asked Remmie. He rode the city bus to work, and thinking about it made him want to scream. Anyway, he was used to living with scum. Hell, he was used to living in scum. But Remmie needed sleep; he needed it so he could go back to making limp-dick French fries in the morning. And these scumbags next door would not shut the fuck up—there was also the new decorating they’d done to his apartment. Remmie didn’t have a gun, not yet. The best he could find was a butter knife with a bent tip. He carried it in his right hand as he walked down the hall. He reached the next door apartment and pounded on the loose number seven nailed to the door. “What the fuck, man? I need to talk to you guys. I have to work in the morning and—”

  The door swung open and Remmie gasped. His voice lodged in his throat and a headache burned behind his eyes. In front of him, face speckled with blood, was a fat man with a shotgun propped on one shoulder. He smiled at Remmie—the man’s top two front teeth were missing—and said, “Nice to see you, neighbor. I could use a little help with the clean up over here. Thanks for the visit.” The fat man moved aside and waved Remmie into the room. “Come on in. Hurry on in. Don’t stand out there like a stranger. Let’s be friends.”

  Remmie slipped the butter knife into a pocket.

  He shuffled into the apartment.

  So much for starting a new life. Remmie had an odd feeling, a feeling like he was slipping out of his new skin and back into his old one.

  2

  “Now, you see here what happens when I get annoyed?” The fat man pointed at the body draped across the carpet. “And sometimes, you know, when I get annoyed, people get in the way and, shit—” He grunted and cleared his throat. “They get some bad luck coming their way.” The fat man jabbed the shotgun at Remmie; his cheeks flapped while he talked. “You the one banging on the goddamn wall? What do I have to do to have a decent business meeting in this shit hole? Here I am, in quiet palaver with my steamed colleague, and I got a fry cook,” the fat man squinted at Remmie’s ketchup-soiled pants, “thinking he’s the goddam quiet-police. You got a badge to go with that righteous dig-nation? Or maybe you think everybody keeps the same hours as a broke-ass hamburger jockey? Is that it, friend?”

  Remmie didn’t know where to look.

  He had two choices: The shotgun or the dead man.

  The body was oddly twisted across the carpet, as if the man—in blue-tinged pimp suit and wingtips—was doing ballet when he got plugged. Half his face, framed in dark oily curls, was drenched in blood; one eye was a fleshy black mass, like a tumor unveiled. From the looks of it, Mr. Pimp (raspy voice, Remmie knew by now) got half the load, and the other half plunged through the wall. A little more demo and they’d have a two-bedroom on their hands.

  The fat man sighed. “What do you call yourself? What’s your Christian name, friend?” He wagged the shotgun at Remmie. It was a finger of doom.

  Remmie grunted, felt his throat tighten. He choked out a response. “Remmie. Miken. I live in number five, just down—”

  “Howdy, neighbor. It’s nice to meet you.” He swung the shotgun toward the dead man, pumped it once, and fired. The blast filled the room, echoed like a heavy metal chord. The body shook with the gut shot. “One for fun,” the fat man said turning back to Remmie. He tossed the gun onto a worn leather sofa. “They call me Trevor Spends around here.” He smiled and offered Remmie a hand. “Because, like the name says, I spend.”

  Remmie forced himself to shake Trevor’s hand. “Shit, I didn’t know, I mean—fuck. I didn’t figure you’d shoot the guy.” Remmie rubbed the place between his eyes, tried to scrub away the pain. His ears rang; a sharp, persistent odor of gunfire filled his nose.

  Trevor shrugged, pointed his palms at the ceiling. “Accidents happen, especially when I get pissed off. It’s a weakness, I admit it.” He looked into the dead space behind Remmie, as if conjuring a wise thought: “I got this therapist, guy says I shoot myself in the foot. You believe that? Says I let my anger run loose, like it’s a rabid dog or something. I shoot myself in the foot, he says.” Trevor laughed from the round fat belly beneath his suit and tie; he wore a blood-red tie over a black shirt—smart looking guy, even with the extra weight on him. “What I want to tell the guy, it’s that I might shoot myself in the foot, but I’d like to shoot him in the throat. Right here,” he said and lifted a finger to his Adam’s apple. He lifted his eyebrows and smirked. “But I digress, huh?”

  Remmie said, “You got blood on your face.”

  “Oh, shit. Give me a minute.” Trevor went into the bathroom adjacent to the couch, just beyond the lifeless pimp. He ran the sink and scrubbed his face with a wet towel while Remmie stared at the scene. “You know, I didn’t really care for Donny anyhow. He’s the son of a bitch who let Veranda run off, take the fucking Dodge Charger with her. I let a guy borrow my car, and look what fucking happens, will you? Motherfucker brought it on his damn self.”

  Remmie lifted his eyes from the body, traced the shape of the shotgun on the couch. If he moved fast, he could have it in his hands before Trevor finished in the bathroom. One quick step, lift the goddamn thing, point it. But wait. No, two shots fired and that meant, what? Time to reload. Fuck. Okay, Remmie. You’re going to walk out of here, let this scene be what it is. You’re going to walk back to your apartment, crawl into bed, and sleep. That’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to sleep. And when you wake up, this’ll be so far away it never happened.

  No dead pimps. No missing whores.

  And, most of all, no fat man scrubbing blood off his face.

  Except, no—you’re going to stand here, Remmie. You’ll wait.

  Trevor came out of the bathroom, wiped the back of his neck with a blue towel. Blood ran down one side of the towel, like shit stains on boxer briefs. “Remmie, my new friend,” he said, “how’d you like to make a little money?”

  Too late, Remmie. You’re stuck. “Doing what?”

  Trevor lowered his chin at the dead pimp. “Well, now we got to chop him up, toss his ass in a dumpster somewhere. What do you say? There’s five hundred big ones in it for you. And a nice breakfast when we finish.”

  Remmie licked his lips. He realized the pain in his head was gone, vanished behind dollar signs. He sniffed the air, scratched behind his head.

  Without blinking, Remmie said: “Cut him up into how many pieces?”

  3


  Ten pieces. That’s how many. Two each for the skinny arms. Two each for the legs, sawed through below the knobby knees. But you leave the torso all by itself after you cut the head off; Remmie never forgot how those dark curls looked rolling across the bathroom tile. Jeez-us Kee-rist. Trevor used a hacksaw to do the job, made Remmie watch. He leaned against the doorway, grimaced as his stomach knotted, tightened, released each time another body part came loose. Less bloody than Remmie imagined, but surreal as all hell. Trevor worked the saw like a carpenter, like he’d been doing it his whole life.

  As he went through the second leg: “I don’t expect you to do the dirty stuff, neighbor. But, hell, you got us into this.” He stopped the slicing motion of the saw and looked over his shoulder at Remmie. His brown eyes looked both alive and dead at the same time. “And that means you got to be along for the ride. The whole ride, too. Not just the tossing the bags in the dumpster stuff. I’m talking the grunt work here.” Trevor turned back to the body with an agonized grunt, bore down on the saw.

  Kee-rist, Remmie thought again. The sound made his teeth grind: Ceaseless scraping mixed with the wet tearing of skin and flesh. Remmie said nothing. He tried to watch without watching, took in the rundown bathroom with its broken floor tiles (like a shitty subway station) and dirty bathtub, red streaks thickening by the second across chipped porcelain. Remmie worked once—for a long hellish week—in a butchering factory. They did pigs there. Remmie’s job was to pull out the guts, plop them down on a conveyor belt. Five straight days, one fat pig after another, and Remmie woke up on his first day off with an unmistakable urge to slice his own throat. He quit the next day, didn’t show up for work at the factory. His wife didn’t like that decision, but that wasn’t the worst of it—Remmie could never stomach bacon again.