by Rio Youers
“Love letters,” she said, reaching into her pocket with her left hand. Pain corkscrewed from the hole in her shoulder, all the way to the tips of her fingers. “Beneath his tough exterior, Vince was a hopeless romantic. He used to write these little notes and leave them in places I’d least expect: under the sun visor in my car, so it would drop into my lap while I was driving, or inside a box of ammunition. Sweet nothings, you know: Crazy about you, girl . . . Love you madly. That kind of thing.”
“Gah, I’m gonna fucking puke.”
“His favorite hiding place, though”—Lola coughed and tilted away from the gathering smoke—“was inside my left shoe, beneath the insole. Always the left, because it was closer to my heart.”
“Gah.”
“When I picked up Vince’s . . . personal belongings from”—she coughed again—“the coroner, I noticed the insole of his left shoe was sticking up just a bit. So I lifted it, and sure enough, I found a little note beneath.”
Lola took her hand from her pocket, a folded piece of paper clasped between her trembling fingers. “Not a love letter, though. Not this time.” She unfolded the paper and showed Jimmy what was written there. A single word in smeared, brownish uppercase:
JIMMY
Another crash from the living room, the sound of breaking glass, the tuneless thud of the grand piano collapsing. More smoke dirtied the air above Lola. In a modest house with narrower spaces, she probably would have died from smoke inhalation by now.
“And yeah, Jimmy, it’s written in blood. Vincent’s blood. I had it checked.” Lola crouched, in part to breathe the fractionally cleaner air, mostly to jam the pistol’s muzzle beneath the ridge of Jimmy’s jaw. “He must’ve found time to write this after you cut his ears off, but before you plugged a bullet in the back of his skull.”
Jimmy gagged and gurgled and spat blood. His eyes were spinning records, playing some shocked, disbelieving tune.
“You couldn’t stand that I chose him over you,” Lola said.
“Fuck you.”
The fire had reached the foyer, climbing the high walls, blackening the windows. Something popped and sizzled. The door to the downstairs bathroom burned off its hinges and fell with an oven-hot clap.
“You couldn’t stand losing. But here’s a news flash for you, Jimmy.” Lola straightened, retreating a step in the heat. She kept the sights locked on Jimmy. “You were never in the running.”
“Bitch, kill me if you’re going to.”
“I don’t have to kill you, Jimmy. You were brought down by a woman—one woman. Even if you survive that bullet in your stomach, your reputation is in pieces. You won’t recover from this.”
“Gah.” Jimmy kicked his legs in agony. His right hand was clapped to his gut, knuckle-deep in blood. His left hand was splayed, trembling, on fire. He didn’t appear to notice.
“But I didn’t suffer these burns, and kill all your men”—Lola looped her finger around the trigger—“just to let you live.”
Smoke ballooned, obscuring Lola’s vision. She waited for it to clear, although her eyes were red-raw and watering.
“You lose, Jimmy.”
She fired twice and saw both bullets hit. Jimmy’s body hopped like he’d taken a couple of quick zaps from a defibrillator. He tensed for a moment, as if all the feeling in his body were rushing toward one point, then slumped.
Lola tossed the last note Vince Petrescu ever wrote onto Jimmy’s chest, where it curled and browned. She staggered backward, then butted through the front doors and out into the night. The first gulp of clean air pushed a wave of dizziness through her. She folded to her knees and vomited.
Sirens blared, extremely close.
Lola hurried from the scene, burned and limping. Blood trickled down her arm and dripped from her sleeve.
Become the storm, she thought, looking at the sky.
Part I
One-Inch Punch
Chapter One
The “gun” was a Zoraki M2906, a replica, a prop for movies and training. It had the heft and feel of a real pistol, all working parts, except it fired blanks, not live rounds. The orange cap lodged into its muzzle, distinguishing it from handguns of a more lethal variety, had been removed a long time ago.
Brody Ellis sat behind the wheel of his shitbox Pontiac, parked in the shadows. His gaze switched between the stale yellow glow of the convenience store and the replica handgun lying on the passenger seat. The clock in the dash—part of the stereo, which had a CD and cassette player; that’s how old and shitty his shitbox was—displayed 4:28. Brody had read somewhere, or maybe one of his loser buddies had told him, that four-thirty to five a.m. was the best time to rob a convenience store. The cash register would be fatter, for one thing. More important, the cashier, not to mention any cops in the vicinity, would be nearing the ends of their shifts, and were likely to be tired, not as responsive. Brody wasn’t sure if this was reliable information. Maybe some cops started their shifts at four a.m., and some no doubt became more focused as the hours wore on. But it sounded plausible, and Brody needed every advantage he could get. He’d never robbed a convenience store before.
And you don’t have to now, he thought. You can still back down from this shit.
Yeah, he could, but what then? Tyrese was hounding him for half the rent. Same as every damn month, only this month Brody was out of cash. His overdraft was maxed and his credit rating was for shit. There was nowhere to go for the money, and Tyrese was not a man of limitless patience.
“I’m just a big ol’ teddy bear,” he’d said when he showed Brody around the place, but yesterday that big ol’ teddy bear had pinned Brody to the wall. “Get your half to me, or you and your damn sister will be out on your asses. I’m not fucking around.” The muscles packed into Tyrese’s arms had thrummed with dangerous energy.
Brody had pondered how different life would be if he were on his own. Jesus Christ, it was 2019, and at twenty-four years old, he could be the goddamn poster boy for free-spirited millennials. He could live out of his car, if needed, or crash on a friend’s sofa. Just for a couple of weeks, until he found a job and pulled enough scratch together to get another place. But he wasn’t on his own. Molly complicated things. She needed comfort and care, much of which came by way of her medication. How many more nights would he lie awake with her, holding her while she cried with the miserable pain of it all, the muscles in her delicate legs trembling and jerking?
* * *
4:34. The convenience store’s light spilled across Independence Avenue like it had been tipped from a barrel. Buddy’s, it was called. 24-hr value with a smile! The owner’s name wasn’t Buddy. It was Elias Abrahamian, a middle-aged Armenian with a gold tooth and a neck tattoo. Drove a Beamer. Never smiled. Elias would be at home sleeping next to his young wife while reliable, bespectacled employee ant—here to help worked the register. Ant—130 pounds of piss in skinny jeans—would be fading, playing Candy Crush Saga on his phone to stay awake. Nobody had been in or out of the store for twenty-three minutes.
* * *
4:41. Brody picked up the replica, leveled his arm, aimed at the windshield. His hand trembled. He cupped his right wrist with his left palm, which helped but only a little.
“Empty the fucking register, motherfucker! Right fucking now!”
Should he scream, like a hair-trigger sociopath, or make his demand in an even but menacing tone, as if blowing Ant out of his Vans were all in a day’s work?
“You know what to do, kid. Don’t give me a reason.”
He preferred the latter option. Keep it cool, controlled, and quick. But he’d never sell cool if he couldn’t keep his goddamn hand from shaking.
Brody tried again.
“Let’s fucking do this—”
Again.
“Gonna ask you once—”
Brody had done his homework. He’d reconnoitered Buddy’s and several other stores this side of the Freewood Valley delta. They all had pros and cons, but Buddy’s came out on top. N
o bulletproof glass. Only one employee running the night shift (Ant on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays). Clear routes in and out. Busy enough to put some stacks in the register, but quiet enough—particularly between three and five a.m.—for the store to be empty for longish periods.
“One wrong move and I’ll—”
Three miles from the nearest police department, which didn’t account for patrols, but Brody was hoping for some luck. Christ knows, he was due. Only two surveillance cameras, one above the checkout counter, the other at the back of the store. It was possible that Ant had an alarm button or .45 beneath the counter, but Brody depended on him being too shit-scared to use them.
“Don’t be a hero, kid—”
* * *
Brody had bought the replica from a wheelchair-bound meth-head who was done with rolling the dice.
“Every time I stick someone up,” he said, “you can see ’em weighing up their chances. As if having no legs makes a bullet slower.”
“But there are no bullets,” Brody said. “Right?”
“Shit, they don’t know that. I mean, the Zoraki is a grade-A replica. They use that shit in movies.”
“But it’s harmless? I don’t want to . . . you know, hurt anybody.”
“Harmless to everybody except you. Cop sees you waving that around, you’re going to catch a bullet.”
“Don’t I know it. So what’s your asking price?”
“That model sells for about one-fifty on eBay.”
“One-fifty? Fuck that. I was thinking, like . . . twenty bucks.”
“Get the fuck out of here with twenty bucks. Jesus.”
“Hey, man, I can probably get the job done with my hand in a paper bag.”
“Good luck with that. See how confident you feel with your hand in a goddamn paper bag. That’s what I’m selling here, man. Confidence.”
“Shit, I’ll give you fifty.”
“I’m looking at a yard, man. At least.”
“A yard? You want to buy a yard?”
“No, a yard. You know, a hundred bucks.”
“Right. Yeah. I can give you sixty, man. That’s all the money in my world.”
“Sixty and that Panthers lid.”
“Deal.”
* * *
4:48. Brody put his gloves on.
Go time.
* * *
He popped the car door and kept to the shadows until there were no shadows, only that lemony splash of light from the store. Approaching the automatic doors, he hooked a ski mask from his jacket pocket and rolled it over his face. The replica gun was in his other pocket, snug beside his wallet. Before reaching for it, a voice at the back of his mind once again insisted that he didn’t have to do this, that he could back out and find another way. It wasn’t the memory of Tyrese pinning him to the wall that kept him going, but of Molly trembling in his arms, trying hard—trying so damn hard—to be brave.
“Do it,” he whispered to himself. “In and out. Thirty seconds.”
A quick glance to his left and right before entering, to make sure no cars were pulling into the lot. Brody snatched the replica from his pocket and the weight of it in his hand—here, in the store lights, in the open—sent his heart cannonballing into his throat. He fumbled the gun, nearly dropped it, reeled into Buddy’s with his lips peeled back behind the ski mask, his right hand jitterbugging, the tip of the barrel swaying like a metronome. The colors—all the boxes and packets and labels—were too bright and the fluorescent lights had sunlamp intensity. Brody wondered, had the gun been real, if he might have pulled the trigger in the sheer rush of it all.
Ant saw him and shrank, his thin arms crossed over his face.
“Jesus Christ, man. No, please—”
“You know what to do. Make it quick.”
“Aw, Jesus. Aw, fuck.”
“Now.”
It didn’t matter that Brody’s hand trembled, because Ant couldn’t see it. Ant cowered behind his crossed arms, knees knocking. He’d started to make a squeaky-door sound—reeee, reeeeeee—and his shoulders jerked with every shrill breath. Brody was the apotheosis of cool in comparison.
“The money, dickwad.” Brody rapped the butt of the replica on the counter. “I’ll put a bullet in your knee, I swear to God.”
Ant yelped and curled into a loose ball. He made no move for the cash register. Brody clenched his jaw and looked behind him, checking that no one had slunk into the store. He scoped the lot, too. No headlights. No early birds heading to Buddy’s for a pack of smokes and a shitty cup of coffee. It was just a matter of time, though.
“Reeee, reeeeeeee—”
Abort mission, the voice at the back of Brody’s mind snapped. This isn’t working. Get the hell out.
But he didn’t want to abort mission. He’d come this far, and he wasn’t sure he could muster the moxie to do it all again.
So what are you going to do? Give Ant a cuddle? Ask nicely?
Ant’s keycard hung from a lanyard around his neck, twirling slowly as he trembled. Brody had watched the store’s cashiers use their keycards on previous occasions, touching the QR code to the scanner to open the register. It was that simple.
“Reeeeeeeee—”
Brody vaulted the counter in a wild, liquid move. Heart revving, he snatched at the plastic card around Ant’s neck. Ant squealed and flailed with one arm.
“No, please . . . nooooooo—”
Ant’s right elbow glanced off Brody’s jaw. It didn’t hurt but Brody staggered backward. He reached for the keycard again, grabbed it in one fist, and yanked. The lanyard didn’t break.
“Motherfuck—”
Brody gave it another firm tug but the card remained around Ant’s neck, and now Ant—probably unaware of what he was doing—grabbed a fistful of Brody’s ski mask, trying to push him away, but succeeding only in shoving the mask up and revealing half of Brody’s face to the surveillance camera. Brody growled, one eye rolling toward the front doors. How long before they opened and someone entered the store? How long before Ant realized that his assailant was a bumbling amateur who had no intention of using the gun?
Brody looked from the doors to the camera above the counter. There was a small black-and-white TV beside it, and Brody—the left half of his face uncovered—was the star of the show.
“Reeee, reeeeee—”
This (attempted) robbery had been somewhat planned, but what happened next was raw impulse. Brody raised the replica and brought the butt down on Ant’s skull. It wasn’t a shocking, forceful blow, but the skin cracked and blood flowed. Ant let go of Brody’s mask and flopped backward. His eyes rolled in a giddy way that made Brody feel sick inside.
“Stupid asshole.” Brody pulled his ski mask down. “You made me do that.”
He looped the lanyard from around Ant’s neck, leaped to the cash register, scanned the card. The drawer opened, revealing coins and banknotes—mostly tens, nothing larger than a twenty. None of the stacks were deep. Brody guesstimated a take of about two hundred bucks.
You’re shitting me? he thought deliriously. All of this for two hundred dollars.
He grabbed the money, stuffing it into a paper bag he’d pulled from beneath the counter. It took seconds. Ant groaned and squirmed on the floor behind him. Brody was about to haul ass when he noticed the cash tray shift loosely. A tiny bell in his mind chimed, cutting through the chaos. He lifted the tray and tossed it, scattering coins. Beneath were more coins in neat rolls, and receipts and vouchers—also a bundle of bills with Benjamin Franklin’s kindly face on the front. He was neighbored by more presidents in fatter stacks. Brody stared at the money for several out-of-body seconds, wondering if there was usually this much in the register, or if Elias had neglected to drop the day’s take at the bank. Although it could have been two days’ take—shit, a whole week’s. There had to be two thousand dollars in there. Maybe three.
Brody removed the cash with an odd mix of euphoria and guilt. He considered, very briefly, leaving some behind, but t
ook it all, even the four rolls of quarters—another forty bucks there.
“I’m sorry, brother,” he said to Ant. “I hope your head’s okay. I just . . . just . . .”
“Fuck you, man. My boss is going to kill me.”
“Yeah.” The bag in Brody’s hand was quite full. “Dude’s going to be pissed.”
“Reeeeee—”
Brody twisted the top of the paper bag to close it, rolled over the counter, and headed for the doors. He moved quickly, sneakers skimming over the floor, his pulse echoing through his quavering limbs. Above the euphoria and guilt was the knowledge that he would never be able to undo what he had just done. Maybe later he would analyze how that made him feel—try to find some peace in it.
The doors opened. He stepped outside.
The girl came out of nowhere.
* * *
Brody collided with her. She staggered backward and he instinctively reached to steady her. “Sorry, I . . . I . . .” They danced awkwardly for a second or two, then she looked up—noticed the ski mask, the gun in his hand. Her eyes widened and she jumped back, and in that moment Brody registered how striking she was. Not pretty, but unusual, with penciled eyebrows, wagon-red lipstick, a scar beneath her left eye. She wore an Oakley beanie, purple hair looping from beneath it, framing her jaw and slender neck.
“Jesus!”
“Sorry,” Brody muttered again. He bolted past her and ran without looking back, into the shadows where his car was parked.
* * *
He drove a mile with his head pounding, vision swimming, and finally pulled over on a side street lined with dark, dozing houses and mature trees. He killed the engine and inched the window open, listening for sirens. The city of Freewood Valley was silent, but for the sporadic hiss of traffic on Kimber Bridge.
Brody waited there until the sweat coating his body had dried, then he wiped his eyes—he’d been crying a little—and drove the nineteen miles to Rebel Point, the town he called home.
