by Sean May
Crimewave: Thirteen Short Stories
By Sean May
Crimewave
©2011 Sean May, All Rights Reserved
"Chop" first appeared in 5923 Quarterly, Issue 2, September 2010
"Cloverleaf Blues" first appeared in Diagonal Proof, Issue 1, 2010
"The Diner" first appeared in Crimefactory Vol. 2, Issue 6, June 2011
Cover image: "The Robbery" by Flickr user gcfairch licensed under Creative Commons
Preface: It Could Be Worse
Here it is, in all its glory. These stories were written over the course of a couple of years, some of them sitting for months before I came back and gave them a nice polish to get them ready for the book. In here you'll find some previously published work, such as "The Diner" which was published in the pages of the wonderful Crimefactory, "Chop" which saw the light of day in 5923 Quarterly's second issue, and "Cloverleaf Blues", featured in the first issue of the online 'zine Diagonal Proof. I'd suggest checking any of these publications out, and I'm incredibly proud to be a part of them.
I've also included "The Cleanup", a story that appeared as a standalone work for the Kindle, but is now part of the whole package deal you get with Crimewave.
The thirteen stories featured in Crimewave encompass a lot of subjects and types of people, but looking over them, they seem to have a common thread running through them. These stories are about people at low points in their lives, fighting just to keep their heads above water. Maybe this is a reflection of the times we live in, or they're just representative of how I've felt over the past couple of years, but they're pretty damn bleak, I have to say.
I'd like to say that everyone in the stories comes out on top, smiling and confident to face the next challenge life throws at them, but that's not really the case for most of the unlucky subjects of these stories. But maybe these stories will give you, the reader, hope. If you're feeling like the world just sucks, and it couldn't get any worse, just look at the unlucky folks that populate the pages of Crimewave. Trust me, it could always get worse.
Now that I've gotten the introduction out of the way, I think it's time to move on to what you really shelled out your hard earned money for, the stories. Enjoy.
Becca
1
I was getting off my shift at the video store, just like most other days of the week. I’d worked here before, during and after college and the prospects of getting my ticket out of the place were slim. Working at the store wasn’t so bad, and through my seven years of employment I’d risen to the position of assistant manager, but it still wasn't my ideal career path. After four years of college, I didn’t expect to spend my days re-sorting and cataloging the deluge of awful movies Hollywood delivered to our doorstep. The people I worked with were mostly teenagers, so even though I was only twenty-four, I was usually the oldest guy on any given night shift. But, not all my co-workers were vapid and self-obsessed high schoolers, texting constantly and ignoring anything I ever requested of them...no, there was also Becca.
Becca was in a similar situation to me, recent college grad looking for some kind of lifeline to fall out of the sky and pull her out of this dead-end town, and it was a point we commiserated on almost nightly. She was beautiful, if a little bit unconventionally so, with short-cropped red hair and slender, long limbs that matched up well with her five foot ten frame. If she wasn’t so into experimental modern art, such as recording videos of her friends and editing them together with stock footage of horrible disasters, she’d have no problem making her wages working as a model. Her body was, and I don’t mean to sound obsessive here but I’ll definitely come off as creepy nonetheless, perfect. Even in the drab polo shirts she wore as her work uniform, whenever she would stretch to get a movie on the top shelf, the utilitarian fabric would hug her curves, giving me hints to what may be hidden underneath. Looking at Becca, imagining what she looked like outside of work, wondering if she’d even talk to me when we were off the clock, took up a more sizeable portion of the day than was healthy.
The night was ending, it was eleven o’clock and I’d sent home the other employees, leaving just Becca and myself to close things up. I had let this tension grow too long without testing the waters, but I was going to change that tonight. After we’d tallied up the day’s totals and made sure everything was taken care of, it was time to go.
I locked the front door to the shop, Becca stood beside me in a long brown military-styled coat, pulling the lapels around her lithe frame to shield herself from the cold.
“You act like it’s cold or something” I said, the feeblest joke I could muster without preparation.
“Yeah...” she trailed off, her smoky voice made raspy by the harsh cold air, but that only made her sexier. She exhaled, a plume of vapor sliding from her lips. “Wish I’d brought a better coat.” She looked over the parking lot, which was empty except for my car. “And of course Jane isn’t here yet...”
“Who’s Jane?”
“Jane’s the most irresponsible roommate on the planet” Becca said, her eyes widening in exasperation. “She picks me up every night, she knows my schedule like the back of her hand, but she’s always at least twenty-five minutes late.” She looked down at the pavement and kicked a discarded styrofoam cup against the side of the building.
I hadn’t planned this, having Becca in need of my chivalry and giving me the perfect opportunity to actually talk to her outside of the work environment, but I wasn't going to let it pass by. This was my chance, on this cool September night, to see if Becca and I actually had something worth giving a try.
“Well, I mean, you don’t live that far away do you?”
“About ten miles away...if Jane doesn’t show up soon, I’ll just call a cab and make her pay the fare. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I could take you home, it’s not a problem.”
She looked at me, trying to gauge my intentions, I think. It was a cheap ploy, and I was sure she could read the eagerness on my face, but at this point it was all I had.
“Yeah that’s alright, I can give you gas money—“
“Don’t worry about it...”
She smiled at me, and I worried that I was moving way too quickly with all this. Plus, what the hell was I doing trying to start a relationship with a co-worker? Things like that never worked out, and in the end someone’s out of a job. I didn’t have much time to think about that, though, because Becca was already on her way to my car, the only one in the parking lot this late at night.
I followed her to the car and formulated my gameplan. It was just a ride home, so I don’t know why I was so damn nervous, but to me it seemed more important than just a ride home, it was an inroad, a chance. Something to keep me happy while everything else in my life was resoundingly mediocre and at a standstill.
Becca leaned against my car and rifled through her pockets, producing a cigarette and a lighter. “...mind if I smoke in the car?” she said, smiling at me. Of course, I did...and the stench would linger for weeks at least...but the rules for Becca were different. Even the nicotine stench would remind me of her after she had gone.
“Yeah, no problem” I said
“Are you sure? I mean, I know you don’t smoke...”
I looked her right in the eye as I hit the button to unlock my car doors. “It’s fine, Becca...do whatever you want in my car.” I said, unable to take it back after it escaped. Becca didn’t react much to that loaded sentence, opened the door to the car and got in. I followed.
We exited the parking lot, drifting beneath the sea of fluorescent lights that composed the main drag of our city, the _only_ drag of the city. We drove past restaurants, 24-hour megamarts and liquor stores, mostly in silence. The inside of the car was dim, despite the lights outside. Becca was illuminated
by the glowing orange tip of her cigarette, which she inhaled from as she stared outside, away from me. “’s hot...” she said, and before I could offer to do anything about the temperature, she was whipping her coat off and throwing it into my back seat, along with her polo shirt. Underneath those layers, she was wearing a fairly low-cut black t-shirt, showing off the tattoos on her collarbones, as well as the ones on her arms. One of her bra straps, a bright red one, peeked out from the shirt, just hinting to me what may be underneath. This was only the third I’d seen Becca out of her work clothes, the other two times being when she’d arrived late for her shift, holding her khakis and polo in her hand and rushing back to the break room to change. Both of those times I thought of ways I could justify getting into the back room, “accidentally” stumbling upon Becca in the process of changing. But I wasn’t that creepy. I wasn’t that obsessed with Becca...
“It’s your day off tomorrow...right?” I said, hoping she would gloss over the creepy fact that I’d memorized her schedule.
“It is. You’re observant, Nick.” She said, flashing her teeth for a quarter of a second, impressed by my memorization. She quickly turned her attention back to the glowing screen of her phone.
“So, what are you planning on doing?”
“...didn’t really have any plans. I worked a couple of doubles this week, so I’m a little burned out on everything.”
“...thanks for working those, by the way. I really appreciate it” I looked over at her again, smiling and maybe even winking a bit, trying to walk the fine line between complementing her work performance and hitting on her. She didn't look up from her phone.
“It’s not like I’ve got much else to do besides work...” She stretched, her arms locked behind her neck and she arched her back, hiking her shirt up just enough for me to see the beautiful flatness of her stomach. I needed to focus, I was getting ahead of myself. The physical aspect of my relationship with Becca would have to come later...this had to last, I didn’t want to blow it with a one night stand, and I was stupid to think that the option was even on the table.
“I haven’t really made any plans for tomorrow either.”
“We should hang out.” She said
“What?” I said, trying to mask my excitement that she was actually making a move on me. This was all I needed
“I don’t know, I mean...we’ve never really hung out outside of work...and that’d be pretty lame if that was the only way we knew each other.”
“Sure, that, um, that sounds great. What do you want to do?”
“We’ll just see what happens. I mean, we’d have as much fun as we can in this fucking city. The mall, a movie, something...lunch at some restaurant, but we’d make it fun.” That smile, again...it was coy, sexy, and even a bit dangerous. She was roping me in.
What she was proposing was a date, right? I mean, I wasn’t looking too far into this, I wasn’t making up an attraction if she was the one that brought this to the table. I was in, Becca actually wanted to spend time with me where I wouldn't be telling her to put another armload of movies back on the shelf.
“I’d be up for it, definitely.” I played it cool, as cool as I was able to. I had to suppress myself, not let her know that this was possibly the best thing that had happened to me for months. I had to make it look like I didn't really care, even though it was more or less the only thing I'd really cared about in months.
We pulled up to her house, a squat one story place with dirty white aluminum siding that was cracked in a few places but still looked good enough to keep the landlord away. I pulled the car into the driveway.
“Here you go.” I said. She reached into the back seat to get her coat and polo shirt, once again giving me a hint of her slender hips and stomach. I wasn’t ogling her, but it was tough not to notice how incredible her body was.
“Thanks” Becca said through her second cigarette of our trip, turning to open the door to the car. She walked around the front of the car, her hips swinging rhythmically, hypnotizing me. She got about ten steps away before turning back to me. “Hey...I’m really not tired right now, and I could use some conversation. Do you wanna come inside for a bit?” She bit her lip slightly. I realized at this point that she was actually hitting on me a lot more than I was hitting on her, more than I’d ever planned on at this point in our relationship.
Of course I didn’t resist even for a second. My act of playing cool, acting like this whole thing meant nothing, it was just a car ride, was now out the window. Becca wanted me, she needed my company, and I was completely OK giving it to her. I jumped out of the car and began following Becca to the house. “I guess I could stay for a little while...”
Becca’s house had probably not changed much in the year since she’d been out of college. The walls were plastered with posters and other hip ephemera, big collections of Blu-Rays and books stood in heaps all over the living room, dwarfing the couch and the other dorm furniture. Without the piles, the room would have been spare, lifeless, but with them, it was full of Becca’s personality. The room itself was a window into Becca’s mind, and I took note, observing the things she liked, mainly so I could talk about the things we had in common.
“I’m gonna go change, these pants are a little too Eastern European tourist for me. There are some beers in the fridge if you want to crack a couple for us.”
She walked back into her room, and I walked over to the fridge to get out the beers. I wasn’t really much of a beer drinker, but at this point if Becca liked something, I was absolutely in love with it. The beers’ labels were in Swedish and German, none of which I recognized from my casual once-overs of liquor aisles. This made sense, as I didn’t really take Becca to be a Bud Light drinker, and I actually appreciated it. I grabbed two that matched and popped the caps off of the bottles with the bottle opener magnetized to the door of the fridge and walked back into the living room.
Becca was still in her room, so I sat on the couch. I took a sip of the beer, and my gag reflexes were tested instantly. It tasted awful, like three day old coffee that had been left out in the sun, but I remembered that I had to like the things Becca liked, so I tensed every muscle in my body and forced the first drink down my throat.
As I was recovering from the awful tasting beer, Becca came out of her room wearing a pair of dangerously short shorts that gave me full view of her lean and freckled legs. She had a couple of tattoos on her calves, flourished, stylized flowers. I’d never been exactly attracted to girls with tattoos before, and even though I assumed Becca had them, I hadn’t seen them before. But, on Becca, the tattoos were art, enhancements. She came over to the couch and sat beside me, and I gave her the beer that was in my other hand. “Here you go.” I said.
She took a drink, winced, and looked at the label. “Oh, this is Jane’s crap...I hate this stuff. She went to Europe her junior year and now thinks that everything European is the best in the world, without question.” She struggled gulping down her first drink as well. “Do you like this stuff?”
“To be honest, not really...”
“Nice to see you have good taste. Here...” she took the bottle from my hand “I’ll go get us some real drinks.” She got up from the couch and walked over to the kitchen. After a half a minute or so, she said “I’m all out of the beer I usually drink, is a rum and coke alright?”
“That’s fine by me.”
She came back in with a bottle of Appleton Estate, good stuff, a two liter of store brand cola and two tall glasses full of ice. She put the glasses on the table and filled both of them most of the way with rum, adding a splash of cola for flavor. “Now this a drink” she said, sitting down and picking her glass up from the table in one smooth motion.
We both ran through our first drinks within a few minutes, and we both wanted more. Within an hour, the whole bottle of rum was gone. Me and rum were a bad combination. Every time I drank even a little bit of the stuff, the bottle wailed its siren song to bring me back to it. In my buzzed state, Becca wa
s even more beautiful, a hazy halo surrounding her as my vision threatened to double. I tried to remain focused, seeing that I didn’t want to pass out during this chance meeting with Becca. This was something I needed to remember, and the rum wasn’t helping with it. Talking with Becca, I drained a couple glasses of cola just to diffuse the rum, and it seemed to work.
We talked for hours, it seemed, matching each other drink for drink, and we both realized we had a lot more in common than we’d previously thought. Turns out, we were both raised by single moms, loved the X-Men Saturday morning cartoon when we were kids, and had an unhealthy obsession with Radiohead’s music in high school. The comparisons kept going and going, and I began to think that Becca was just about, if not the, perfect girl for me.
When she straddled me and began passionately kissing me almost out of nowhere, all that “just about” flew out the window.
The next hour or so was a complete blur to me, the alcohol and adrenaline in my blood twisting my brain and robbing it of all sense of time and space. Feeling her body, her warm skin against my hands, the way she shuddered and moved as we had sex was the best thing I’d ever felt. Sex with Becca was exactly how I’d expected it to be...all three times we did it that night. Eventually, the alcohol and exhaustion got hold of both of us and we crashed in her bed, my arm wrapped around her bare shoulders, savoring the moment that I couldn’t have imagined was even a remote possibility at the beginning of the night.
2
Becca was asleep, but I was staring at the ceiling, exhausted at what we’d just gone through. I was thirsty, unbelievably so. I got up from the bed, careful to not wake Becca, who looked just as beautiful in sleep as she did writhing on the bed. I put on my pants and hoped the floorboards didn’t creak much as I walked across the bedroom.
I walked on the pads of my feet, treading as lightly as possible. The floorboards whispered, but didn’t speak up. I got to the door of the bedroom and turned the knob to the left.
