Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3)

by Owen Laukkanen

  We pass one of the boys on the way inside. I know him by his ink, but I can’t remember the name. He’s standing at the base of the building with a long rubber hose running back to a tap inside. The way he’s spritzing the landscape, he looks like a gang-banger gone straight, trying to care for his lawn in some upwardly mobile suburban bliss. The problem is there’s not a hint of grass in sight and it ruins the effect.

  “Trying to grow a garden of weeds between the cracks?”

  “Boss is doing some spring cleaning around here.”

  There’s a dark patch on the concrete where he’s been hosing it down. The water running into the gutter still hints at a pinkish-red colour. Somebody probably got shot. Somebody probably got dead. Ambulances won’t come here. Nobody will call 911. If you get shot or beaten badly enough, you’d better be able to drag yourself to a hospital. Nobody will lift a finger to get you help while you’re alive, but they’ll all lend a hand to make sure your body disappears if you die on the premises.

  “Looks like somebody had a bad day,” is my comment.

  “A lot of somebodies are having a bad day today,” he says.

  “And here you are, mopping up the mess.”

  “Cleaning up is a dirty job.”

  “That’s profound,” I told him. “You should write that one down. Stuff it in a fortune cookie.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “These kids,” I tell my driver as we head for the front door, “None of them know how to take a compliment.”

  “Maybe you don’t sound sincere.”

  “I said it with a smile.”

  “Accountants don’t do sincere smiles.”

  Over the life of the building, low-rent housing for the poor had become a no-rent factory for the 82nd street drug cartel. Not to be confused with the 83rd street drug cartel, the boys on 82 are big time, dealing a little of everything in the recreational-narcotics spectrum. Their vast empire spans all the way back to 79th street and the two blocks bordered by boulevards north and south. That comes to nearly five and a half square blocks where they own the exclusive rights to deal to every degenerate who juices, shoots or puffs on that postage stamp of concrete. As a client base goes, it’s a good whack of addicts who have decided to call the neighbourhood home—or at least decided it was a good enough place to get high, piss their lives away, overdose and die. There’s money to be made. Not a huge amount—there’s only so much a bunch of late-stage terminal junkies can steal to support their habit—but it all belongs to the cartel.

  Inside we’re met by more of the hired help. The day watch, same as the night watch, fuelled by a speedball cocktail of cocaine and heroin, lubricated by half-sugar, half-caffeine energy drinks that are designed to keep you up and burn you out. Most of the boys have been awake for days. Their version of down time is a burgers-and-fries snack and a 48-hour coma on one of the bare mattresses in the building’s former laundry room. Then it’s back to the vigil and a fresh shot of junk to keep them wide-eyed and aware like a good guard doggie—paranoid and suspicious of everything, ready to bark at a passerby and bite an intruder.

  I run my own laundry room, only mine doesn’t house a bunch of stressed and stoned lookouts trying to grab a nap between hits. The work I do for the cartel—and a select few other gangs—is to turn their ill-gotten proceeds into legit numbers in a bank account. I count the money, crunch the numbers, wave my magic accounting pen, and turn it all into taxed, legal and unquestioned tender. Oh, they keep plenty of piles of cash on hand to throw around and play at being big men in a small neighbourhood. But paper piles up, and nobody wants to leave too much money stacked around the workplace. Even crooks get robbed. And the top guys are bright enough to plan for the future. What good is profit if you can’t spend it on a nice car, a nice house, or a high-dividend stock to see you through your retirement if you ever live that long? You can’t buy these things with cash-on-hand unless you want a visit from John Law.

  So I make the money look good by running it through a series of businesses. I’ve brokered the sale of a number of fronts at bargain prices. Currently, the cartel is the proud owner of a restaurant nobody ever eats at and a bar nobody ever drinks at. Then there’s the long-term storage facility that only stores row upon row of empty lockers. They have two dance clubs downtown. One of them never opens its doors, the other never shuts them because the place is gutted and full of pigeons and pigeon shit. There’s also the landmark movie theatre that hasn’t shown a movie since colour was a novelty and the debate raged on whether talkies were here to stay. On paper it’s a community centre, even though no one from the community has seen the inside of the place since it was boarded up twenty years ago with placards that announced “Under renovation” and “Opening soon.” Failed businesses all, but in the books they’re gold mines. If you tell the tax man your dive bar is the hottest watering hole in town, he’ll just cash your cheque and congratulate you. You think he gives a shit it’s all drug money? Of course not. So long as you can produce enough fake numbers to convince him you’re not guilty of tax evasion, he doesn’t care what else you might be guilty of.

  There’s a fire burning in the lobby. No fireplace, just a fire. Trash is being burned in a garbage can in the middle of the floor so the watch dogs can keep warm. With so many broken windows, the place gets drafty. I’d be concerned about an open blaze setting off the fire alarm or the sprinklers, but none of that equipment has worked in years.

  When my driver and I get closer, I can hear the boys talking tall tales. With nothing better to do than get high and tell each other work-related anecdotes, they can always be counted on for a good story or two when I visit. I might as well be witnessing primitive man from a hundred thousand years ago, telling ghost stories over camp fires. The ghost stories change, the fuel that’s burning in the pit changes, but man’s still primitive, superstitious. Savage and fearful.

  I linger, so my driver stops to listen too. “Skiff” is what they call the scrawny collection of bones and needle tracks who has the floor. He recognizes me from my monthly visits and nods a greeting. Skiff is always there, always on watch, always ready with a story. Every first of the month I experience the same mild surprise that he’s still alive, still bullshitting. But he’ll outlive the building, that Skiff. Like the rats and the cockroaches and the money, Skiff will go on.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” he says.

  We’re all heard this one before, but nobody stops him.

  “This one time, Dunlan’s in an elevator. Derek Dunlan, right? You’ve heard of him. Everyone’s heard of him. He’s in an elevator and it’s packed. No room to breathe, no room to slouch, people are standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Everybody’s in everybody else’s personal space, got it? And then the elevator stops. Dead. Power failure, or it just breaks down, or something. It’s not important. Just know that this motherfucker isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. People bitch, people complain, but not our Dunlan. He just stands there, quiet, doesn’t say shit. He closes his eyes like he’s going to sleep or meditating or some damn thing and he’s a statue. Meanwhile everybody else is freaking out. Slow at first. Situation like that, you want to stay calm, be polite, be considerate of your fellow man. Whatever. But after ten, twenty minutes, folks get antsy. After an hour they’re going fucking nuts. The air’s stale, everybody’s sweating, it’s hot like a sonofabitch. And this is what happens.

  “One guy lights up. I don’t know if he’s claustrophic, or a nic addict, or just a miserable fucking asshole, but he takes out his pack of cigarettes and lights one. People complain. Obviously. Shit like, ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here,’ or ‘We can hardly breathe as it is.’ And he’s all like, ‘Fuck you! I need this!’ And people shut up because they don’t know if the guy’s a freak or not. But our Dunlan has something to say. Understand now, Dunlan’s been quiet as the dead. He hasn’t said a word the whole time. He hasn’t moved or opened his eyes in about an hour. Hell, he’s not even sweating. But now he opens his
eyes and says very calmly, very politely, ‘Please put that out.’

  “The guy puffing away, I don’t know what he says. Maybe he gives Dunlan another ‘Fuck you,’ or maybe he doesn’t have anything to say. Bottom line, though, is that he’s still smoking. So Dunlan tells him, still calm, but a little less polite, ‘Put it out, or I’ll put it out for you.’

  “This time I’m sure the smoker gives Dunlan a ‘Fuck you’ or worse. Whatever he said, a second later he’s screaming. And I mean screaming his head off worse than you’ve ever heard anyone scream in your life. Because Dunlan leaps across the elevator. There’s nowhere to move, but suddenly everybody just somehow finds room to get the fuck out of his way. The sardines part like the Red Sea and Dunlan’s all over the guy. He lets him have a knee in the groin to give him something to think about, and before anyone knows what’s happening, he’s got the guy’s head jammed in the corner of the car. With one hand he’s forcing the guy’s eye wide open, with the other he pops the cigarette out of his mouth and he stubs it out right in his eyeball. And none too fast either. He lets it simmer there for a bit. And that’s when the screaming starts and it just keeps going and going, even after Dunlan lets the guy drop and flicks the dead butt at him.

  “So Dunlan goes back to exactly where he was standing and assumes the position like nothing happened. Everyone’s too stunned to say dick. And even if they had anything to say, no one would have heard it because smoker-boy is still screaming himself horse. Dunlan lets this go on for a little while, but it only takes him about a minute to have had his fill of that shit. So he just says all soft spoken, ‘Quiet please.’

  “Nothing. The guy’s still screaming like he didn’t hear, which is probably the case. So Dunlan repeats himself, ‘I said, quiet please.’ And the smoker must have heard that one because he says something back. ‘You burned my fucking eye out!’ which is stating the obvious, but at least it’s a little more articulate than all that hollering. And Dunlan just tells him, cool as a cucumber, ‘You saw what I did to make you stop smoking. You don’t want to see what I’ll do to you to make you stop shouting.’ And that does the trick. The guy shuts the fuck up in a big hurry, but then some other people in the elevator start thinking they can talk shit to Dunlan. Maybe they figure he’s just one guy and they outnumber him. Who knows, but one big guy right behind Dunlan thinks he’s got balls.

  “‘You’re a fucking psycho,’ the big guy says. And Dunlan turns around to look this guy right in the face. He’s stares at him, not hard or mean or anything. He just stares at him, indifferently, like he’s watching paint dry. And you can practically see this other guy shrinking. He doesn’t know where to put his eyes, so he tries to out-stare his shoes. And Dunlan says, calm and quiet and composed, ‘That’s right. I’m a psycho. And you’re all locked in here with me. So I want everyone to be on their very best behaviour, because if you piss me off I’m going to kill every last one of you.’

  “And Dunlan turns back around, turns his back on all of them, and closes his eyes again and waits for the doors to open. Six hours he stands there not moving a muscle. By then, everyone else is all over the floor, lying on each other, trying not to crush each other. But they make sure Dunlan’s got his space. A little halo of elbow room so no one has to touch him or disturb him in any way. And it’s like that until the elevator starts moving again and the doors open on the main floor. The emergency crew’s there, and paramedics and maybe a real doctor or two in case people are passed out or worse. But everyone’s fine, except for the guy with only one eye, but even he’s not complaining. And the owner of the building asks, ‘Is everybody okay?’

  “That’s when Dunlan opens his eyes again and just says, ‘Quite.’ And he walks off that elevator like the whole trip downstairs took only two minutes. Seriously though, six hours with that many people all jammed together, the medics were expecting to find half of them dead. And except for one of them, they were all in perfect health. They figure Dunlan probably saved lives that day by keeping everybody calm, or at least too scared to panic. Yeah, that’s right, Derek Dunlan saving lives. Who’d have thought? Of course the cops wanted to talk to him once they found out what had gone down in the elevator, but by then he was long gone and no one there knew who he was. The last time they ever laid eyes on him, he was heading out the door of the building. And you know what? He was lighting up.”

  There’s a respectful, contemplative silence from the watch dogs. Derek Dunlan stories are the local boogyman stories, and nobody ever wants to be the first to speak afterwards. So I do.

  “Last time I heard that one, nobody said anything about Dunlan smoking.”

  “I told you to stop me if you’d heard it before,” says Skiff, sounding hurt.

  “Well you know me, I just love listening to your beautiful speaking voice.”

  I’ve opened the flood gates, and now the rest of the boys want to know more details, question the facts, reassure themselves that there really is no boogyman.

  “Anybody ever lay eyes on this Derek Dunlan?” one wants to know.

  “Sure, I seen him,” is the answer. “Biggest nigger you ever saw. Built like a wall of cinderblocks.”

  “I heard he was little wop,” comes a dissenting voice, “no more than five feet tall, but all muscle.”

  “Hey, Jimmy! You a wop?” one wants to know of his fellow watch dog.

  “Quarter wop. My granny on my mother’s side was from the old country.”

  “Sicilly?”

  “Queens.”

  Their brand of racism is so casual, so familiar, it’s impossible to take offense.

  “With a name like Derek Dunlan? Bullshit,” declares another dissenting voice that nudges the conversation back on topic. “He’s gotta be a mick. Fire-engine red hair and everything.”

  I have to laugh at these young turks and their old wives’ tales. This can go on for hours and I’ve heard enough of the debate already. Before long, they’ll be speculating that Derek Dunlan is a Martian. There’s an appointment to keep so I hit the call button for the elevator. My driver steps inside with me when it arrives. He pushes the button for twenty-two, the top floor. I’ve never been up that high. Accounting is on seventeen, between heroin on sixteen and bath salts on eighteen.

  He catches my eye on the button that lights up red.

  “Boss wants to see you,” he explains.

  I’ve never had the pleasure.

  “Really?” I say, flattered. “The penthouse.”

  He shakes his head.

  “One higher.”

  There’s nothing higher.

  “The roof?”

  “Boss wants to see you pass his window on the way down. Says you’ve been skimming.”

  And suddenly the new driver and all the talk of spring cleaning makes sense. I consider bolting, but I know I’ll never make it past the dogs, never make it outside, never even make it as far as that stain on the pavement before I’ve made it a twin.

  My hands shake as I reach for the pack of smokes in my pocket.

  “Mind if I have a last cigarette?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Want one?” I offer the driver, trying to hand him one between fingers I hold as steady as I’m able. I’m hoping a bit of courtesy might buy some compassion. If I’m nice, polite, maybe he’ll make it quick and let the drop do all the killing.

  He doesn’t take my offer.

  “You said it yourself. I don’t smoke.”

  And as the doors shut us in together, I realized that some of the tall tales are true, some of the ghosts are flesh and blood. And in a day, a week, a year, I’ll be another anecdote connected to that underworld boogyman, Derek Dunlan. They’ll all remember me and my last words to them over a fire and a story, but nobody will recall the face of the man who rode the elevator back down alone.

  The Hangover Cure

  Seth Lynch

  Anyone who drinks, drinks a lot, has a hangover cure. Something to push them through the long, pounding, headache hou
rs of morning. I’ve witnessed sufferers knock back a vile medley of tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, and raw eggs in one sickening draft. Others have been known to flail themselves with birch twigs until their backs bleed—people so dedicated to their cure that they’ll take it with or without a hangover. For most of the folk the cure is more booze, a neat whiskey or a vodka and orange for breakfast. For me, it’s Greenbank Lucy.

  Lucy is only available on Sunday mornings. Sunday being the one day of the week her kid, Sammy, isn’t around. Neither is her husband—she calls him that ‘though they never got married and now they’ve split. I’ve got a few names I call him but I’ll save the expletives for later. Besides, the point is, on Sunday mornings he gets the kid and I get his wife. And yeah, I call her that.

  This Sunday morning there’s a steam roller working my head and two baling machines giving demonstrations in my gut. I’ve a feeling they just found the place where Saddam hid his weapons of mass destruction. I don’t usually drink that much, that quick, but last night was a blow-out. Three beers in and there’s a tap on my shoulder. Not the filth, they don’t do anything so gentle as tap. I turned around, half-expecting a fist in the mouth, only to see Fat Ellis and his Siamese twin of violence, ‘Normal’ Norman Machin. They helped me finish my drink, by pouring it over my head, and then, in case I might be in danger of fainting, they each took an arm lifted me a few inches off the ground. In this elevated postion they carried me outside to show me their car.

  You can tell how expensive a car is by the size of the boot. This car is in the mid-range price bracket. I had enough room to roll on my side but not enough to stretch out my legs. The drive was smooth, I only hit my head twice and just once had to hold back on a serious stomach lurch. For that I’m grateful, the last thing I needed was to cover my clothes in vomit. In fact I’d call an day a success if I can get through it without throwing up on myself.