by Dan O'Shea
EDITED BY
Ron Earl Phillips
Kent Gowran
Sabrina Ogden
Chad Rohrbacher
Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels
Copyright © 2012 by Shotgun Honey Books
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-0615687728
www.ShotgunHoney.net
Cover art, “Caught in the Honey Jar”
Copyright © 2012 by Ray Dillon. Visit www.RayDillon.com.
Cover dress, book design, Shotgun Honey™ logo design
by Coaster Books & Design, www.CoasterBooks.com
Previously Published:
“The Jade Bounty”, Kung Fu Factory, March 2011.
FOREWORD
Kent Gowran
I suppose it might be a safe assumption to figure anyone reading this anthology is already familiar with the webzine Shotgun Honey and the flash fiction of a criminal persuasion it deals out a few times every week. But, just in case, I’ll give you all a quick rundown.
There used to be a flash fiction site called DZ Allen’s Muzzle Flash, run by, as you probably already know or could easily guess, one DZ Allen. That was where I got turned on to some flash fiction from up and coming crime writers. And then DZ pulled the plug. All good things come to an end, I’m cool with that, and, let’s be honest, new online venues for crime fiction open shop often enough that Muzzle Flash wouldn’t leave much of a void behind. Except it did. There were other flash fiction sites, but none of them ever scratched that particular itch they way DZ’s place had. In the Spring of 2011, I decided, after a few “Is this a dumb idea?” emails made the rounds, to launch Shotgun Honey. Almost immediately upon announcing the new venue, Sabrina Ogden and Ron Earl Phillips simultaneously offered their help. Now, you could hold me down and tattoo Does Not Work Well With Others across my forehead and no one who read it would ever get the wrong idea, but, for whatever reason, I found myself liking the idea of having a pair of cohorts for this particular venture. After that, things were off an running. Since then, we added Chad Rohrbacher to the crew and, a year after Shotgun Honey got underway, I turned in my walking papers. No drama, no hard feelings, it was simply time to move on.
Which brings us to Shotgun Honey: Both Barrels. We’d talked several times about doing an anthology, at first thinking maybe a Best Of... type deal, but quickly decided we weren’t so hot on that idea. Let’s give people something new. And let’s open up the word count. No 700 word stories, no flash fiction, but still crime fiction with the same kind of punch you get at the site.
The writers answered the call. 29 stories by 29 writers, and each one a pleasure to read. Some of these writers are names you know, other might be less familiar, but all are writers who should be read, who you should be reading.
I’d like to say thanks to all the writers, both those whose stories made it into Both Barrels and those who didn’t. Your enthusiasm for the project, for Shotgun Honey, means a whole lot. I also want to thank Sabrina, Ron, and Chad, my co-editors and, more importantly, my friends. It’s been a blast. We’ll have to do it again sometime.
All right, enough out of me.
Kent Gowran, 2012
FATHER’S DAY
Dan O’Shea
“That poor girl,” his sister Sandra, between sips of her Pinot Noir.
They were at a bar in Boston, overlooking the harbor, someplace his sister had picked, someplace pricey, the kind of place where the Sam Adams was the cheap beer and even that would cost you ten bucks a pop, the kind of place where the cost of admission meant it was never crowded. They were waiting for their brother, Harold, the oldest. You always waited for Harold.
Quentin Roberts turned, looked over his shoulder at the story running on the TV behind him, an 18-year-old gone missing from Bar Harbor, her family on vacation in Maine, the girl’s month-old high school graduation picture on the screen, the usual tearful pleas from the family. Blonde, as it seemed the missing often were. Lovely, too, as the missing often were.
He supposed the girl had always imagined her beauty was a benefit without cost, an accident of birth that she likely had used her whole life to lubricate the gears of social commerce so that they turned more easily for her. Or perhaps she was one of the guileless, the blissfully ignorant, the kind that smiled and glided across the surface of life on an unrecognized cushion of genetic privilege, imagining that the unalloyed joy of their experience was readily available to all, shaking their heads in wonder at the sufferings of others on those occasions that they noticed them.
Now the gift of her beauty had marked her as prey, just as a fourteen point rack would mark a buck, would draw the hunter’s eye to a creature that had reigned supreme among its kind for its entire life. How many times, he wondered, had this girl used her beauty to stimulate the appetites of men and then to use those longings as a leash, never considering the power those appetites held or the lengths to which some might go to sate them. He wondered if now this girl would choose to be ugly, to be another girl, maybe one she had seen in the hallways at school, a girl with stringy not-blonde hair, medium brown probably, not even afforded the small luxury, the small drama of black, a girl with a lopsided face, a bulbous nose, shoulders that were too broad, a torso that was too long, hips that were too wide, legs that were too short, calves that stumped gracelessly into her shoes instead of tapering with that hint of the erotic, that narrowing that hinted at fragility, at vulnerability, that could awaken unholy imaginings in a man with some imagination.
Quentin thought yes. Thought that, at this moment, that girl would choose to go back to the womb, to unwind her DNA and hide within that burqa of homely anonymous flesh. Foolishness, of course, for no matter which sack of flesh we wear through this life, it comes complete with its own horrors. That other girl, the ugly girl that the beautiful girl now envied, she would know this, would have lived a life of small, corrosive, daily horrors. The active horror of insult, the passive horror of neglect, the personal horror of loneliness, that loneliness sharpened as she aged by the knowledge that it was her own being that made her alone, that her face and flesh repelled those she sought to attract, that she was not just an innocent target for the abuses she suffered, but rather had been born a magnet to them. And so her loneliness had metastasized into self loathing, and that disease created the creature she would become, the shuffling, unspeaking, unsmiling golem that haunted the halls of a school that another girl had reigned o’er with such easy and unearned glory. A creature that today, even full knowing the circumstances, would likely choose to be the beautiful girl, choose it even knowing she would experience beauty’s gifts only as memories, and would accept its punishment, in the flesh, in the blood. Would choose to die as what she still envied to escape living as what she still loathed.
Foolishness. We are born as we are and must inhabit in full such flesh and mind as we are granted, must create within those confines a spirit with a beauty that will sustain us, a beauty that only we need be able to see.
Something Quentin understood. Something he was quite sure his sister did n
ot.
His sister. Just short of six foot, fully tall enough to have a model’s carriage, to have the legs that stretched from long to willowy to fantasy, every aspect of her created in perfect proportion, but even that graceful architecture which, on its own, would have created a generic melody of beauty and attraction, even that fate had deemed insufficient, and so she also had been adorned with exotic grace notes so that her person became a kind of art. Her hair that was neither blonde nor red but both or either depending on the light. Her eyes, while drawn from entirely Anglo-Saxon stock, almost emerald green in color and whispering in their shape a hint of the Orient. Her flawless flesh that radiated a seasoning of some darker spice while still remaining alabaster in its effect. She was instantly the sun in any setting, the sole source of light and heat around which all other bodies had to orbit.
She was, Quentin realized, Wallace Steven’s jar on that Tennessee hillside, the one perfect thing around which all of flawed nature reoriented itself. Not that Sandra would know what Quentin meant if he mentioned Stevens. Not that she would care. The beautiful were poor judges of beauty.
Quentin Roberts was an excellent judge.
His siblings both cut the tall, slim Roberts figure, his father’s figure, his mother’s figure. Quentin was short, squat. His siblings shared his father’s patrician features, the long face, the thin, graceful nose, the full hair that his father and his brother always wore brushed straight back to emphasize their high, fine foreheads. Quentin’s head was round, lumpy, misshapen; his nose a florid protuberance, his fleshy ears hanging from his head like tumors, his wiry hair a thinning chaotic halo.
Function followed form. His sister had been a nationally ranked tennis player in her teens, his brother a champion swimmer and runner.
Quentin had always been clumsy, graceless, but a powerful boy become a powerful man. The WASP sports were not for him. Wrestling was his refuge, wrestling and, when it became clear he would always fight as a heavyweight, the obsessive weightlifting that went with it. Where his siblings had both attended Harvard like their father, Quentin accepted a wrestling scholarship to Iowa. He had the grades for Harvard, certainly didn’t need the money, but he wasn’t ready to give up the sport, not yet. Barcelona, his coach had said, the Olympics back in 1992, a gold maybe. Then the neck injury, the shoulder injury, and that was that. An MBA at Wharton, and off to work at Roberts Capital, the family firm.
Harold arrived twenty minutes late, something he’d read in one of his business books, probably, always be the last to the meeting, show everybody who the lead dog was.
Lunch was about money, of course. It was always about money. Each of them was already rich. Born rich, raised rich. The first millions hitting their trust funds at 18, more millions at 21, those millions earning further millions, for it is the dirty secret of the rich that, except for the recklessly profligate, they couldn’t spend their money as quickly as it replaced itself, not even his sister who had never worked at all, except at spending.
And now, with their father’s sudden death, they would have more millions, hundreds of millions apiece. Virtually all of their father’s assets were held in various trust documents and would pass privately to his three heirs outside the public spotlight of probate, aside from a few million that would be tossed quite publicly to various charities in a well-orchestrated orgy of noblige oblige that had far more to do with the guidance of Roberts Capital’s PR functionaries than it had to do with any sense of nobility.
But, in an estate this size, a few things always slip through the cracks. Furnishings, some of the artwork, the cars – twenty million in assets maybe, all in, a rounding error, really. The cabin. That’s why Quentin insisted on this meeting. To divvy up the drippings.
“I suppose each of us have certain items we’re attached to,” Quentin started, “things we might –“
“I say screw the lot of it,” Harold interrupted. “Auction off the whole pile and we split the take. You want anything, then bid on it with the rest of the schlubs.” Harold tossed the catalog Quentin had put together onto the table. “Nothing in there that I need. Maybe check out the capital gains situation on some of that artwork, we get the right numbers, we can throw that crap at the charities instead of the cash, get a bigger write off.”
Sandra shrugged. “The Bentley’s nice,” she said, “the one at the place out in the Hamptons. I have one in Europe, but it’s nice to have one over here. But I suppose I can bid on that. Or just buy one. Really, Squinty, why did we have to meet over this?”
Squinty, another reminder of his imperfections, the nickname a gift from his first stepmother. His siblings were both born with perfect vision, while Quentin went though childhood in thick glasses.
Quentin paused for a moment, waiting until they were both focused on him. “I want the cabin.”
“Then bid on the cabin,” Harold said.
“What cabin?” said Sandra.
“That dump up on that pond in Maine. The old man’s great-grandfather’s place, I think. I haven’t been there since I was maybe six. You weren’t even born yet. Didn’t even have electricity, no TV, no AC, nothing. Dad probably forgot he had it, or he would have rolled it in to the trusts with the rest of the real estate.”
“Dad knew he had it,” said Quentin. “I’ve been up there with him every year. It’s our hunting cabin.”
For golf, tennis, sailing, all the usual blue-blood activities, Harold or Sandra were his father’s companions of choice. It was always the two or three of them in the papers, at the ribbon cuttings, at the fundraisers.
But hunting was his father’s passion, a passion none of the others shared, not Quentin’ siblings, not his mother, nor any of the wives that followed. Quentin hadn’t shared it either, not at first, but to have his father’s attention to himself, to be with him in a place where his siblings were not there to eclipse him with their easy successes, where being able to shoulder a seventy-pound buck was what mattered, to be able to shoulder it and carry it through the woods back to hang in the shed next to the cabin to cure. To be alone with his father in a place where he could show his father the man he was, learn the man his father was, this had been the greatest gift of Quentin’s life.
“Congatu-fucking-lations, Squinty,” said Harold. “We all know you were Daddy’s little butt-boy, always ready to go off on his hunting trips with him. Doesn’t give you any special claim.”
“It’s all I want. Between the land and the cabin, it’s worth three quarters of a million at best. The valuations are in the catalog – two from local brokers up there who know the area and one from your guy in New York, just so you know I’m not screwing you. I take the cabin and you can take me out of the mix for the rest of it. Split it up, auction it off, whatever you guys decide. Either way, with me out of the mix, your ends both go up by almost a third.”
“Still trying to impress everyone with your daddy love, Squinty?” Harold said. “You screw yourself out of a pile here, don’t come back whining later, looking for another taste just because daddy liked you better.”
“Harold,” Sandra said, “You don’t have to be unpleasant.”
Harold waved his hand dismissively. “No, of course not. Thirty years I have to listen to the old man carry on about him and Squinty and their hunting trips, trying to guilt me into tramping through the goddamn woods, go up to Maine, freeze my ass of so I can kill some defenseless animal, and then I gotta put up with Squinty and his I-loved-the-old-man better crap, gotta put up with that, but I don’t have to be unpleasant.”
Harold picked up his glass, drained the $200-a-shot scotch in one go and then held his glass up at the waitress, wiggled it at her.
“I’m sorry if I gave that impression, Harold,” Quentin said. “I’m sure we each loved Dad in our own way as best we could.”
Sandra let out a small laugh. “He was a hard man to love.”
“Fucking a,” said Harold. “A lot of good it did you anyway, Squinty, all your sucking up. The old bastard left th
e firm to me. Just ‘cause you’d get elbow deep in deer guts with him didn’t make him think you weren’t a loser.
Quentin had nothing to say about that and so said nothing. He put both hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” he said.
“I’ll say anything I want about the bastard, dead or not.”
Quentin took an envelope from his jacket pocket and pulled out some papers. A simple contract. Three pages, three copies. It gave Quentin undisputed rights to the cabin and its contents in exchange for abrogating his claim to any other items in the estate not covered by the trust documents. He slid it across the table to Harold.
“Sign this and it won’t matter what either of us say. I get the cabin, you two split the rest.”
Harold read through the document, quickly once, then slowly. The he reached for the catalog again, opened it to the pages dealing with the cabin and its valuation.
“Made some improvements, I see,” Harold said, reading a list of property features. “Wow, a generator? The old man broke down and wired up the place? Granite counters, satellite, Fucking hot tub? Really?.” He turned the page to a spread showing photos of the interior and snorted. “Jesus, what did the old fuck do? Fly Ralph Lauren up there to decorate?”
“It’s a nice place,” Quentin said. “I like it up there.”
Sandra pulled the catalog across the table.
“Hey, hold on now, this is nice. Maybe we should keep it in the family.”
“I am keeping it in the family,” Quentin said.
“No, I mean for everybody.”
“Don’t queer the deal here,” Harold said. “The valuations are solid. Squinty gets a $750,000 cabin in the woods, and we each pick up another three mil and change. You want some rustic joint to rough it in, you can buy one with your three mil. Buy one someplace nice, like Aspen, where they’ve got stores. Where this place is, it’s a two-hour drive to get toilet paper.”
