End Of The Year Collection - 2014

by Spain, Laura

  “Felix Fixit,” Billy sputtered, gasping. “Felix Fixit. You know him?”

  The Cowl cocked her head and stared at Billy for a long moment, silent. He could hear a high electronic whine, cycling, cycling. Then it stopped. The Cowl nodded. “Felix Johnson, a.k.a Felix Fixit, a.k.a. Mr. Fixit. Weapon-maker for the Super Villain set. Yeah, I know him. What about him?”

  Billy swallowed.

  And lied.

  “He’s making a… a… ah…” a sudden burst of inspiration, “a back-brace leg thing! The Cowl, the old Cowl, he fucked The Sick Man up before the Sick Man finally killed…ah…” She leaned in, close and menacing, and Billy shrank back, talking fast. “Felix is making an exoskeleton to prop him up, like a brace or—”

  “I get the idea,” she snapped. “What about him?”

  “He knows. Felix Fixit knows. He knows where The Sick Man is holed up. He’s gotta deliver the brace when it’s done, right? So, he knows.”

  One beat.

  Two.

  “Felix Fixit,” The Cowl said, slow and considering. “Is he still in that warehouse by the docks, the one with the sub-levels? Where he built that robot dirigible army?”

  Billy shook his head. “The Blimp-bots? No. He’s in that old mega-mall, the one Fistor the Unstoppable wrecked until Captain Awesome, uh… stopped him. He’s in there making super-suits. Weapons. Meth. Lots of money.” The bastard.

  Silence.

  The Cowl straightened. She stood over him and stared down. “If you’re fucking with me, I’ll come back here and stomp you into paste.”

  Billy nodded, swallowing, “Ok. Yeah. No. I—I wouldn’t like that.”

  “The Cowl’s still in town, Billy Torch, so it’s time for you to retire. Go find yourself a nice new life and get lost, you understand?” She dug in the bag slanted across her back and pulled out the familiar shape of The Cowl’s grapple gun—a pneumatic tank, some copper tubing, and a claw of serrated iron spikes. The old Cowl once shot me in the ass with that thing, Billy thought. It hurt. A lot.

  She raised the grapple gun over her head. Pafffft! A blast of compressed air. The spikes disappeared into the night sky, the line unspooling. There was a thunk somewhere high above. “Consider this your only warning.” The grapple gun clicked and whirred and she started to rise up into the dark. “If I see you again, Billy Torch, I’ll bury you.”

  The sky ripped open with a brilliant white flash of lightning, thunder booming right on its heels.

  Billy turned his head, squinting, shielding his eyes.

  He blinked his vision clear and there were figures lining the rooftops above him, silhouetted by the lights of downtown. They stared down at him, men and women as still as statues, looming like gods above him. Wings flexed. Capes snapped in the wind. He saw stern faces, colorful costumes and masks lit by glowing auras and gleaming weapons that crackled with alien energies.

  “Get out of town, Billy Torch,” The Cowl warned, her slim silhouette joining the others along the roof’s edge. “I’ll be watching.” He saw a flash of red goggles.

  Lightning cracked, a searing blue fork across the sky. Thunder boomed so loud, he felt it in his chest. It rocked the world and rattled the ground. He covered his face and when he peered around his hands again, the Supers were gone, the rooftops were empty.

  He was alone.

  Left in the gutter.

  Tossed aside like trash. Churned up and spit out.

  Thank God.

  He sagged with relief, soaked in blood and muddy water and filth. His ribs were screaming at him, his chest was tight, but he laughed. “Ow…” He imagined Felix getting his ass kicked, that slimy smirk of his smashing under The Cowl’s heavy fists.

  And laughter burbled up out of him.

  More thunder, like the world had cracked in half, and then the rain began to fall. The fat drops were as cold as ice, slow at first, then faster, soaking him.

  And he laughed. “Ow… shit,” still laughing.

  I hope it hurts, Felix, you fucker, he thought, I hope it hurts. And once those super-assholes are done with you, I’m gonna slip in and get what’s mine… for free. He tried to sit up, but fell back again, a burst of white hot pain shooting up his side. Or maybe not. His mouth was full of blood and he spat a red wad, slouching back into the garbage and the wet. Ah, fuck. He couldn’t move his leg, it was twisted up underneath him, throbbing, shooting stabbing pain. It hurt like crazy. He squeezed his eyes shut, leaking hot tears.

  Goddamn Cowl.

  It would hurt more in the morning. He wheezed and groaned, wincing as the rain fell and he tried to lever himself up off of his injured leg. But at least that cheap-ass, little nickel-and-diming son of a bitch will get his ass kicked too. And he wheezed laughter.

  At least there’s that.

  Sometimes, you gotta appreciate the little things.

  Devil’s Mill

  by Fred McGavran

  The land has a liar’s smile, alluring and concealing. Even after 250 years of farming and logging and mining, it still greens up in the spring, covering the ravaged earth with the sheen of new birth. The fields are too small to support a family above the subsistence level, and the Appalachian foothills keep anyone from combining the plots into a larger farm. Frustrated and embittered, the inhabitants often turn their rage against each other. Family feuds, usually sparked by a land dispute or a rape, stretch across generations.

  The detritus of this culture are their weapons: long rifles carried through the Cumberland Gap by the pioneers, and Civil War muskets and pistols looted from the corpses of ambushed wagoners and soldiers. Passed from generation to generation, embellished by tales of how they had been acquired and the men they had killed, they embody the mystery and the savagery of the place. Some are still in use.

  In the 21st century, however, collecting firearms has become a rich man’s sport. I drive up through the Cumberland Gap to Lazard County every year or so, listening to the old stories and waiting until grandpa has to part with the family long rifle to pay for another operation, or his heirs, lured by tales of Las Vegas and Miami, decide to sell off his cherished percussion cap revolver. Then I take them to auction in Cincinnati and collect a commission for something that was first bought with blood.

  * * * * *

  “Go ahead, Lowry, show it to him,” the old man said.

  The boy, who had been watching from the door, came over to us carrying something wadded up in a newspaper. We were sitting at the counter in the town’s only restaurant, drinking coffee and talking about the University of Kentucky basketball team. Both Lowry and his grandfather were dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, work shoes and baseball cap, standard issue for Eastern Kentucky farmers. Like most boys, his hair was cut short, making his ears stand out and the cap look too big.

  “Lowry collects arrows,” his grandfather said.

  He wasn’t the first kid who thought he’d made his fortune finding a flint arrow head or spear head. I had grown up on a farm myself, getting up to milk the cows in the frozen dawn and the hottest days of summer, and thought I knew how to talk to them. Going along with it so they wouldn’t be embarrassed, I took the package and unwrapped it carefully. An arrow head like a four sided spike—badly corroded—was inside. Holding it up to the light, I could see a piece of the shaft was still in it.

  “Where’d you find it, Lowry?” I asked.

  “Up around Devil’s Mill.”

  His voice hadn’t started to change yet, and he spoke excitedly, like a kid who had just knocked in two runs. Everything else in the place was worn out and exhausted: the Formica countertop was discolored and thin, the chrome rim was disfigured, and the color had been beaten out of the linoleum floor by years of heavy footsteps and nightly swabbings.

  “Think it’s worth anything?” the old man said.

  A lifetime as a dirt farmer in Eastern Kentucky had made him as hungry for money as a hedge fund operator.

  “It’s what they call a bodkin point,” I said. “Archers used it i
n the Middle Ages.”

  “None of our people ever hunted with arrows,” the boy said.

  His grandfather raised his hand to quiet him.

  “Can you test it out?” the old man asked. “Lowry thinks it’s pretty old.”

  In Eastern Kentucky, you don’t often hear a man in his sixties defer to a kid. I looked at the boy again. Something about the way he was looking at me, as if one eye were focusing behind me, almost made me shiver.

  “It was stuck in a stone at the mill,” Lowry said, breaking the mountaineer’s code of never volunteering anything.

  Devil’s Mill was an abandoned mill at the highest elevation in the county. The old man’s family had been farming the slopes below it since before the Revolution.

  “I can get them to test the shaft at the university for age, but the head, I don’t know.”

  “Thanks, Glen,” the old man said, delighted I had vindicated him in the eyes of his grandson.

  “How long will it take?” Lowry asked.

  “I’ll let you know in the fall.”

  * * * * *

  Strung out between a coal yard at one end and the elementary and high schools at the other, Addleton is cupped between two hills that confine it more securely than a razor wire fence. The only entertainment was the VFW hall a block from the garage, and for most residents the only way out was the cemetery on the other side of the high school practice field. What business there is revolves around the courthouse in the center of town, the largest employer in the county. The gas station was the only enterprise besides the restaurant, a barber shop, a beautician, and a five and dime store still operating on the square. Kids dropped by to brag about the high school basketball team and talk about the cars they would buy when they hit it big.

  Gary Shanks, the owner, let them hang out in his office while he and an assistant worked on cars in the two bays. Always in gas station greens, Gary, somewhere in his forties, had fading black hair and a tolerant expression that invited confidences from his customers. When these involved old guns, he passed them along to me, and I would pass part of my commission on to him in cash.

  We did pretty well with a Henry rifle, the first repeating rifle ever issued to the U.S Army that a customer brought in to trade for a new transmission for his truck. We appraised it for $60,000, and it brought over $200,000 at auction. The customer blew his share on a trip to Vegas, while Gary and I celebrated by going to a UK game in Lexington.

  The office had a beat up gray government surplus desk and chair, a cash register with large keys and locked cashbox, and soda pop and candy vending machines. The boys would always find a reason to go through the door with the “Caution” sign into the bays to see the latest pin up on the calendar. Sometimes I’d let them sit in the driver’s seat of my Mercedes and even bought them pop to get them talking, the same as I’d open a bottle of bourbon with their fathers. Most of the time all I heard was kid talk, but every now and then one of them says something that I remember. Lowry was at the gas station drinking soda pop with some older boys when I drove through in the fall.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Something went wrong with the test,” I said. “They got a bad reading.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was as disappointed as a kid whose his birthday party has been cancelled.

  “According to the radiocarbon analysis, the shaft is between six and nine hundred years old.”

  His expression changed to wonder and delight, as if he’d won a trip to Cincinnati to see the Reds play.

  “That can’t be right,” I tried to explain.

  “What about the arrow head?”

  “All they could say is that nobody’s ever made steel in Kentucky with that proportion of carbon to iron.”

  Both his eyes were focusing on me, and he was smiling. The older boys were looking at him with something approaching respect, and I had the odd sensation that I had just passed some sort of a test with a seventh grader.

  “Thanks, Mr. Osborne,” he said, shaking my hand. “Grandpa said I could trust you.”

  The other boys stared at me in awe. It was the first time they ever heard that an outsider could be trusted.

  * * * * *

  It usually takes as much time to learn who these people are as to gain their confidence for a sale. I had met Tom Grimes, Lowry’s grandfather, at the restaurant in Addleton a decade earlier. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he was waiting for a verdict in a manslaughter case against his son, Tom, Jr. in the courthouse across the street. His friends—all farmers—introduced me to distract him. After about an hour, the bailiff came in and said it was time. Tom, Jr. was convicted and was sentenced to 15 years in the state penitentiary.

  That’s how Lowry came to live with his grandfather. No one ever said what happened to his mother. Piecing things together, she was either the cause of the death that sent Tom, Jr. to prison, or she may have been the killer herself. Some men around here still stand up for their women, even when it comes to covering up a murder.

  Desperate for money to pay the lawyers for an appeal, the old man called me in Cincinnati to say he had a Kentucky long rifle from the golden age, refitted in the distant past with a percussion cap firing mechanism. The brass fittings had never been polished, and the raised wood carving on the stock had never been cleaned, making it even more valuable to collectors. We appraised it for $10,000 and sold it for $15,000. Surprisingly, our in-house specialist told me that it had been fired recently. I was so happy to get it that I forgot that one reason to suddenly put up a firearm for auction was to get it away from a forensic examiner investigating a death.

  Tom Grimes, Sr. was one of the last old time farmers left in Lazard County. He continued to plant corn as a cash crop and fruits and vegetables for his own use, and even had a few dairy cows. The problem was the neighbors. Marijuana had become Kentucky’s largest cash crop, larger even than California’s. It was easy enough to plant the seedlings in a field shielded from the road by corn, and National Guard helicopters looking for marijuana were taking more ground fire in the’90s over Lazard County than they would the next decade in Iraq.

  A corn field was too much for a lazy or a ruthless man to resist, knowing he could rip out the center, plant it with marijuana and sell it for more than Tom Grimes could earn in a lifetime growing corn. Knowing his neighbors well, Tom, Sr. guarded his land in the traditional way, not making his son’s or daughter-in-law’s mistake of leaving a body to draw the attention of law enforcement. So after a wandering neighbor or two disappeared on a jaunt to Devil’s Mill, the old man’s land was safe. At least it was safe until a new generation rose up looking for vengeance.

  Despite the money from the antique rifle, Tom, Jr.’s appeal was denied. Fifteen years is a long time to spend in the penitentiary, magnified by the daily threats and promises of revenge from the dead man’s relatives. A man raised in the mountains can take a lot, but the confinement and the terror can break him. A month after he lost his appeal, Tom, Jr. hanged himself in his cell. His cellmate, Jarrell Lee Taylor from Lazard County, said he hadn’t heard a thing all night.

  * * * * *

  “What’s the most valuable gun there is?” Lowry asked me a couple of years later, standing around the vending machines in the station office with several other kids.

  He was starting to fill out after a growth spurt: nearly six feet tall with unruly black hair tucked under a bigger UK baseball cap and wearing the same tattered jeans and Nikes they all somehow found the money to buy at the shopping center in the next county.

  “I guess that would be a Colt Patterson percussion cap revolver,” I said.

  “Why’s it so valuable?”

  “Only 1,000 were made, and only about half of those are accounted for.”

  “What’s it look like?” one of the other boys said.

  “About this big,” I said, holding my hands about a foot apart. “What’s unusual is that the trigger doesn’t drop into place until it’s cocked.�
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  “Your uncle’s got one of those, doesn’t he, Danny?” Lowry said, turning to a kid well over six feet, heavy and already hardened by life on the farm.

  The big kid glared at Lowry.

  “Does he have the case?” I asked, feeling my heart beat faster, like a hunter moving in for the kill.

  “What’s so important about the case?” the big kid demanded.

  “You need the bullet mold and tools to load and fire it. Makes it really valuable if you have it.”

  “You ever seen the case, Danny?” Lowry said.

  “You shut the fuck up,” the big kid said, clenching his fists.

  Lowry looked at him as coldly as if he were a deer in his sights.

  “You shut the fuck up.”

  The other boys knew the tone and started to draw back, the same as they would in a few years when someone pulled a gun in a bar.

  “Come on, guys, let it go,” I said.

  Danny shifted, another kid said, “It’s alright, man,” and their anger seemed to pass like a summer cloudburst. After they left, I asked Gary about the big kid.

  “Danny and the rest of the Taylors are a little down the mountain from Devil’s Mill,” he said. “They’re nearly as dangerous to tangle with as the Grimes.”

  Somehow, though, Lowry was different from the other kids, who couldn’t wait until they were old enough to drop out of school and go to work in the mines or the marijuana fields. Maybe living at the highest point in the county gave him a vision the others lacked. He was also the only one I ever saw carrying a school book.

  “You know what Mr. Lutz told us today?” he exclaimed when he was in high school, throwing open the door to the gas station.

  Mr. Lutz was the high school history teacher.

  “Addleton is named for a man who came here looking for Welsh speaking Indians.”