Love You to a Pulp

by CS DeWildt

  And finally, much love to all my virtual friends, fans, and everyone else who understands that spending time in the dark is vital if we are to truly know the beauty of the light.

  Fuck Yous in no particular order

  S.T.

  C.P.

  E.J.

  E.K.

  Eat shit you fucking assholes.

  The excerpt below is from crime writer Jake Hinkson’s short story collection The Deepening Shade, from All Due Respect Books. And be sure to check out all of our titles at allduerespectbooks.com!

  COLD CITY

  BY JAKE HINKSON

  Graham said he needed to talk. I had to go outside for a cigarette break anyway, so we walked downstairs. Wet snow flurries pelted the sidewalks, and all the smokers wedged into a space just beside the front door to keep out of the wind. Graham motioned me away from the smoker’s nook, though. What he had to say was private. He didn’t want to say it around a bunch of cops.

  We dashed across the street to a greasy spoon where most of us ate before or after our shifts. We took a booth in the back and ordered a couple of coffees. I lit up a cigarette and said, “Let’s have it.”

  “I’m in trouble, Larry. I’m in a damn mess.”

  Graham scratched his smooth forehead. Even when I was a rookie I looked about fifty. That’s a good quality for a cop to have. Graham was thirty years old, but he looked all of twenty-one.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. He sucked in his upper lip a little and put down the cup. “It’s money. I’m in debt way over my head. It’s going to break me if I don’t do something soon. Real soon.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty grand.”

  “Jesus.”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I take it we’re not talking about student loans here.”

  He took a deep breath. “No. Dirt Bramson.”

  “Damn, kid.” I sat there smoking for a moment. He stared down at his hands. Finally, I said, “Three things you can do on a deal like this. One, you go talk to him and try to get an extension.”

  “I tried, but—”

  “Just shut up,” I snapped. “Just sit there and listen to me. You can go talk to him and try to get an extension, but Dirt’s a grade A asshole. Plus, he hates cops. He’d probably love to send someone around to break your knees. Or he might just let it leak to the guys upstairs that you’re into him for thirty g’s. So option one is out. Option two, you can try to raise the money some other way.”

  “How do I get my hands on that kind of cash?”

  I looked him straight in the eye and shrugged. “Depends on what you want to do.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What’s option three?”

  I mashed out my butt and leaned forward. “You get rid of him.”

  Graham ran his hand over his face. I’d never stared at him before—not really. I’d never noticed that he was kind of delicate looking. Odd for a cop. He was a good kid, good at his job, though. He had a deep, authoritative voice, and he didn’t take any shit from smart-mouthed dickheads, but if you just saw him walking around on the street you’d swear he was a high school math teacher.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I stirred some sugar into my coffee and took a sip. I added more sugar.

  “What would you do, Larry?”

  I sighed. “Tough to know what to do.”

  He let out a curt chuckle and shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe I got myself into this. This wasn’t how the old man raised me.”

  Graham had a daddy complex. His old man had been some kind of preacher, and the kid always beat himself up because he wasn’t John the Baptist.

  He ran his hands over his face. “It shouldn’t be tough to know what to do.”

  What can you say to that? If God wanted us to have moral clarity he shouldn’t have created us blind and stupid.

  I pushed away my coffee and stood up. “You’ll figure something out, kid. Do what you got to do. What’s more important, you or Dirt?”

  I left him sitting there and ran back over to the station. We didn’t talk the rest of the day, but that night I followed him home. He lived in a little brownstone not far away, and I tailed him in the snow. He went inside about seven.

  I parked my car down the street and sat. I smoked up the last of my pack. I had some coffee from my old green thermos.

  I’d had the thermos ten years. Mom got it for me for Christmas the year before she died.

  “You need warm coffee on a chilly stakeout,” she’d said.

  When she said it, she probably didn’t have this particular stakeout in mind.

  The kid came out of his house at about ten and climbed in his car. I trailed him at a close distance. The snow provided good cover, and I could afford to stick closer than I usually would.

  We rode across town and the kid parked a few blocks away from Dirt’s joint. It was the back room of a cigarette store. The store was owned by Dirt’s old man, a fat redneck from way down south who had a thick Mississippi accent and always acted as if he had no idea what his son did for a living. He closed up shop about six every day and left the back door open.

  I followed the kid with snow-heavy winds slapping us the whole way. I expected Graham to turn into the alley that led behind the store, but instead he walked to the front door. The place had once had a heavy gate, but some drunk had run her car into it a few months before and the old man hadn’t replaced it yet. Graham looked around, and not seeing anyone, he crouched down and picked the lock on the front door. It took him a while, but he got it open and went inside.

  I crept up to the window and saw him go behind the counter. The old man had a piece back there. Graham found it, checked it and came back around. I hustled back to my hiding place and watched him come out. He braced himself against the wind and headed down the alley.

  Why not just sneak in through the store? I wondered. Maybe he wanted to scope out the place first and make sure Dirt was alone.

  I stomped my feet to get some feeling back into my toes, and I waited. I looked down the street.

  Wet clumps of snow splattered on the sidewalk, while overhead, dirty gray clouds floated across the moon like ice drifts. Down the street I heard the damp crunch of tires.

  Headlights split the darkness and glittered off the snow in front of me. I sunk deeper into my little nook as the car got closer, sloshing through the streams of ice and water. I lost my breath when I realized it was a patrol car.

  Two man team. I could barely make them out. Gutierrez and Parker.

  Shit.

  Gutierrez was driving. He slowed to a halt in front of the cigarette store.

  The sky spit snow, and the car idled in front of the store. I waited for the gun shot.

  Gutierrez and Parker were talking. They seemed intent on whatever it was they were discussing. Then Parker leaned over and kissed Gutierrez. At first, Gutierrez didn’t move, but then he put his hand on Parker’s shoulder and pulled him closer.

  They were still making out when the gun shot exploded from the cigar shop.

  The boys looked toward the store, and Parker said something. Gutierrez threw the car into drive and they pulled away but not too fast, not too harried. The car crawled to the end of the street, its taillights bleeding over the ice and slush, and at the stop sign, it turned and disappeared.

  Less than a minute later, Graham ran out of the alley. He slipped and fell in some snow, picked himself up and bolted down the street.

  I didn’t waste time. He was barely gone before I ran across the street and down the alley. I drew my gun as I got to the back door of the cigarette store. The door was cracked, and I nudged it opened and pushed through the curtain. Dirt lay on the floor in a widening pool of blood, a single shot in the head.

  If I knew Graham like I thought I did, he wouldn’t have checked Dirt for the book. Sure enough, it was there, tucked in his back pocket.

  I pulled it out, shoved it in my c
oat and got the hell out of there.

  ***

  Two days later he came to my desk and sat down. I was eating a Pop Tart and having some coffee.

  Graham looked thin and ashen, but his blue eyes were lit up like a neon sign.

  “You hear about Dirt Bramson?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Not a big blow to humanity.”

  “Culliton and Varner are working the case.”

  “Good men,” I said. I dipped some Pop Tart in my coffee and ate it. That made the Pop Tart even better, if such a thing were possible. “Still, they have bigger fish to fry than Dirt. Everybody in town wanted to kill that hillbilly.”

  The kid nodded. “I hear Dirt’s book is missing.”

  I sipped some coffee and looked at him.

  He asked, “You hear the same thing?”

  “Unsubstantiated rumor.”

  “Yeah? It struck me as being the kind of thing someone would do for a reason.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like if they were in the book. They’d kill Dirt and then take the book.” He looked around and then leaned in. “Or they might forget the book and then someone else, say someone else who was also in there, he might come along and take it.”

  “Well, kid,” I said, “I guess that’s possible. Either way, I’m sure whoever took it disposed of it promptly. Like I said, everyone in town wanted to kill that asshole.”

  Graham shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “It doesn’t make murder right.”

  “Nope,” I said standing up. “But we have other crimes to investigate. You gotta make a hierarchy of what you’re going to care about. The murder of Dirt Bramson is pretty low down everybody’s list.”

  “And that’s all there is?” he said.

  “What else could there be?”

  He closed his eyes. “God?”

  I threw my coffee cup in the trash. “Just another unsubstantiated rumor.”