Not yet.
So he had a whole evening planned for her, didn't he? But there's always a party pooper in the crowd…
When I burst into the bathroom with the.45 in hand, he practically jumped out of the tub. The hot bubbles were going, and more drinks sat on the edge, but I motioned with the gun for him to sit down and stay put. The girl didn't notice me, or anyway didn't notice me much. She was half unconscious already, leaning back against the tub, a sweet little nude with hooded eyes and pert handfuls with tiny tips poking up out of the froth like flowers just starting to grow.
I held the gun on him as he frowned at me in seeming incomprehension and I leaned over and lifted the girl by a skinny arm out of the tub. She didn't seem to mind. She might have been a child of twelve but for the cupcake breasts. If I hadn't got here when I did, she wouldn't have ever got any older. She managed to stand on wobbly legs, her wet feet slippery on the tile. I took her chin in my free hand. "I'm the cops. You want to leave. Wake up! This bastard doped you."
Life leaped into her eyes, and self-preservation kicked in, and she stumbled into the other room. I left the door open as I trained the gun on Kratch.
He was a handsome guy, as far as it went, with a pockmarked ruggedness. His hair was gray and in tight Roman curls, his chest hair going white too, stark on tanned flesh.
And he frowned at me, as if I were just some deranged intruder-he didn't have to fake the fear.
"My name is Grossman. I'm an insurance salesman from Nebraska. Take my money from my wallet-it's by the bed. You can have it all. Just don't hurt the girl."
That made me laugh.
She stuck her head in. She was dressed now. Didn't take long with those skimpy threads.
"Thank you, mister," she said.
"I never saw you," I said. "And you never saw me."
She nodded prettily and was out the door.
I grinned at him. "Alone at last. Are you really going to play games, Kratch?"
He smiled. "Almost didn't recognize you, Hammer. You're not as young as you used to be."
"No, but I can still recognize a piece of shit when I see one."
"No one else will. I'm a respectable citizen. Have been for a long, long time."
"I don't think so. I think Grossman is just the latest front for your sick appetites. How many young girls like that have you raped and killed in the past ten years or so, Kratch? I will go to my grave regretting I didn't kill you the first time around."
"My name isn't Kratch." The fear had ebbed. He had an oily confidence-if I was going to kill him, he figured, I'd have done it by now. "It's Grossman. And you will never prove otherwise. You can put all your resources and connections behind it, Hammer, and you will never, ever have the proof you need."
"Since when did I give a damn about proof?"
The radio made a simple splash going in, like a big bar of soap, and he did not scream or thrash, simply froze with clawed hands and a look of horror that had come over him as the deadly little box came sailing his way. I held the plug in and let the juice have him and endured the sick smell of scorched flesh with no idea whether he could feel what I was seeing, the all-over blisters forming like so many more bubbles, the hair on his head catching fire like a flaming hat, fingertips bursting like overdone sausages, eyes bulging, then popping, one, two, like plump squeezed grapes, leaving sightless black sockets crying scarlet tears as he cooked in the gravy of his own gore.
I unplugged the thing, and the grotesque corpse slipped under the roiling water.
"Now you're fucking dead," I said.
Contributors' Notes
Brock Adams is the author of Gulf, a collection of short stories. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, A capella Zoo, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among many others. He grew up in Panama City, Florida, and studied at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, where he received his MFA. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they both write and teach at USC Upstate.
▪ "Audacious" had a simple beginning: I wanted to write a story about crowds. There's something fascinating about the level of anonymity that can exist even when surrounded by hundreds of people. I knew who Gerald was, and I knew who Audi was, but I had nothing of the story planned other than them sensing each other's loneliness in the midst of a crowd. They took it from there.
I'm amazed at the success that "Audacious" has had. When I wrote it, I had no idea if it worked at all. The others in my workshop panned it. They wanted to see Audi steal from Gerald. They wanted to see Gerald and Audi have sex. They wanted lots of things and I ignored them all, and the story works as it is: simple and sad. It taught me the most important thing I learned in schooclass="underline" you have to know when to listen, but sometimes you have to know when to ignore everybody else.
Eric Barnes is the author of the novel Shimmer (2009), an IndieNext pick that is a dark and sometimes comic novel about a person who's built a company based entirely on a lie. He also has published short stories in Raritan, Washington Square Review, North Atlantic Review, Tampa Review, and a number of other journals. He has been a reporter, editor, and publisher in Connecticut, New York, and now Memphis. Years ago he drove a forklift in Tacoma, Washington, and then in Kenai, Alaska, worked construction on Puget Sound, and froze fish in a warehouse outside Anchorage. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the publisher of three newspapers covering business and politics in Memphis and Nashville.
▪ I wrote the first version of "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" a number of years ago, as part of a series of stories about Tacoma, where I grew up, and four friends who lived there. They are all very dark stories, and every time I reread one, I like them even more, yet am also slightly more disturbed that I was ever able to write them in the first place.
Lawrence Block has been doing this long enough to have collected lifetime achievement awards from Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the (U.K.) Crime Writers Association. He'll be publishing two books in 2011, A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.
▪ I'd written a couple of short stories about a young woman who picked up men for sex, went home with them, had a fine time in bed with them, and capped it off by killing them. I couldn't get her out of my head, and found myself wondering why she was doing this, and how she got this way, and where she was going with it. "Clean Slate" was the result.
Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film.
Both Collins and Mickey Spillane (who died in 2006) received the Private Eye Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Eye.
▪ Mickey Spillane said to his wife, Jane, just days before his passing, "After I'm gone, there'll be a treasure hunt around here-give everything you find to Max. He'll know what to do." Mickey was the hero of my adolescence, and the direct inspiration for my career. So it's hard for me to think of a greater honor.
Jane, my wife, Barb, and I went through the voluminous files in Mickey's three offices in his South Carolina home. Among the treasures discovered were half-a-dozen incomplete Hammer novels-all running 100 manuscript pages or more-and three of these (thus far) have appeared: The Goliath Bone, The Big Ban g, and Kiss Her Goodbye. We also discovered a number of shorter fragments that I felt would be better served as short stories.