gritty Super Short Stories

When the man came up to the counter, the clerk had just started smelling himself. He was wearing the chain’s vest with the red and blue patch and had left his name tag on the bed. He’d forgot to wash the vest because he started watching a comedy on Netflix, then watched a second and stayed up until midnight. The vest’s armpits got soaked in sweat the day before when he was unloading the truck. When the man walked up, he was thinking about having to wash the vest that night. The man put his things on the counter and started yacking like a hedge trimmer.

“Seen him move over onto the yellow median and I’m thinking he’s going to make a left, but he didn’t make a left. He kept inching along the median. I slowed down because I was afraid to pass him on the right. Me, afraid. I’m following him and he keeps driving along the median, and I’m thinking, son of a bitch, he’s getting me irritated. I kept watching the car and getting more irritated. Red Taurus. And he wasn’t drunk. The car wasn’t moving like a drunk was driving it. So, what I was saying—it moved like he was looking for an address, slowing down, speeding up, like a zoo animal. You seen a polar bear at the zoo, what they do? They pace. They pace and they tear fur out. You see what zoo polar bears look like? It looks like it has some kind of disease, but it doesn’t. Well, it does, I take that back. It’s a mental disease. They all look like that from tearing their fur out with their teeth.”

Chuckles and Full Pint sat around their shared record player, playing the game they played most nights, drinking cheap beer and listening to cheap records. The rules of the game were easy. Pick one half of a LP or a full 45, and then it was the next guy’s turn. They were currently half way through Chuckle’s pick of side-one of Lou Reed’s Rock n’ Roll Animal.

Punk nicknames were acquired in one of two fashions, either you were so cool you got something great, or, like most, you stumbled into one through unfortunate life choices. Neither Chuckles or Full Pint were that cool.

Full Pint’s real name was Jason Vala, but after a five-day bender of cocaine and Little House on the Prairie he demanded to be called Half Pint; the name of some girl in the show. After a few years of beer and fast food, the once skinny punk had ballooned to 260 and his once demanded nickname of Half Pint was ballooned to Full Pint.

Chuckles’ case was less in-depth. Originally named Charles Dearth, an evening of laughing fits thanks to huffing nitrous oxide and computer cleaner had forever deemed him Chuckles, and possibly borderline retarded.

The pair lived in a seedy part of downtown Oakland, in an apartment on a corner above a Japanese ramen house. The apartment was constantly engulfed in the smell of boiling noodles and pork belly, something both craved and neither could afford.

The apartment gave them a good vantage point of their corner. They could see everybody coming and going. They could see if friends were bumming around, or getting off the bus at the corner stop, or if there was some creditor out there, someone dumb enough to have lent them money.

If I ride hard and I ride through the night, I’ll reach Barstow by morning.

And there,

There, I’m gonna kill me a man.

Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Never had any hatred for him neither. All I have is his first name, an address, a list of things I’m supposed to say when I kill him.

Every week it’s the same thing. One name, one address, one list of things I forget as soon as I’ve read it to the poor sucker on the wrong end of my twelve gauge. Sometimes the name is someone just a few miles down the road, sometimes halfway across the country. Sometimes the name I get belongs to a girl, sometimes to a little kid, but most of them, most of the names I get are men, mid-thirties or forties, balding, in business or accounting, a job that puts their dirty hands in contact with a lot of easy money.

All of them have one thing in common.

All of them are sick.

Just another night in The City. Two million people, and it seems like half of them must be awake, despite the hour. It’s the kind of night where the cold settles into your bones like a disease, eating at you, and you can’t get rid of it no matter how much whiskey you drink or how many suspects you chase down dark alleyways, hoping that this time isn’t the last time, hoping this night isn’t the night you catch a knife in the dark.

I’m seated at the counter at Mickey’s, nursing a glass of rye and going over the details of my latest case. A string of murders, each one more grisly than the last. All the victims are girls working the streets in the poorest quarter of The City. A regular Jack The Ripper this guy is, I figure. A copycat of the worst kind.

But all of that goes out the window when this dame walks in and sits on the stool next to mine.

The smoke in Mickey’s is so thick you could cut it with a knife. This dame, she moves through it all like a divine wind, and when she turns her eyes on me, it’s everything I can do not to drop my shriveled cigarette right there on top of my notes.

“Detective William Gray?” She asks, and I can hardly think straight enough to remember my name or agree with her that must be the one I’m supposed to have. This dame, she’s a tall drink of crimson sin, all legs, red dress, ruby lips and a figure that could put a man on his knees quicker than any bullet could. “I need your help, Will.”