The Concrete Smile Read online

  Big loss. Too big. They had to find it. And Veranda, too.

  This fucking car. This fucking skinny girl who runs off without a word. Remmie wanted to burn the car and kill the girl, drown these two loudmouths in their own toilet bowl. He tried some deep breathing exercises, a thing he learned in his anger management courses—it was no good.

  He couldn’t fucking sleep.

  He got out of bed and put his ear to the wall. He noticed how bare his apartment looked. Sad. Pitiful, in fact. All he had in the place was a mattress on the floor, a cell phone plugged into the wall, and a mini-fridge filled with cheap beer next to the electric stove. He had a stack of paperback books, too. Old mysteries he found in a cardboard box in the alley outside his apartment building. Moody covers. Tough guys with five o’clock shadow and loaded pistols. Naked women clutching wet sheets in dingy motel rooms.

  For all Remmie knew, the books could have belonged to the skinny girl.

  He listened while the two men talked:

  “Veranda couldn’t find her own reflection in a mirror.”

  The raspy voice said, “Trust me, that girl knows what kind of money Leo Action pulls in. Don’t think she doesn’t have the balls to rip him off.”

  “If she took the car, she did it because it was easy. That’s all.”

  “Fuck if I believe that. She’s smarter than you give her credit for.”

  “She didn’t know about the cop.”

  More from raspy voice, “She does now.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Remmie banged on the wall again and said, “Can you two shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep over here.” Before he could scream at them again, a blast slammed his ears and Remmie stumbled backwards, sat on the cheap carpet. It was like being shot through a cloud; he didn’t know what was happening. His ears rang and pain started in the front of his head. What the fuck? He wiped particles of dry wall from his face, brushed dust off his hands and arms. He squinted through the darkness, tried to stand up, fell onto his knees. After a few deep breaths, Remmie stood and stared at a gaping crevice in the wall, just below where it met the ceiling; it looked like his apartment was yawning. He could see the two-by-four wall studs and some red and green electrical wires dangling through the slit. Across the room, in the far wall, he saw the splattered, pockmarked surface of a shotgun blast.

  Those scumbag motherfuckers: They shot a hole in his wall.

  Looked like Remmie needed to pay his neighbors a visit.

  Remmie Miken was starting over after a bad run.

  Divorce.

  Lost custody.

  Ten thousand dollars in gambling debt.

  Here’s a bit of advice: Know what the fuck cricket is before you start laying bets on the sport—it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than you think.

  What happened to Remmie could—he was sure—happen to almost any high school graduate. You start out alright, but you get bored. You get sick of frying catfish and mixing mayonnaise into tarter sauce. Everything starts to feel watered down; your snot-nosed kid cries a little too long each night, your wife asks a few too many questions, and your mother-in-law won’t stop talking about Oprah and her favorite reality tv shows. The double-wide starts to feel too much like a cell in the county jail.

  Next thing you know, you’re sipping from a toilet bowl in a dive bar down by the mud flats, a thick slab of hand holding you by the neck.

  Here’s the gist: They want their fucking money.

  Of course, later, there’s a whole arson plot when it comes to the double-wide. And insurance fraud. Too much bail money to think about. And collateral, what little you have. Another bit of advice: Those class rings aren’t worth a solid-shitty-half of what you paid for them. Oh, and they’re not real gold either.

  Just so you know, you know?

  Point is, Remmie Miken needed a fresh start after the first thirty-six years of his life. He thought he’d try to make it in the Big City. Give it the old junior college try. Why not? All his shit was burned up and he’d never been loved.

  Not for what he was, at least.

  How much worse could life get?

  The apartment building was low-rent, a two-story place next to a freeway on-ramp, refurbished with cheap carpet and mismatched paint. No credit check required. The property manager told Remmie not to cook meth or grow marijuana. Everything else, from Remmie’s experience in the building, was fair game. That included prostitution—the skinny girl’s vocation.

  Funny, Veranda was taking a vacation from her vocation.

  Rolling around TJ in a stolen Dodge Charger.

  Not a bad way to do it if you asked Remmie. He rode the city bus to work, and thinking about it made him want to scream. Anyway, he was used to living with scum. Hell, he was used to living in scum. But Remmie needed sleep; he needed it so he could go back to making limp-dick French fries in the morning. And these scumbags next door would not shut the fuck up—there was also the new decorating they’d done to his apartment. Remmie didn’t have a gun, not yet. The best he could find was a butter knife with a bent tip. He carried it in his right hand as he walked down the hall. He reached the next door apartment and pounded on the loose number seven nailed to the door. “What the fuck, man? I need to talk to you guys. I have to work in the morning and—”

  The door swung open and Remmie gasped. His voice lodged in his throat and a headache burned behind his eyes. In front of him, face speckled with blood, was a fat man with a shotgun propped on one shoulder. He smiled at Remmie—the man’s top two front teeth were missing—and said, “Nice to see you, neighbor. I could use a little help with the clean up over here. Thanks for the visit.” The fat man moved aside and waved Remmie into the room. “Come on in. Hurry on in. Don’t stand out there like a stranger. Let’s be friends.”

  Remmie slipped the butter knife into a pocket.

  He shuffled into the apartment.

  So much for starting a new life. Remmie had an odd feeling, a feeling like he was slipping out of his new skin and back into his old one.

  2

  “Now, you see here what happens when I get annoyed?” The fat man pointed at the body draped across the carpet. “And sometimes, you know, when I get annoyed, people get in the way and, shit—” He grunted and cleared his throat. “They get some bad luck coming their way.” The fat man jabbed the shotgun at Remmie; his cheeks flapped while he talked. “You the one banging on the goddamn wall? What do I have to do to have a decent business meeting in this shit hole? Here I am, in quiet palaver with my steamed colleague, and I got a fry cook,” the fat man squinted at Remmie’s ketchup-soiled pants, “thinking he’s the goddam quiet-police. You got a badge to go with that righteous dig-nation? Or maybe you think everybody keeps the same hours as a broke-ass hamburger jockey? Is that it, friend?”

  Remmie didn’t know where to look.

  He had two choices: The shotgun or the dead man.

  The body was oddly twisted across the carpet, as if the man—in blue-tinged pimp suit and wingtips—was doing ballet when he got plugged. Half his face, framed in dark oily curls, was drenched in blood; one eye was a fleshy black mass, like a tumor unveiled. From the looks of it, Mr. Pimp (raspy voice, Remmie knew by now) got half the load, and the other half plunged through the wall. A little more demo and they’d have a two-bedroom on their hands.

  The fat man sighed. “What do you call yourself? What’s your Christian name, friend?” He wagged the shotgun at Remmie. It was a finger of doom.

  Remmie grunted, felt his throat tighten. He choked out a response. “Remmie. Miken. I live in number five, just down—”

  “Howdy, neighbor. It’s nice to meet you.” He swung the shotgun toward the dead man, pumped it once, and fired. The blast filled the room, echoed like a heavy metal chord. The body shook with the gut shot. “One for fun,” the fat man said turning back to Remmie. He tossed the gun onto a worn leather sofa. “They call me Trevor Spends around here.” He smile
d and offered Remmie a hand. “Because, like the name says, I spend.”

  Remmie forced himself to shake Trevor’s hand. “Shit, I didn’t know, I mean—fuck. I didn’t figure you’d shoot the guy.” Remmie rubbed the place between his eyes, tried to scrub away the pain. His ears rang; a sharp, persistent odor of gunfire filled his nose.

  Trevor shrugged, pointed his palms at the ceiling. “Accidents happen, especially when I get pissed off. It’s a weakness, I admit it.” He looked into the dead space behind Remmie, as if conjuring a wise thought: “I got this therapist, guy says I shoot myself in the foot. You believe that? Says I let my anger run loose, like it’s a rabid dog or something. I shoot myself in the foot, he says.” Trevor laughed from the round fat belly beneath his suit and tie; he wore a blood-red tie over a black shirt—smart looking guy, even with the extra weight on him. “What I want to tell the guy, it’s that I might shoot myself in the foot, but I’d like to shoot him in the throat. Right here,” he said and lifted a finger to his Adam’s apple. He lifted his eyebrows and smirked. “But I digress, huh?”

  Remmie said, “You got blood on your face.”

  “Oh, shit. Give me a minute.” Trevor went into the bathroom adjacent to the couch, just beyond the lifeless pimp. He ran the sink and scrubbed his face with a wet towel while Remmie stared at the scene. “You know, I didn’t really care for Donny anyhow. He’s the son of a bitch who let Veranda run off, take the fucking Dodge Charger with her. I let a guy borrow my car, and look what fucking happens, will you? Motherfucker brought it on his damn self.”

  Remmie lifted his eyes from the body, traced the shape of the shotgun on the couch. If he moved fast, he could have it in his hands before Trevor finished in the bathroom. One quick step, lift the goddamn thing, point it. But wait. No, two shots fired and that meant, what? Time to reload. Fuck. Okay, Remmie. You’re going to walk out of here, let this scene be what it is. You’re going to walk back to your apartment, crawl into bed, and sleep. That’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to sleep. And when you wake up, this’ll be so far away it never happened.

  No dead pimps. No missing whores.

  And, most of all, no fat man scrubbing blood off his face.

  Except, no—you’re going to stand here, Remmie. You’ll wait.

  Trevor came out of the bathroom, wiped the back of his neck with a blue towel. Blood ran down one side of the towel, like shit stains on boxer briefs. “Remmie, my new friend,” he said, “how’d you like to make a little money?”

  Too late, Remmie. You’re stuck. “Doing what?”

  Trevor lowered his chin at the dead pimp. “Well, now we got to chop him up, toss his ass in a dumpster somewhere. What do you say? There’s five hundred big ones in it for you. And a nice breakfast when we finish.”

  Remmie licked his lips. He realized the pain in his head was gone, vanished behind dollar signs. He sniffed the air, scratched behind his head.

  Without blinking, Remmie said: “Cut him up into how many pieces?”

  3

  Ten pieces. That’s how many. Two each for the skinny arms. Two each for the legs, sawed through below the knobby knees. But you leave the torso all by itself after you cut the head off; Remmie never forgot how those dark curls looked rolling across the bathroom tile. Jeez-us Kee-rist. Trevor used a hacksaw to do the job, made Remmie watch. He leaned against the doorway, grimaced as his stomach knotted, tightened, released each time another body part came loose. Less bloody than Remmie imagined, but surreal as all hell. Trevor worked the saw like a carpenter, like he’d been doing it his whole life.

  As he went through the second leg: “I don’t expect you to do the dirty stuff, neighbor. But, hell, you got us into this.” He stopped the slicing motion of the saw and looked over his shoulder at Remmie. His brown eyes looked both alive and dead at the same time. “And that means you got to be along for the ride. The whole ride, too. Not just the tossing the bags in the dumpster stuff. I’m talking the grunt work here.” Trevor turned back to the body with an agonized grunt, bore down on the saw.

  Kee-rist, Remmie thought again. The sound made his teeth grind: Ceaseless scraping mixed with the wet tearing of skin and flesh. Remmie said nothing. He tried to watch without watching, took in the rundown bathroom with its broken floor tiles (like a shitty subway station) and dirty bathtub, red streaks thickening by the second across chipped porcelain. Remmie worked once—for a long hellish week—in a butchering factory. They did pigs there. Remmie’s job was to pull out the guts, plop them down on a conveyor belt. Five straight days, one fat pig after another, and Remmie woke up on his first day off with an unmistakable urge to slice his own throat. He quit the next day, didn’t show up for work at the factory. His wife didn’t like that decision, but that wasn’t the worst of it—Remmie could never stomach bacon again.

  Trevor finished the second leg, tossed the pieces at the foot of the bathtub. He shifted to the dead pimp’s head. The body was draped over the tub, the pimp’s neck lifted at the sky, his half-hairy chin pointed at the drab yellow lights and black mold sporing across the ceiling. “The thing with the head,” Trevor said, “is that it comes away kind of messy, but it’s an easy job. That’s why I save it for last—you don’t want to get messy before you have to. I bet you’ll agree with me there, huh?” He positioned the hacksaw slightly higher than the pimp’s Adam’s apple. Before slicing, he stopped, turned to Remmie. “Know what? I could use an apron. Last thing I need is my dry cleaning guy giving me a bunch of shit about a little blood. You mind?”

  Remmie wandered like a ghost into the kitchen, opened a few drawers, found an apron crushed into a crusty ball. He walked back to the bathroom and handed it to Trevor. The fat man set the hacksaw on the edge of the sink and slipped the apron over his barbered hair, tied it around his broad belly. On the front of the apron was a cartoon image of a slim woman in a red bathing suit.

  Trevor smoothed down the apron and studied his profile in the bathroom mirror. The glass was rutted with toothpaste stains and caked with the gunk of the dead pimp’s uncouth and sporadic grooming habits. In the glass, Trevor was a lumpy shape framed by soap scum. He turned to face himself, ran his hands over the woman’s curves. “Kiss this cook,” Trevor said. He looked back at Remmie, noted the ketchup-stained pants again, and the greasy sheen of Remmie’s boots. “Say, where in the hell do you work, neighbor? I bet I might know the place.”

  “Big Stop’s Roadhouse. Just off the highway. We got—”

  “The world’s only egg-six-ways burger,” Trevor said nodding his head.

  “You know it?”

  “Like the underside of my dick. I get the bacon burger with scrambled eggs on top. That’s one hell of a meal, if you ask me.”

  Remmie said, “I bet I’ve cooked you a burger.”

  “It’s a small world, neighbor.”

  Remmie glanced at the pimp’s limbs piled in the tub. He’d come all this way—from the podunk shit heel town of his birth, from the mustard-odor of a dog food factory during the pitiful years of his youth, from the trailer park wedding and home births of his two little boys, from the county jail lockup—and wound up a fry cook at an inner city burger joint, a grease monkey standing in a shitty bathroom while a fat man in a suit chopped up a dead pimp.

  Small world?

  Yeah, Remmie guessed that about matched.

  He said, “The smallest world.”

  Trevor picked up the hacksaw, drew it down across the dead pimp’s neck, and began his bloody work. When it came free, the pimp’s head dropped, bounced, and rolled casually across the tile floor. It ended up at Remmie’s feet, the dead man’s sky blue eyes glaring up at him from the oily frame of black curls. Jeez-us, Remmie thought again. Kee-rist.

  Trevor tossed the saw in the tub. “Time to bag this sucker up,” he said. “This is where you’re going to earn your money, neighbor.”

  “Jeez-us,” Remmie said. “Kee-rist.”

  Trevor nodded and said, �
�Amen, brother. And may he rest in peace.”

  Click here to learn more about The Bad Kind of Lucky by Matt Phillips.

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  Here is a preview from All the Way Down, a thriller by Eric Beetner.

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  CHAPTER 1

  As Dale rode up in the elevator he thought, This is it, they know everything. I’m fired and then off to jail.

  He wiped damp palms down the front of his pants as the elevator doors dinged and opened. The pebbled glass door faced him, stenciled writing in an arch announcing this was the office of the chief of police. Dale went inside and spoke to the secretary.

  “Dale Burnett to see the chief.”

  She gave him an expressionless look. “Yes, he’s expecting you, Detective. Have a seat.”

  Dale moved to the row of four chrome and leather chairs, no magazines on the shin-busting low coffee table. Behind him the secretary pressed a button on the intercom. “Detective Burnett to see you.”

  Whatever answer she got Dale couldn’t hear through the headset she wore, but he wasn’t invited immediately in. He sat.

  Fifteen years on the force. Seven since he left the beat to become a detective. All about to be thrown out the window because he’d been so goddamn stupid. A dirty cop. How the hell did that happen?

  He’d seen it over the years. You can’t be on the force and not catch a glimpse in the periphery, hiding in the shadows, creeping up the back stairs. But he’d resisted. At least he’d convinced himself he had. In truth, no one had made him an offer. And when they did…