Kzine Issue 21 Read online

  Harry knew he ought to finish running the guy off, but instead Harry said, “No, that’s okay. No need to rush. Just don’t overstay your welcome. And leave the plants alone.” Harry didn’t think he had to explain which plants he was talking about.

  “Never touch the stuff.”

  “Good call.”

  * * *

  One thing led to another, and Harry ended up offering Jason Burke a job and a place to stay.

  * * *

  Five months later, after dozens of carefully asked and answered questions, Harry drove Jason down into Innocence and showed him the town’s “world-famous” Ocean Circle Drive. It was the middle of July 1967, and the tourists were feeding like maggots in the headless carcass of a trophy hunter’s buck. The Drive was a narrow, two-lane, car-choked street. Curio shops, cafes, and arcades lined it.

  During the winter months, the Drive sat desolate and ignored, dark and dank, a drain on Innocent’s economy. But during the week of spring break and the months of June, July, and August, the shops and the cafes and the arcades threw off their winter clothing. They opened their doors and their windows, and they switched on their lights.

  Up-tempo rock music boomed out over the crowds. Barkers bawled their pitches, children shrieked over their spilled ice-cream cones, and job-weary parents yelled their threats.

  College and high school kids thronged the Drive. The draft was about to scoop them up—the boys, not their girlfriends—about to drop them into the jungles of Viet Nam, but for now, everyone could ignore it. After all, there was light at the end of the tunnel. President Johnson said so, didn’t he? It would all be over by the time they were out of boot camp.

  Yes, the tourists had returned to Innocent, and every one of them, from the youngest baby to the oldest granny, shut off their brains and spent their money.

  “There it is,” Harry said, “the Drive.”

  “Fucking-A,” Jason said. “Selling dope here would be like having a license to steal.”

  “Yes, it would, but first, you gotta have a franchise.”

  “A franchise? What do you mean?”

  “Permission from on high, that’s what I mean.”

  Jason nodded his understanding. “How do I get that?”

  “The same way I did. You buy it.”

  “Who from?”

  “The man. Who else?”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Harry introduced Jason Burke to Otis Marvin Franklin, Innocent’s chief of police. They met in Franklin’s office.

  Furniture crowded the room, and Franklin’s family pictures crowded his desk. The largest was of Chief Franklin’s son, Michael John, taken on his tenth birthday. The sharp stench of Franklin’s bargain-basement cigars permeated the air.

  After the necessary chit-chat, the purpose of which was to make it as plain as day that Franklin could crush them like the insignificant cockroaches they were, the three of them got down to business.

  Since Harry was bringing Burke into his operation, Harry would be responsible for him. If Burke fucked up, Harry’s ass was on the line right next to Burke’s. There was also Franklin’s percentage. They were talking a lot more volume, which meant a lot more risk, so, naturally, Franklin’s percentage had to go up a couple of points.

  “Understood,” Harry said.

  Then came a review of the rules: no sales to anyone under eighteen, no sales to anyone who’d sell it on to their buddies, no bookmaking or loansharking on the side, no hard drugs, no adulterated product, no special additives, and no large cash deposits in the local banks. If they hadn’t grown the product themselves, if it wasn’t absolutely pure, they weren’t selling it in Innocent.

  What they got in return was simple: the local cops wouldn’t annoy them, the sheriff wouldn’t hassle them, Franklin would warn them of any outside investigations, the local politicos would turn a blind eye, and Franklin and his boys in blue would keep out the riffraff.

  Outside, after the meeting, Jason said, “He’s taking one hell of a cut, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t be greedy. Without him, we’re dead in the water, but with him, we’re fat and happy.”

  * * *

  Fat and happy had been good enough to begin with, but after a year or two, after the Days of Rage had come and gone, Jason Burke had taken to strutting around as if he were the big man on campus.

  He wasn’t, but he was acting like it.

  He was a farmhand, and his flashy car and his fast girlfriends didn’t fit the profile of someone who worked on a farm. In short, Jason Burke was attracting attention, and attention was bad for business.

  Harry had explained the situation to Jason more than once, but Jason had neither sold the car nor dumped the girlfriends.

  By this time, the farm had become an operation they could be proud of, not just a good way to launder drug money. Harry and Jason selectively logged the timber land, a few trees at a time, and they grew silage and grazed dairy cows on the arable ground. They added a feedlot. The money rolled in, not truckloads of it, but more than enough to get by.

  In a lot of ways, pot was more of a sideline to Harry than it was his mainline. He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but the farm had grown into something he was afraid of losing.

  Jason Burke’s flashy car and his fast girls had to go.

  That said, however, Harry was at a standstill.

  * * *

  Then one fine day, Chief Franklin pulled Harry over, apparently for a moving violation.

  Rather than the usual stuff about speeding or not signaling or expired tags, Franklin said, “We’ve got a problem, which means you’ve got a problem.”

  “Jason?”

  “He’s making waves.”

  “I’m working on it,” Harry said.

  “Work harder.”

  Harry’s stomach turned sour. “How hard?”

  “Hard,” Franklin said, and walked back to his cruiser.

  By the time Harry pulled up in front of the house, he’d figured out what he had to do, exactly what hard meant, and how he was going to go about it.

  * * *

  Over dinner that night, Harry asked Jason Burke, “How’d you like to bring in a few bricks of cocaine?”

  Burke’s face broke into a wide grin. He looked like a kid who’d just been given the keys to the candy store. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s about time we branched out.”

  “What about Franklin?”

  “Who do you think suggested it?”

  “There’s a switch,” Burke said.

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s tired of being the country mouse.”

  “Well, all I have to say is, it pays to know people in high places.”

  “Indeed it does,” Harry said.

  “So how’ll we go about it?”

  “Boats are going up and down the coast all the time,” Harry said. “It’d be easy to land a couple of bricks on the seaward side of Lovejoy Rock. Call it a trial run.”

  Jason’s eyes lit up. “Great idea. No one would see a boat come ashore out there.”

  “I’ll call a guy who knows a guy,” Harry said. “By this time next month, we ought to be in business.”

  * * *

  Three weeks later, at one o’clock in the morning, just after high tide, Harry Overton and Jason Burke were standing on a narrow ledge on the seaward side of Lovejoy Rock. The basalt was jagged and irregular underfoot. It rose high, high above them on one side, looming up into the darkness, while on the other, the rock face slopped downward precipitously, disappearing beneath the tumbling, churning, hissing waves.

  The air was cold and heavy with the smell of seaweed and wet rock and bird droppings.

  Burke looked at his watch. “It’s time they were here,“ he said.

  “Yeah,” Harry said.

  “So where the hell are they?”

  “They’ll be along,” Harry said. “Maybe you ought to check the next spot over.”

  “Why? Weren’t they su
pposed to have met us here?”

  “They could have picked the wrong indentation, or they could have landed early. You never know with these guys.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  Burke turned and started along the shelf. It was several feet above the high-tide line.

  Stunted grass, bird droppings, and loose rocks covered the shelf, which had the look of a tourist-worn trail. The whole of it was slick with spray.

  The instant Jason’s back was turned to him, Harry picked up a rock. It was about the size of a grapefruit.

  For Harry, what happen next bled one event into another. They formed a disjointed flood of images and sounds and smells: Burke’s flailing arms and legs, his boots slipping. The birds shrieking as they took flight in panic. Burke’s bowels letting go.

  But the one thing that remained distinct in Harry’s mind was the clear, sharp sound of the rock splintering the bones in the back of Jason Burke’s neck.

  The body collapsed onto the ledge, rolled, and plummeted into the surf.

  Harry threw the rock, now bloodstained, after it.

  He stood there for a time, sucking in lungful after lungful of the cold sea air, wishing desperately that he could erase that last couple of years, knowing that he couldn’t, knowing, too, that he would have to live with them for the rest of his life.

  Harry had planned the blow to duplicate the sort of injury that Burke might have sustained in a fall. He would be Jason Burke: the victim of yet another tragic accident…if his body was ever found.

  It wasn’t.

  The ebbing tide had done its work, and the fish and the crabs had done the rest.

  * * *

  Now, with the late-breakfast crowd filling the Drowning Tourist, Ashley refilled Harry’s coffee cup.

  Harry nodded his thanks, and she moved on to her next table.

  Harry sipped his coffee and forced himself to think about the rest of his day. There’d be one more stop and then he’d drive back to the farm and work at farming until he didn’t want to work at farming anymore and then it would be dinner, television, and bed. The end of his turning seventy-five.

  Harry left a ten-dollar bill next to his plate, left it for Ashley, and then he went to pay his bill at the counter.

  Imogene handed him his change.

  She was looking thinner these days, and beneath the makeup, her skin had taken on an unhealthy color.

  “How’re you doing?” Harry asked.

  “Okay,” she said, giving her shoulders a tiny shrug.

  “More chemo?”

  “More chemo.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Harry said.

  He pulled a baggie packed with marijuana out of his coat pocket and passed it across to her. He’d even remembered to include a packet of her favorite rolling papers.

  “On the house,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Before things could get sloppy, Harry went out to his truck.

  He drove up the hill to Ridge Line Terrace, hung a left, and pulled into the driveway of a newer split-entry house. It was blue-gray with white trim.

  By the time he reached the front door, it was open.

  Michael John Franklin, the late Otis Franklin’s son, was standing in the entry. He had followed his father into police work and had risen through the ranks. Like his father, he’d eventually become Innocent’s police chief.

  Michael John had retired the previous year.

  He had on a gray sweatshirt, tan cotton-twill pants, and leather sandals. He had heavy wool socks on his feet. The socks were green and yellow, the colors of his alma mater, the University of Oregon.

  His eyes were watery, and his face was thin to the point of being gaunt. A football tackle in high school, he now looked as though he’d just been liberated from a World War II prison camp. Metastasized prostate cancer. He was fifty-nine.

  They sat in the living room. It was decorated with a woman’s touch, lots of fabric and frills, and family pictures—Michael John, Jean, and their three kids, all grown.

  Michael John’s awards and trophies were proudly displayed flanking the fireplace and along the mantelpiece. The awards were police-related and community-related: officer of the year, community leadership, and so on. The trophies were for things like marksmanship and fishing. There was one award for skiing. As good as he’d been in high school, he hadn’t been quite big enough or fast enough to make it in college beyond his freshman year.

  Five rosaries hung on hooks beneath a portrait of the Blessed Virgin in the dining room, which was a continuation of the living room. The rosaries, Harry knew, were well and often prayed.

  The place had the caustic smell of sickness: antiseptic, dribbled urine that hadn’t quite gotten cleaned up, the lingering odor of a recent bout of vomiting.

  “How’s Jean?” Harry asked.

  “Fine. She wants to quit teaching. Retire early, you know? But I won’t let her. She’s got better things to do than take care of me.”

  Harry tried not to react to the statement as anything but a statement of bald fact, which it was. Michael John was the last person who’d ever go begging for sympathy or false hope. He was like his father, Ottis Marvin Franklin—“the old chief”—in that regard.

  “How can I help?” Harry asked.

  “I wanna try pot.”

  “Why not go to your doctor?”

  “Because then I’d have to go to that punk Duzermann’s dispensary.”

  “I see,” Harry said, and he did. Not only would there be Duzermann to put up with, but the dispensary was too public a place for a person like Michael John.

  “Dad always said he could trust you, that you were the most honest man he’d ever known.”

  Harry felt himself blush. Coming from the old chief that was no small praise.

  A quarter of an hour later, Michael John had a baggie of marijuana, papers, and a new lighter. Harry had a few bills in his pocket, but they added up to a whole lot less than the pot’s street value.

  Michael John was the sort of man who’d take a deal but never accept a freebie.

  * * *

  Harry was home finishing dinner when Phil Duzermann showed up on his doorstep, still dressed in his wannabe-logger outfit.

  Blocking the doorway, Harry asked, “What do you want?”

  Harry kept his right hand hidden from Phil’s view. That was because Harry was holding his .45, cocked and locked, in that hand. It was the exact same pistol he’d had since the 1960s.

  “I want a few kilos of marijuana,” Phil said. “To start with.”

  “I thought I told you—”

  “You did, but hell, man, like I told you, I know you’re supplying my mom. How am I not supposed to know you’re a grower?”

  Harry had to admit that his marijuana operation was Innocent’s best-kept open secret.

  Shit. Well, what the hell. If nothing else the kid had balls.

  Harry shrugged and stood back from the door. “Come on in.”

  “Thanks,” Phil said.

  Phil walked into Harry’s front room, and Harry closed the door, simultaneously slipping the .45 into his waistband at the small of his back.

  If Phil noticed, he didn’t say anything. It was a good sign.

  They sat at the dining room table.

  “How about it?” Phil asked.

  “I’d have to register.”

  “Not your whole operation. I’ll even take care of the paperwork for you.”

  Harry thought about it. There was desperation in the kid’s voice, desperation but sincerity, too, a new level of maturity. Maybe. For sure, he wanted to make a go of his dispensary.

  Phil said, “Look, I’ll even give you an interest in the dispensary if you’ll agree to be my supplier.”

  Harry shrugged. Maybe it was time for him to change with the times.

  “No, I don’t want a piece of your business. That’s yours. What I want is to go on supplying my own clients. I don’t want to undercut you, but I deal wi
th a lot of people who can’t come to you.”

  “Okay. Understood.”

  “Then it’s a deal.”

  Phil grinned. “Great!”

  It was time to see if the kid had more backbone than Jason Burke had had.

  “One last thing,” Harry said. “How’d you like to bring in a few kilos of cocaine once in a while? Or maybe a little heroin? Just to liven things up a bit, you know? Maybe we could make a few extra bucks on the side.”

  Phil’s face fell. “Nothing doing,” he said. “I run a clean business. And just so we’re clear, if you try anything like that, I’ll turn you in to the cops myself.”

  Harry smiled. Maybe Phil had a brain after all. Harry sure as hell hoped so.

  RANDY PULASKI VS THE DEMONOIDS

  by Matthew Lyons

  Fifteen years ago, Randy got into the worst fight of his life at a Dillinger Escape Plan show in Hoboken. This was way before Hoboken was cool. It was way before a lot of stuff, actually. The band was onstage, midset, just getting into the full swing of 43% Burnt when it happened: the pit spilled over into the bar area, and some chucklefuck poseur with green liberty spikes went flying full-tilt into Randy and the tray of beers he’d scored for himself and his friends. Shit went everywhere, Randy and the poseur were both soaked with froth. They were both pissed, too. Obvious reasons. The poseur—just some townie kid, really, maybe not even old enough to be at the show—about the wave of damp seeping into his imitation-shopworn leathers, Randy about the forty bucks of beer slowly spreading across the painted cement floor. So they both squared up, totally natural, they both knew the rules, even if Liberty Spikes (who even wore those anymore? And especially not here, this wasn’t a Rancid show, for fuck’s sake) was some bullshit poseur kid or not. Old enough to fuck entirely up, spill my beer, old enough to catch the shit that follows. Fuck you anyway.

  They were ready to do it then and there, probably would’ve too, had the bouncer not been right there and coming off his break. Shit luck. Real shit luck. The dude—clearly a veteran of this kind of shit—hauled them both out into the cold, one in each hand, sending them skiddering across the rough asphalt of the back alley.

  “You girls sort it out yourselves,” the guy said, just before locking them out. The door slammed shut and then it was just Randy and Liberty Spikes.