kid like his mother. I’d sneak into her whisky stash when I could and drink myself stupid. Self-medication is the stuff of the angels. I guess this time those nasty knots triggered when I saw the unfamiliar car parked out front. Things change in five years, maybe she’d bought a new one, but it didn’t feel right. I was going to barge right in, catch her in the act—maybe beat up some poor jerk before I slapped her around, then forgave her. Stuff like that helped the gut knots go away. And Gloria got off on the drama. It made her hot—we fed off each other—the perfect match. Damn, I’d missed her. Ordinarily I don’t like confrontation this early in the morning. It’s something you gotta work up to, you know?
The door was locked.
So I knocked.
Really hard.
The guy that opened the door stood there in his bathrobe and looked at me like a tattered question mark, probably trying to place my face in his memory bank.
“Where’s Gloria?” I bellowed, trying to push through him and past him.
He was strong for an old guy and was on me like a toad’s tongue on a swamp fly before I knew what hit me. It was his fist. But it hurt his hand as much as it hurt my jaw, so I landed a good one below his rib cage while he paused to shake his aching hand. I lost my balance—landed on the hardwood floor with an undignified thud. That pissed me off, as you can imagine. He dove after me and I managed to trip him. He fell to the floor. I got myself upright before he could. Then I lost it. I kicked the holy shit out of him. He cowered in a fetal position and I didn’t stop until he stopped moving. My stomach felt better already. He was still breathing as he looked up at me. He groaned something so muffled I could barely hear him.
The words finally registered.
“I bought this place a month ago,” he’d said, then passed out.
That’s when I went totally bug-shit.
I ran out the front door to the side of the house, kicked the lattice away and wiggled into the crawlspace, through the dust and spider webs and empty, rusting paint cans. I hate to say I was bordering on frantic, but that’s what I was and there isn’t a better word for it. I was so frantic that I dug in the dirt until my fingers bled. I was still digging long after I knew that the loot I’d hid was just as gone as Gloria. I’d never told Gloria I’d really done it. A guy has gotta cover his bases, right? But, even dumb as she was, she must have figured things out back when I told her not to sell the house. She’d probably gone through every square inch of the place until she found it. Female greed and pure determination won out. In my mind, I saw her on some tropical island, drinking something sweet and strong with a little pink umbrella in it, boasting a tan and laughing at me.
She was probably getting serviced by some gigolo with a moustache—named Julio or Enrique or something like that.
The heartless bitch.
I didn’t like being laughed at.
Everything that happened, up to that and after that, was all Gloria’s fault. I’ve got nobody to blame but her.
My bloody fingers were still digging through dirt when the cops pulled up. I froze in my hiding place, stopped breathing, but eventually they spotted me. They pulled me out kicking and screaming and babbling, covered in spiders and sweat and dirt and my own piss, devoid of all dignity.
One more trip in the back of one more squad car. Hell, it was probably the same one. The scenario was getting too familiar. Like I said, there’s no such thing as a perfect day. Seems the guy I’d roughed up came to long enough to dial 911 before he passed out again. Just my luck, right?
They grilled me for three days and nights. The dumbest question, the one that drove them nuts, was what the hell was I doing digging in the crawlspace? Damned if I would tell them. Then they’d know I was like every other con who’d swore he was innocent. It was the mantra of the incarcerated. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of telling them the loot had been under their big, flat feet all the time. Of course, if they hadn’t figured I was guilty from the get-go, I wouldn’t have been put away for that robbery in the first place. The snakes were squirming around in my stomach again and I had no way to let off steam. My thought processes were starting to fog. Interrogations do that.
The morning of day four it hit the fan. The bastard I’d beaten up had died from his injuries. Things got fucking serious after that. The son of a bitch, I didn’t hit him that hard.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the details of the trial, the ankle chains, the long, boring ride to the penitentiary. For me it was just business as usual.
God sure as hell gave me the middle finger this time.
Thanks a lot, Gloria.
So, here I sit in a smaller cell in a bigger prison, reading the same old crap and sleeping with one eye open so I don’t get it from behind, if you know what I mean. I’ve got lots of time to think. The rest of my life. Some things I still don’t have quite right in my head. I wonder sometimes what I really miss the most—losing the loot—losing my freedom—or losing Gloria.
Damn, I just don’t know.
But I sure as hell miss her visits.
DEAD MAN’S DANCE
Land’s End, Cornwall 1649
High upon the cliff, overlooking the wild Cornish sea, the event unfolded in a mood as vacillating as the gray morning sky. The small crowd gathered like the overhead clouds, giggling, muttering, then silent, as shards of sunlight strangled in the thickening fog. The fingers of mist clung to the cliff-side as if they feared the churning sea below, then moved like tendrils around the half-obscured gnarl of twisted oak.
There was laughter, as if they’d gathered for a Sunday picnic, their voices muffled by the roar of waves crashing against solid rock. The sea spewed its vengeance upward toward the restless, hostile sky, its spray sifting downward to baptize the assemblage. They stood in a circle, and in the center of the circle stood he, tall and ominous, cloaked in black, stoic and still.
Waves of agitation rippled through the crowd as two men secured a rope on a high, sturdy branch of the old oak. One of them spoke to the other as he tightened the knot:
“Would’a be fittin’ if the witch finder Matthew Hopkins were here for to find the rest of ’em heathens.”
“Twenty shillings saved, for he’m be dead as salted mackerel, my dear Michael. An’ besides, we don’t be needing a furriner in our midst—bein’ privy to business better handled by our own.”
Michael fashioned a noose, then said, “We shoulda killed his wicked father before he spawned the divil by that disease-ridden wench—and better yet to have killed his father before him. But what of the others?”
“Eff the divil finally be dead they’m be getting back to the business o’ healin’ instead o’ cursin’ I should think.”
“O’ course, o’ course,” said Michael, but his voice held no conviction. His eyes glanced at the man in black as he lowered himself to the damp ground.
The wind gusted as the men reentered the crowd. The man was turned over to them, his hands tied behind his back. They held firmly to his arms, as if unsure the bindings could confine him, and pushed him beneath the oak. The man held his head high as he ascended the makeshift ladder, smiling at the gathering
