Dirty Words - [2]

Uh, yeah. I'm her, too.

Again, if you've already read that one, I'm reeeeeeally sorry. But hey, you still got nine more stories here!

Lemme explain (again…)

After the first issue, I hard-marketed the website online and at BoucherCon, the annual crime writing festival. For issues two and three, I was FLOODED with submissions.

Issue four? Sahara. Still managed to put a great issue together.

Then, two days before we were set to launch the issue, a writer inexplicably pulled his piece (this is also why that cover is so shitty and slapped-together-looking). In response, I panicked, made a pot of coffee and stayed up all night writing the story.

The next morning, seeking a new pen name, I accidentally stepped on the apple fritter my wonderful wife had brought me while watching the previous night's UFC interview with Dana White.

Bada-bing, bada-boom, Dana Frittersmash.

Next thing I know, THAT story is nominated for a Derringer.

Although I have to admit that I did emit a few chuckles when I read the letter from the Derringer committee asking for Ms. Frittersmash's contact info.

Again, whoopsie.

And that was that. I never wrote another story under a pen name, although I should, considering the amount of accolades my alter-egos receive.

Maybe my reputation precedes me…ENJOY, FUCKO!

So Long, Johnnie Scumbag

Johnnie sat behind the glass partition in his prison oranges, huffing a Newport. Obese, pale and tired-looking, jail hadn't been kind to him. Not that it's particularly kind to anybody. His dyed black hair was starting to show its brown roots, giving his head a layered chocolate cake look. Johnnie smelled bad to begin with, but the stint in lock-up wasn't doing his hygiene any favors. It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that I could smell him through the inch and a half of plexiglass. I tried to cover his stink of garlic mixed with wet dog by chain smoking, until the guard informed me of the no smoking policy.

Christ. Can't even smoke in jail. I wondered what the hell passed for currency on the yard since 2003.

I'd just have to breathe through my mouth then. What I needed was a drink. As it was, I interrupted my day's barflying to see Johnnie in the first place.

"T.C., I need you on this, man," he said. Not that he didn't cut a pathetic picture to begin with, but his blubbering only made him seem fatter. Maybe it was my own word association with blubber.

"Tell me why I should, Johnnie."

"'Cause I didn't do this!"

"Again Johnnie, tell me why I should give a shit." I wanted an answer and I wanted it fast. I didn't enjoy being at Riker's, even if it was a friend in there. And in case you didn't have it figured out by now, I'm not a big fan of Johnnie Scumbag's. Nobody really is. The people who like him call him Johnnie Scumbag.

"Because I don't have a lot of time and you're the only person who can do it."

I wasn't, but I was probably the only one who'd shown up when Johnnie called. My services, no matter how mundane, don't come cheap. In the sudden economic slide in New York City, jobs had been so scarce lately that I was even willing to show up for Johnnie Scumbag. Most people who would've been clients a year ago tried to do their own work instead in order to save a few bucks. Most of them wound up on Johnnie's side of the glass. If they were lucky.

"Convince me with a number," I said.

"Five grand," Johnnie said, hopefully.

"Six." I tried to keep my feet from fidgeting in my shoes. Jail gives me the heebie-jeebies. Probably because something deep inside told me that I would end up in one eventually.

"Why six?"

"Jeannie Giammarino told me to remind you that you owe her a grand off the last Klitchko fight."

"What, she think I was gonna welsh?" Johnnie puffed his chest out in a pose of dignified disbelief.

"The fight was in January. She's been waiting five months."

"I was getting the money together."

"Yeah. And the check's in the mail." He spoke to me as if I didn't know him and his history. The nickname "scumbag" wasn't put on people known for their high standards of integrity.

Johnnie didn't like my attitude. "Then maybe you should help me because I know what you really do, T.C." He flashed a smirk that I wanted to peel off with a lemon zester.

I let his words hang for a bit. I felt a smile play across my own mouth. "You threatening me, Johnnie?" My words were ice. My look was colder.

Johnnie quickly reconsidered his tactic. "No, no T.C., I…I mean…I know you can help me." Beads of sweat popped out on his face. "That little bastard Tino's setting me up."

I sucked in my upper lip. "Tino's girlfriend is dead. Seems to me like a damned stupid way to be setting you up."

"The guy gets robbed, see? He lives on Sullivan Street, for chrissakes. There's a junkie every ten feet since they got shoo-flyed out of Washington Square. He tells the cops it was me and here I am."

Truth was, despite everything else that made him a piece of shit, Johnnie was no killer.

Fuck it. I needed income.

"Give me the names."

The deal.

Tino, one of the last people in the Tri-State area who had any faith in Johnnie, let him stay with him a bit while he was "between apartments." I'd be more likely to believe that if Johnnie ever had an address for more than a couple months at a time. He'd attach himself like a tick to someone until they wizened up and changed their locks. Problem was, Johnnie's few possessions were still in Tino's after his keys stopped working. Up to that point, everyone else had returned Johnnie's stuff if only to guarantee his absence from their lives. Tino thought differently. Johnnie was going to pay him back all of the money he owed or else his stuff would hit the furnace. Then Tino comes home one night to find his girlfriend Nina dead on the floor, the apartment robbed down to the hardwood.