Ice filled Teresa’s veins. “Know what?”

  “You dumb bitch, I didn’t burn through fifteen thousand—I burned through maybe five. The other ten went to your brother, Eddie. He’s the one who brought me in. This whole thing was his idea right from the start. Suited me a lot better than stealing some jewelry from one more old asshole.”

  The realization slammed into Teresa with sickening certainty. Of course. Fucking Eddie, always whining about how Dad never gave him shit. She pushed the gun barrel against Ray’s shoulder. “Get the fuck out of the car.”

  “Okay, okay.” He opened the door, held up his hands in a surrender motion, and staggered backward out of the car, nearly falling on his ass. Teresa leaned over, slammed and locked the passenger door, turned the key, and burned rubber, leaving the California Kings Casino behind.

  She glanced back once in the rearview mirror and saw Reynaldo turning to go back into the casino. Once a loser, she thought, always a loser.

  Teresa drove straight to where Eddie was staying. She knocked on the front door of the house, which was opened by a middle-aged woman in a sweatsuit. Teresa had glimpsed her once, figured she was the mother of Eddie’s friend Rob, who lived here. “Yeah?”

  “Hi,” Teresa said, “my name’s Teresa Michaud, I’m looking for my brother Eddie—”

  The woman cut her off angrily. “He ain’t here no more. After Rob got fired from his job this morning because he was too stoned to go to work, we kicked your brother out. He’s a bad influence, sitting back there always smokin’, the two of ’em…” The woman eyed Teresa more closely and relented, pulling back her rage. “Look, I heard ‘bout you takin’ care of your dad and all, and I think you’re probably a decent person, but your brother…”

  It wasn’t the first time Teresa had heard a speech like this; it was a familiar weight pressing down on her. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.”

  She didn’t have to ask where Eddie had gone.

  His car was in the driveway at home, leaving Teresa to park her rental on the street. She came in, sent Angie home, and found Eddie sprawled in a chaise lounge in the backyard, a half-smoked joint and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s beside him as he scrolled through his phone.

  “You hear from your friend Ray yet?” Teresa asked.

  “No,” Eddie said, squinting up at her.

  At least he didn’t try to deny any of it. He also didn’t offer to return any of the money. “This is the least Dad could do for me, since he’ll probably leave everything else to you.”

  Teresa pushed down her outrage to ask, “Got one last question: what kind of split did you set up with Ray?”

  “Fifty-fifty. Why?”

  “You got suckered, moron. He got thirty thousand out of Dad, not twenty. Now get the fuck out of this house.”

  That got Eddie’s attention; he’d never heard this steel in her before. “Give me a few days, and I’ll—”

  “NOW.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t really care, Eddie. You’re no longer welcome here—not now, not ever.”

  Acting like a temperamental child, he leapt from the chaise, went inside, grabbed his duffel bag and one box, and left, slamming the front door behind him.

  Teresa turned to see Dad watching. She prepared herself for a rebuke, for a “he’s not so bad” speech. Instead, Dad walked up, hugged her, and said, “I’m proud of you, baby. I should’ve done that years ago, but you handled it like a boss.”

  Teresa knew then her luck had finally changed.

  Back to TOC

  “It’s a Man’s, Man’s World”

  Gar Anthony Haywood

  We met in a bar. How else would a story like this begin?

  The name of the bar’s not important, but I’ll mention it anyway: Jerry’s, on Northeast Weidler, Portland, Oregon. Think of any hole in the wall you’ve ever been in with only two beers on tap and nothing but disgruntled white men crowding the bar, and you’ve got Jerry’s. I was in the habit of hanging out there three nights a week when all this happened, don’t ask me why, except that a loser has to do their drinking somewhere other than inside their cracker box apartment and Jerry’s just happened to be that place for me.

  I probably saw Dennis Vance in there a few times before we actually became acquainted because he was a regular there, too. But Dennis was an easy guy to miss, hunched over his Budweiser at the bar like a mother hen over her chicks, emerging from his shell of silence only to order another round. The word “ordinary” would have fit him like a glove: tall but without any distinctive shape, lifeless brown hair, clothes right off the rack when there’s only one rack at Walmart to choose from. If the man hadn’t finally spoken to me directly, I might have gone my entire life never knowing his name.

  “You married?” he asked me.

  I’d taken the stool to his left that night and had been there for almost an hour, nursing two beers of my own, when he broke the ice.

  “Excuse me?”

  He just stared at me, eyes nearly closed, idly fingering the rim of his glass with his right hand. I was beginning to think I’d imagined the sound of his voice when he said, “I asked you if you were married. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. It’s a free fucking country.”

  I considered my options. Leave things at that or explore uncharted waters. Boredom won the day. “No. I’m not married.”

  “Good. Take my advice and stay that way. You’ll live longer.” He picked up his glass and took a long draw. I tried to think of a follow-up question and failed. He turned to me again and, as if seeing me now for only the first time, said, “She don’t know how good she’s got it.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Of course, my wife. Who else are we talking about? Free room and board. All the food she can eat. Clothes, shoes, a nice car to drive. And what do I ask in return? Blood? Money?”

  I thought it was a rhetorical question, but he was actually waiting for me to answer. I shook my head.

  “No,” he went on. “Respect. Obedience. A halfway decent lay every once in a while. What the hell’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it,” I said.

  “Goddamn right, nothing’s wrong with it. So why should I tolerate her bullshit? Tell me that. Why shouldn’t I just put a bullet in her head and be done with it?”

  Here was my first chance to get out while I still could. I didn’t take it. “Uh…”

  “Because they’d toss my ass in the joint and throw away the key, that’s why. That’s the only reason.”

  “If you were caught,” I said, surprising myself.

  He gave me another long, lingering look. Re-evaluating. I knew what he was thinking because I knew what he saw: a shapeless, harmless nobody in a pair of loose-fitting Dickies and a blue-on-gray corduroy shirt. At least, that’s what I thought I saw in the mirror every morning at the time.

  “That’s right. If I were caught.” He glanced at my half-empty beer. “You want another?”

  This was my second chance at redemption. I passed this one up, too. “Sure.”

  He waved the bartender over and ordered one more Bud for himself and a third Volatile Substance for me. Then he stuck his hand out for me to shake.

  “Dennis Vance.”

  “Rob.” I felt uncomfortable giving him my last name, but he’d given me his, so…“Rob Wolford.”

  We made small talk for a while. Where we worked, how long we’d lived in Portland, what teams we followed in what sports. But none of that was what he really wanted to talk about and our conversation soon turned back to it: his wife Ginny and his utter hatred for her. To Dennis’s way of thinking, Ginny was a symptom of a much bigger, universal problem. Women who didn’t “get it.” Women who didn’t understand their place. Women who thought they were a man’s equal in every way when, in fact, they were inferior in all the ways that really mattered. Brains. Strength. Courage.

  “Am I right?” he kept asking.

  I should have told him the truth. Just once. “No, Dennis, actually, you’re full of shit. You aren’t smarter than every woman you’ve ever met. You aren’t smarter than most of the men you’ve ever met. You’re just a little man with a big ego who needs to feel superior to women in order to have somebody to blame for your sorry existence.”

  Maybe if I had said all that, he would have sent me on my way and none of what followed would have happened. But I didn’t. I didn’t tell him the truth because I was full of shit myself back then. The twisted hard-on Dennis had for women was weirdly compatible with my own sad and conflicted feelings in those days and the noise he was making, rather than strike me as the crazed ramblings of a fool, instead sounded merely like common sense taken to an overly emotional extreme.

  So I just nodded my head as he spoke, said “yeah” every now and then, and let his burning, unhinged misogynism work me into a lather. The beers kept coming, fantasies gave way to actual designs and, before I knew it, we were planning his wife’s murder.

  Together.

  I didn’t think he was serious. That was the excuse I made for continuing to meet with him, indulge in his diatribes, and accept his free drinks. It was just a game to me, a lot of talk that would never actually come to anything. But at some point, I realized it was more than that to Dennis. Much more. He wanted his wife dead, and he was expecting me to help him kill her.

  I should have backed out. Stopped taking his phone calls and showing up at Jerry’s to discuss the next steps in our insane conspiracy. That’s what a sane person would have done. Someone with a life to protect and a conscience to adhere to. But I had no life to speak of and my conscience had been a no-show for years. I was an angry and embittered loser in my own right and, as much as I would have denied it at the time, I was getting a kick out of the idea of doing something crazy to make somebody, anybody, pay for my pain.

  I didn’t know Dennis’s wife, Ginny, but I thought I knew her kind, at least the way he described her. Lazy. Self-obsessed. Greedy. Manipulative. I’d had women like that around me all my life, starting with my mother and two sisters, and by the time I reached my early teens, I had developed a cold and dark form of misogyny all my own. Mine wasn’t quite the rival of Dennis’s, perhaps, but it was just as unemotional and mindless. And Ginny made a perfect target for it.

  So I didn’t run. Tell Dennis to get himself another accomplice and cut him out of my life forever. Instead, I went along with the program, because beyond a certain point, I realized I had no choice. Dennis was going to kill his wife with or without me, and if he got himself caught, he’d take me down, too. The only way I could save myself was to do what I could to see that he didn’t get caught. We didn’t get caught.

  And so, over the next two weeks, we talked about killing a woman the way we might have talked about building a backyard shed. Piece by piece, from the foundation up, everything built to last. No mistakes, no errors. Dennis knew what he wanted to do, but not how. His version of “how” was like that of a child, a rudimentary, unimaginative approach that would have been a recipe for disaster. That’s why he needed me. A co-conspirator who could see all the flaws in his thinking and offer him a better way. I wasn’t a killer—or at least had never seen that potential in myself prior to this moment—but true crime television was my religion, to the extent that I’d learned all the missteps killers make to get themselves arrested, tried, and convicted of murder. I knew what not to do:

  Don’t hold onto anything used in the crime that could later incriminate you (clothes or shoes, tools or weapons). Everything gets tossed afterward. Everything.

  Don’t use your own cell phone to communicate.

  Don’t do Google searches related to your plans on your home or work computer.

  Don’t buy your supplies within a hundred miles of the murder scene and don’t use your credit card to pay for them.

  The list went on and on, and I shared every line item with Dennis. Together, we came up with a plan for Ginny’s murder that should have been airtight. Dennis would kill her late one night and make it look like she’d been shot by somebody robbing their home while Dennis was out. I’d be his alibi, the two of us having allegedly been playing video games at my apartment when the crime took place, as we’d actually begun doing in recent days. Dennis would use an unregistered handgun no one knew he had and trash the trailer he shared with Ginny completely, careful to behave like an actual burglar searching for cash and jewelry, rather than someone who already knew where it all was and was just pretending to look for it.

  He’d stage the break-in expertly, operating from the outside in so that a forced-entry would appear to have occurred before Ginny was killed and not after. When he left, he’d leave nothing behind a thief, strung out on meth and in a hurry, would fail to take: cash money, rings and wrist watches, credit cards and cell phones.

  “Make sure to take everything worth stealing you can carry,” I told him. “Do an inventory now you can use later. A real burglar won’t leave anything behind that’s out in the open where he can see it.”

  Afterwards, while Dennis scrubbed any gunpowder residue from his body at my apartment, I’d drive way the hell out to Bridgeton to dispose of his clothes and toss the gun into the Columbia River, making sure to leave my cell phone and Dennis’s at home to further establish our alibi. My route to Bridgeton and back would be specifically designed to avoid any obvious security cameras that might record my trip.

  We checked and rechecked everything. I tested his memory, and he tested mine. We looked for errors, found some, and erased them. When we were finally done, Dennis was satisfied we had devised the perfect crime, and I was at least certain we had a better-than-average chance of getting away with murder.

  It was the most I could hope for and much more than I deserved.

  Then, two days before go-time, I bailed out.

  “I can’t do it. You’re on your own,” I told Dennis.

  I wasn’t a killer. It was that simple. For two weeks I’d been talking like one, trying to convince both Dennis and myself that we shared enough anger and hatred in common that I could enable the murder of a woman I didn’t even know, but I could only sustain the masquerade for so long. When the time came to put up or shut up, my courage gave out, my conscience kicked in, and I had to back out before it was too late.

  “The hell you say,” Dennis said.

  I had known what was coming. The begging and the pleading. The threats to tear my heart out. But I made up my mind, and there was nothing Dennis could do to change it. If he chose to go through with his wife’s murder now, all I’d have to live with was having helped him decide how to do it. I could tell the cops I never thought he was serious and almost be telling the truth. How many years could they give me if I played no part in the actual commission of the crime? Three to five years, maybe?

  Or none at all if—best-case scenario—my decision to back out resulted in Dennis doing the same.

  I had the feeling that was what would happen when I ended our phone call that night. Dennis was going to let it go. Our plan only worked with two players and trying to pull it off with only one would be an invitation to disaster.

  As much as he despised her, Dennis was going to have to go on living with Ginny for a little while longer.

  Sherry called me the next day. My sister.

  “We miss you,” she said.

  I was already regretting having taken the call. She was starting right off with a lie.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Why do I have to want something? You haven’t called me or Mom in four months. I’m your sister. She’s your mother. You can change anything you want, but you’ll never be able to change that.”

  “Don’t start, Sherry.”

  “Start? Start what? I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying. And what you’ll go on saying if I don’t stop you now. So just get to the point, please.”

  “Okay. My point? How are you doing? That’s why I called. To see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing fine. And no, I still have no regrets. Are we done?”

  “Why are you being so defensive? We’re worried about you, is all. They say people who’ve done to themselves what you did suffer from deep depression and we thought, well, if you’re depressed—”

  “I’m not depressed,” I said, feeling the old feelings my family always brought out in me boiling to the surface. “I’m good. In fact, I’ve never been happier. I know the three of you can’t believe that, but it’s true.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say,” Sherry said. “But it’s only been what? Six months? Seven? Who knows how you’re going to feel a year from now.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Lorraine,” I said. My oldest sister. The one who’d stopped talking to me altogether.

  “Lorraine’s just hurt, Bobby. Mom’s hurt. They don’t understand. You gotta give ‘em some time.”

  “They’ve had thirty-one years to understand, same as you. I’m all done waiting for you to understand. I don’t need your understanding anymore, okay?”

  “So you’re done with us forever, is that it? Your mother and your two sisters, we don’t matter to you anymore. You’ve got no need for us in this new life you’ve made for yourself.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Sherry.”

  “Wait! Wait!” I waited. Like a fool, I waited. “Don’t hang up. Please.”

  “You’ve got a favor to ask,” I said. Making a calculated guess.

  “They’re gonna turn off the gas. Mom gave me what I need for the electricity, but I still need a hundred and seventy-five dollars to pay the gas.”

  It was always the same thing. Only the amount and the name of the payee or creditor ever changed.

  “Why don’t you ask poor Larry? You’re still playing him for a sucker, aren’t you?”

  Larry was the ex-husband. The straight-as-an-arrow, lovelorn insurance salesman she’d cheated on incessantly until she finally left him flat, unable to stomach his willingness to forgive her unconditionally another minute.