“He’s cut me off. Fuck Larry,” Sherry said.

  “That’s a real shame,” I said. “Because I’ve just cut you off, too.”

  This time, I hung up the phone without warning.

  And just like that, I found the nerve to help kill Ginny Vance.

  I sat with my sister’s phone call for ten sleepless hours, trying to tamp my anger down like somebody stomping on a fire, but the fire raged on. I’d endured the inbred ignorance and callousness of the three women in my life for as long as I could, and I’d come to the end of what I could take. They’d always treated me like a freak, an embarrassment to the family name, and yet they seemed intent on keeping me around forever, no matter what I did to escape their clutches. My mother thrived on blaming me for all her ills while bleeding me dry financially, and both my sisters had learned to do the same. My call with Sherry served as further evidence I would never be free until all three women were dead.

  But the idea of killing my mother and two sisters terrified me. Only a monster would do such a thing. Still, they had finally made me a monster of sorts; I could feel the shift that had taken place inside me. I wasn’t just angry anymore. I was hungry for blood. If I wasn’t quite insane enough to murder the three women most responsible for my pain and anguish, I had to murder them by proxy. Let Dennis’s wife Ginny—born of the same loathsome mold, to hear Dennis tell it—suffer the punishment I now so desperately wanted my mother and sisters to suffer. It was either that or put a gun barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger.

  I called Dennis and told him I was good to go if he was.

  To my amazement, it all went off without a hitch. The fuck up I thought sure would befall us never happened.

  Dennis followed our plan to the letter. He committed his wife’s murder and set the scene exactly as he was supposed to, and his interviews with the police afterward went as scripted. Neither he nor I had any trouble telling our story to the detectives consistently, and nothing they tried could make us change it. I could tell they never entirely believed us, but doubts were all we left them with. They’d have to find proof we were lying somewhere else.

  Naturally, they asked for our cell phones and learned that both were in the vicinity of my apartment, and not Dennis’s trailer, for the time period we insisted we’d been there playing video games. No texts, no calls between us before, during, or after Ginny was killed. No DNA, no murder weapon, no witnesses. They got search warrants for our residences, took my laptop and Dennis’s desktop computer, and came up empty. We’d given them nothing to use against us. If it was possible to commit the perfect crime, it seemed Dennis and I had performed such a feat.

  Weeks went by. The cops grew quiet. Dennis and I met a few times at the bar because it would have looked suspicious for us to suddenly stop doing so, but for the most part, we left each other alone. As far as I was concerned, our friendship was over. Dennis had taken me somewhere I had never intended to go, and I had no plans to ever go there again.

  I was starting to relax, thinking Ginny’s murder was behind me, when Dennis called me out of nowhere and said, “They took my watch.”

  “Your watch?”

  “Yeah. Why would they do that?”

  His watch? What the hell was that about? I tried to picture it on his wrist. Had I ever even seen it? It wasn’t something I paid attention to, whether a man had a watch on his wrist or not.

  “What kind of watch was it?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “An Apple Watch. Ginny got it for me for Christmas three years ago. What difference should it make?”

  An Apple Watch. My stomach started to turn. We had talked about computers and cell phones, but electronic watches? The thought had never occurred to me.

  “Do you keep any apps on it?”

  “Apps? I guess. One or two, just for—”

  He fell silent.

  “Dennis, what the fuck did you do?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Dennis!”

  “You said nothing on our computers, so I never did a sync.” He was all out of breath. “It was just on my watch. I guess I should have deleted it, but…I’d forgotten all about it until right now.”

  “It” turned out to be a simple list Dennis had recorded in a notetaking app on his watch:

  G’s cell phone, iPad & laptop

  My laptop

  Cash in G’s bedside table

  Cash and Visa cards in G’s purse

  Jewelry in G’s box on dresser

  Rings on G’s fingers, necklace & earrings

  My cash in coffee can in front closet

  Checkbook in my beside table

  This was everything the “thief” who murdered Ginny Vance had allegedly stolen from Dennis’s trailer, and everything I had actually tossed, inside a weighted duffel bag, into the Columbia River immediately after she was killed. I’d told Dennis to do an inventory of his place to make sure he took everything a real burglar would take, hammering the point home with him again and again, and he’d taken my directions to heart. Sadly, his way of doing so was to create an actual list of items to steal he could consult during the commission of his crime. A list the police were later able to find on the fancy electronic wristwatch they’d eventually noticed he liked to wear.

  This evidence alone was not enough to prove that Dennis had murdered his wife, but we both recognized it as the beginning of the end. There was no explaining the list away and, sooner or later, the cops would connect it to another loose thread, and another after that, until either Dennis or I reached the limits of our capacity to lie. One of us was going to break eventually, and the other was going under the bus.

  I decided the latter wasn’t going to be me.

  I tumbled, and Dennis, seeing the writing on the wall, tumbled right behind me. But being first to cooperate, I got the better deal. Dennis wasn’t happy about that.

  “I pray to God they put us in the same cell,” he told me the last time he saw me before our arraignment. Somehow, he hadn’t seemed to notice that we weren’t even sharing the same holding facility at the moment. They’d taken me out of the general male population shortly after my arrest and had no plans to return me to it. Ever.

  Such was the law in the state of Oregon.

  I could have been insulted. I’d gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to receive all the benefits of being a man, realizing a lifelong dream, and the world was still bent on treating me like a woman. The lesser sex. The gender of my birth and that of the mother and two sisters I detested, and who detested me. Because I wouldn’t wear the dresses or play with the dolls; talk about boys instead of girls or join in their plans to use boyfriends and husbands like sex toys and ATMs. Because I was a man in a woman’s body who could not wait to escape the confines of a female’s existence, yet had finally managed to do exactly that.

  It wasn’t really relevant to anything, but my gender reassignment status came up during our individual trials just the same. When I took the stand to testify against him for the prosecution in his case, the look of betrayal on Dennis’s face was cold and unwavering. He couldn’t believe it. He had taken me for a kindred spirit, someone who appreciated being a male of the species as much as he did, but he had failed to see that we had come to our mutual chauvinism by entirely different means.

  Just as we went in different directions when the state ultimately sentenced Dennis to thirty-years-to-life and me to ten-to-fifteen. He was shipped off to Deer Ridge Correctional Institution for men and I was sent to Coffee Creek. At Coffee Creek, I’m right back where I started, surrounded by women who look upon me with contempt and disdain. I don’t fit in and they don’t want me to. But that’s okay. Because it’s a man’s, man’s world, baby.

  And as soon as I get the hell out of here, I’m going to be a man again.

  Back to TOC

  In a Cold Sweat

  Gary Phillips

  The freight train derailed with a violent, noisy rending of iron, steel and aluminum. Cars slid one into the other, buckling with several inverting into upside down “Vs”. Others tumbled from the tracks, accelerating as they gouged across the earth, sending up massive sprays of dirt and dust. On several cars their sliding doors popped open, machine parts to cereal boxes spewing across the landscape. Three of the train cars rolled end-over-end across the earth and smashed into the side of a sugar warehouse, taking out the brick wall and two support columns. The roof partially collapsed. The thunderous sounds of the accident were heard nearly a mile away. Incredibly, no one was killed—yet.

  The destruction went off like clockwork as far as the four thieves were concerned. Burgess, the explosive expert, had planted his charge at a strategic location on the tracks. In this way, the shipment of vinyl chloride spilled from the two railcars carrying the volatile chemical. The cars had ripped open like ripened fruit. The thousands of gallons of the substance reacted to the air. The stuff was fundamental in the making of plastics and adhesives. The compound remained liquid under pressure but formed a toxic gas when released.

  There was no wind at the moment. But should one occur, thousands would be affected.

  Immediately an evacuation of the small town was on. The sheriff and his deputies were not enough to handle the logistics alone. The state police were called in to help get people to safety.

  The thieves counted on these procedures. As excited, but not scared, grade school kids swarmed out of their classrooms, the four-person crew went to work on their objective. Having donned hazmat suits equipped with individual oxygen supply, their silhouettes resembled giant mutant worker insects seen in a line marching across a field of wind-blown prairie grass. Their destination was a weather-beaten, modest looking ranch house and barn. On the edge of town, other such abodes were far apart. There was a stack of hay collected to one side of the barn. There were motion sensor devices hidden in the hay and on the barn. Romita, the crew’s electronics expert, deactivated the sensor with a hand-held gadget she pointed at the stack as they got closer. She also short-circuited the other ones, too.

  Inside the barn, they quickly swept hay away from the floor and unlatched a portion of the floorboards, which were hinged, and swung open. Revealed was a titanium-reinforced door they knew from blueprints to be two feet thick. Beneath was a custom-made survival shelter for a one percenter and his family. The company that had done the work had its computers unknowingly hacked. The leader of the quartet, O’Connor, had been engaged to command the heist by a hacktivist he’d never met. In turn, the hacktivist was operating at the behest of someone unknown to O’Connor though he assumed it was probably another one percenter.

  “We’re in,” Romita announced as her high-tech burglary skills overcame the dual electronic locks on the door. She removed several thin cables ending in magnetic circular pads from the door’s surface. The cables were attached on the other end to an instrument that looked not unlike a Geiger counter, but had a much different function.

  Rossmon, broad-shouldered and stockily built, took hold of a grab bar built onto the door while simultaneously undoing the latch. The massive door opened silently on its hydraulics. There were stairs with an iron railing and down they descended. More motion sensors triggered the lights before they reached the bottom, or rather the first of three floors they understood from memorized blueprints. A twenty-foot hallway led to a main room.

  “Damn,” Burgess exhaled as they stood taking in their surroundings. “This isn’t your grandpappy’s bomb shelter.” He adjusted his glasses.

  “Sure as shit ain’t,” the taciturn O’Connor agreed.

  The layout and furnishings spoke of an interior-designed home and not an apocalyptic hidey-hole. Original art was on the walls and indirect lighting gave the spacious room a comfortable feel. The video brochure selling the benefits of these high-end fortified structures casually mentioned they were designed to withstand a nuclear strike. The place also came equipped with a self-contained power system, water purification system, blast valves, and nuclear-biological-chemical air filtration. Interestingly, what cameras existed only monitored the exterior. Unless specified, the sales pitch had informed them, cameras did not aim inward. The notion seemed to be, as civilization fell apart, be it from pandemic or zombies, who would be around to watch and respond, anyway

  Burgess was the oldest of the four, in his sixties, but lean and agile for a man his age. He’d learned his trade in the service and had applied his acumen in a variety of ways over the years, from construction to mining to thievery. He’d even helped rig and bring down a fabled casino past its prime in Las Vegas some years ago. An event covered live on local TV. Burgess had made sure not to be interviewed on camera, as some in the demolition detail had been that day.

  He and the others took off their suits. Underneath they had on gloves and three of them had close haircuts and watch caps pulled over their heads so as not to leave any hairs as DNA trace evidence. Rossmon was bald and kept his dome clean-shaven.

  Romita, the youngest, was in her late twenties, tatted and pierced and dark-eyed. She was adept at Krav Maga and regularly took hot yoga classes. Rossmon and O’Connor were both in their forties, good-sized men who moved fluidly. Rossmon, who walked with a slight limp from an old wound, was taller, but O’Connor’s hands were larger, blockier—as if hewn from granite and grafted onto the ends of his arms in a Dr. Frankenstein-like experiment. Those hands looked as if they could punch through a door’s wooden panel. And they had.

  “Let’s get to it,” O’Connor advised.

  Leaving this room took them along a shorter hallway into a recreation area outfitted with gym equipment, a ping-pong table and computer games.

  “Bourgeois shits,” Romita muttered.

  Rossmon chuckled. “Ease up, Che Guevara, you about to be one of them.”

  “Never.”

  Romita had been recommended to O’Connor by the hacktivist. Not for the first time, he wondered if she might be that person, as he’d deduced it was a woman using a voice modulator when they’d talked over an encrypted line. He refocused. The quartet passed through the laid-out bedroom areas for the husband and wife and the two children. There was a dining room. Off of that, a fully stocked kitchen included three floor-to-ceiling refrigerators, confectioner’s stove and several types of blenders, three microwaves of varying capacities, and so on. This took them to another short hallway and a modest-sized living quarters with its own bedroom tucked in the rear.

  “That for the maid they’re gonna bring along?” Burgess wondered aloud.

  “Why not?” Rossmon said. “Sumabitch’s got more money than Jehovah.”

  Another set of stairs took them down to the second level, which had more living spaces and a warehouse type of stock room. There, shelved and labeled rows of canned goods, freeze-dried foods, seemingly endless jerky, MREs, plastic water containers, first aid kits, extra generators and more to last each inhabitant of the shelter at least a year and a half.

  “Back here.” O’Connor stood facing them in an open doorway, signaling with a raised hand. He was at the end of one of the rows, light illuminating one side of his body. He went away from the opening as the other three walked toward him. The quartet found themselves at another set of stairs at the end of an unadorned, short hallway. At the foot of the stairs was a twenty-foot-tall bank-like vault.

  “Holy shit,” Rossmon exclaimed.

  A thin smile on his face, O’Connor looked from him and followed Romita down the steps to the last level of the shelter. Here there was little in the way of creature comforts as above. On the first two levels, the shelter’s thick metal walls were hidden behind plaster painted in warm earth tones. The gray metal was evident all around save for the floor, which was tiled. Near the safe was a doorless entryway, and O’Connor leaned inside the room.

  “What’s in there?” Burgess asked him.

  “A control room, it seems. Monitors and relays for the various systems, pressure gages and what have you.”

  “Crazy,” Romita said when she came off the bottom step.

  There was a combination dial on the safe’s door, as well as an electronic lock mechanism. If this was a job where not being detected was a requirement, Romita would work in unison with O’Connor, who had training as a cracksman, to overcome the safe. But the fancy bunker they were in had been soundproofed, and the authorities were otherwise engaged. Rossmon had a smartphone-looking gadget on him tuned to the emergency band monitoring the gathered authorities’ activities. He had a lone earbud tuned to the apparatus.

  Burgess took a knee and extracted a length of malleable material from one of the two messenger bags strapped across his torso. This was C4 explosive and was wrapped in a Saran-like plastic, which he removed. Rossmon and Romita watched as the older man and O’Connor outlined the two locks on the safe with the off-white-colored compound, which the two men molded to the metal door. Burgess then inserted charge wires at key points in the C4, the wiring leading to a timer device. He engaged this as he set in on the floor. They all went back up the top of the stairs and waited. Burgess signaled for them to stick their fingers in their ears, and they did so.

  There was a flash of light, and the accompanying boom reverberated throughout the interior. The concussive vibration rose through the soles of their boots. The safe’s combination dial blasted loose with such force it flew across the room, its edge slicing into the metal wall, embedding there. The electronic lock was also destroyed. A smell like burnt toast filled the space.

  Hurrying back downstairs, Rossmon and O’Connor inserted the wedge ends of the pry bars they had with them and got the large door of the safe open. Once it was ajar, they used their hands to open it wider, though still not fully all the way.