Dirty Words Read online

  Dirty Words

  Dirty Words

  stories

  Todd Robinson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  DIRTY WORDS: stories

  ISBN-13: 978-1480074873

  ISBN-10: 148007487X

  Copyright 2012

  All stories ©Todd Robinson

  Published by THUGLIT Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Author.

  Table of Contents

  An Introduction, George Lucas-ing, and a Confession…

  So Long, Johnnie Scumbag

  The Biggest Dick In Brooklyn

  Roses At His Feet

  The Long Count

  Dirty Laundry

  Last Call

  Hot Enough For Ya?

  Angelo Death

  Delivery

  The Saint of Gunners

  The Legendary Great Black Cloud of Ralphie O'Malley

  Acknowledgements, Thank-Yous and a Bunch of Bullshit That Nobody Really Reads Except For People Trying to Find Their Own Name

  An Introduction, George Lucas-ing, and a Confession…

  Hello there.

  Name's Todd Robinson.

  Not sure what else to go with by way of introduction…

  Some of you (I would assume most of you who dropped coin on the collection in the first place) might have some idea who I am. If you don't, good luck and God bless.

  If you DO know me, it's probably through the website THUGLIT that I created and edited for five years (and its subsequent anthologies). Maybe you've seen one or more of my stories floating around the web or in one of the publications that have blessed me with acceptance over the years.

  Or maybe I just harangued you into buying the fucking thing while you were sitting at the bar.

  Yeah, I'm a bartender. That means that you'll see some connective tissues between the stories other than characters. Write what you know. I know bars, the people who work there, the people who drink there. The damaged souls, the weirdos, the characters, the alcoholics, junkies, the lonely, and everybody in between. I love these people, warts and all. I consider some of the most damaged my friends. I hope that by the end of these stories, you will too.

  Either way, thanks for being here. All monies derived go to a couple of good causes. First of which are the goddamn cat's medical bills. For the record? The cat is dead. His bills aren't.

  The second is taking my kid to Disneyland for the first time.

  Hey, I said good causes, I never said charity. And if dead cats and taking nice kids to Disneyland don't qualify as good causes to you, you're probably a prick.

  So there…

  Where were we?

  Oh yeah. Introductions.

  At this point, you might be thinking that I'm a prick, what with the previous paragraphs and all, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn't disagree with you. If that's the case, buckle up, Buttercup, because the stories you got coming are no more pleasant than I am.

  So if you normally spend your hard-earned loot on crime stories that feature a nice scone recipe, you might as well stop right here. It ain't gonna get any better for you.

  I won't take it personally; hell, my mother agrees with you. However, long as you're not like my mother, you might dig what lies ahead. Hope you do.

  George Lucas-ing

  In the grand tradition of Mr. Lucas (and running the risk of fucking it all up), not all of the stories collected here are as they were when originally printed. Like most writers, I couldn't resist the urge to tweak the prose, correct some questionable phrasings, and sometimes just flat-out change shit. For instance, two separate characters in two different stories had the same first name. In order to maintain an even flow between stories, one of them had to adopt a sudden alias.

  HOWEVER, there was one story that required a drastic facelift. The story was fine, the characters and dialogue worked, but some of the prose was just awful. I mean…just really awful. It was an early published tale, and I'm glad and grateful that it got picked up, but for the life of me, I have no idea how somebody thought it was overall fit to print.

  So, if you notice some changes between a story you may have read before and one collected here and it bugs you, seriously…you need a hobby.

  A Confession (or two)

  Before I get a bunch of angry e-mails from those of you who read HARDCORE HARDBOILED, the first of the THUGLIT anthologies, I'm Sam Edwards.

  Lemme explain.

  When I first started the website, we didn't have enough submissions for the first issue. I mean, we did, but for some reason, we got a shitload of stories that didn't necessarily fit our bill. Yeah, that's a nice story about visiting your grandfather's grave in Argentina, but what in sweet fuck-all does it have to do with crime fiction?

  You get my point.

  I was committed to getting the first issue up, but lo and behold, I didn't have enough material. So I dusted off "The Long Count", one of my trunk stories, and threw it up under Sam Edwards (Sam and Edward being the first names of my grandfathers). I didn't tell my other editors.

  Then the dang thing gets selected by BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES as a "Notable Story of the Year".

  I kept my mouth shut. The biggest honor of my short writing career, and I couldn't tell anybody. THAT kinda sucked.

  Then, when Kensington books decided to print our anthologies, of course they insisted that I include all of the award-nominated/winning stories.

  I decided to get clever.

  Sam Edward's bio reads:

  Truly other digests deserving recognition on bios, instead, Nasty Sam offers nothing.

  Now, take the first letter in each word…

  Yeah, nobody figured it out then either. I only spent about three days writing out the acrostic. Time well spent, no?

  Oh, and if you actually bought any copies and had the book signed at an event by Sam? That was really Julius Franco, my best friend and co-conspirator in all of life's misadventures since the age of thirteen.

  Aaaaaaand some of you may recognize the THUGLIT story (and Derringer-nominated short) "Roses at his Feet" as written by Ms. Dana Frittersmash.

  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 alte
r-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.

  Nina was four months pregnant.

  Johnnie claimed that he'd been playing poker in Williamsburg the whole night. Problem was, the game was illegal and nobody wanted to admit having been there. Even if they were, fewer were willing to step up to the plate for Johnnie Scumbag.

  My first stop was Paulie D's Barbershop. It was a nice day, so I took the L train into Brooklyn and walked up Metropolitan to Paulie's.

  A tin bell tinkled as I walked in. "How's things Paulie?"

  Paulie didn't bother looking up. He was busy sweeping up a mess of curly blonde hair off the floor. Paulie looked like a shaved ferret, only slightly taller. A shaved ferret with a horrible personality. In the dingy back room of the dingier barbershop, he ran illegal poker games on weekends for the gambling junkies who didn't want to bother getting a bus to Atlantic City.

  Paulie just grunted at me. The fresh hair told me that somebody new was in the neighborhood. Anybody who'd lived there more than a week knew that the barbershop was a front and wouldn't trust Paulie to shear a sheep, much less cut their hair—not unless they wanted to look like Patti LaBelle after she'd stuck her head in a thresher. Most people of reasonable intelligence just had to look at the magazine rack to figure it out. His most recent copy of Sports Illustrated featured Johnnie Bench on the cover.

  "Hey Paulie, was Johnnie Scumbag at poker on Saturday?"

  "Polka? I don't know nothin' about no Polack dancing."

  I could see I was going to be on the receiving end of Paulie's legendary talent for playing dumb. "The poker game. P-O-K-E-R."

  "What poker game?"

  "The one on Saturday."

  "What's poker?"

  I sighed. I should have known better. If push came to shove, Paulie would wind up with his own ass in a sling if he gave Johnnie his alibi. "This is between you and me, Paulie. I just need to know whether or not he was here."

  Paulie stopped sweeping and gave me the once over. "Why you wanna know?"

  "He's in Riker's for something that went down on Saturday night and he needs somebody to say that he was elsewhere."

  "It ain't gonna be me."

  "Well, I need to know."

  Paulie scratched his chin. "He came by Saturday night. Got his hair cut."

  That was all I needed to hear. Johnnie wouldn't let Paulie touch his hair with a velvet glove, much less his scissors. "How long?"

  "He was here all night. Man's got one helluva complicated haircut."

  "Would you be willing to tell a cop that? Even on the DL"

  "Nope." Paulie resumed his sweeping. I started to leave when the broom stopped. "Next time you see that fat turd, you tell him he dropped one of his cards under his chair when he left."

  "His cards?"

  "Wasn't one of mine. You tell him he comes back again, I'm gonna cut more than his hair."

  I left Brooklyn and returned to Manhattan for stop number two over at Dino's bar.

  Josh already had the bottle of Makers in his hand when I told him I was having coffee. The bottle hovered for a second in Josh's unbelieving hand.

  "Seriously?"

  "Seriously. I'm working."

  "Whew! For a second I thought you were gonna say you were on the wagon. I don't think I make my rent, you stop drinking."

  "Hardy har, Sheckie."

  Josh poured me a cup that tasted like it was brewed around the time Paulie picked up that Johnnie Bench S.I.


  Scumbag claimed that Josh was at the poker game with him. Or danced a polka with him. After my talk with Paulie, I wasn't so sure anymore. After my tongue stopped shitting in my mouth from that first sip of coffee, I said as much.

  "What poker game?" Josh said innocently. Or as innocently as a man sleeved in tattoos with an old bottle scar across one cheek can say it.

  "Don't start that shit with me, Josh. I just went through it with Paulie." Josh and I went back a-ways together, so I wasn't about to play verbal hide & seek with him. I'd been a semi-regular at Dino's for a decade and tip well for an alcoholic. The amount of money I'd dropped in the last year alone should have been enough to buy me some straight talk.

  "Okay, okay. Yeah. I was there. So was Scumbag."

  "He's gonna need somebody to alibi him then."

  Josh shook his head. "I'm not doing it. My wife finds out I was gambling, she's gonna have my balls in her spaghetti sauce."

  I accidentally slugged another mouthful of coffee. Josh reached for the pot to refill it and I almost pulled my gun. "So don't say you were gambling. Say you were at a bar with him. Say you were playing pool with him. Say you were dancing a goddamn cha-cha with him in Monte Carlo for all I fucking care."

  Josh blushed a deep red all the way up to the tips of his ears. "I can't"

  "Why the hell not?"

  "Well…" The red deepened into crimson. "My wife doesn't know I was out. I kinda snuck out after she fell asleep. She takes an Ambien, she wouldn't notice if I had the poker game in the bed on top of her."

  "Josh, an innocent man is in jail right now and you're willing to let him stay there because you're afraid of your wife?"

  "You never met Janelle, have you?"