Monkey Justice: Stories Read online

  Monkey Justice

  And Other Stories

  Patti Abbott

  Monkey Justice: Stories

  By Patti Abbott

  Edited by Brian Lindenmuth

  Published by Snubnose Press at Amazon

  The copyright belongs to the author unless otherwise noted. 2011. All rights reserved.

  Kindle Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  First Kindle Original Edition, 2015

  Cover Design: Boden Steiner

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PRAISE

  "Patricia Abbott proves that there are many shades of noir as she expertly layers her stories with melancholy, loss and the frailness of the human psyche" – Dave Zeltserman

  “Patti Abbott is a master when it comes to short stories.” -- Anne Frasier

  “In this collection of short contemporary noir fiction, Patti Abbott distinguishes herself as an extraordinary storyteller of the dark recesses of the human heart. Abbott’s characters hit hard, fight dirty, and seek a brand of hardscrabble justice that will leave you both wincing and wishing for more.” – Sophie Littlefield

  “My first introduction to Patti Abbott's writing was during my stint as Editor at Large for Beat to a Pulp. Publisher/editor David Cranmer told me Patti's work would be launching the zine. It was kind of a literary family story he intimated, and I cringed that it wasn't going to be hard-hitting enough. Then I read it. "The Instrument of Their Desire" sent my blood racing from the first paragraph and brought tears to my eyes when it ended. Not only was it the perfect story to launch the site, it set the bar very, very high for the quality of stories to follow. After that, I worked with Patti on various short stories as well as one of her novels. Sensitive to the human mind and character, Patti doesn't flinch when it comes to crime and the dark side. She is a gifted writer, and a collection of her short stories is a brilliant idea. The publisher that snags Patti is a lucky word-jockey. Buyers of the collection are even luckier.” -- Elaine Ash, Editor

  "There are few writers who have been more instrumental in my development as a short story writer as Patti Abbott. Her dark, explosive, and yet intensely humane stories leave me breathless and Monkey Justice is nothing less than brilliant" -- Keith Rawson, some schmuck on the internet

  “Patti Abbott is one of the premier practitioners of the American crime story. The staggering level of care she invests in her craft is always evident from the first sentence to the last line. She writes smart, dark tales with frighteningly real characters and vivid settings. If you enjoy seeing a master at work, buy this collection.” – Chris Rhatigan, co-editor of Pulp Ink and blogger at Death by Killing

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Like a Hawk Rising

  The Snake Charmer

  Sleep, Creep, Leap,

  Bit Players

  The Instrument of Their Desire

  Hole in the Wall

  Escapes

  Georgie

  My Hero

  Monkey Justice

  On Paladin Road

  What Happened Next

  Tongues

  The Tortoise and the Tortoise

  The Squatter

  The Trouble with Trolls

  A Saving Grace

  Girl of My Dreams

  Raising the Dead

  I Am Madame X’s Bodyguard

  Catnaps

  RE: University Protocol on Student Plagarizing

  Souris

  LIKE A HAWK RISING

  “I can think of a shitload of things you could be doin’ instead of that.”

  Marsha’s voice was a buzzing in Bernie’s ear and unconsciously he fanned her away without taking the binoculars from his eyes.

  “Like what?”

  “You could fix the bathroom faucet. Or,” she paused, softening her voice, “you could come up with a plan to get us some cash. The balance in our check book is looking piss-poor.”

  He looked up in time to see her yank her hair back into a virtual ponytail and then release it, lowering her raised shoulders in a shrug.

  He put down the binoculars. “Or maybe you could help us out.”

  His voice was even quieter than hers.

  Marsha didn’t flinch; the issue of her working had been laid to rest years ago. “You oughta at least take up some kind of hobby till your knee heals—that’s all I’m saying.”

  They both looked down at his cast, one of those bumpy plaster ones from the middle of the last century. The doctor who’d fixed him up was from that time too. It hadn’t been like Bernie could just turn up at the local hospital. Someone might’ve seen him take that header off the fire escape. Or heard the rusty structure give way. Or found some of the stolen goods he’d left behind in his gym bag. Because of this, he’d been forced to go to a doctor whose license had been revoked for various misdeeds thirty years ago.

  “Look, it was mostly for performing abortions before Roe v. Wade,” the doctor told him the first time he’d gone to him a few years back. Bernie nodded halfheartedly, not being on the approving side of that law much himself.

  “Grown men don’t do fuckin’ hobbies, Marsh,” he told his wife now. “You think I’m gonna take up macramé or paint-by-numbers.”

  “You could plant a garden. You seem keen on the out-of-doors lately. Anyway,” she continued, “I just don’t get why you’re looking out that window all day long. You’re making a gully in the kitchen linoleum.” She stood next to him at the window, following his gaze, both of their eyes trained on the small boy in the yard next door who was feeding his iguana.

  “It’s like you’re casing the place, Baby.” Her voice was a whisper in his ear. “Or maybe you’re turning into a ped?”

  He smelled strawberries on her breath and inhaled. It was probably just that cereal with the blow-up berries ‘cause fresh strawberries in winter were out of the question now. She’d called him worse, but this accusation stung and brought the glasses down.

  “Don’t even like kids.”

  “You think peds like kids?” Marsha made a face. “Gotta hate them to do—to do what they do.” Her voice had a shudder in it.

  “It’s the kid’s father I’m looking for. Fat bastard in the Olds.” Bernie turned back to the window. “Don’t he usually turn up on Fridays?”

  “Only every other one,” she said. “She probably gets paid twice a month. That’s when he shows.” She gestured with her head toward the house next door.

  She—meant the kid’s mother. Didn’t know her name either. He watched as Marsha opened her gargantuan purse, withdrew a banana-yellow comb, and began to run it through her blonde hair; he could hear it pass through the spiky curls with an electrical charge. Lipstick came next: coral. Marsha never even glanced in a mirror—didn’t need to. She snapped her purse shut, reaching for her studded denim jacket on the peg.

  “Where you going?” He considered telling her about the trace of lipstick on her teeth but decided not to. Let her look a bit unkempt, though some men went for that too.

  She must have either tasted the lipstick or read his mind becau
se she tongued it away. “Someone’s gotta buy the food you wolf down, Bern. Someone’s gotta pump gas. Pay bills. Run over to the post office.” She stretched to her full 5’ 6. “Remember, I take care of business now, Bub.” She waved a manila envelope at him. “I got a promotion when you took your fucking swan dive.”

  “Nosedive,” he said, hurt. Leave it to Marsha to bring that up again. He felt like smacking her. He never had and never would, but thought about it two-three times a day. Mostly though he thought about chasing her into the bedroom, laying her down on the chenille spread, and doing what they’d done a million times before. Good thing she liked to be on top so he could protect his knee while she went about it.

  “Hey, do you have that script for Vicodin?”

  The thought of some Vic or even Soma cheered him up for a second or two, but then he remembered that damned envelope again. The bogus name and genuine address on the envelope she held in her hand was written in bold black letters with one of those Sharpie pens. This delivery arrangement had been the drill for the last few years. He wondered how many other envelopes found their way to P.O. Box 409. Did the post office even think about the contents of the boxes they were so eager to rent? How many of them held stolen goods, payoffs, bribe money, drugs?

  Marsha looked pissed as she fished for car keys in her bottomless bag, probably thinking this “being in charge” thing was getting to be too much like work. He watched her hunt with curiosity, guessing at how long it would take her to come up with the keys. She was deplaning calendars, combs, unopened bills, Kleenex, Xanax. She rattled the keys in his face thirty seconds later.

  Things had been much better between them when he’d been able to run this errand himself, keeping her from knowing about the worst of his misdeeds. There’d always been those two sides to Marsh. She was both the deer caught frozen in the headlights and the Ford pickup speeding wildly toward the blinded animal. You never knew which Marsha you’d find on the road. But letting her get the upper hand too often made him the deer.

  He looked down at the plaster cast again, wondering if the pin the doctor had stuck in his knee was rusty yet. Or maybe it’d traveled to some other spot in his leg and a fatal infection was coursing to his brain. He’d heard of such things on the Discovery Channel when they still had cable TV.

  “The fucking envelope can wait,” he said at last, sitting down heavily on the stool he’d dragged to the window. “Not due to the end of the month, is it?”

  “Last time you were late, Buzzy bent my finger back, and gave me a good slapping. Fucked up monster.” She lit a cig with her free hand and squinted. The burst of smoke made him squint too. “Remember that, Bern?”

  Like he’d ever forget that day. He’d come in shortly after Buzzy’s departure and found her sobbing that her front tooth was loose. It took some doing to calm her down. He’d been shocked into silence for a second or two since Marsha never cried. That was before his knee got busted though. When there’d been some chance for a reprisal. Now he was an invalid, and stuck at this window. Or at least that’s what he told himself.

  Leave it to Marsha to remind him about her altercation with Buzzy every chance she got.Find Buzzy standing at your door and you practically wet yourself—especially when you barely cleared 5’9 yourself.” Bernie would never get over the fact that the thug laid a hand on his Marsha. But what was he gonna do about it? Realistically, that was.

  He should have asked old Tom Tepper to place his bets back then. So what if Tom forgot to place one from time to time. So what if he paid up short now and then. Mike Overman ran a very different operation. Tom didn’t have a giant like Buzzy to knock women around. It was a friendlier arrangement all around.

  “Anything you need in town?”

  Marsha sounded excited; no, no, it wasn’t the tone to her voice that made him think this. It was the glaze of sweat on her nose, a certain rustling tenseness in her movements. On the back of her jacket was a hand-painted hawk—its eyes jeweled studs. The joke was she had the same bird tattooed on her actual back—minus the jewels—though she’d given their future addition some thought. She might pierce the skin with tiny pearls if she got up her nerve again. Only a few people knew about the tattoo. At least, that’s what Bernie hoped. Either that hawk was jittery or Marsh was. It looked about to take off.

  “Some bourbon might be nice,” Bernie said under his breath as Marsha stood at the door.

  She rolled her eyes, flipped him half-heartedly and walked out. There’d be no liquor for him till he went back to work. As soon as she crossed the front porch, he reached down inside the cast with the long, thin stick he kept for that purpose and scratched away, blissed-out with the relief of it. She hated seeing him do this.

  “You look like you’re jackin’ off your knee. You even get the same dopeu look in your eyes.”

  The scent of strawberry hung in the air for a minute and he let it wash over him. He suspected Marsha had a drink or two every time she went into town. And why shouldn’t she? Though he certainly didn’t like to imagine her sitting at the bar alone. He knew just how she looked too because they’d met at Hy’s Hidey-Hole seventeen years ago when she was a sweet-assed, fresh-faced twenty-two year old. She’d been wearing red, patent leather sling backs and one of the shoes was dangling from her red-painted toenails. It was damned sexy: the red of the shoes, her naked heel, and her jiggling leg. The other men in the bar stared too, but he was the one who took a chance and bought her a drink.

  “Sex on the beach,” the bartender told him out of the side of his mouth. “She always orders that one.”

  Fuck me, he thought to himself, sending over the girliest drink he’d ever seen. It seemed like an invitation when you lived in Florida.

  Anyway, there was nothing he could say about Marsha stopping in at a bar because of that envelope and what it meant, and what Buzzy had done to her, and what promises were not being kept and—well—because of pretty much everything. He watched Marsha’s still first-rate fanny from the side window as she headed for the Corolla. You couldn’t slip a feather between Marsha and her jeans. The mint-green Corolla hummed smoothly as she turned the key. He hated the car and that fruity color just made it worse. Until two months ago, they’d owned a black Jag that roared and bucked with power when you turned it on. It could have eaten the damned Corolla for a snack. She’d traded it in as soon as he fell off the fire escape, pocketing the difference without revealing the amount.

  “This’ll tide us over,” she said, making him run his hand over the fake leather seats. “You’d never know it wasn’t real leather.”

  Fuck, he’d know it in a second. The Jag’s leather was butter-smooth, rich.

  Marsha still kept him in cigs and he lit one now, taking up his spot at the back window. The kid, whose name he didn’t even know, was feeding some other animal. He couldn’t identify it, coming as he did from folks who didn’t take teaching kids their animal names seriously. He’d learned the brands of cigarettes, whiskey and beer earlier than the names of animals ‘cause he’d gone to the store for one or the other of those items every single day.

  The barnyard menagerie next door had taken shape over the last three months, starting a few weeks before Bernie got laid up. First a rabbit appeared, then a snake. Soon there were frogs, iguanas and critters too small to make out from his back window. Cages came soon too, probably lifted from lobster boats on the Gulf, other ones were made out of twine and sticks, sanded smooth by the kid.

  One day he watched the kid build an exercise yard out of chicken wire. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. Took him most of the day to do it, sitting on his heels and creeping around on the hard-packed dirt that came after weeks of no rain. What was the payoff? Despite what he’d told Marsha, it was the kid who interested him. The father, he dreaded. The kid could end up dead if he got his father too angry someday. Sometimes Bernie felt like chasing those animals away himself just to avoid the next altercation.

  The father was a fat fuck if ever
there was one, and Bernie put off a badly needed trip to the john so he wouldn’t miss his appearance. Arvis Hobbes, if the name on the mailbox was right. Even with the windows closed on the rare cool day, he could hear Hobbes ream the kid out on his bi-weekly visit. If Hobbes really got going, which he’d done more than once, he opened the cages and chased the critters away, yelling “E-ow” like some crazy cattle driver.

  Once he’d waved a gun in the air, firing it when nothing else got the animals moving. The kid stood frozen and watched, waiting till his old man left before he started to bawl. Then his mother, fat fuck that she was too, came to the window, a lit cigarette in her mouth and watched the kid cry.

  “I think she likes to see him cry,” he’d told Marsha last time this happened.

  “Nah, she’s scared of him.”

  “Scared of the kid?”

  Marsha sighed. “Scared of the father, Bern. Don’t you see it in her eyes? He fired a gun out there today, for God’s sake! We should’ve called the cops.”She gave him a look and then shook her head. After that, she began to keep an eye on things too, even if she didn’t like to admit it. She was soft on kids, had even wanted one till it was clear Bernie wasn’t loaded with the right ammunition.

  Bernie didn’t see anything going on in Mrs. Hobbes’ eyes—if that was even her name. Her pupils looked blank to him. Dark marbles in a pasty white face. Hobbes didn’t live with them, so why did she let him sashay in and pounce on the kid and his pets? She could’ve shoved the money into his hands and pushed him out the door. The only answer he could come up with was she was waiting for the next time he crawled on top of her. Giving her kid up for another go with that asshole Hobbes.

  The phone rang twenty minutes later and without thinking, he picked it up.

  “Someone fuckin’ took the envelope off the backseat while I was in the Safeway.”

  It was Marsha, out of breath and sounding scared. “I don’t know how it could have happened.”

  “Didn’t you lock the car?”