Misdeeds Read online

  MISDEEDS

  A Criminal Collection of Crime Fiction

  A.S. Coomer

  Collection Copyright © 2021 by A.S. Coomer

  The Goddamn Amazon Here first appeared in Literary Orphans. The Fixer first appeared in Shotgun Honey. More Rust than Nickel first appeared in Serving House Journal and was nominated for a Pushcart. Trail Magic (Good Intentions) first appeared in Horror Sleaze Trash. Buffalo Nickel Hat first appeared in Heater.

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Shotgun Honey

  an imprint of Down & Out Books

  P.O. Box 75272

  Charleston, WV 25375

  ShotgunHoney.com

  Down & Out Books

  3959 Van Dyke Road, Suite 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  DownAndOutBooks.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Bad Fido

  Visit the Shotgun Honey website to find more fiction with a kick!

  Visit the Down & Out Books website to sign up for our monthly newsletter and we’ll deliver the latest news on our upcoming titles, sale books, Down & Out authors on the net, and more!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Misdeeds

  Dellie’s Ditch

  The Goddamn Amazon Here

  The Fixer

  More Rust than Nickel

  Trail Magic (Good Intentions)

  Buffalo Nickel Hat

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Sangre Road by David Tromblay

  Preview from Tracking Shot by Colin Campbell

  Preview from Trigger Switch by Bryon Quertermous

  For my family

  Dellie’s Ditch

  “There’s a guy down there,” Kamden said.

  “In the ditch?” Sammy asked.

  Kamden nodded his head vigorously, nearly spilling himself from his bike as they turned left off Mapleway onto Wildwood.

  “Weird,” Sammy said. “Why’s he down there?”

  Kamden shrugged his shoulders, his eyebrows shooting towards his bowl cut.

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Toads told me.”

  Sammy nodded solemnly. Toads wouldn’t lie about something like this.

  The trees, sycamore and oak, reached over their heads like an archway, a tunnel of glistening boughs starting their first blooms of an early spring. Little crystal spheres of the April sunlight spilled through the low hovering clouds and twinkled off the boys’ bicycles’ dusty reflectors.

  Kamden picked up the pace, pumping winter restrained calves.

  Sammy already had a sheen of sweat sitting like a pencil mustache across his upper lip.

  The boys skirted potholes as deep as their little fists, old ones and new ones alike. The winter freeze had been one of the worse Toledo had seen in decades.

  Like the sirens of Fire & Rescue Station 21 not a half-mile down the road or the nighttime passing of trains on the tracks even closer, thoughts of last year’s summer activities flooded Sammy’s brain in a peripheral manner. He saw himself and the boys filling the potholes with clumps of gravel stolen from the Meeks driveway and, after they got caught—they always got caught—smooth stones from Delaware Creek, running sometimes in a trickle, sometimes in a torrent down in the ditch.

  Almost to Detroit Avenue, just behind the Delaware Park sign, Kamden and Sammy left their bikes behind two cascading burning bushes, just beginning to show their green buds atop skeletal, winter-hardened branches. The path down into the ditch was sloppy, muddy from the recent melting of the snows and the light, week-long drizzle of the previous week. Knowingly, they took the steep steps down crossways, holding themselves upright on the trees all around them.

  Kamden led the way and stopped at the first cut in the path, sheltering himself behind the light bark of a thick birch. Sammy crept up behind him, shielding himself in the same manner.

  “Can you see him?” Sammy whispered.

  Both boys scanned the ditch bottom, clearly in view now that the trees and bushes were still winter bare.

  Kamden’s face, scrunched together and wrinkle-filled, took in the creek in quick jerks. Left to right. Right to left.

  Sammy, moving in a systematic, slow sweep, started his search at the basin of the massive tunnel, where the creek flowed twenty-five feet under Detroit Avenue, and followed the creek as it churned, brown and thickened from the melted snow and recent rain, towards the Maumee, not three miles away.

  “I don’t see anybody,” Sammy said.

  Kamden shook his head.

  “Me neither.”

  “Toad’s never told no lies before…”

  The boys looked from their perch above the creek. Sammy turned back to the opening of the tunnel and started again, more slowly this time.

  “There’s a bunch of cans down there,” he told Kamden.

  “There’s always trash down there.”

  “Look,” Sammy said, stepping out from around the birch and directing Kamden’s attention with a pointed finger.

  Just outside the mouth of the tunnel, which the boys called “the Cave,” several piles of shimmering silver glinted in the sun, just then peeking out from behind cloud cover. Sammy’s brain, again in the peripheral saw the soaked, glittering scales of a walleye freshly pulled from the Maumee.

  “Let’s check it out,” Kamden said.

  The boys made their way down the steep, little trail to the creekbank. They sloshed in the mud, careful to avoid the thickest, wettest puddles whenever possible, until they reached the pile of crushed aluminum cans. The black mouth of the tunnel yawned just behind the cans, unmarred by even the faintest hint of sunlight on the other side—none of the neighborhood boys had ever successfully managed to traverse the tunnel from end to end.

  Sammy stared into the tunnel transfixed by the completeness of the darkness within. He squinted, his eyes taking the running water and transmuting it into a myriad of other possibilities: snakes and rats and creatures from the monster books he spent the winter reading.

  “Ugh,” Kamden said. “Keystone Ice.”

  “Huh?” Sammy said, turning away from the tunnel.

  “Keystone Ice. My uncle won’t even drink this stuff and he’s, like, an alcoholic. A ‘real boozehound,’ my mom calls him.”

  Kamden was holding one of the lesser crushed cans. His face was a mask of distaste. He let the can drop back onto the pile and wipes his hands on the seat of his stiff blue jeans.

  “Ever tried it?” Sammy asked.

  Kamden shot him a sidelong look and paused before he answered.

  Sammy knew Kamden was getting ready to tell a lie.

  “Sure,” Kamden said. Of course.”

  Sammy turned back to the tunnel, starting with the muddy water rushing out and moving as far back as he could squint until he couldn’t distinguish the water from the walls, the brown from the black.

  “Tried it one time when my uncle and dad were drinking in the garage. During one of the Red Wings games. Yeah, it was during one of the Red Wings games. Not the last one but maybe two or three games back.”

  Sammy only half-listened. He stared into the abyss.

  “—too sweet for my taste, almost a girl’s drink—”

  A faint tendril of smoke seemed to snake out of the tunnel. It languidly traced some unseen stream of air
along the ceiling until it met the spring air and sunlight outside and dissipated.

  Sammy strained his eyes, thought he lost the smoke, rubbed his eyes and looked again. There. There it was. A thin, little plume of smoke.

  “—I mean, you might be into it but me, I prefer stouts and liquors, the more bitter the be—”

  The faint sound of splashing came from within the tunnel. It steadily grew until Sammy placed the sound: steps. Somebody was walking towards them from within the tunnel.

  “Shut up,” Sammy said.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up,” Kamden’s voice was blustering, building towards another of his tantrums. “I can’t help it if you’re just a little baby that hasn’t had any real booze. Don’t tell somebody to shut up that actually knows what they’re talking about. I don’t know why I eve—”

  “Someone’s coming,” Sammy said. “Shut up.”

  Kamden stopped talking and walked up beside Sammy. They stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, squinting into the darkness.

  The faintest speck of red light became visible.

  The splashing became louder.

  From the corner of his eye, Sammy saw Kamden squirming in his mud-soaked shoes.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Kamden whispered.

  Sammy shook his head.

  “Wait,” he whispered back.

  A strange odor wafted out with the smoke. Sammy found it both foul and sweet. He heard Kamden sniffing too.

  “Devil’s Lettuce,” Kamden gasped.

  Sammy turned towards his friend.

  “What?”

  Kamden sniffed again, two rapid-fire inhalations through his snot-crusted nostrils, then nodded his head in confirmation.

  “That’s the smell. Mom said it was the Devil’s Lettuce. Got real mad at my dad and my uncle one time because they stunk up the garage with that. The Devil’s Lettuce.”

  Sammy turned back to the tunnel. The dim shadow of a man, hunched over and moving slow, was taking shape along the left-hand side of the tunnel’s wall.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It made my mom real mad though. I think it’s like a…a…a drug or something.”

  Sammy felt his mouth drop open but didn’t turn away from the tunnel.

  “Your dad does drugs?”

  “No. No, he doesn’t. It had to have been my uncle.”

  The splashing ceased momentarily, and the red dot intensified. Then the smell got worse and there was a fit of coughing jangling out of the darkness like a cheap, circus calliope. In his sweeping mind’s eye, Sammy thought of Mr. Dark and his nightmare carnival from the Ray Bradbury novel he’d finished some weeks back.

  A slow, enervated chuckling, not quite laughter but not quite a continuation of the coughing, echoed off the walls. The shadow moved closer to the left wall of the tunnel and the red glow was extinguished after a scratching sound. The splashing resumed, and a man emerged, blinking out in the sunlight.

  All three of them stood stock still for a moment, the two boys staring wide-eyed at the ragged stranger before them, the man, his eyes barely anything but slits, shielded his eyes from the brightness of the April afternoon.

  The sun went back behind a cloud and the moment ended.

  The man dropped his hand from his brow and Sammy saw that he was smiling.

  “Morning, boys,” the man said.

  His voice reminded Sammy of a blender full of nails set to high.

  “Toadie tell y’all about me?” he asked.

  His ragged overalls were soaked up to his thighs. The water cascaded around the pencil sticks of his legs, briefly turning the muddy water a creamy toffee brown before splashing around and running on towards the Maumee and Lake Erie.

  Neither boy answered him. Not right off.

  The man resumed his slow trudging in the creek. He stepped up onto the bank and out of the water. A bit of steam rose off his bare scalp.

  The man reached down and took hold of his pants legs with each hand and shook them. Every movement he made seemed to Sammy to be in slow-motion.

  “A little damp, eh?” he said, chuckling again.

  The man moved to the thicker of the piles of aluminum cans and slowly lowered himself down onto it. Several of the cans spilled out onto the bank and fell into Delaware Creek, quickly taking off like little speedboats.

  The man sat on the crushed cans like a beanbag.

  Sam and Kamden, nearly in unison, took a step back.

  “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” the man asked, smiling up.

  His eyes had adjusted to the daylight and Sammy could see they were nearly completely bloodshot. He was close enough to see the spider web working of blood vessels surrounding the brown irises that was all dark, dilated pupils.

  “It’s four-thirty in the afternoon,” Kamden said.

  The man’s smile faltered then widened. That odd laugh that was not quite a cough but close, came bubbling out. There was something infectious in it. Sammy found his lips curling up into a half-smile.

  “So it is,” the man said. “So it is. I guess, you could say morning is a frame of mind, boys.”

  “Who are you?” Sammy asked.

  The suddenness of his own voice shocked him. He hadn’t meant to speak. The thought of asking a question to this unknown man hadn’t even occurred to his conscious self.

  “Call me Dellie,” the man said.

  The man’s smile stretched even further and crooked, yellow teeth poked out from his chapped and cracked lips.

  “Dellie?” Kamden said.

  The man nodded and another crushed can of Keystone Ice fell from the pile into the creek.

  “Ship ahoy,” the man called, laughing.

  The three of them watched the can, carried by the runoff, bounce off a protruding rock in the center of the creek.

  “Uh,” the man said as if he felt the blow himself.

  The can resumed its down current float and struck a rotting log along the bank.

  “Might have another Titanic on our hands, boys,” the man said, never taking his eyes off the floating can.

  Sammy and Kamden watched the can, turning their backs to the man to follow its course.

  The can slipped below the surface of the water, once then twice then a third time, but emerged and sped along out of view.

  “Close one,” the man said, bursting into a fresh wave of wheezing laughter.

  Sammy couldn’t help but join him. He looked over and saw that Kamden couldn’t either.

  “All boys live around here,” the man said.

  It wasn’t a question.

  Sammy and Kamden nodded their heads.

  The man replicated their nodding with a slow upturning then dropping of his own head. He had long, stringy hair but was nearly completely bald around the crown of his skull. His hair could’ve been a darker blonde or brown. Sammy couldn’t tell because of all the grime, little flecks of what looks like crushed leaves and mud coated the man from head to foot. Thick stubble gave his sallow cheeks another aspect of dirtiness.

  With a weird sensation of otherworldliness, Sammy realized he couldn’t tell the man’s age. He could’ve been ninety or he could’ve been thirty years old. This made him feel like a child. Sammy hated that feeling.

  “I’ve been coming back here, off and on, for longer than you two’ve been alive,” the man said.

  Neither boy replied.

  The man swept his arms out from the cans, a gesture taking in the entirety of the culvert park with the dirty, little creek running through it.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” Sammy said finally.

  The man’s eyes settled on Sammy’s. It made Sammy want to look anywhere else, but he held the stranger’s gaze.

  “I haven’t been back for a while.”

  The man’s face was covered in sun-thickened skin, leather-like and off red like a turning tomato. The hair on his chin, cheeks and neck was leaning more towa
rds beard than stubble. There was quite a bit of it that was gray.

  It was just then, in this growing silence between them, that Sammy became aware of the man’s stench. It was subtle but once he noticed it, Sammy couldn’t smell anything else, not the blooms on the bushes and trees or the freshly cut grass diffusing throughout the neighborhood like wafted, freshly baked pie.

  “I’d say,” Sammy said. “I’m damn near thirteen.”

  The man’s face stretched, worked as if being pulled tighter on a rusty, misaligned vise attached somewhere, unseen, on the back of his filthy head or neck. It took overlong, but his face became the biggest smile the boys had been shown yet. Peaking from the broken fence of his teeth, Sammy saw the man’s tongue: it was a sickly blue, scaly, thinner than any tongue Sammy could remember seeing.

  Cacophonous laughter spilled from the man’s open mouth. It sounded like a metal silverware clanging down a set of metal stairs.

  “Are you an indian?” Kamden asked.

  The man buckled forward, resting his hands on his bone-thin thighs, as the laughter racked across his body. It radiated from him like heat. Sammy couldn’t help but smile and felt his stomach lurching with burgeoning belly laughs.

  Kamden was already laughing.

  “Indian?” the man wiped a tear from his left eye. His hand smeared the soot on his cheek around the eye and it gave the man a sly boots raccoon look or the appearance of a blossoming black eye.

  The man quickly reigned in his laughter, sat erect, lifted on hand, palm out, and said, “How.”

  All three of them erupted into fresh peals of laughter.

  From somewhere high and above, Sammy caught the tenor of his mother’s voice, faint but clear.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  Kamden and the stranger turned to him, fresh tears on their eyes, their faces looking stretched and limber from great smiles.

  “Dinnertime,” Sammy explained.

  The man nodded his head and pulled himself, slowly almost sloth-like, to his feet. When he reached his full height, Sammy saw the man stood a good foot taller than himself, maybe a foot and a half for Kamden. The smile slipped back a bit and the man’s face, although holding a familiar, jovial expression, became more formal. He reached out, extended his gnarled, bony hand, first to Kamden, then to Sammy. Each boy shook the man’s hand and Sammy couldn’t help but feel a little older, parting with such a ceremonial formality.