Fiction

Checker sat behind the wheel of the Caprice, his gloved hands wrapped around the take-away coffee cup perched on his lap. His chin tucked into the zipped collar of his jacket. He kept his focus out the windshield, fogging around the edges, the aging V8 and its clogged heater core unable to keep up with the blowing snow outside. As people traversed back and forth along the sidewalk beside the car, he catalogued each one.

In the passenger seat, Kean gnawed on a foot-long convenience store pepperoni stick, chewing without enough lip contact for Checker’s liking. After Kean swallowed, he held the pepperoni out to consider it. “Do you think you could make pepperoni pancakes?”

“What?”

“Pepperoni pancakes. That could be a thing, right?”

“Anything can be a thing. Why the hell would you want to make pepperoni pancakes?”

“I don’t know.” Kean took another bite. “This is technically breakfast, right? So why not make it actual breakfast?”

Checker shook his head but didn’t otherwise respond.

Kean turned the stick in his hand. “Maybe make a smoothie.”

Checker made a slow-motion pan to his partner.

“Or a milkshake. Peanut butter and pepperoni. With pickles. Maybe cottage cheese so it’s healthy.”

“There is something rotten inside of you, my friend.”

Kean tilted his body to release a one cheek squeak. “Yeah, it’s my ass.”

“Jesus H. You sick son of a bitch.”

Kean smiled and took another bite from his pepperoni stick.
Checker cranked the window down enough to allow some fresh air but not flood the inside of the car with snow. “You’re disgusting.”

“I’m a normal functioning human being.”

“I hate you.”

“You say that a lot, but I don’t think it’s true. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be here.”

Checker pointed his face toward the open driver’s side window and breathed through his mouth.

Kean stopped mid-chew and focused out the clear patch on the windshield.

Three car lengths down the sidewalk, a big black sedan pulled to the curb. The driver jumped out to open the rear passenger door. A man stepped out first. Black trench coat. Black gloves. He set a black porkpie hat over his voluminous silver hair. A woman stepped out next, a light, ankle length jacket being her only protection from the weather. Smooth wrap-around sunglasses obscured her eyes. Her long red hair, nearly the same colour as the jagged scar across her jaw, had been pulled into a tight ponytail.

Kean raised his finger. “Is that…”

Checker sighed. “Yeah. ‘Fraid it is.”

“Shit.”

“You can say that again.”

The pair sat in silence as the Caprice idled.

Kean pushed the last of the pepperoni stick into his mouth, then searched inside his jacket to unbutton his holster. “We going to do this or what?”

Checker turned the key in the ignition to kill the engine. “Guess we don’t have much of a choice.”

***

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

***

The man had lived alone for so long, that no one around him remembered why. He kept to himself, offering little more than a raised hand or pained smile to those he met. As neighbours moved in and moved out over the years, rumours sprouted. They stretched like vines, the flowering ends looking nothing like the stem, rooted in the truth, so far away.

By the time the Vox family moved in next door, the branches of the vine spread far and wide. Deborah across the street spoke of a love lost to a particularly aggressive form of cancer. Noah two doors down kept his voice low and looked side-eyed along the street as he shared stories of lights flickering late at night and strange noises from the basement.

Pashmina Vox, the youngest of the Vox children, paid no mind to the stories. Not only because she was seven years old, but because she had already learned that most things adults said didn’t make sense, if they weren’t outright lies to begin with. She had seen enough to understand. Dark eyes peeking out from drawn curtains. The man’s sadness for being out in the world. More importantly, the dark figure constantly perched on his left shoulder. Plump and round in contrast to the man’s thin frame. A wide, toothy sneer to the man’s downturned lips.

Another thing that Pashmina understood was the futility in trying to explain the figure to her mother or father. They would only tell her to go play, to use her imagination somewhere else. She did know someone who would believe her, though. Her great, great grandmother. Long dead before Pashmina was born, but still with her. And so it was, that on a quiet Saturday morning in the spring, that Pashmina snuck away from the cartoons her father left her to watch and went to knock on the man’s door. As always, her Gran stood with her, ready to have a stern conversation with the little demon perched on the man’s shoulder, and perhaps put all of the rumours about him to rest.

***

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

***

“Can you touch your toes like that?”

On the elevated stage in front of Leon, a young woman, who looks too scrawny to support the size of her artificial chest, adjusts her G-string and saunters over to a group of college students waving dollar bills in the air.

Mick leans back in his chair with a bottle of beer in his hand. “That’s really the first thought to come to mind?”

Leon picks at his teeth and side-eyes the bar. A fat man hovers over it, his thick-rimmed spectacles spotted with precipitation and the shoulders of his long coat glossy under the dim yellow light.

“Tryin’ ta keep my mind on the job is all.”

Mick holds his beer up and watches the bottom as he swirls the dregs. “Yeah. The job.” He sets the bottle down.

“This the extortionist or the pedophile?”

“Extortionist.”

“Too bad.” Mick laces his fingers behind his head. “Got a little pent-up energy I was hoping to find an outlet for.”

Leon guides his eyes to the edge of the stage but doesn’t focus on anything in particular. “That’s called anger, Mick. And you’ve always had a healthy supply.”

Mick frowns but gives no other response.

At the bar, the fat man drops a few coins to pay for his drink, then heads toward the back of the room. He knocks on a black painted door hidden built into a black painted wall. When it opens, harsh light spills out, eclipsing the fat man as he moves across the threshold. The door eases shut behind him, but not tight.

Mick looks up when Leon stands and shrugs on his jacket. “You sure it’s not the pedo?”

Leon zips his jacket and pulls a thin pair of leather gloves from one pocket. “I’m sure, but if you want to pretend, I won’t get in the way. Let’s go.”

***

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

***