The First Cut Read Free Page B

my car. The bottle hit the steel beams, making a tremendous racket of shattering glass and clanging metal.
    “Shit!” yelled one of the men a second later. “I been hit!”
    “Somebody else is here,” yelled the other one. “Get down!”
    When I got to the car, I slammed the door shut, then opened and closed it twice more, hoping the goons would think there were several people on the grounds. Then, I prepped myself and lay down with my head in the pool of spilled beer.
    A few seconds later I heard footsteps approach.
    “Holy fuck! Somebody took that guy out with a crossbow!”
    “Where are they?” said the other guy. “Get down behind the car!”
    I laid still, the arrow affixed to my head and ketchup oozing from around each side and onto the ground. I had hoped the whole thing would look real enough in the moonlight to buy me some time.
    It did. I heard sirens in the distance, and for the first time in my life the cops were coming to help me rather than arrest me. I hoped.
    “Let’s bolt,” said one of the young cons. “We’ll just tell ’em somebody took care of him for us.”
    I heard their shoes kick up gravel as they ran out of the gate and down the street. A car started and pulled away as the sirens got closer. I got up, pulled off the arrow, started to wipe the ketchup away from my head and prayed that the cop who responded would be an old guy with a sense of humor.
     
     
     
     

 
    Dog Days of Summer
     
    Janice and I were just getting into bed when I remembered I still had Lenny’s body in my trunk. You’d think you wouldn’t forget something like that, but it had been a long day.
    It was like one of those hourglass things where the sand falls from the top to the bottom. When Mr. Sharp put a bullet in Lenny’s head, the top was at least half full, maybe more. After that came a bunch of payment pickups, roughing up that Pakistani convenience store owner, getting groceries so Janice didn’t kick my ass and then a late dinner.
    The last grains of sand were falling as I drained my third beer, hit the can and then climbed the stairs to the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, about to pull my shoes off. That last grain of sand teetered on the brink, ready to slip through to the bottom as my head hit my pillow. That's when I remembered Lenny.
    I laced my shoes up again and pushed myself up off the bed.
    “Where you goin’?” Janice said.
    “I just remembered some stuff I gotta do for Mr. Sharp,” I said. “Don’t bother waiting up.”
    "Right," she said. "Mr. Sharp. Why don't you just call him Uncle Florian?"
    "I don't want to get into that now. I gotta keep work and homelife separate, you know that."
    She knew the drill, even though we had never talked about what exactly it is I do. I was her second husband, and was well into this before we even met. She chooses to look the other way and accepts that she doesn’t have to work.
    I went out to the garage and keyed the trunk release. The lid popped up a couple inches. I’ll admit that I jumped back, thinking for a split second that Lenny was gonna come up out of there and tackle me. ’Course, if the guy could survive a slug in the brain, I guess he deserved to take a swing at me. Nothing moved, so I lifted the lid the rest of the way.
    Lenny was wrapped in a canvas tarp that had been in my trunk; he looked like the big bag of softball bats I carried around when I was coaching Janice’s kid, back before he went to live with his dad. If those kids only knew what I did with those bats between practices.
    I probably had enough gas to get to the station down the block, but I had coasted into the garage on fumes and didn’t want to risk getting stranded and having a cop show up to help me. Or worse, standing at a gas pump to fill up and have Mr. Sharp or one of the other guys drive by. That would lead to an inspection of my trunk and the very physical expression of the resulting disappointment.
    You might think it was overkill, but Mr. Sharp