Armistice Suicide (eBook)
206 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9595-6 (ISBN)
It's mid-spring 1975 and twenty-two-year-old Dice is in the process of avenging his brother's murder. Then his landlord tells him he has thirty days to move out of his place due to renovations. He also tells him he will be doubling the rent. Dice's priority changes. Now he feels he needs to get more money and lots of it. With the help of his friend Spike, they both embark on a career of murdering for hire, in and around the housing projects they grew up in. They feel that they're bounty hunters, ridding the Earth of people who deserve to be killed. Eventually, they will be biting off more than they can chew.
Chapter One: Life Worth Living
If he ran he wouldn’t last. He might possibly give out, he thought, but he ran anyway.
The color of the spring nighttime was dark blackberry, and the side streets were vacant, except for the spots of dim white lights hanging overhead, which were usual that time of the morning, after 3AM, in 1975.
He turns a corner and stops in a doorway beside a store with its protection gate down. All six feet of his twenty two year old coffee dark body remained motionless in there as a white and sky blue police car sails by on the cross street, searchingly. He waited for the car to turn from view before leaving.
Walking out of that doorway he calmly walks fast down the block, hearing left and right instead of looking that way. He heads for the subway station at the end of the block and entered it.
Later that morning. The sunshine brightly showed the commercial and residential areas of Roberts Street. Commercial/residential, because of the division of both districts, by the narrow one-way street known as Roberts.
On one side you had fire house red or heavy cream colored brick houses for two or three families, while the other side had business concerns like Linda’s Hair Salon, and Lee Chung’s Fish Market, and Lady Tee’s Tarot Readings.
Awakening from sleep the young man’s eyes opened wide suddenly and his torso rose quick like a nightmare. His one room apartment had the sunlight raying through the window on the sparseness in there: a chestnut colored small desk, a smudged gray fourteen inch Philco black & white tv (portable) on top of it, a black push button phone that looked like a rotary in the corner, a black waste paper basket.
Three bangs on the door!
He rises from the flat bed he slept on and gets up to answer it. On the other side of the threshold stands a five-nine balding perfect circle headed man with Greek features, bordering sixty years old. He gets right to it:
“Listen… There’s gonna be guys workin’ in the building this month ‘cause I’m ren-ovatin’ the place. If yous’re stayin’, the rent’s gonna be double. So that’ll be one thousand and two a month. If yous don’t plan on payin’ it, ya got thirty days ta move out.” And he turns and walks away down the stairs with his back showing a huge sweat stain on his white tee-shirt.
The young man stands there just a bit shocked, but not enough not to close the door, which he did. Before he goes over to plop himself back down on the bed, two knocks are heard on the door now. He turns back around to go open it.
There on the other side stands a five foot seven inch twenty year old caramel tan colored man. “What happened?” he says to the other, who was letting him in.
Closing the door but not realizing it (staring at a wall) he answers, “The fuckin’ guy declares thirty days for me to pack up and go, if I don’t have the new rent, which is a thousand and two a month now. For me, that’s a million and two a month.”
“C’mon Dice!” the other says, “Is he the fantasy man?… He must be the fantasy man, right?”
Dice still stands not facing the questioner but the wall. “The fuckin’ guy,” he repeats, bracing himself, “…declares, that I got thirty fuckin’ days, like, Oh!— okay! Let me pack up now, and I’ll be out! Pronto!”
“That’s what I’m sayin’,” replies the other. “He must be the fantasy man!… But it ain’t like you didn’t know it was comin’ tho.”
“Yeah I know,” Dice says. “Soon has become now with a dagger sticking in its mouth. Diplomatically of course— there’s no need to be caustic. ”
“So, what happened to the other thing? You went down there?”
“Yeah, I went down there, and when I got there I got real locomotive and left. I thought they were in there and spotted me first. There’ll be none of that I said.” He plops
his rear on the bed, reaching for a cigarette and lighting it. “And besides, like I told you Spike, I wasn’t gonna hang around long enough to get caught anyway.”
Spike sits next to him and takes one of Dice’s cigarettes from the pack that was on the bed, then looks all around. “I thought you said you were gonna pick up a box? You got a ban on entertainment in here.”
“I know. No music, no radio… I was gonna get something before, but what’s the point now? This guy might change the channel and flip me out tomorrow for all I know.
Real life ain’t like fiction at all.”
“So what happened when you went up there last night?”
“I was a star. A Hollywood leading man,” Dice explains. “A swashbuckler. I had in my mind right from the start I was goin’ in there and confront shit. So, outside of the front of the club there’s the usual line—”
“Right.”
“—from here to Venice, only thinner. Now, how many dudes you think they had at the door, waitin’ for me.”
“I dunno. Two? Three?”
“Five!”
“What??”
“Five angels standing there waitin’, and one of them knows me already, and he tells the others it’s me, shifting his head, ya know?”
“Right.”
“And I’m like, fuck it— I ain’t carrying no kind of persuasion for silence. I’m not the master of my destiny tonight by any stretch of the libido, ya know? So I had to get locomotive real fast, before they started revvin’ up their engines behind me, like biker dudes.”
“Like what?”
“Like the Apocalypse. Frightening.”
“Terror men.”
“Exactly,” Dice says, as he gets up and steps over to the window to look out of it.
He sighed a slow sigh inside his head and mourned out, “You seen Rosie yesterday at all?”
“Nah,” returns Spike, not looking at him.
As Dice looks out his second floor window he sees the passers-by moderately walking to and fro. He turns to Spike like he had an idea and says “Let’s go outside and see what’s happenin’,” and they proceed to do that.
Once outside, Dice and Spike talk and walk casually in and out through the pedestrians.
The crowd looked like spring, with their coats on, coats off, no coats, and light jackets.
The anticipation of summer was around, thick and inevitable.
The ladies are resplendent with beauty and Spike responds to that, saying,“You can tell summer’s coming,” as he stares each one of them down while Dice is thinking about something else. Then Spike says, “Check this out. I was talkin’ to Moose the other day.
Tell me this ain’t serial killeresh…”
“Go ‘head.”
“Awright. You remember Bob Randerson?— he’s trying to call this guy—”
“Right.”
“—and he keeps callin’ and callin’, leaving messages with the guy’s wife and the guy never calls him back?”
“Hmm.”
“So, what d’you think Bob did? He puts all his energy into waiting for the guy to get off work. I mean, he’s waiting for him at his subway stop and everything. And then he finally sees him coming down the stairs at his station?”
“So don’t tell me.”
“And he grabs him by the neck and starts choking him!”
“Get outta here!”
“I swear ta God, he starts chokin’ him right in the station, shaking him ‘n shit like a ragdoll. Goin’, ‘You didn’t call me back muthafucka!! You didn’t call me back!!’”
“Get outta here!— who you said told you that, Rosie?”
“Nah, Moose. Moose!”
“Oh! Yeah, he always has some wild stories to share with mankind.”
“So wait a minute, the guy’s still choking this guy. Then he stops and pulls out a butcher knife and starts stabbing the guy all over the place with punctures ‘n shit.”
“Unbelievable. So you think the guy calls back now?”
“Nah, he’s probably dead now.”
And the two bust out laughing out of control.
They look at a coffee shop across the street. “Let’s go there,” Dice says, as if he knew Spike’s answer would be “okay” already. And they head over that way.
Before them, girls and women stroll back and forth, and the guys’ eyes follow each one of them, as the sun’s light slaps against their faces from the moving cars.
Commotion was the layered sound of voices and auto motors, and crowded passing buses with heat exhaust, while the other buses passing were scant with people.
“When was the last time I told you I talked to Rosie?” Dice asks his friend.
“I don’t know. I think it was last Monday.”
They walk into the coffee shop, which is as crowded as the outside, with chairs full of people. Dishes are clanging dull against each other here and there, as waitresses are seen all over the place walking with them in their hands, some carry trays filled with food, others painted with the stains from it.
Dice steps up to the take-out counter to the spice-brown waitress there. “Let me have a cup of java and a jelly donut.”
She gives her nose a quick twitch up, twice. “A cup of what??”
“I was being nostalgic. Uh, just make it coffee. Instead.”
She goes to get it not amused. Suddenly, a loud metallic crash explodes inside and everybody turns to the left to see a tall thin man standing up— his hair rampaging stalk standing high. His powder grayish complexion is sixtyish in age and he has on a gray overcoat. A gray tweed overcoat! (Spring.) He’s angry and he shouts:
“What kinda hospital is this? Where’s the hospitality??” and he steps up...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 22.3.2023 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror |
| ISBN-10 | 1-6678-9595-8 / 1667895958 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-6678-9595-6 / 9781667895956 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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