“You won’t lose your job,” Lex assured him. “My old man’s gonna kill me if I lose another job,” Creep said. He didn’t dare because once he did, she was going to start riding him about the shortcut and exposing his inadequacies behind the wheel. She could feel him tensing behind the wheel, but he didn’t say anything. She lit a cigarette and mainly because she knew it would annoy Chazz, who was virulently anti-smoking inside his van. Some time in a cage will do wonders for him. Jail time and a suspended license is exactly what he deserves. Any moment now, some hotshot sheriff’s deputy was going to come screaming out of the williwags with both flashers going and siren screaming.Īnd I hope it happens soon, she thought, before he fucking kills us.

He had no idea where he was going and with all that alcohol in his system, he couldn’t have pissed in a straight line let alone walked one. Chazz’s sense of direction was seriously challenged when he was sober let alone after ten beers and half-a-dozen Jager Bombs. Which was bullshit of course, Ramona knew. “You never mentioned a shortcut,” Ramona said. The rain was coming down in sheets and the pavement was greasy like it had been oiled with cooking spray. “This’ll cut twenty minutes off the drive,” Chazz explained, taking the next right and almost putting the van in the ditch as the road curved sharply down a low hill. She was having trouble finding the humor in a situation where the drunken idiot behind the wheel didn’t have the good sense to hand over his keys or admit he was lost. Lex giggled in the backseat and Soo-Lee did, too, because if Lex thought it was funny, then surely it was. “I’m taking a shortcut,” Chazz told him, an edge to his voice cutting beneath his words like a razor. came real early once you passed the midnight hour. “You missed the turn-off,” Creep pointed out, getting nervous because he had to cover the morning shift at Donut Den back in the city and five a.m. Or it wanted people to suffer.Ĭhazz was too drunk to drive by the time they hit Highway 8, only no one was saying so because although he was a real mellow, easy sort of cat when he was sober, when he was drunk, he was mean as skunk piss and if you didn’t want that spraying into your eyes, you learned to keep your mouth shut and go with the flow like a turd being sucked down a toilet. Like pieces of a die-cut puzzle, everything simply fit into place in that purely seamless and smooth sort of way that fate managed when it wanted something to happen. It wasn’t until later that Ramona realized how neatly it all fit together. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.įind out why DarkFuse is the premier publisher of dark fiction.Ĭheck out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list: Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Long Black Coffin by Tim Curran