Discount Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Title

  Genesis by Patti Abbott

  Introduction by Charles Ardai

  What Was Heavy? by Sophie Littlefield

  One in the Big Box by Kieran Shea

  The Black Friday of Daniel Maddox by Chad Eagleton

  The Holiday Spirit by Ed Gorman

  Acceptance by Cormac Brown

  Aubergine by Fleur Bradley

  Concrete Jungle by Alan Griffiths

  Loss by Patricia Abbott

  Tenderloin by Laura Benedict

  Freak Shift by Garnett Elliott

  Inside Man by Eric Beetner

  The Bayou Beast: A Requiem

  Their Fancies Lightly Turned by Bill Crider

  Thirty-One Hundred by Loren Eaton

  WWGD? by John DuMond

  Part-Time by John McFetridge

  Cold Feet by Toni McGee Causey

  A Fish Called Lazarus by Jeff Vande Zande

  House Names by James Reasoner

  A New Game by Kyle Minor

  Getting Messed Up by Randy Rohn

  Discount Primrose by Todd Mason

  Super People of Megamart by Bryon Quertermous

  Heinie Man by Sandra Scoppettone

  In and Out by Stephen D. Rogers

  Code Adam by Steve Weddle

  Skyler Hobbs and the Rollback Bandit by Evan Lewis

  Black Friday by Daniel B. O'Shea

  The Gimmick by Sandra Seamans

  The Hideous Lime Green Truth by Albert Tucher

  Mondays and Thursdays by Donna Moore

  Friday Night with the Tijuana Wolfman by John Weagly

  Pink Tidal Wave by Keith Rawson

  Need a Hand? by Gerald So

  Hope You're Having Yourself an Especially Grand Time by Dave Zeltserman

  Megamartyres by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

  The Tin Foil Heist by Jay Stringer

  Crack House by Anne Frasier

  Secret Identity by Kathleen A. Ryan

  A Place Marked Malmart by Eric Peterson

  For One Night Only by Chris Grabenstein

  Have You Seen Me? by J.T. Ellison

  Contributors

  Discount Noir

  Edited by Patricia Abbott and Steve Weddle

  “Loss,” Copyright 2010 by Patti Abbott

  “Introduction,” Copyright 2010 by Charles Ardai

  “The Bayou Beast: A Requiem,” Copyright 2010 by Jack Bates

  “Inside Man,” Copyright 2010 by Eric Beetner

  “Tenderloin,” Copyright 2010 by Laura Benedict

  “Aubergine,” Copyright 2010 by Fleur Bradley

  “Acceptance,” Copyright 2010 by Cormac Brown

  “Their Fancies Lightly Turned...,” Copyright 2010 by Bill Crider

  “WWGD?,” Copyright 2010 by John DuMond

  “The Black Friday of Daniel Maddox,” Copyright 2010 by Chad Eagleton

  “Thirty-One Hundred,” Copyright 2010 by Loren Eaton

  “Freak Shift,” Copyright 2010 by Garnett Elliott

  “Have You Seen Me?,” Copyright 2010 by J.T. Ellison

  “Crack House,” Copyright 2010 by Anne Fraiser

  “Holiday Spirit,” Copyright 2010 by Ed Gorman

  “For One Night Only,” Copyright 2010 by Chris Grabenstein

  “Concrete Jungle” Copyright 2010 by Alan Griffiths

  “Megamartyres,” Copyright 2010 by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

  “Skylar Hobbs and the Rollback Bandit,” Copyright 2010 by Evan Lewis

  “What Was Heavy?,” Copyright 2010 by Sophie Littlefield

  “Discount Primrose,” Copyright 2010 by Todd Mason

  “Part-Time,” Copyright 2010 by John McFetridge

  “Cold Feet,” Copyright 2010 by Toni McGee Causey

  “A New Game,” Copyright 2010 by Kyle Minor

  “Mondays and Thursdays,” Copyright 2010 by Donna Moore

  “Black Friday,” Copyright 2010 by Daniel B. O’Shea

  “A Place Marked Malmart,” Copyright 2010 by Eric Peterson

  “Super People of Megamart,” Copyright 2010 by Bryon Quertermous

  “Pink Tidal Wave,” Copyright 2010 by Keith Rawson

  “House Names,” Copyright 2010 by James Reasoner

  “In and Out,” Copyright 2010 by Stephen D. Rogers

  “Getting Messed Up,” Copyright 2010 by Randy Rohn

  “Secret Identity,” Copyright 2010 by Kathleen A. Ryan

  “Heinie Man,” Copyright 2010 by Sandra Scoppettone

  “The Gimmick,” Copyright 2010 by Sandra Seamans

  “One In the Big Box,” Copyright 2010 by Kieran Shea

  “Need a Hand?,” Copyright 2010 by Gerald So

  “The Tin Foil Heist,” Copyright 2010 by Jay Stringer

  “The Hideous Lime Green Truth,” Copyright 2010 by Albert Tucher

  “A Fish Called Lazarus,” Copyright 2010 by Jeff Vande Zande

  “Friday Night With the Tijuana Wolfman,” Copyright 2010 by John Weagly

  “Code Adam,” Copyright 2010 by Steve Weddle

  “Hope You're Having Yourself an Especially Grand Time,” Copyright 2010 by Dave Zeltserman

  Cover Copyright 2010 by Dara England

  The authors are hereby established as the sole holder of their copyrights. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or authors may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent for individual stories or the anthology as a whole.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Discount Noir

  Edited by Patricia Abbott and Steve Weddle

  Genesis

  By Patti Abbott

  In October 2009, my co-anthologist Steve Weddle suggested I use a website that I’ll call The People of Megamart as the inspiration for a flash fiction challenge.

  Keeping a blog can be a solipsistic and silly venture, and to combat this tendency, I’ve promoted several communal activities over the years and I have maintained a website. The first was Friday’s Forgotten Books, in which, every Friday, crime and western fiction writers and readers write brief reviews of books they believe to be forgotten.

  But since most readers of my blog are short story writers, I decided in February 2008, to issue a flash fiction challenge. (I was far from the first to do so.) This was not a contest but rather an inclusive invitation to write a story of about 800 words and post it on an assigned day. This first challenge was to write a story set on Valentine’s Day. For those without blogs, Aldo Calgano posted stories on his flash zine, Powder Burn Flash. Gerald So helped to advertise the challenge. It was a success and each of the succeeding four challenges drew more entries. Each challenge had its own topic—my favorite being one in which each participant wrote an opening paragraph that was passed on to someone else.

  For our sixth challenge, Megamart: I Love You, writers were asked to contribute a story set, or partially set, in a Megamart or Megamart-type store. This topic generated more than thirty stories, all published simultaneously on various blogs on November 30, 2009. Those stories and a few more can be found here. I hope you enjoy them.

  Introduction to
Discount Noir

  By Charles Ardai

  Noir is a literature of the working class. This is not a requirement—rich people, too, can struggle desperately against dark forces beyond their control and wind up crushed, ground down, destroyed. But in practice the stories noir writers tell tend to be about people at the other end of the economic spectrum. The Postman Always Rings Twice famously opens with down-and-out drifter Frank Chambers saying, “They threw me off the hay truck about noon”; none of Jim Thompson’s characters, Donald Westlake once said, ever had an annual income with a comma in it.

  In the modern world, the rail-riding hobo is gone, as is the SRO-dwelling private eye with the cheap tin desk in his fleabag office. But privation is not gone, and the symbols of it resonate with writers of crime fiction as much today as they ever did. And one of the most visible symbols is the big discount mall store—call it Megamart if you must, we all know what you mean—with its air of cheapness and disappointment, its dead-end jobs and shabby “bargains.” Pretty much everyone shops at these stores from time to time, but the more desperate among us, the most pressed for time and least able to claw their way out of the daily grind, sometimes seem to shop nowhere else. Accordingly, the discount store is a potent emblem today in the way that automats and flophouses were in the days of Raymond Chandler.

  These are the places where people with not too many resources gather, the ones who’ve got their heads above water but not by enough that they can ever stop paddling hard to keep it that way. These are the people with only a threadbare cushion between their backsides and the hard pavement of a city street.

  And what sorts of stories do they inhabit? Well, in the case of this volume, short ones—none of the forty-two pieces you’re about to read runs more than 800 words. It’s a way to give you an impression of this teeming world one tense and overworked life at a time, building up a mosaic-like portrait of souls in strained coexistence or imminent collision. Outside of length and setting, these stories offer more variety than overlap—ironic tales nestle side by side with earnestly bleak ones, stories of career criminals abut ones about ordinary men and women pushed over the edge by one provocation too many. And you get to see that “working class” applies not just to the greeters and checkout clerks and the customers they serve, but also to the cops and crooks who carry out their trade in the margins. A thief’s a working man, too. And who’s to say his job’s worse than some of the worst offered by the Megamarts of this world? Neither come with benefits.

  Discount Noir offers a bracing view into a world that deserves more attention than it normally gets as the butt of jokes on late-night TV or as the destination of last resort for those in the market for inexpensive goods or a fluorescent bulb tan. If it doesn’t have the charm of the flophouse or the romance of the automat, perhaps it’s because it hasn’t had the opportunity yet to fade into nostalgia-tinged memory. And until it does, it provides an acute reminder that the “mean streets” enshrined by noir fiction can sometimes be well-lit, linoleum-paved store aisles.

  What Was Heavy?

  By Sophie Littlefield

  What was heavy?

  Those round landscape rocks would work. But of course the Garden Center was closed—it was 2:37 AM.

  Sand. Like, for cactus and shit? But that was probably in the Garden Center too. And that wouldn’t work anyway, not underwater.

  Bricks. Lead shot. Cannonballs. Fuck, focus.

  The Megamart Supercenter had seemed like a godsend when he saw the sign from the highway, fifty feet in the air, lit up like Christmas. He’d already driven twenty, fifty, eighty miles of nothing, that long empty stretch of northbound up to Graham’s place. He’d made this trip a dozen times. He’d driven it drunk, he’d driven it half asleep, but he’d never driven it like this.

  (Not he, they. Still they.)

  The cabin was another couple of hours but they’d be there well before light, and with any luck at all the lake wouldn’t be frozen over this late in the season. It had frozen back home, but that was a shitty little drainage pond; Crooked Lake was decent sized. Eight, ten cabins on the east shore. No one up there this time of year, though. Cordwood and kerosene, boat key on the hook by the fridge, house key under that rock. Holy hell, it better be under that rock.

  Casey slowed the cart in front of an iron log holder. He hadn’t meant for this to happen. It was the way she just kept coming at him. She was relentless. He’d asked her—begged her—to shut her mouth. The log holder was heavy, yeah, but what was he supposed to do, tie it around her ass?

  He kept moving. Walking through the aisles, tossing shit into the cart. There should have been more shoppers. Why even keep the joint open all night if no one was going to come in? Hell of a lot of square footage, lights, heat…so far he had a couple cans of cashews, half a dozen cheap plastic hangers. Bottle of Windex.

  The breathing—that was freaking him out. He didn’t know how much more of that he could take. Worse than the dent in her skull—come on, a fucking dent, like when you step on a cooler lid. Not big though. Maybe…a couple inches, an inch wide? A cut. Blood, not as much as you’d expect. Yeah, the dent, that was bad. But that fast and shallow breathing, and her eyes not shut all the way. He should have put her in the back seat, wouldn’t have had to look at her that way.

  Emergency room would have been the way to go. Only, how was that going to look, with that thing just a month ago? And how fucked up was that? He’d never laid a hand on her before that. Last month was bad, yeah, he’d admit he’d gotten a little out of control. But it was one time, just one time.

  And this—well,she was coming athim. All he’d done was try to push her back away from him, and it was just shit luck that they were in the hall by that fake-country-French hook thing she wouldn’t let him hang anything on.

  Which is how she got the dent.

  But Christ, what was heavy?

  “M’elp you find somethin’?”

  The voice scared the crap out of him, but Casey took his time turning around, fixed a smile on his face. “Naw, man, I’m good.”

  The guy shrugged. Greasy hair and glasses; looked like he’d had them twenty years, blue vest too big, nametag crooked. Brett. Guy didn’t look like a Brett.

  “Just get off?”

  The smile froze on Casey’s face as his mind ran through the possibilities, racing, tumbling, panicking.

  “Work?” The guy finally said, helping him out. “Just get off work? Second shift?”

  “Ah. Yeah. Yeah, uh.”

  The guy nodded, pleased to have got it right. He went back to working his little sticker gun, doing something to the price tags on a rack of flannel shirts.

  For a minute Casey just stared at him, heart slamming, hands sweaty. He could ask the guy for a phone. For directions. Get an ambulance. Get the cops, even, get anyone. A helicopter, get her out of this shithole stretch of nothing, somewhere there was a decent hospital.

  Past the guy’s sloped shoulder, the Paint department. Foam brushes, shelves of stain in yellow cans. Plenty heavy, the big cans anyway…too big for a pocket. But hey…wire handles, and there were belt loops, buttonholes.

  “Gotta stain my deck,” he said, to no one in particular.

  Guy gave him an agreeable nod. “Gonna warm up, too,” he said. “Big thaw next week. And clear. You’ll be ahead of the game, getting it done now.”

  One in the Big Box

  By Kieran Shea

  Sergeant Darryl Welsh, forty-two years old, wiped a gloved forefinger beneath his eye and swept away a smudge of cold sweat. Welsh blinked, then he trained the Remington 700’s scope on a beige metal door two hundred and fifty-three feet away.

  The scope’s sights floated, so Welsh steadied his grip. Behind the beige door, the suspect—male, white, mid-thirties to early forties, two hundred thirty or fifty pounds—was holed up with two hostages. The first hostage was believed to be a woman (Asian American, pregnant, customer); the second hostage was supposedly an employee of unspecified gender and rac
e. It was 11:43 AM on a Tuesday morning, twelve miles east of Charlottesville, Virginia. A nice, hot summer day and things had gone straight to hell.

  Welsh’s position was high on some heavy-duty display shelving that held home office furniture. The shelving was reinforced for weight, and if Welsh reached up he could nearly touch the perforate drop ceiling above. Empty black and candy-apple red metal file cabinets book-ended his hips as he lined up the Remington 700 down the aisle at the beige door.

  Nearby, off to his immediate right, a banner hung from gray metal ceiling wires. The banner had a big, floppy cartoon dog on it and read: DOLLAR DOG DAYS! Even with the air conditioning, the summer sun muscled its way through the roof above Welsh’s head like a heavy, hot curtain being drawn down.

  Four casualties was the count for now, with more expected. Half a dozen customers and over two dozen employees wounded all in all—each victim hit by semi-automatic weapon fire. Lone gunman off the rails. A crazy. It was all so sad, so American, and all so familiar.

  On the floor one hundred and fifty feet ahead of Welsh and just past the electronics section was a bright smear of blood where yet another uncounted victim crawled and quit. Welsh squinted and swung the scope slightly. He could make out a pair of dark green cargo shorts, bloody legs, and inexpensive flip-flops. The legs were hairy so Welsh assumed the victim was male. The legs were still.

  Welsh touched his ear. Command volleyed curt updates. Harsh bursts of static were sudden and strong in his earpiece like tiny, sharp explosions.

  Other than Welsh, ten other county tactical officers surrounded the suspect and hostages: four covering the rear exits, two on either flank, and two other sharpshooters, like Welsh, positioned high as possible and hidden.

  Besides a botched bank robbery two years ago and a standoff with some knuckle-draggers after Obama won the presidential election, this was the most intense situation the tactical unit had ever faced.

  Megamart. Christ. Welsh’s wife shopped here only three days ago. Bought Welsh one of those jumbo sleeves of Teriyaki beef jerky he liked, some bath towels, bunch of frozen pizzas, and diapers for the baby. Welsh tried to remember the last time he’d been in the store by himself but couldn’t. He did on occasion gas up his F-150 at the pumps outside. Bought hunting ammo here in the fall. Yeah, yeah, yeah...crushed the little guy, but good values are welcome in these times.