Here is a preview from All the Good in Evil by Joe Ricker.
PART I
ONE
Amos
An inch to the right and Amos Swain would have killed a man for the second time. A .38 hollow point would have shredded through the crest of skull just behind Bobby Sisk’s ear, fragmenting, eliminating any chance for ballistics. Those fragments would have sliced through brain and severed nerve endings like ties to a relative who slept with your spouse. The main part of the bullet would have tumbled to an exit, maybe through the palate, blasting out the lower set of teeth. Bobby Sisk wouldn’t have felt a thing—as merciful a death as any. Amos wanted him to feel something, so he put the bullet through the top part of Bobby’s ear. Blood sprayed on the fading yellow curtains and the money Bobby had been counting. His head snapped away from the gunshot and he dropped to the floor, cupping his ear. Caleb, Amos’s partner, swept the money off the table into a brown paper bag and they left him there, on the floor of his kitchen, howling like the wind of the winter night outside. Amos and Caleb slipped through the falling snow, their shoulders rolling into the shadows, and they were gone.
If his father had fallen an inch to the right, Amos wouldn’t have been waiting for Bobby Sisk to notice that he and Caleb were standing behind him. Amos wouldn’t have pulled the trigger and let a bullet blow out the tiny bones in Bobby’s ear. He wouldn’t have known that Bobby was a dealer or that he’d be counting a large amount of cash for his drop in the morning. He wouldn’t have had to warn Bobby to stop peddling drugs at his bar. He wouldn’t know the amount of tension it took to squeeze a trigger. He wouldn’t know what spending three years in prison felt like. He wouldn’t be a bouncer in his small Maine town just inland from the coast.
Tourists come into Maine after the sloping winter months, when the coastal air is sticky with salt, after the squeeze of winter has coiled into the mud along the edges of tidal rivers. They come north on I-95 from Boston and they hit Portsmouth and then the Piscataquis River Bridge. They pass the sign on the interstate telling them this is the way life should be, but they never see past that. They never get a chance to look close enough, and even if they tried, they wouldn’t see past the veneer of Vacationland.
The streets and neighborhoods are stitched together with the weakening threads of the past that once made the place something more than just another dead New England mill town—more than the people who stayed because they had nowhere else to go. There are people trying to make it on three-hundred-dollar paychecks, but their jobs age them more than their cigarettes and drinking habits. Dealers sling stomped coke or whatever else they can fit in a baggy, and cabbage patch gangsters run neighborhoods thinking they’re as hard as the empty threats they make. Echelons of single teenage moms push their babies in strollers over broken sidewalks. The convenience stores pack with customers buying Megabucks tickets with their cashed welfare checks on the first and fifteenth, hoping for dreams that will never come true.
The mills are crumbling along the Mousam River and haven’t been occupied in decades. The river continues to make its way through the dams and toward the ocean, heading out of town. Follow any street long enough and shabby, dilapidated houses and apartment buildings sneer with the contempt of a bitter, pain-riddled old man. Porches sag like weak shoulders ready to tear away, and inside, linoleum peels up at the edges of the floors waiting for the walls to buckle and let the place cave in. In the cemeteries, headstones lean toward the grave and break while the other rows wait patiently to follow.
Violence and crime and all fearful things get shuffled to the backs of newspapers and barbershops. To most people, Amos is just a bouncer, a washed-out criminal who couldn’t make it through college, another flannel wearing, R-dropping townie. But, he knew every crack in every sidewalk and every rusted staple in the telephone poles. He connected himself to the whispers of desperate men in his attempt to break away from his town, from a place he, like everyone else, had gone back to because there was no other place to go. More than anything, Amos wanted to flee, but not to another town or another place. He didn’t want to be someone else. Amos just wanted the freedom of solitude, the freedom to be alone. He wanted the freedom to move through his life without the snag from the fabric of his past.
TWO
Caleb
Caleb pushed a flat stream of smoke through his right nostril. From certain angles, it looked like he shot it from his ear, a clever trick that he used for entertainment even though he didn’t remember that he did it to himself after he broke his nose with the fat end of a pool cue. Caleb leaned on the porch railing, flicking paint chips from the wood with his thumbnail, and finished his cigarette. The two-hour drive and cigarettes and coffee did little to help him wake up to make his collection in Lynn, Massachusetts. He looked down the street at the other houses. They were all just shitty enough to confuse with one another, like those portrait cut kit homes they build in places nobody should live, except these houses were rotting on their foundations. Boarded windows, broken vinyl siding and graffiti clung to them like bed sores. Trash twined into the rusted chain-link fences separating small yards while mounds of trash bags covered in snow were piled next to the steps—the houses that actually had steps leading up to the doors. Other houses sat like stacks of spine-mangled books, leaning or twisting with panes of broken glass covered with cardboard and plastic and the flapping of loose shingles or tarpaper on their roofs. The neighborhood had quieted for the day, but that would fade and the dregs would come out to shuffle along the streets with their noise. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, Caleb muttered and rapped on the door.
The door opened wide enough for a sawed-off double barrel twelve gauge to fit through. A dull brown eye passed over the crack behind the gun. Caleb lifted his eyebrow and tilted his head to look in at the eye. The barrel retreated and the door opened.
Caleb looked down at the torn welcome mat. “Gotta collect, Crow.” Nobody called Crow by his real name, and the racist connotations of Crow, which was short for Velcro, didn’t seem to matter to him, except when he needed it as an excuse to accuse someone of being racist.
“Now?” Crow asked.
“I didn’t drive two hours to have a fucking barbecue.”
He sighed. “Come on.”
Caleb entered the house, kicked through the pizza boxes and empty two-liter bottles of Coke. In the dim light, Caleb followed Crow’s child-like stature through the hall. In the dark, his waddling movement made him look like a school kid struggling with a heavy backpack, and when they entered the light of the living room, Caleb could see the sag in his pants and the oversized stainless-steel revolver tucked into his waist band. The living room windows were covered with strips of blankets and towels. The air in the room smelled of dirt and motor oil. When Crow tossed the twelve gauge on the sofa in the living room, Caleb pulled his hand from the hole in his hoodie pocket and away from the pistol tucked into his belt.
“I figured you guys would at least give me another week.”
“You already got another week. It’s Moss’s birthday soon. I’d like him to start a new year with nothing outstanding.”
Crow pulled the screen off the right speaker of his stereo and pulled out four rolls of cash bound with rubber bands. “You guys got anything else lined up?”
“Construction’s slow in the winter, and riskier, you know, with the snow, but we should have a couple things for you soon.”
“Alright.”
“How’s the other business?”
“Same old, you know. Hard to find guys that won’t roll if they get pinched. Plus, I got another crew trying to make moves and I don’t have the posse to do shit. I was going to talk to you and Moss about that.”
“Come up in a couple days and talk to Moss. I’m not counting this.” Caleb held the rolls of money up. “You sure it’s here?”
“Yeah, it’s there.”
“All twenty-five?”
“Twenty-five? The deal was twenty?”
“Was twenty. That was Wednesday, when you were supposed to meet me in Portsmouth.”
“When I talked to you, you said, okay.”
“Yeah. I did. But I didn’t say there wouldn’t be any points.”
“This is fucking bullshit.”
“So call the fucking NAACP.”
Caleb heard lips smack behind him. He turned to the man half asleep in the recliner by a boarded window. Crow looked over, too, and jutted a thumb at him.
“My cousin,” he said. “Motherfucker thinks it’s a motel.”
Caleb looked at the trash scattered around the room. “Definitely not a motel.” Then he noticed the patches of pale skin on Crow’s cousin’s face. “What the fuck happened to his skin?”
“Vitiligo.”
“Is that from sickle-cell or some shit?”
“Nah, man.”
The man opened his eyes, worked them with his thumb and smacked his lips a few more times. “Yo, man. Shut up.”
Caleb chuckled. “Is he talking to you or me?”
“Talking to you, bitch.”
“Is that right?”
Caleb slipped his hands under his shirt and worked his fingers around the grip of his pistol. Crow pulled a beer can from the top of the speaker and tossed it at his cousin. It clanged on the floor at his feet. “I’m doing business, man. Shut the fuck up.”
The cousin had already fallen back to sleep. Crow snatched another roll of bills and tossed them to Caleb. He snapped the speaker cover back on. Caleb took another look around the room, crushed beer cans and empty potato chip bags. The cardboard box serving as a coffee table by the plastic-covered couch was littered with piles of marijuana stems and seeds. Butane lighters were strewn on windowsills and other flat surfaces. Empty Gatorade bottles and candy wrappers were piled in corners. Caleb took inventory—crack, meth, pot.
“You should really clean this fucking place up.”
Crow sucked his teeth. “Man, don’t be coming in here talking shit about my home.”
Caleb ran his tongue over his teeth, annoyed with the sound Crow made. “I’ll tell Moss you said happy birthday.”
“Tell Moss to go fuck himself.”
Caleb lifted an eyebrow.
“Just kidding, Jesus.”
Caleb dropped the rolls into an inside jacket pocket. “See you ’round, Crow.” He clung to the walls on his way out, keeping his focus on Crow and his cousin.
Sunlight broke over the narrow peaks of pines as Caleb drove up the interstate back toward Maine. A mile from the Lexington plaza, his ability to hold his stomach ceased and he pulled his car over the rumble strip into the break down lane. He opened his door and spun from his seat into the cold and an even colder blast of wind from a passing eighteen-wheeler. He slid along the edge of his car and retched into the dirty snow. Passing cars, rushing by in their early morning commutes, shook him inside his clothes. The gusts made his ears pop. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and got back behind the wheel.
Caleb waited in his car for a while after he’d pulled into the plaza. He steadied his nerves and rested his head against the steering wheel. He dug his fingers into the back of his neck, pressing the muscle into his spine until his fingers went numb.
A silver Ford sedan pulled into the plaza and parked on the opposite side of the lot. The man driving climbed out and peered over his sunglasses at Caleb’s car. He scanned the parking lot and adjusted the pistol on his hip. He sauntered over, rubbing out the bunching in his tailored blue suit. As he walked, he looked inside the vehicles he passed, especially those with a clear view of Caleb’s car. Caleb lit a cigarette as the man approached the front of the car. He stood at Caleb’s passenger door and tapped on the window.
“A bit fucking cold out here.” The man said, and pointed down to the lock button.
Caleb leaned over and unlocked the door. The man got in. He pulled his suit tight around his back. Caleb looked down at the man’s outstretched palm. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the rolls of bills he’d taken from Crow. He slapped it into the man’s palm.
“Now,” the man said, “tell me more about Amos Swain.”
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