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Remmie Miken heard the voices through the wall, two loudmouths shouting at each other in the studio apartment next door. Something about a skinny girl named Veranda and a used Dodge Charger with low miles. Remmie caught bits and pieces, put together that the girl was gone, but somehow the Dodge might still be around, maybe in Tijuana. Who-fucking-knew?

Thing was: Remmie couldn’t sleep.

Not with the shouting and the stomping and the constant back and forth about the goddamn car. Whether the girl and the car were in Tijuana or not, Remmie was tired after ten hours on fryer duty at Big Stop’s Roadhouse, a grease pit burger joint smudged beneath a freeway overpass on the outskirts of downtown. He worked six days a week and all he wanted—besides a timely fucking paycheck—was a few hours sleep before his next shift.

How to get some quiet in this rundown apartment building?

He started by banging his fist against the wall and smothering himself with a lumpy pillow.

The conversation coming through the wall was the scumbag version of the scientific method:

Could be the girl got picked up by the cops, no? Would have been out by now, that’s right. Okay, so she didn’t get picked up, but maybe the girl took the Dodge up north? What’d the raspy-voiced guy think? Well, he thought the skinny bitch was too lazy to drive herself. No, she maybe sold the car to a gringo down on the border, used the money for a flight to Mexico City. The Dodge had leather interior, a decent sound system. Some nice fucking rims.

Big loss. Too big. They had to find it. And Veranda, too.

This fucking car. This fucking skinny girl who runs off without a word. Remmie wanted to burn the car and kill the girl, drown these two loudmouths in their own toilet bowl. He tried some deep breathing exercises, a thing he learned in his anger management courses—it was no good.

He couldn’t fucking sleep.

He got out of bed and put his ear to the wall. He noticed how bare his apartment looked. Sad. Pitiful, in fact. All he had in the place was a mattress on the floor, a cell phone plugged into the wall, and a mini-fridge filled with cheap beer next to the electric stove. He had a stack of paperback books, too. Old mysteries he found in a cardboard box in the alley outside his apartment building. Moody covers. Tough guys with five o’clock shadow and loaded pistols. Naked women clutching wet sheets in dingy motel rooms.

For all Remmie knew, the books could have belonged to the skinny girl.

He listened while the two men talked:

“Veranda couldn’t find her own reflection in a mirror.”

The raspy voice said, “Trust me, that girl knows what kind of money Leo Action pulls in. Don’t think she doesn’t have the balls to rip him off.”

“If she took the car, she did it because it was easy. That’s all.”

“Fuck if I believe that. She’s smarter than you give her credit for.”

“She didn’t know about the cop.”

More from raspy voice, “She does now.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Remmie banged on the wall again and said, “Can you two shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep over here.” Before he could scream at them again, a blast slammed his ears and Remmie stumbled backwards, sat on the cheap carpet. It was like being shot through a cloud; he didn’t know what was happening. His ears rang and pain started in the front of his head. What the fuck? He wiped particles of dry wall from his face, brushed dust off his hands and arms. He squinted through the darkness, tried to stand up, fell onto his knees. After a few deep breaths, Remmie stood and stared at a gaping crevice in the wall, just below where it met the ceiling; it looked like his apartment was yawning. He could see the two-by-four wall studs and some red and green electrical wires dangling through the slit. Across the room, in the far wall, he saw the splattered, pockmarked surface of a shotgun blast.

Those scumbag motherfuckers: They shot a hole in his wall.

Looked like Remmie needed to pay his neighbors a visit.

 

 

Remmie Miken was starting over after a bad run.

Divorce.

Lost custody.

Ten thousand dollars in gambling debt.

Here’s a bit of advice: Know what the fuck cricket is before you start laying bets on the sport—it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than you think.

What happened to Remmie could—he was sure—happen to almost any high school graduate. You start out alright, but you get bored. You get sick of frying catfish and mixing mayonnaise into tarter sauce. Everything starts to feel watered down; your snot-nosed kid cries a little too long each night, your wife asks a few too many questions, and your mother-in-law won’t stop talking about Oprah and her favorite reality tv shows. The double-wide starts to feel too much like a cell in the county jail.

Next thing you know, you’re sipping from a toilet bowl in a dive bar down by the mud flats, a thick slab of hand holding you by the neck.

Here’s the gist: They want their fucking money.

Of course, later, there’s a whole arson plot when it comes to the double-wide. And insurance fraud. Too much bail money to think about. And collateral, what little you have. Another bit of advice: Those class rings aren’t worth a solid-shitty-half of what you paid for them. Oh, and they’re not real gold either.

Just so you know, you know?

Point is, Remmie Miken needed a fresh start after the first thirty-six years of his life. He thought he’d try to make it in the Big City. Give it the old junior college try. Why not? All his shit was burned up and he’d never been loved.

Not for what he was, at least.

How much worse could life get?

 

 

The apartment building was low-rent, a two-story place next to a freeway on-ramp, refurbished with cheap carpet and mismatched paint. No credit check required. The property manager told Remmie not to cook meth or grow marijuana. Everything else, from Remmie’s experience in the building, was fair game. That included prostitution—the skinny girl’s vocation.

Funny, Veranda was taking a vacation from her vocation.

Rolling around TJ in a stolen Dodge Charger.

Not a bad way to do it if you asked Remmie. He rode the city bus to work, and thinking about it made him want to scream. Anyway, he was used to living with scum. Hell, he was used to living in scum. But Remmie needed sleep; he needed it so he could go back to making limp-dick French fries in the morning. And these scumbags next door would not shut the fuck up—there was also the new decorating they’d done to his apartment. Remmie didn’t have a gun, not yet. The best he could find was a butter knife with a bent tip. He carried it in his right hand as he walked down the hall. He reached the next door apartment and pounded on the loose number seven nailed to the door. “What the fuck, man? I need to talk to you guys. I have to work in the morning and—”

The door swung open and Remmie gasped. His voice lodged in his throat and a headache burned behind his eyes. In front of him, face speckled with blood, was a fat man with a shotgun propped on one shoulder. He smiled at Remmie—the man’s top two front teeth were missing—and said, “Nice to see you, neighbor. I could use a little help with the clean up over here. Thanks for the visit.” The fat man moved aside and waved Remmie into the room. “Come on in. Hurry on in. Don’t stand out there like a stranger. Let’s be friends.”

Remmie slipped the butter knife into a pocket.

He shuffled into the apartment.

So much for starting a new life. Remmie had an odd feeling, a feeling like he was slipping out of his new skin and back into his old one.