They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy

  R. D. Harless

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 5

  Chapter 2 14

  Chapter 3 22

  Chapter 4 26

  Chapter 5 36

  Chapter 6 43

  Chapter 7 54

  Chapter 8 60

  Chapter 9 71

  Chapter 10 81

  Chapter 11 86

  Chapter 12 91

  Chapter 13 100

  Chapter 14 108

  Chapter 15 116

  Chapter 16 131

  Chapter 17 141

  Chapter 18 147

  Chapter 19 159

  Chapter 20 168

  Chapter 21 177

  Chapter 22 186

  Chapter 23 192

  Chapter 24 201

  Chapter 1

  Striking the Match

  My cell phone blasted Johnny Cash's 'One Piece at a Time' for the third time in twenty minutes. The ring tone was for my buddy Will, but I let the call go to voicemail because he hadn't picked up his damn phone in a week, so he could wait until after the game.

  I eased the footrest down on my sagging blue recliner and reached for another slice of pizza from the delivery box stained with grease. The Colts missed a blitz on TV, and the phone buzzed that I had a text message. I took a big bite of the pizza and wiped my hand on my jeans so I didn't grease up the phone.

  U THERE? was Will's message.

  I thumbed him back. YEA Y?

  A referee threw a flag on the TV. Fucking Browns false started again. They got paid more than I would see in a decade, and they couldn't remember the count to go on.

  The phone vibrated in my hand. CALLIN. Then the phone played Cash again.

  "Hey, what?" I asked.

  "Answer your phone, asshole."

  "Watch your fucking language. Why?"

  "I got a job if you need some paper."

  Fuck. And there was the word I hated to hear Will say sober. A job. There went my relaxing evening. I would be talking him out of it for the rest of the night. "Me need money? You know I stacks paper at the factory, man. I'm rich, bitch. Had my first interview with Lester today, got one with Ruiz in a couple of days."

  "Uh huh. I'll bet that pans out for you this time," he said like a sarcastic prick. "Look, seriously, if you want to get paid real money, meet me at my place at one."

  "Will, man, come on. You're not gonna do shit but talk. We put this behind us. We're grownups now."

  "Yeah, well, I just got served today. Charlene's taking me to court for child support. The fucking bitch is trying to take everything I got."

  "That's what you get for not paying her for what, like, four months? I told you that was gonna happen, you dumbass. You need a job for more than a few months."

  "Fuck all that, man. Fuuuuck. It. I need you on this. Come on, big daddy, I'll buy you a flat screen. Just come by here at one. It'll be real easy."

  The television caught my eye. "Oh, shit, man," I said, turning up the volume on the nightly news commercial.

  "What is it?"

  "--Jury found Benjamin Jeffries, who signed his crimes as the 'G-Mod Killah,' not guilty today in a Phoenix court. We’ll give you the details tonight at ten."

  I hit the mute button on the remote. "Shit. They let G-Mod Killah off."

  "What the fuck. They let him off? Well, goddamn, man, I guess I'll go on a killing spree since that ain't against the law anymore. See, this is more reason to do this. Nobody cares about when we do stuff anymore. We're victims of our condition, man. We don't know what we're doing. The kids love us."

  "Shut the fuck up. How much is this big take of yours, anyway, Capone? One-point-five, two million?"

  "Like, ten grand. Easy, less than ten minutes. Just a break in with two cameras and a simple keypad."

  "You gotta be fucking kidding me," I laughed. "You're retarded. You wanna do this spur of the fucking moment for ten grand? That's like liquor store money."

  "Come on. I got the access code and everything down. Nobody will be there. Come with me."

  Shit. He had been planning this. Without me. Not five months after his parole ended.

  "Hell. No," I told him. "You're being stupid. Go down to that guy in your building, get some weed, bring it over here and we'll light up. Come on, man. You're smarter than this. I have to believe that after the shit you went through last time. Man up and get a fucking steady job."

  "Shit," Will said on the other end of the phone. "I'm an ex-con. Nobody wants to hire me--"

  "Wait, wait, hang on. Let me go get my violin so I can play along with this record."

  "Hey, fuck you, I need the money. The guy's just some rich asshole. Come on, you have to do this with me or I'm gonna get caught, and then my son's gonna grow up without his father."

  "Oh, Jesus Christ, here we go. When was the last time you even went to see Will, Jr." I sucked down a swig of warm beer and fell into the recliner. "I'll say it again. Get a job, lazy ass."

  "Don't be a bitch, man. We're not gonna get caught. Come on."

  "Will," I barked into the phone, "The answer is no. You need to forget all this. Why don't you come over and finish watching the game with me. I was working Sunday and recorded it, haven't finished it."

  "The Colts come back and the Browns lose. I need you on this, man."

  "Just come over here. I got pizza and beer."

  He hung up the phone with a flat, "Whatever. Later."

  I called him back, but he didn't answer. I called him ten times more times, but he didn't answer.

  That was the first stop on the Will Bowman fucking dipshit decision train.

  Will Bowman was an ex-con. Will Bowman was a shitty father and husband. But Will Bowman was one of the top three guys I'd ever met to hang out and drink with, and at least in the top five of guys to pull a job beside. I was best man at his wedding to Charlene the Bitch after trying to talk him out of the wedding at the bachelor party. I tried to talk him out of divorce when they split up. Even though she was meaner than all hell and hated me, she kept him straight and kept him off my back about crap like this. Not long after the divorce, we were back to break-in's.

  Break-in's led to stumbling into insurance fraud scams, which I was a fucking pro at because I could make the fire look completely natural with no accelerant and originating from whatever source aroused the least suspicion. Will helped. Kind of like a bird that eats the ticks off the back of an animal or something. He made sure people paid. Success with that led to our stupid idea in Miami to get into the world of serious money-making shit and back to break-ins.

  Out drinking one night, he bench-pressed a hatchback at a bar to impress some Latinas. That got him busted and processed for public intoxication and reckless endangerment with enhanced biological processes. And since he had apparently left a handprint half an inch deep in the fender of the car while bailing on a warehouse we had ripped off and a partial footprint in the curb he had tripped off of, they ran his prints against those because his power set matched up. They matched, and Will became a guest of the Miami-Dade Police Department while I managed to slip out of town. He did a quality stretch at Stone Pass Penitentiary for Post-Humans up in Alaska because he didn't give up his accomplice even for a reduced sentence. And his accomplice didn't come forward to take the blame for his buddy that had a kid. That pretty much made me the asshole.

  One o'clock came and went, and I couldn't sleep. I put the volume all the way up on my cell in case Will called. At eight past three, old Mr. Cash woke me up, and I fumbled for the phone, knocked over the fire extinguisher I kept beside the bed and mashed down the 'talk' button. The sound of blurting police sirens came blaring through from the other end. />
  "Hey, Donnie," Will said, out of breath, "Can you come over here? I know I'm wrong to ask you this, but I need you, man. I'm in the shit."

  I wiped the crap out of my eyes. "Sounds like you need a lawyer. Where are you?"

  He said something, but shattering glass cut him off.

  "Holed up in that Texaco on Cedar. I need some cover to slip out."

  All my worrying about him turned to piss. "You're at a gas station?"

  "Hey, I didn't plan it that way." Garbled police ultimatums echoed in the background.

  "The fuck you didn't. You're an asshole."

  "It's Will, Jr.'s birthday next month. I don't wanna be locked-up for it."

  "His birthday is not next month, dick. Christ, Will. Lemme get my shoes on."

  "Hurry up, man."

  "Fuck you. Just wait." I hung up. That dumb motherfucker.

  I stumbled through the apartment and tore the cushions off the broke-down couch looking for my keys. I had to retrace my steps and finally found them in my shoes for some jackass reason.

  I threw my truck into gear and jammed down the gas pedal. I hadn't even used my fire in months, and the last time was by accident, so I prepped myself for the stress of going hot. The air in the cab of the truck got so hot that I had to roll down the windows and crank the A/C, which was a good sign.

  Three blocks from the Texaco, I rolled to a stop with the squeal of old brake pads. Blue lights flashed up ahead, and the bullhorns shouted at Will inside the station. I left the truck and half tried to sneak in the shadows and half tried to look like I belonged in the neighborhood like there was any way I was going to make going for a walk at three in the morning seem normal to anybody. I stopped and stepped into a shadow to call Will.

  "Where are you?!" he shouted at me over the phone.

  "I'm down the street. You alone?"

  "Yeah. Ran the clerk outta here. I rammed a car into one of the pumps, so everything will look perfect."

  "Please tell me it's not your car."

  "Yeah, it is 'cause I'm that stupid. No, I jacked it earlier tonight, asshole."

  Thank God for small favors. "Which way you headed?"

  "I'm aimin' out back," he said. "Make it big."

  "Uh huh. You owe me. You get what you were after?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good. Go fuck yourself when this is over." I hung up the phone.

  I moved within a few hundred feet of the gas station and mingled in with the growing crowd of ugly, cow-eyed people holding their phones up hoping to record a police shoot-out or an explosion or both. The smell of gasoline from the broken pump hung in the air. A fire engine came down the street to join the six police cars and ten officers that surrounded the station since the night shift had nothing better to do at three a.m. than gun somebody down. Fucking cops.

  I stayed in the shadow in case I flared up on fire or something, dropped into my breathing rhythm and focused on the gas pumps and the sedan Will had wedged up in them. Used to be they would blow in an eye's blink, but I was long out of practice. The octane stickers on the pumps browned and curled then caught fire, and the vapors ignited and blew the pumps, knocking everybody back with a pretty nice shockwave. I took a deep breath and manipulated the flames into spreading to the station and focused hard to catch the building and push it into an inferno.

  I texted Will, NOW, gave a little shudder to the flames for a signal and whipped up a big-ass fireball through the roof of the station that sent people scrambling away.

  We had done this twice before, and it had worked both times to lose the cops. The fire wouldn't hurt him, and he would use the explosion as cover to jump through the ceiling in a huge leap that would take him away from the scene. I went back to my truck to wait for him. Two cigarettes and three unanswered calls to his cell later, he dashed out from behind an apartment building across the street, clothes torn and smoking, his shoes half-melted, with as many bottles of Jack Daniels and Grey Goose as he could carry along with a case of Budweiser. He loudly dumped the bottles on the floorboard as he dumped himself into the passenger seat he had already broken the adjuster on by doing that rough shit. I started the engine up and made a hard u-turn.

  "I got some drinks," he laughed, out-of-breath, "That was cool as hell. You set off car alarms." He coughed his guts out from the smoke.

  I turned the wheel hard around a corner. "I'd kick you in the dick if I didn't think I'd break my damn foot on it. You're welcome."

  "Thanks, brutha. I got a nice, juicy stack from the--"

  "Which I don't wanna know anything about. What you did, where you went or what you took. I don't wanna have to lie for you more than I already have to."

  Will peeled his burnt shirt off. "All right. I'll still break you off a piece. You bring me any more clothes?"

  "Man, hell no. I'm not your mom."

  "We going to your place?"

  "Anybody see you?" I asked him, staring at him hard in the dark.

  "Nobody. It was clean. I had a little help from somebody on--"

  "Ah ah ah!" I cut him off, slamming my hand on the steering wheel. "I don't want to hear it."

  "All right, all right, whatever. We going to your place?"

  "No, yours. We gotta get your alibi in place if the cops start sniffing around."

  "My man. You berry, berry smart, round eye. So what really happened tonight?"

  I lit a cigarette and breezed through a yellow light. "What happened was you were at my house all night. I picked you up because your car was messed up, so we're going to fuck it up in case they check it."

  "What? Why do we need to bring my car into it?"

  "We're gonna fix it tomorrow, all right? And we're gonna be smart about this and cover our asses."

  "When are you fixing it? I got places to go in the morning."

  I flicked my cigarette butt out the window. "Well, sorry, motherfucker, but you should've thought of that before you went and pulled this tonight. You think I give a damn if you have plans in the morning? You made me an accessory."

  "Man, whatever. Thanks, though. I mean that."

  "Go to hell."

  "I love you too, baby."

  I eased my truck into his apartment parking lot with the lights off and left it running while I slit the coolant line near the radiator and grabbed a shirt for him from the backseat of his black '92 Mustang, the one with a giant American flag and screaming eagle decal that filled the back windshield. The coolant drained out and made a nice, fluorescent pool that neighbors would see.

  "Hey, I gotta run into my buddy's place real quick," he said before I could pull out of the lot.

  I slammed the truck back into park. "What? What for?"

  "Celebration time. I'm gonna pinch a little smokin' bud from him."

  "No, not tonight."

  "You said I should on the phone."

  "Will."

  "All right, all right. You're right. Thanks. I'm taking you out this weekend, though. No excuses."

  At my place, I gave Will a blanket and pillow to crash on the couch and checked the clock. Only an hour and a half until I had to get up for work. I stood in the kitchen with the light over the sink on and downed the rest of the pizza. Will started snoring like a chainsaw on the couch.

  I grabbed an empty beer bottle and broke it on his forehead to rouse him up since I didn't feel like breaking my hand hitting him.

  "What?" he said groggily.

  "You're snoring, man. Turn on your side so I don't have to hear it."

  He wiped off the glass shards on him, all confused. "The fuck's on me?"

  "Nothing. Roll over and stop snoring. I got work in the morning. I can't be a lazy bastard like some people."

  Will gave me the finger and rolled over to snore into my couch.

  I brought a fresh beer to bed with me and put the fire extinguisher I kept on my garage sale nightstand on the covers beside me in case I set fire a fire while I slept. I hadn't done it in a while, but there was always the risk after a night of burning.
Will's snoring came down the hallway with THX quality, so I shoved a pillow over my head. It didn't help. I shut the bedroom door. Still could hear it.

  Fifteen minutes of trying to sleep later, I gave up and turned the clock back around to face me. It said 5:45 in blazing red numbers in the dark. No way was I going to make it in to work, so I flipped on the TV, watched an infomercial for a set of kitchen knives for a while, then cut over to the news. Some lawyers were in their little boxes on screen going over the evidence against G-Mod Killah and what the state had done wrong in its case against him.

  After a couple of minutes of that bullshit, I pulled out the locked trunk with my fireproof fiberglass suit and oxygen tank and covered it all up with magazines and clothes in case somebody with a badge came through my place. What I really needed was to stash it away from my place because the last thing I needed was for my past, the Feds and Interpol to catch up with me because of a stupid robbery.

  I flipped through the channels for a while, still trying to go to sleep without being able to make it happen. I came across one of those half-hour Girls Gone Wild advertisements, so I watched that until I got sick of the black boxes and pulled out one of the many Girls Gone Wild DVDs in my top dresser drawer and popped it in to get some use out of while I called Helen's voicemail at the factory and told her I was too sick to show up for my shift.

  And while girls did things on my TV that would make their fathers cry, I lied back in my bed, regretting not going with Will to make sure the job had been done right. He never thought it all through. That little hamster on the wheel in his head wasn't as smart as he thought it was.

  With the sun coming up, I popped the fireballs in little flare-ups, getting them bigger and bigger, wider, fatter, thicker, just fucking around with them until they nearly set the ceiling on fire. Then I did a pitifully sad run-through of the practice exercises I used to do keep my firings sharp.

  It started with a sphere of fire that looked more like a blob than it had back in the day. Then another next to it and another beside that one. I moved the three around while keeping them the same size. It took a few tries to get it right, they kept sputtering and trying to merge into one big flame, and I had to pull them back apart. With a deep breath, I held them in mid-air, one, two, three. Finally got them all the same size in a shape that could be considered a sphere.