Hell on Church Street

A NEW PULP PRESS BOOK

First Printing, January 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Jake
Hinkson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9828436-7-3

ISBN-10: 0-9828436-7-4

To

JR and Amy,

For giving me a place to sleep

God made everything out of nothing

but
the nothingness shows through.

—Paul Valery

Part One:

Bad Men and Termites

Chapter One

I’d been working three weeks at a plastics factory down in Mississippi when the foreman—a bucktoothed redneck named Cyrus Broadway—made the mistake of calling me a lazy asshole. Now, I might be lazy, but I’m also one mean son of a bitch. I’ve spent time in jails and
drunk
tanks all over this country, everywhere from a dusty cell at the edge of the Mojave desert to a damp, padlocked shack on an island off the coast of Maine. And nobody gets away with insulting me, even if he thinks he’s just kidding. By the time they pulled me off Cyrus Broadway, I’d smashed his face to sausage. His big horse teeth were
laying
next to him on the factory floor.

I didn’t wait around to talk to those Mississippi cops. I left that night and snaked my way up through Louisiana, into Texas and wound up lurking around a Texaco just outside of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. I tried to keep a low profile, but after a couple of days of not eating, I started looking for somebody to stick up. I scoped out a couple of women, but sticking up women is usually more trouble than it’s worth. Cops respond faster when there’s a woman involved, and if things go bad and you have to rough up a woman—hell, cops love tracking down a woman-beater and kicking the shit out of him. Makes them feel like they’re good guys.

So I waited. I let the women go. The teenagers. The couples.
The old man with a van full of dogs.
I waited, but I was getting impatient.

When I spotted the fat guy, I knew I’d found my mark.

It wasn’t just that he was fat. He was eating his way, and quick, into being too fat for regular clothes. Fat swelled off every part of him and stretched his white dress shirt like a balloon. His hair had faded yellow stains at the tips like he’d dyed it blond at some point.

But there was something else about him, something else that marked him as a loser. It was how he moved. He carried himself like he’d already had the shit beat out of him that night, like every step he took was a battle he was barely winning against gravity.

He parked his beat-up station wagon at the end of the row. As I watched from the shadows, he climbed out, opened the back door and dug his wallet out of the coat hanging off the seat. Without locking the car, he stumbled inside. I watched through the window. Behind me, the interstate was dark and quiet. Occasionally a car passed in the distance and then disappeared back into the black silence. At the counter, my big, fat, easy mark checked his watch and rubbed his eyes. He bought a pack of caffeine pills, three packs of cigarettes, and 24 ounces of Dr. Pepper. He pointed at some chicken wings under the heat lamp, and the cashier piled a heap of them into a box.

As the fat guy came out, dragging himself back to his car, the cashier settled down onto his mop bucket behind the counter so he could watch television. I was pretty sure he couldn’t see a thing over the counter. I pulled the gun from my jeans. For the moment, there were no cars at the pumps. When the fat man got his car door open, I stepped from the shadows, slipped up behind him and shoved the gun into the saddlebag of cellulite drooping over his belt.

“Stay calm,” I told him, “and get in the car.”

He didn’t move. Behind us, the interstate didn’t make a sound.

I jabbed him with the gun. “Get in the fucking car.”

He clutched the door with one hand and rested his other hand on the roof of the station wagon. In a high-pitched voice he said, “Why don’t you just take my money and car now?”

I pistol-whipped him—hard, but not too hard, making sure to get some of his ear into it. He slumped into the door and the hinges groaned and the whole damn car tilted. He didn’t make a sound, though.

I jammed the gun barrel against his skull. “Get in the fucking car.”

Cupping his bloody ear, he climbed in, and I got in behind him. The car reeked of cigarettes and coffee. He started it up and backed out, still holding his ear, not moaning or crying, just holding it like he might be listening to a seashell.

We pulled away from the station and everything was dark inside the car except the green glow of his dashboard. When he pulled to the edge of the parking lot, I said, “Go left” and he did. I had in mind a little field about a mile away where the lights from a cord factory shined down off a hill. It was impossible for anybody up there to really see what you were doing in the field, and if there weren’t any
drunk
teenagers down there, you’d be all alone.

We were about to pass the turn-off to the interstate and I told him, “Keep going straight.”
  

As soon as I said it, he swung the car onto the turn-off and floored the gas.

“Straight, goddamn it,” I yelled, but he just picked up speed. I went to hit him again, but he leaned forward, as far as his blubber would allow. The thick roll of fat on his neck pinched out between his block-shaped head and round shoulders. He was so crammed against the wheel he could barely steer, and we ripped through grass and gravel and shot onto the interstate beside a diesel. I flung myself forward on the seat and wedged the gun barrel behind his right ear.

Over the diesel blaring its horn at us I yelled, “I’m going to blow your goddamn head off!”

“And then what?” he asked. The wagon looked like a piece of shit, but it had some get up and go. We were already doing ninety and the diesel’s headlights shrunk behind us.

I pressed the gun to his shoulder. “You don’t have to die right away,” I said. “Slow down.”

“Happy to,” he said. He slowed down a little, but we were still cruising along.

“Jesus,” I said. I wiped some sweat off my lip and rolled down the window. “Stop the car.”

“No,” he said.

“What?”

“No, I’m not stopping the car.”

I shoved the gun against his head, really digging the barrel into the soft part just behind his earlobe.

“This again?” he asked, pressing down on the pedal.

I almost laughed at that. Resting my gun against his seat, I said, “Okay then. What the hell do you want to do now?”

He took a deep breath. “Give me a second,” he said. “All this excitement’s hard for a fat man.” He took another breath, let it out through his nose and pointed the rear-view mirror at me. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “You wanted to rob me,” he said.

The pale green dashboard lights glowed on his face. He looked damn near dead.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

I leaned forward and tapped the back of his head with the gun. “That’s up for debate.”

“I’m not going to let you rob me,” he said calmly, “but I’m willing to give you some money. A pretty good amount of money, actually.”

“What are talking you about?”

He nodded and settled back into his seat, his head bumping the gun as if it didn’t mean anything. I dropped the gun to my knee, but I kept a finger on the trigger. He peeled the cellophane off his cigarettes and pulled one out. He gestured to me. I shook my head. When he lit up, the car filled with smoke. It smelled pretty good.

“On second thought,” I said, “give me one.”

He pulled out a cigarette and handed it back. I lit it with my own lighter.

He said, “Let’s look at your predicament: I’m driving. I’ve made it clear I’m not just going to just pull over and let you stick me up.”

“I still have the gun here,” I reminded him.

“Of course,” he said. “And I’m still driving. That makes us about even, I’d say.”

“Except that I’ll probably survive a crash,” I said. “And you won’t survive a bullet through the back of your brain.”

“Good point,” he said. His voice was high and girlish, but firm. “Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it in a minute. Right now we’re at an impasse. You want to rob me. I won’t pull over. If I run us into a tree or off an overpass, maybe you’ll survive, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll just lose an arm or a leg. But what if we change things up?”