The cow was standing on the side of the hill behind Mr. O’Leary’s house, and we thought if we ran down the hill and rammed it, we could tip it. We were right. The problem was, when we hit the cow, Cody slipped underneath so the cow landed on top of him, which was sort of like a brick landing on a tube of toothpaste. The cow acted just like a brick too, laying there like it was knocked out or maybe dead–though I was pretty sure the dead one was Cody.      Sometimes panic is smart. I started to run away, which would have been the smart kind of panic. If I’d don ..read more

     Sam fiddled with the cuffs of his flannel, unsure if he should unbutton them, roll them up, or leave them be. It’s not that Amy Chandler made him nervous, though he hadn’t been on a date in ages. He was, however, bored out of his fucking mind.      “He actually had the balls to tell me I couldn’t return it,” Amy said. “The stitching was frayed! You should have been there. At Saks of all places. It took every ounce of my patience not to raise my voice. We’re not talking about a cheap knock off purse. This is a Moynat Rejane. What am I saying? You already know ..read more

     Marcus Jackson said he was called "Juke" on account he was born in a juke joint outside Clarksville, Mississippi. The way he told it, his mamma went into labor at the beginning of a twelve-bar blues riff and spit him out before the turnaround. He said he was born in a hurry cuz he had stuff to do. Well, he didn't have much to do now—but die. Like everything else though, he was better at talking about it than actually doing it.       “You motherless cocksucker. You son of a whore, motherfucker,” Juke said.      I guess if I had shot him in ..read more

     Nineteen is there in black on white, the license as fake as everything else about me. But I’ve found that when you’re small, female and Asian, exchanging the school uniform for a hoodie can be all that stands between fifteen and thirty. At least after dark.       It’s Thursday, a school night, but Mom is already too strung out to notice me missing. If all goes right, I’ll be long gone by the time she does.      The cars stand bumper-to-bumper outside, people hip-to-hip inside, skin and floor sticky with things I blank out.    &nb ..read more

     Faro was over eight thousand feet above sea level when it truly struck him. The air was thin and crisp with the wintry breeze of the German alps flowing against the cable car. There was only one other man in the car, some lonely, bitter rich man who probably got too big for his britches. Faro wasn’t thinking about that man. He was thinking about Singapore.      Faro was never the type of man to let things bother him, but it had been a few days since Singapore and it stuck in his mind like a wound. The neon lights and foggy waterfronts of the Asian city-state ..read more

     Ducky had survived a lot of shit jobs when the street didn’t provide, but this seasonal work was going to finally whack him out. He’d endured fifty years of bloody mob wars, restaurant massacres and even a prosecutor with a raging hard-on, but never had the old wiseguy faced the shit waiting for him at the Philadelphia Macys in December. He wouldn’t have taken the job if he’d realized the horror, but he had no choice now. So he sighed, took a Leuprolide with a half-a-glass of Puni to wrench shut his leaky pipes then put on the ridiculous disguise. The damn thing reeked of w ..read more

     I tipped the glass and downed the last swallow. Ice brushed my lips. A splash of bourbon laced with cherry hit the back of my throat like hot oil. The floral tang of the bitters lingered.         I caught the bartender's eye and clinked my wedding ring on the rim of the lowball. "Another."          He nodded.     The bar was a shithole steeped in backwoods charm. The lights were dimmed, and sawdust spattered the floor like buckshot. The jukebox blasted new country. The smell of fried beer-batter perm ..read more

     Will swung the gun toward the crowd as he backed, leaving employees and patrons face down on the floor. It was the eighth bank he’d robbed, and a similar exit each time.       In and out in less than three minutes.      Sprint around the corner to your ride.      Remove mask.      Drive the limit to the safe house.      This time, though, it was different. He had an inside woman with access to the  vault, and in his possession was more than two-hundred grand. He had to get gone. Not later ..read more

     Jerome crouched between a row of shrubs and trained his binoculars on a house across the street in a residential San Francisco neighborhood. The last light went off about an hour before; plenty of time for the old biddy to have fallen asleep. He stuffed the binoculars into his shoulder bag, slipped on a pair of gloves, pulled the sweatshirt hood over his head, and headed toward the place.       He halted, frozen for a moment, when a motion detector triggered a set of floodlights as he crossed the lawn. He scampered to the dark side of the house, jimmied ..read more

     Luna glided into the boutique hotel. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in one of the lobby mirrors. Everything was perfectly in place: hair in a tight bun, cinched waist in her qipao dress, Louboutins accentuating her long legs.      “I’ll see you in five minutes,” read the text that popped up on her phone from an anonymous number.      To think: they had once been neighbours, but he never gave her the time of day, back when she went by her birth name of Xiao Chen.       Xiao Chen wasn’t like Xiao Hua, her prettier, doc ..read more