Rough Men Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Aric Davis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612186535

  ISBN-10: 161218653X

  Dedicated to the memory of Officer Trevor Slot

  CONTENTS

  Alex pushed the…

  Will Daniels was…

  “Will.” Alison was…

  Will woke just…

  Will offered to…

  The second day…

  That night, Will…

  Will stood at…

  They took Isaac’s…

  “What the fuck…

  Isaac’s hands were…

  Two days after…

  Will and Isaac…

  Isaac drove, Will…

  The television was…

  “Why in the…

  Walking in behind…

  The house must…

  The driver of…

  The door from…

  Will's arms were…

  Will drove himself…

  Will found himself…

  When Will woke,…

  Writing came back.…

  They stood as…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alex pushed the magazine into the Glock, pulled back the slide to verify the still-chambered round of .45 ACP ammunition, and then hit the magazine release again. His hands were made of nervous energy, and messing with the gun was as good a way to burn it off as any. The blunt he’d split with Rob an hour earlier had made him go from relaxed, to paranoid, to lazy, and now he was back to paranoid. He sighed and set the rechecked gun onto the console of the van.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” called Chris from the bucket seat behind Alex in the ancient Dodge Caravan. “You acting like you didn’t already get your pussy wet, homey.”

  Alex considered the words, then did his best to ignore them. Killing that so-called snitch bitch earlier in the month had not been on his list of things to do in life. In fact, every moment since then had felt almost dreamlike, as if killing that girl—and she was just a girl, Chris and Mumbo had both confirmed that when they started fucking her a year ago, when she was just fifteen—had been something that had happened to some other Alex. An Alex who didn’t regret every second since then, an Alex who wasn’t sitting in a van waiting for the manager to leave a Lake Michigan Credit Union, the same manager who had been getting head on a consistent basis from the snitch bitch, the same manager who had wanted to be long gone when they went hot. Also, the same manager who had been paid off so well that he was willing to give up everything to let them run this shit.

  Alex looked at the Glock one more time, heard Mumbo’s cell phone ring on the kind of ringer that sounded like an old house phone, and then they all watched the manager leave the credit union.

  The plan was simple. Alex, Mumbo, and Chris were going to walk into the building while Rob drove around it. The manager had been intentionally getting sloppy about the vault for just over six months, so when the blame game started, he would just look like a shitty employee, not like someone who was in on the action. Alex didn’t think it was going to make much of a difference. The dudes that set this whole thing up had made it very clear to him that he could come along for the ride and get paid or crash and burn. Alex figured the guy was fucked no matter the take from the credit union; he didn’t see any way that he was going to get to just walk away.

  Rob gave him a look that said, Get on with it, and Alex stopped worrying about managers. He stuffed the Glock in a loose jacket pocket and got out of the van. He had a black duffel in his left hand and took a moment to pull a stocking cap over his face. Chris and Mumbo were doing the same thing with their own ski masks, but neither of them had bothered to try to disguise their guns.

  Mumbo was carrying an AK-47 with a folding stock and a short barrel. Chris had a pistol that he’d said was called “the Judge,” a Brazilian shotgun in pistol form, which could fire .45 pistol loads as well as .410 shotshells. Alex followed their lead and took the Glock from his pocket before following Mumbo through the door and into the building.

  Their sudden appearance shocked the packed room quiet, and then a little girl began to scream. Mumbo was rushing past him to the center of the room, and Chris vaulted over a teller’s desk. “Get the fuck back!” he screamed. “Get away from your fucking desks right now!”

  Alex could see three loan officers sitting at desks to his left. One of them had been meeting with a client. This guy, the client, and one of the other loan officers rose and moved away from their desks. The one who wasn’t moving, a slick-looking younger guy who looked like he should’ve been selling cars, had both hands under his desk, and without thinking, Alex raised the Glock and shot him twice in the chest.

  The explosions were louder than hell in the small building, and now it felt like everyone was screaming, and Chris was repeating his mantras of “Get the fuck down!” and “Stay the fuck away from your desks!”

  Alex leaped over the row of teller desks and joined Chris, who called to Mumbo, “You got this?”

  “You know I do,” said Mumbo. “Now hurry the fuck up.”

  Alex followed Chris to the waiting vault. It was open just as it was supposed to be, and on one of the walls was a rack of banded bills—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Alex fell to his knees and began throwing money into his duffel bag, the duffel becoming heavy with bills almost instantly. The sound of gunfire began pouring in from the main floor of the credit union, and then Mumbo was yelling something undistinguishable.

  Realizing that Chris wasn’t gathering money with him, Alex looked over his shoulder at him. Chris was pulling some things, papers it looked like, from a safety deposit box with a pair of keys still dangling from its lock. Chris locked eyes with him, then turned back to slam the box closed before tossing it onto the floor and wheeling toward Alex, knocking a shelf of money all over the floor as he did so.

  Alex and Chris were scurrying like rats, filling their bags until they were impossibly full and then sprinting from the vault together. Mumbo had turned the credit union to a hellhole in the ninety seconds they’d been gone. Two tellers were dead and so were the remaining loan officers, as well as the customer one of them had been talking to when they’d entered.

  “Jesus,” said Chris, “the fuck happened?”

  Mumbo just grunted, and then they were out of the bank, running to Rob as he pulled the van around, exactly two minutes after they’d entered the building.

  They yanked open the doors and piled in, throwing the bags into the backseat.

  Alex felt like his heart was going to pound free from his chest. That was like being in a fucking movie. Killing the man in the bank hadn’t felt like doing the snitch—they both deserved it, but the fucker in the bank had been trying to burn them, maybe even thought he had before he’d gotten shot. Alex set the Glock on his lap and pulled the mask off of his face as the van ripped free from the parking lot.

  “What happened in there?” said Rob. “Sounded like I was back in Iraq, shit hitting the fan, am I right?”

  “We had to put heat on some motherfuckers,” said Mumbo. “They wasn’t listening good enough.”

  “I hope it was worth it,” said Rob. “Every fucking cop in the county is going to be on this shit.”

&nbs
p; “Calm down,” said Chris. “What happened was only what had to happen, you knew that going in. Hey, don’t forget, you turn up there, after that light.”

  “Do you want to fucking drive?” Rob said, scowling. “You asked me to drive, now let me drive.”

  Barely audible sirens could be heard in the distance, and Alex looked over his shoulder. Between Mumbo and Chris, he could see traffic at a standstill by the credit union, but no cops, at least not yet.

  Rob turned onto their road, and Alex could see the old barn where they’d stashed the other car and the shit to burn the van. “Hurry up,” called Chris. “We need to get the fuck out of this car.”

  Rob just grunted in response and gravel flew under their wheels as they pulled into the farm’s forgotten driveway. The barn doors away from the road were open and waiting, and Rob pulled right in, stopping with a lurch that almost knocked Alex’s Glock to the floor.

  Alex was second out of the van, after Chris, and Mumbo was handing them the bags from the back. By the time Alex got to the Impala, Rob had already gotten the trunk open, and he threw his bag in. Chris set his in after Alex, and almost as an afterthought, Alex looked at Chris and said, “What was up with that safety deposit box, dude?”

  Chris looked over his shoulder at Mumbo, who was still next to the van, then turned back to Alex. He raised the Judge, and Alex didn’t even have time to react before thunder from the gun took apart half of his head.

  Will Daniels was suffering through a severe case of writer’s block. His publisher had recently rejected his new manuscript, not that he faulted them for the decision, but if he wanted to belly up to the queue and keep this full-time writer thing going, he needed a story, and he needed it now.

  But he had nothing. Hour upon hour, day upon day—nothing.

  That had never happened to him before. Ideas had come from the wellspring of his mind as though they were supposed to be there; he’d never had to ferret one out before. They just, well, they just came to him, and he’d never even bothered to say thank you.

  It was almost funny. He’d always had such a cavalier attitude about his ideas and work. “Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block,” he’d said on more than one occasion, but those words left a mocking echo now, to say the very least. The cursor was teasing him, blinking over and over again. He’d tried just about everything to force an idea from his head, and nothing he’d come up with had been worth a damn.

  Sure, Will had started stuff, gotten up to a few hundred words on some of them, but reading them later, it was clear that they had obviously been forced out by a man playing at being a writer. It was so damn frustrating! Every idea he had was either too similar to something he’d read recently or just plain old sucked. The worst part was that it wasn’t like his publisher had such high expectations for him. All they wanted was a manuscript that would be easy to market and sell. Really, he should have the world by the balls. But Will felt like he’d taken a melon baller to his brain getting his first two books on paper.

  Will’s first published novel had been a YA book titled The Fort. A clean little story engine, it had just popped, whole, into his head: Three boys find an old tree house in the woods, and while they’re playing in it one day, they look down and see a man kill a young girl. The boys tell their parents, and a massive search is called, but no body or evidence is recovered, and the boys are accused of lying for attention. Since no one else is trying to solve the crime, or even believes that one was committed, the boys decide to solve it themselves.

  The Fort had sold only moderately well, but the reviews had been amazing. Will hadn’t minded a bit that it had brought him only a pittance. He had created something of worth that both his publisher and the critical world at large agreed had merit.

  The reception to the second book had been much different. Broken Bottles had been written as a supernatural horror novel about a bartender, his friends, and the things that they were losing while they ignored the reality of their collapsing lives. That book had come easily to Will as well, though it had cut closer to the bone. Like his hero, he’d been working as a bartender his entire adult life; the bartender in the book had a caring wife and a fuckup for a son, just like he did; and they were both desperate to escape the bar scene and make life right for their families. The bartender in the book, a man named Trent, had been unable to escape his demons, both real and those created by a mind poisoned by drink. Will had better luck.

  Broken Bottles earned lukewarm reviews—nothing crazy terrible or crazy good, just sort of “meh.” In a perverse reversal of his first book’s fate, though, his publisher had sold the hell out of Broken Bottles, tepid critical reception be damned. And the second book’s sales lit up the demand for his first one. Fewer than six months after Bottles had debuted on shelves and Kindles, Will really did escape from his bartending job, a fate Trent was not to share in the novel.

  Retiring from the bar, and the bar scene, had likely saved his life and had certainly saved his marriage. Alison was a fighter. She’d been there for him while he’d worked at all hours and drank like a fish, but she’d turned colder on both counts the older he got, and colder still after his fortieth birthday. The success of Bottles had been a miracle for them, or at least as close to one as Will would ever allow himself to believe in.

  But now, if he didn’t get his shit together, he was going to need another miracle, and the prospects of that were dim as hell.

  Going back to the bar after leaving with such fanfare wasn’t an option his brain could quite wrap itself around. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t get the job back; he’d likely be met with open arms. He’d created most of his bad memories there years earlier, back when he still needed cocaine to stay up late and was hitting on everything with a short skirt and a pulse, marriage or no marriage. Alison had never busted him—not exactly, anyway. But his sad, drunken misadventures with other sad drunks had cast a sheen of doubt over their struggling marriage like a caul.

  It had never been just about the infidelity, the bottomless bottles of booze, or the work that never seemed to stop. Alex, his son from a long-gone former girlfriend, had been as much of a problem as everything else combined.

  Will himself had run with a bad crowd when he was young, had done a lot of drugs and some worse things that he wasn’t too proud of. But the arrival of his son, the departure of the boy’s mother, and picking just the right night to bow out of an ill-fated smash-and-grab B and E—all occurring within a year of one another—had combined to shake most of the wild from him.

  Nothing like that had happened to Alex.

  Will had never gotten the right handle on his son. God knew it wasn’t Alison’s fault, though she blamed herself, despite the fact that he’d been five when they’d gotten married. Alex had just always been off, and the resentment over his missing mother just never seemed to go away, even when it would seem like things were fine for weeks and even months at a time. The boy had gone from skipping school and smoking when he was only eight, to shoplifting and drug use before he’d dropped out of middle school, to finally wind up in the alternative high school a year early. Not that he stayed there, of course. At sixteen, Alex was gone.

  Will and Alison heard from him on occasion in the five years after that, but they’d never been able to spare the money he was looking for, and the trips to see him in jail were always awful. Alex was piling up a record that would have made even a young Will pale and forced the older one to the bar—but also, to the keyboard.

  Now, sitting before his pitiless cursor, Will felt as stumped as he had raising Alex. When those threads had come loose in his fingers, Alison had picked up the pieces and let him hide from his damaged son in work. Writing had come as a blessing in the years after Alex had mostly disappeared, but now, sitting with no muse, no contact with his son, and a wife almost certainly expecting him to come to bed soon, it was all Will could do not to drink.

  He still did partake, of course, and even put on like he could still be the life of the party if he wou
ld just let himself cut loose, yet that drinking was tempered, an act for friends that was trying to say that he really could just have a couple and still have fun. Alison had long ago forbade alcohol in the house—a reasonable rule, considering his unreasonable past. He didn’t think alcohol would help—not really. But it would be a temporary tarred patch of gravel to soothe the raw road of invention he felt, as though he were carving into his brain.

  It had all become a pretty straightforward situation in his mind, and one he was scared to even tell Alison about. In order for him to stay away from booze—or a twelve-step program—he had to write. If he slipped on a brown bag of the good stuff, he was one day closer to working in the bar again, and working there was what had inspired so many benders in the first place. So to make it all work the way he wanted it to, he needed to write, stave off the demon on his own, and not work in the bar ever again. Yet, at the same time, he felt a terribly selfish need to hang onto liquor as well. He wanted more than anything to be the man he never had been, the guy who had a scotch with dinner and could stop right there. He wanted to be himself, a man that the bar wasn’t in control of, but for that, he needed a story, and stories can be hard to find when you go looking for one, rather than letting one find you.

  Checking the clock on the bottom right of his laptop screen, Will considered the time. 12:30 a.m. Though there was nothing to wake up for tomorrow but the fucking ever-blinking cursor, he’d once again neglected his bed and his wife for far too long. He folded the laptop closed and trudged upstairs, depressed and a little shocked that, once again, he’d gone a day with nothing to show for it and certainly nothing to offer his publisher for the following year.

  Will brushed his teeth, spitting into the sink and running wet hands over his face, then made the mistake of looking up. He was somehow still surprised on a daily basis just how old, how haggard and gray, that young man he used to be was getting. It was like looking into a mirror that broadcast the future. He certainly didn’t feel different than he had as a kid. More easily tired, maybe, and certainly with less of a temper, but despite his mirror’s insistence that he was slowly turning into an old picture of his father, he still felt like Will.