Everyone knew it. The crooks knew it. They’d get shaken down by the sumbitch on the regular. The cops knew it. They’d crack jokes about Dancer selling the best meth in Hohman. Hell, the average citizen knew it. You couldn’t walk into a bar in North Hohman without crossing paths with Charlie Dancer, sitting at the end of the bar, with his back to the wall, radiating bad intentions.
I stopped at the Whiskey Double Tap, hugged Kristy the bartender while getting an eyeful of her cleavage, then slipped downstairs for a snootful of marching powder. I hated going to the WDT. It seemed like the cops raided it once a month so scoring coke here was always a gamble. The secret was get your shit and get out. Don’t get caught loitering with the coke whores hanging around like its superbowl Sunday in Bolivia.
My breath caught in my throat the moment my foot hit the bottom stair. There’s Charlie Dancer in the back of the room. He’s snorting a line of coke bigger than his nostril. It’s like a traffic jam going on up there. He’s huffing and wheezing and he’s got two weekend strippers from the Industrial Strip on either side of him, giggling and having a good old time.
“The fuck are you doing here, Ohms?” Mickey asked me.
“Feeding my addiction. Why I usually come down here? What the fuck is he doing down here?”
“Keep your voice down.” Mickey walked me back up the stairs.
He owned the joint so he could do that. Also, he’s got arms big around as my torso.
“What’s Dancer doing here?” I asked again in a whisper once we were back in the bar proper.
“Whatever the fuck he wants to do here, that’s what,” Mickey said. “You gotta lotta balls showing your face around here.”
“Oh shit. What now?”
“You ain’t heard?”
“Nobody tells me nothing.”
“Dancer and Starla’s got together. They’re the new item. Like the Hohman power couple. The Region’s Bradgelina.”
So there’s only one Starla I know in all of North Hohman. My on-again, off-again girlfriend.
“Well, it looks like we’re off again.”
“It would appear that way, Ohms. See why it’s a good idea you make yourself scarce from around here a little while.”
I left Whiskey Double Tap thinking Mickey probably wasn’t just referring to me keeping away from the bar, so much as steering clear of the entire Region altogether.
Laying low didn’t appeal to my self-destructive streak, so I stopped at Toecutter Joe’s to nurse my ego. It was the one bar in the area women generally avoided. It’s a good place to go to when you want to massage your misery without having to worry about combing your hair.
“Yeah,” Yahtzee said, bringing me a bottle of Okocim. “Dancer always said he’d bring down Starla, eventually. And he did!”
It occurred to me Starla and I had been off again a lot longer than I had anticipated. Once Mickey clued me in, everyone felt the need to fill in the informational gaps for me.
Starla was famous in North Hohman. Her fame resulted directly from her big tits, her whorish immorality and her lucrative marijuana trade. She kept at least ten pounds of good weed around her apartment at all times. It was another one of those open secrets North Hohman thrived on.
Of course, when I say she was my girlfriend, it ain’t like we at the Ruby Tuesdays every Saturday night. Mostly we smoked pot and fucked on the couch. I thought we were really good for each other.
“Whatcha got there, Ohms?”
My cell phone.
I have a self-destructive streak a mile long. That’s the only explanation I have for taking my phone out in the middle of Toecutter Joe’s and cycling through a year’s worth of naked pictures. There’s Starla in all her buck naked, spread eagle glory. Every pose imaginable for everyone in the bar to see.
I imagined the text went something like this:
HEY DANCER, OHMS IS OVER HERE AT JOE’S SHOWING OFF NAKED PICTURES OF YOUR OLD LADY.
The bar began buzzing with a nervous energy. I quickly became aware of the grins and whispers, never a good combination. That self-destructive streak shriveled from a mile to a millimeter.
“Well, I guess I better get going.”
“Stay and have another one. I’m buying.” Brian Taylor offered. The sleazy drunken Judas to my broken-hearted, coke head Jesus.
“No, I gotta skedaddle.”
Brian: “Yahtzee, get Ohms another one of those Polish beers. Put it on my tab.”
“Gotta fucking go.”
I walked to the side door, slipped out, in time to witness Charlie Dancer driving up on the curb in his dull gray Dodge Charger. Even his car windows were illegal, tinted darker than the state law allowed.
My longevity in this town went hand in hand with my lack of pride. I’ve never been afraid to run away. I thought, maybe if I keep running fast enough and Dancer keeps chasing long enough, he’ll be too tired to do much damage once he caught me. It was a drunk’s logic and I loved my mind for it.
Charlie Dancer stepped out of the Charger, drew his police issue 9mm and opened fire on me.
I thought I’d gotten a fairly decent head start on Dancer, but those gunshots sounded like canon shots. The window of a Camaro to my right exploded in a party blast of glass. Bullets ricocheted off apartment brick to my left. I heard some hollering, more than likely Dancer screaming for me to freeze or something equally Ludacris. I ducked into the alley, cut through yards, I didn’t stop running for a long time.
A week passed before I worked up the nerve to show my face at the Whiskey Double Tap again. I seemed to have upset the status quo. Kristy didn’t have a hug for me. Ever her cleavage seemed to shrink before my eyes. Mickey didn’t invite me downstairs.
“It’s hard to believe you took down the most corrupt cop in the entire Region,” Mickey said.
“Yep,” I treated the folks to my biggest, most self-destructive smile. “Who knew discharging your service weapon at a fleeing drunk was grounds for dismissal, eh? Not I!”
“You know he’s gonna fuck you for this if it’s the last thing he does, right?” Mickey said.
“He was a year away from getting his twenty,” Kristy added. “Even with sick days and vacation, he ain’t getting his pension because of you.”
“Boo fucking hoo.”
Kristy and Mickey exchanged this-guy-is-an-idiot glances.
“I’m just saying,” Mickey said. “It ain’t gonna be this week. It ain’t gonna be next week. Probably six months would be my guess. And it probably won’t even be Dancer who pulls the trigger. He’ll be sitting out in Tennessee somewhere with Starla on his lap, and you’ll be getting assassinated by some Cholo who owes a favor.”
“Mickey, please. If I took every death threat seriously I’d have never made it outta kindergarten.”
“And you ain’t learned nothing since then.”
“Nope,” I smiled, withdrawing my phone. “You wanna see some naked pictures?”
by 
Karl Kowesky
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Great story Karl- pulled me right in and hooked me. Loved it.
Thanks for a yarn like a slap of good espresso—hot, strong, plenty of punch.