Right Behind You



  Right Behind You

  Three Stories By

  Dale Lucas

  Author of the neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights

  Published 2012 by Beating Windward Press LLC

 

  For contact information, please visit:

  www.BeatingWindward.com

 

 

  Text: Copyright © Dale Lucas, 2012

  All Rights Reserved

  Book & Cover Design: Copyright © KP Creative, 2012

  Cover Photograph by Richard North (creative commons) https://richardnorth.net

 

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  About the Author

  Dale Lucas is the author of the neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights (Beating Windward Press, 2011). He is a novelist, screenwriter, civil servant, and armchair historian. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. His short stories have appeared in Samsara: The Magazine of Suffering and Horror Garage, his film reviews in The Orlando Sentinel.

  He lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

  Follow his blog at www.authordalelucas.wordpress.com and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AuthorDaleLucas

  If you enjoy these stories, check out his neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights. Available where ever books and e-books are sold.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  It Takes a Light Touch For This Sort of Work

  The Devil You Know

  Dureski’s Requiem

  Afterword

  It Takes A Light Touch For This Sort Of Work

  Leta crouched in a shaded corner of the Plaza Mayor. Betani stood beside her, fanning their folded street map against her leg with one hand, the other hooked in the pocket of her second-hand jeans. It was a Wednesday in May, late morning, warming. There had been rain in the gray hours before dawn, and the plaza stones were still damp. The milling crowd was thin but adequate. Only a few locals. Most of those in sight were gawking turistas.

  Easy marks.

  Leta shifted her weight back on her hams, felt the wall against her back. Crouching gave her a better perspective and kept her inconspicuous. There were only the two of them today, neither her sister’s baby nor Betani’s little cousin being available to them as they normally might be. No baby in Betani’s arms meant no visual distraction. No little cousin—young and wiry and prepubescent—meant no runner. It was just the two of them: Betani to draw the mark’s attention, Leta to pick their pockets and dash. It was a risky set-up, but Duricio had left them with little choice.

  They always met their fence on Wednesday mornings, down by the Puerta del Sol where the corrida touts circled like sharks, eager to hawk their billetes to stupid North Americans with bloodlust and too much money in their pockets. But they’d run into Duricio last night. Duricio, whose insistence that Leta and Betani were whores in his stable—and thus, owed him tribute—had passed annoyance and moved into outright harassment. If he was simply joking, or a coward, the two of them could have handled it. Unfortunately, Duricio was neither. He’d proven as much the night before, clubbing Betani’s left ear, then whipping Leta across her back with his belt and buckle. They’d won out in the end, drawing blood and getting free of him, but Duricio had still been walking when they fled. Worse, he flew with their take. Their pockets were empty now, and if they wanted to catch their fence before he left for the corrida, they had only a few hours more.

  At some point in the future, given the opportunity, Leta hoped to slit Duricio’s throat. She owed him for the stripes on her back.

  But first: cash. She’d worry about vengeance later.

  A street cleaner in green coveralls moved past them, pushing his dumpster cart, picking up stray bullfight handbills, discarded maps and tour brochures. His eyes fell on Betani. Still crouching, Leta saw a smile creep onto the street cleaner’s lips. He liked what he saw.

  Then he saw Leta. Suddenly, he realized what the tall, thin girl in blue jeans and the crouched girl beside her were up to. His smile collapsed into a sneer. He shouted at them as he passed by.

  “Putas gitanas!” he cried in Spanish. “Get out of our country! Keep your greasy fingers out of our pockets!”

  Betani waved him off, spitting at him between forked fingers. All over the Plaza, the turistas turned to see what the commotion was about. If any of them knew what the street cleaner was saying, their blank stares and gaping mouths gave no indication.

  Betani stepped away from the wall. “Bastard,” she muttered. “Come on.”

  “No,” Leta said. “They have no idea.”

  Betani set herself against the wall. Leta lowered her eyes until the street cleaner passed. Soon enough, he forgot about them and went on his way, as did the milling tourists. Leta sighed.

  The cities used to be easy places to pinch travelers for swag and fast cash. Two or three passports put more money in your pocket than one full wallet ever could. But the Spanish—especially the Madrileños—were getting ever-more belligerent, espousing the same sort of vigilanteism and anti-gitano sentiment that Leta and her clan had fled from in the Czech Republic. The conservative powers in the European Union didn’t like foreign influence—communists, capitalists, Jews, or Muslims—but by God, they despised the Romani.

  Leta had come to Madrid with her parents and siblings, but hard times—and the ever-darkening Madrileño humor—made regular, fruitful pickpocketing difficult. The family’s income flagged. As Leta’s father had never liked her, it was easy for him to chase her away. He called her shiftless, a layabout, a filthy little slut who couldn’t earn her keep. If she’d been selling her body, he would’ve been content. Instead, he was sure she was sleeping around for free, maybe even keeping pinch proceeds for herself.

  She did keep a percentage for herself. Who wouldn’t? She was the one risking her neck every time she made a mark, after all, not her father. The courts and policia were notoriously brutal, true, but the greater threat were the Madrileños themselves. They saw the gypsies as a pestilence, little more, and they weren’t afraid to make it known with their grasping hands and flying fists.

  Stealth and confidence were required. Guile and cunning. It took a light touch for this sort of work. Therefore, Leta reasoned, the greater portion of the spoils were hers, not her father’s or her family’s. To hell with them all if they didn’t want her anymore. Soon, she’d squirrel away enough to head north, and she’d never have to see them again. Paris, Amsterdam, maybe London. Only time and good fortune would tell.

  Now a shuffling pack of Anglos led by a portly Brit in a corduroy jacket shuffled into the square. The Brit spoke loudly, gesturing from time to time with a rolled newspaper in his hands. Where his newspaper pointed, their eyes followed. From time to time, they asked questions.

  Leta smiled. These were prime marks, but there were too many of them. Besides, she recognized one of them: she’d hit him on Sunday, gotten nothing more than a few American dollars from his wallet, and thrown it back on the sidewalk. He didn’t even have the decency to tip her for returning it. They were an ungracious lot, Americans.

  Betani tapped Leta’s shoulder and gestured with a slight grunt.

  Across the plaza, a young man in a black leather coat walked alone, studying the contents of a small book held just inches from his face. He stopped, sighed wearily, and lowered the small book into the outer left pocket of his coat.

  What was he thinking, Leta wondered, wearing a leather coat like that in May? It wasn’t hot, as yet, but no one
could mistake a Madrid May for coat weather, could they? He didn’t seem to be sweating, though, so Leta assumed he was comfortable.

  Rummaging in the same pocket where he’d stuffed the book, he drew out a billfold. His other hand dipped into the right hip pocket of his slacks and emerged with a wad of bills.

  North American. Leta knew it. Only they wadded money in their pockets like that. It was the first sign of their excessive caches of—and casual contempt for—money that they mistreated it so.

  Standing still in the middle of the plaza, the young man in the leather coat ordered his bills and slipped them into his billfold. As he did so, he scanned the world around him with narrowed eyes, as if his extraction of the wadded cash had been the most casual, surreptitious act in the world.

  Maybe no one else passing noticed.

  But Leta and Betani did.

  “Yes?” Betani asked.

  Leta nodded. She rose. She and Betani swung behind a nearby column, out of sight, and prepared. Leta wiggled her fingers to limber them. Betani handed over the street map. Leta unfolded it, then closed her eyes and slipped into character. When she opened them again, she wasn’t a gypsy pickpocket about to lift a stupid American's wallet any more, but a starving girl, lost in a strange city, with only a map in a language she couldn’t read to guide her. Her hands shook and her face was drawn and her brow was furrowed and her dewy eyes pleaded and her lips shook and were down-turned.

  Betani shook as well—enough to suggest fear and agitation and hunger, but not so much as to suggest methadone withdrawal or venereal disease—then the two closed on the young man in the black leather coat, babbling in Caló, telling him what a fool he was to see them and believe their charade, how sorry he would be when he checked his pockets and found his billfold gone.

  Betani threw scattered Spanish and English phrases in with her native rebuke, just so the fellow would get the idea: por favor… hungry… help… perdí mi familia…

  Up close he was handsome, but his stunned surprise and weak response made Leta loathe him even as she admired him. At least the Madrileños—hell, most Europeans—cursed and spat when the gypsies came to call.

  But this fool… he stood with a gaping mouth, shaking his head, speaking slowly—and loudly, as Americans were wont to do when someone spoke in foreign tongues to them—and let the whole maneuver go down smooth as cream.

  Betani had his arm, tugging, begging, pleading.

  Leta closed in on his left, holding out the map, letting it shake to show off her terrible affliction—the hunger that stole her composure and strength. In a moment, her free hand snaked beneath the outspread map and her fingers slipped with serpentine grace into the deep leather pocket of the coat. Out came the billfold. As it rose into her grasp, it caught the small book, and rather than tug it free, Leta decided to lift both and be done with it. In the next instant, billfold and pocket-book were free, and Leta withdrew.

  The young man worked up a response now, saying, “No, no, no” again and again. Betani held him. Finally, he cried out, “No! Get away!” and broke from them and hurried across the plaza, back the way he’d come.

  As soon as his back was turned they slid on lithe feet into the shadows of the colonnade.