Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

with the 8-gauge shotgun loaded for pigeon. He remembers the sharp, flat slap, and remembers dragging the body across a half a mile of scrub brush to a sewage treatment facility, then weighing the corpse down with paint cans. Now, his knees going weak and watery, his heart racing, he gropes for the right words. “You deserved it.”

Fu-Manchu shrugs. “Maybe I did.”

“You were supposed to be my... what? My guardian. You were supposed to—” Oswald stops, feeling the eyes of the other dead people on him.

The man in the shiny sport coat glowers at him. “Supposed to what? Supposed to what? Put up with yer shit just ’cause I was bangin’ yer ma—that stupid-ass squaw didn’t know her cunt from a corncob.”

“YOU LEAVE MY MOM OUTTA THIS OR I SWEAR I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU AGAIN!”

Oswald’s booming voice seizes the room like a jolt of electricity, and makes the ghost of Quentin Lawrence Warburton flinch, and all the other dead people snap their gazes up at Oswald, who is now facing down the memory of his stepfather in a fog of rage. Oswald’s eyes burn with tears of fury. He feels tiny, as though he is shriveling back into himself, regressing back to that bitter, confused kid sitting on a riverbank.

Nobody moves. Nobody says a word for several seconds, as the muffled, moaning grunts of a sleeping Gerbil Goldstein stirring in the adjoining room seem to come from light-years away.

The voice of the Accountant pierces the silence: “You killed your own stepfather?”

Oswald finally lets out a sigh, turns to the Accountant, and speaks calmly, almost softly. “He used to burn my arms with his cigarettes.”

“All right, I will grant you he’s not exactly Ward Cleaver, but—”

“And when he was really feeling industrious he would torture me on the Tilt-A-Whirl.”

“Pardon?”

Oswald looks at the ghost of his stepfather. “Why don’t you tell them.”

Fu-Manchu is gazing at the floor. “Yer doin’ fine.”

“He was a carny,” Oswald explains to the group. “Worked at a little two-bit fairground on the edge of the Sleeping Waters Casino. Used to drag me up there late at night, after closing time—”

“With all due respect,” the Accountant murmurs, “I really would prefer not to hear this.”

“Sshhh—let him finish,” the Head-Wound Guy whispers. “I want to hear about it.”

“He used to tie me down in one of the cars, and he’d play a little game, called it the Tilt-A-Roulette. He’d remove the bolts from the connecting arm, one at a time, and he’d send me spinning.”

The man in the slimy fish-skin jacket grunts. “You never fell off, did ya? Huh? You never—”

“Dude.” Across the room, the Drug Dealer is now looking askance at the ghost of Quentin Warburton. “That’s pretty harsh.”

The Accountant chimes in. “If I may be so bold, I’m going to have to concur.” A disparaging tone has crept into his voice as he stares at the man with the stringy mustache. “And not to be judgmental or impertinent, but I’m starting to think we’re seeing the results of bad parenting here.”

“All right, all right!” Quentin throws up his hands and skulks back around behind the lampshade. “Why don’t y’all just have every little spoiled brat in the world go get a shotgun and blow their daddies’ brains out!”

Oswald is about to say something else when a meek little voice from the shadows weighs in.

“Some of us never got a chance to be a good parent.”

Oswald turns and sees the faint outline of a woman perched on a worn vinyl armchair pushed against the far corner of the room.

Alberta Goldstein rises off the chair with a flourish, her long scarlet robe hugging her voluptuous curves. Like an actress making a grand entrance in a play, the former prostitute takes a few steps across the room and stands before Oswald with her hands on her hips, her sculpted face with its dark features and Cleopatra eyes trained on Oswald with baleful authority. The only flaw—the single blemish in her pristine appearance—is the wig of charred auburn hair, some of the burned tendrils hanging down, obscuring the .38-caliber exit wound in her stunning forehead. “Did you forget me, big fella?” she purrs with the sardonic tang of a born wiseacre.

“Of course I didn’t forget you.” Oswald takes a deep breath. “You’re number eight.”

“Whoopty-do,” she says with a facetious little twirl of her finger. “Lucky number eight.” Her gaze is unwavering. “You shot me in the back of the head.”

Oswald looks down, the shame and regret smoldering in his guts. He licks his lips. “I’m really sorry about that, Alberta.”

“You promised me I’d get to see her again.” Ghostly tears shimmer on the woman’s face. “I thought you were helping me.”

Oswald keeps looking at the floor. He can’t bring himself to look at the statuesque phantom. “I took care of her as best I could. I kept my promise. I told you I would take care of her.”

“Take care of her?” The ghost lets out a bitter, scalding laugh. “The Illinois State Children’s Orphanage?! Really? That’s how you cared for my daughter? That place was a dung heap!”

Oswald swallows the hard lump of guilt wedged in the back of his throat.

It had all happened so fast: the rumors starting to float around the underworld that the Mink had knocked up his high-class hooker girlfriend. A few months later, the woman vanishes, pregnant and terrified for her life and the life of her baby. Oswald had gotten the call then to hunt the woman down, and “make the problem go away.”

Finding her had been easy. A pregnant prostitute on the lam is not exactly a needle in a haystack. But something about the job bothered Oswald from the get-go. This wasn’t a corrupt politician with his fingers too deep into the cookie jar. This wasn’t a scumbag pornographer skimming funds from the mob. This was an innocent bystander, and an even more innocent unborn child. Oswald decided to go off script and intercede.

He snatched the woman and kept her on ice for