5 Tales

By JB Vincent

5 Tales is an eclectic collection of five completely unrelated short stories by JB Vincent. Last Thoughts guides the reader through the final ponderings and regrets of a fallible man as he faces imminent death. Killer’s Holiday chronicles the afternoon of a serial killer author as an incorrigible teenaged fan interrupts the plotting of his next murder. The Grocery Man follows a middle-aged grocery clerk’s walk through a winter night’s snowstorm pondering his life as a grocery man in a small New England town. Station Vermont tells the story of a recently moth balled CIA agent who cannot resist killing off the residents of the small town he’s been relegated to. And, finally, Presidential Fetish is a twisted account of the death of a former president and the cover-up that follows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626600119

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Copyright

5 TALES

JB Vincent

Copyright © 2013 by JB Vincent. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author.

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-62660-011-9

Edited by Dierdre Kelly

eBook designed by MC Writing

5

TALES

JB VINCENT

Acknowledgements

This bizarre collection of stories would never have been finished without the help of the following key people.

Holli Delp who read and re-read until both our heads nearly exploded.

Rose Trapani Cipriano whose knowledge of the book business kept me from just packing it in and becoming a lighthouse keeper and also for letting me latch on to her process during the writing of her book Coffee with My Brother as R.A. Diane.

Joseph Olshan, the only famous author I personally know for his guidance and advice.

Faith Middleton who told me twenty years ago that the key to writing is to actually write. I’m a little slow on the uptake.

Whoever the guy is at Mac’s Grocery Store in Woodstock, Vermont who inspired The Grocery Man, my favorite story to write thus far.

My Mom because she’s my mom.

And, of course, my family for dealing with the mood swings.

A very special thanks goes to Becca Luccas for her amazing cover art.

LAST THOUGHTS

Oh shit, it’s really happening. Kermit Stevens felt the bridge start to let loose under the Jeep, and this time he was going down for real.

Every morning for the last six years it happened exactly like this in his head, only he never thought it would actually happen. What were the odds, ten billion to one? Whatever the case, the same scene played across the screen of his mind each day on the ride to work. It always happened at the middle of the eighty-degree curve of the Coronado Bridge where Interstate 75 lugubriously ebbs from downtown San Diego onto the exclusive isthmus of Coronado, which has been referred to lo these hundred or so years by the geographically incorrect term of island. The section at mile-marker two breaks free in front of the Jeep, the lip of the stressed concrete and steel structure becomes visible over the hood and the air above the asphalt swirls in the haze of Southern California heat.

It’s exactly at this spot where the dry desert air from the mainland collides with the ocean breeze of the Pacific morphing into moist and subtly cool wisps that cascade off the interior side of the windscreen and rush across Kermit’s face. The swapping of warm soothing air to the slightly bracing signifying that its time to downshift from sixth to third gear and drop the accelerator to the floor in an effort to race the falling section of bridge and make it safely to the other side, the long defunct toll booth at the end beckoning like the ghostly finish line of some important race.

On some days, in Kermit’s imagination, the ending was successful, and on others, it wasn’t. In reality the Jeep always made it across … until today. There was no telling why this specific vision invaded his head every single morning. Kermit wasn’t afraid of bridges and certainly never had any signs of clairvoyance, but for some strange reason he just knew he was going to die underneath the Coronado Bridge. Each morning was a kind of dress rehearsal, a morbid inter-cerebellum Ground Hog’s Day.

Every weekday at 6:43 a.m. the same cars were in identical positions at mile marker two. Always on the left, just south of Kermit’s rear fender, was the dark blue Ford Expedition with government plates, its driver, a severe looking bald, black gentleman with gold framed aviator sunglasses. In the front, the orange Dodge Charger passed on the right at about eighty (the Charger always made it across, even today). Directly behind the Jeep was the fifteen-passenger airport shuttle van, carting tourists to the various oceanside hotels after flying in from parts unknown. Always in the same position, the passengers’ fates, on any given day, were left to the whimsy of Kermit Steven’s creative power. He wondered what the other drivers thought of his Jeep’s reliable daily burst of speed at that same precise time every single morning.

It didn’t matter what they thought, Kermit had resigned himself to the idea that this would indeed be the manner in which he died and, as was his character, he had begun preparing for the inevitable a long time ago. It was comforting to know how death would come, so he could make the necessary arrangements. At the time he was transferred from the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia to Coronado as chief investigator of the Navy SEALS internal affairs unit, Kermit drove a Dodge Durango, purchased for a song from the Navy’s carpool surplus division. The first time the bridge made its imaginary fall and he realized his fate, Kermit decided the Durango just wouldn’t do. At that particular section of bridge he and the SUV would be dumped onto land, not into the drink and there was the risk the external hard drive, his constant companion for the last six years, might survive the fall. He couldn’t afford to take the chance, the drive needed to hit water. Since his death was assured, the thing had to go. He couldn’t be worried about trying to get a door or window open while tumbling two hundred feet into the next life.

The Jeep was perfect; with the doors and roof off there was plenty of space to maneuver and toss anything in any direction while plummeting down to the concrete below. As chance would have it, the model year Jeep Kermit purchased had a perfectly positioned center console where he could easily grab the drive and pitch it, which would be fantastic, if for the first time in six years he hadn’t forgotten it on the kitchen table of his Ocean Beach home, in plain view of the love of his life.

Jenny Lee, Kermit’s wife of a decade, could not understand the obsession with keeping the doors and roof off the Jeep. She couldn’t believe he bought the thing at all. Kermit was so tight with money and had been extremely proud of purchasing the Durango so cheaply. His excuse for the buying the Jeep was some dream of driving topless and with no doors at all times, like the island people he encountered in the South Pacific and Caribbean while in SEAL training. Since they lived where the weather rarely deviated from seventy-two degrees and sunny, why not? To Jenny Lee it seemed like the whimsy of a sixteen-year-old boy, not a thirty-nine-year-old, conservative and responsible man who so painstakingly planned out their entire existence as a couple, sensible cars, sensible house, decent 401-K, retirement plan…etc. She wondered if it was a mid-life crisis as she watched him dismantle the doors and roof from the back window of their OB bungalow on the day the Jeep arrived. Six years later, it was obvious that wasn’t the case, but rarely did Jenny Lee give it a thought since she had never been in the Jeep anyway. Whenever they went out as a couple it was always in her sedan.

Six years without a top, exposed to the elements, the interior of the Jeep had taken a beating. The speedometer was fogged with moisture, the radio no longer worked, and the headrests were faded. Kermit’s eyes focused briefly on the trim underneath the windshield as he gathered his last thoughts. The once gray plastic was now sun bleached chalky white with the sun visors cracked and hanging morosely from their hinges. He watched the red pointed corona of the famous Hotel del Coronado disappear over the windshield as the Jeep began its sharp descent.

Why? Why after so many years of whatever this was, a daily premonition, a predestination, whatever, why had he forgotten the hard drive on this particular day? It wasn’t fair. All he wanted was to protect Jenny Lee. The plan had gone so well in his mind. Sure, like anything, there were bound to be hiccups; maybe the bridge fell backward, maybe it gave way at some other point, maybe the Jeep made it over to the other side only to teeter on edge and then fall. Lots of variables, including the more real possibility that this day would never come at all, however, the option of forgetting the drive was never a factor. That hard drive never left his immediate orbit at any time.

His eyes dropped from the shifting horizon of bridge and buildings as they disappeared over the hood of the Jeep and replaced the vista with the masts of a hundred or so sailboats moored just off the Coronado golf course. Out of the corner of his eye the black and white double decked Coronado ferry trudged slowly but surely toward its destination from the shores of Seaport Village. Tears started to well up.

* * *

Jenny Lee was a grad student at St John’s in Annapolis, Maryland when Kermit fell in love with her, and it was her face that now filled the theatre of his mind. They met on a beautiful crisp early fall day at the Annapolis boat show where Kermit was manning a Navy SEAL recruitment booth and Jenny Lee was killing time between classes with a friend. The gorgeous weather had brought out the crowds, and people were packed so tightly together in the aisles as to be barely discernible from one another, just a colorful blur like the subject of an Impressionist painting lit perfectly by the mid-afternoon Maryland sun. Kermit was talking to a