Three Brisket Tacos and a Sig Sauer

By Michael Bracken

Joseph “Joey D” Garrett owes everything to his Aunt Sylvia, including a stint in the Stateville Correctional Center. When he’s released, Joey returns to the only life he knows, and he soon becomes an instrumental part of his aunt’s plan to rob four banks in a single day.

Before that can happen, though, Joey meets Gloria Sanchez, and she turns his life upside down. Gloria’s everything his aunt isn’t, and their developing relationship makes him think about how life could be if he weren’t so dependent on Sylvia. When he’s forced to choose between the two most important women in his life, Joey finds the answer in a take-out bag from a taco truck.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463142714

Michael Bracken

Michael Bracken is the author of several books, but is better known as the author of more than 1,200 short stories, including erotica published in the Lambda Award-nominated anthologies Show-offs and Team Players and in Best Gay Erotica 2013, Best New Erotica 4, Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora, Fifty Shades of Green, Flesh & Blood: Guilty as Sin, Gent, Hot Blood: Strange Bedfellows, Oui, Ultimate Gay Erotica 2006, and many other anthologies and periodicals. Learn more at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com.

Book preview

THREE BRISKET TACOS AND A SIG SAUER

Guns + Tacos Season One Episode 2

Michael Bracken

Series Created and Edited by

Michael Bracken and Trey R. Barker

Copyright © 2019 by Michael Bracken

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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

Cover design by Zach McCain

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Three Brisket Tacos and a Sig Sauer

About the Author

Also by the Author

Preview from the third episode of Guns + Tacos

A Gyro and a Glock by Frank Zafiro

For Temple

My Love, My Muse, My Everything

Damn it, Joey, Sylvia said as she slapped his ass. Do it again.

They had driven directly to a cheap motel in Romeoville upon Joey’s release from the Stateville Correctional Center, and he had been too eager, finishing before his aunt even warmed up.

I can’t, Joey said. He rolled off of her. Not yet.

He sat up, reached for the pack of Marlboros on the nightstand, and lipped out two as his gaze traveled the dangerous curves of Sylvia’s supine figure. She had gained a few pounds during his incarceration, most of it settling around her hips and softening her slender figure. Three years older than Joey, Sylvia was his father’s step-sister, the pre-existing daughter of his grandfather’s second—and much younger—wife, and she had been a dominating force throughout Joey’s adolescence in downstate Illinois. When arrested for robbing Goober’s Bait & Tackle, he took the fall alone because she disappeared out the back door when sheriff’s deputies walked through the front door, and she promised to safeguard the money from their previous jobs. He lit both cigarettes with a black crackle Zippo handed down from his great-grandfather and handed one to her.

After taking a deep drag from his, he asked, How much longer?

We’ll get tacos after dark, she told him. Jesse’s doesn’t open until near on ten.

You know how to find it?

Frank showed me.

Yeah. He didn’t want to talk about Frank. Not right then.

They smoked in silence. When they finished, Joey burned daylight ensuring his aunt’s satisfaction.

Sylvia found Jesse’s Tacos parked on a dark South Side street, light from inside the truck providing the only illumination for almost two blocks in any direction. The truck’s lone customer, a syringe Sally begging for a handout, scurried away when Sylvia’s Fathom Blue Chevelle pulled to the curb. Sylvia handed Joey a thin roll of bills taken from her front pocket and he exited the vehicle.

A granite block of a woman with a complexion like moldy Wonder Bread stood inside the taco truck. Joey could barely see the dwarf working the grill behind her as he approached the window, and the woman squinted at him with her good eye while her other eye gazed at something off to his left.

He asked, Where’s Jesse?

In a voice that spoke of too many cigarettes and not enough estrogen, she said, I’m Jessie.

Joey had expected to give his order to a wiry black man with a doughnut ring of gray hair. He began to protest. But—

I’m Jessie, she repeated.

Okay, then, give me the special.

The woman hesitated when she heard his order. I don’t know you.

I know Frank Zappo, Joey said. We were roomies in Stateville.

Frank’s dead.

I heard, Joey said. He

Reviews for Three Brisket Tacos and a Sig Sauer

[Gary Carter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Michael Bracken shows his talents as a writer of a hard boiled gritty noir short story full of sex, violence and the art of the double cross. He is also the editor of Guns and Tacos in which this story was featured.