Jalapeño Poppers and a Flare Gun

By Michael Bracken and Trey R. Barker

Carl Ember has just been released from prison and is eager to reunite with Kate Vinson, his former lover and the daughter of his former boss. There’s just one thing preventing him—paperwork stolen from Alderman Sonny Vinson’s safe during a burglary Carl instigated. He has to find it and return it so he can prove his love.

Kate Vinson, a Chicago Police Department sergeant, is after the same paperwork because she believes it reveals something about her past that might destroy her career. Her once-powerful father, now battling Alzheimer’s, is no help.

Taking separate paths through the Chicago underworld, Carl and Kate find themselves reunited at the home of mobster Sammy the Hat in a showdown that leads to a fiery conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005448974

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.

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JALAPEÑO POPPERS AND A FLARE GUN

Guns + Tacos Season Two Episode 2

Michael Bracken & Trey R. Barker

Series Created and Edited by

Michael Bracken and Trey R. Barker

Copyright © 2020 by Michael Bracken and Trey R. Barker

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

Jalapeño Poppers and a Flare Gun

About the Authors

Books by the Authors

Preview from the next episode of Guns + Tacos

Four Shrimp Tacos and a Walther P38 by Alec Cizak

Carl Ember had ordered the special once, five years earlier, but something about the man inside the taco truck didn’t seem right. Where’s Jesse?

I’m Jesse.

He stared hard at the man, at the leather patch over his left eye and the scars decorating his sunken cheekbone. He motioned toward the eye patch. Didn’t you used to wear that on the other side?

You’re thinking of my brother.

You have a brother with an eye patch?

Siamese twins, separated at birth.

What’s his name?

Jesse, the man behind the counter said. We used to see eye-to-eye, but not so much lately.

Carl thought about two kids born connected at the face and grimaced. Then he said, Give me the special.

The man in the window shouted over his shoulder to the stout woman at the grill, Jalapeño poppers.

"The special special."

Jesse stared at him. You have the cash?

Carl handed the one-eyed man a fistful of bills.

A moment later, Jesse handed Carl two bags. One contained his poppers. He opened the other bag and stared down at a flare gun. He looked up. What the fuck am I going to do with this?

Jesse shrugged.

Carl thrust the bag toward the window. Give me something else.

No exchanges.

Then give me back my money.

No refunds.

Carl pulled the flare gun from the bag and pointed it at Jesse. Then how about if I shoot you with it?

Jesse rested the barrel of a cut-down pistol-grip shotgun on the window frame. Go ahead, make my day.

Carl hesitated, then lowered the flare gun. As he turned away, he muttered, Asshole.

Jesse shouted after him. And don’t come back. We don’t need your business.

When Carl reached his borrowed car, he tossed the flare gun on the seat beside him and opened the bag of poppers—jalapeños stuffed with a cream cheese and pineapple mix, wrapped with bacon, and deep-fried until crisp—and bit into one. The capsaicin made his mouth burn and his eyes water, and he stuffed the rest of the popper into his mouth as he drove away.

Kate Vinson let her smile, a slow, vicious thing, play quietly. She knew the effect; both devil and seductress. She’d spent how many hours practicing that smile: in her bedroom, in the district locker room, in the cruiser, hell even while passing shop windows on foot patrol. She knew what it could do and how malleable it made most men, more than a few women, and even four different judges.

Plus lots of Daddy’s supplicants, eh?

Politicians and people in need of politicians and all bearing gifts to her father’s ward office and eying Kate while her body filled out the way her beautiful mother’s had.

And none of that was doing dick with this guy.

Skinny Nicky spit a shred of tobacco from his shitty home-rolled cigarette. You trying to scare me?

Or score you, more like, his squeeze said.

Shut up, bitch, Kate said. I’ll end you now and sleep like his baby all night long.

The woman—Kate had no clue what her name was, only that her style and taste ran toward Late Modern Street Trash—stood and flexed a muscle or two but made no real move.

Kate had known she wouldn’t. Kate knew the score on almost everyone she dealt with. It was her gift, discovered by Mama and honed to a razor’s bloody edge by Daddy in that very ward office. And when it came to idiots like this woman? Kate just wanted to laugh. Breathing hard and waiting for Skinny Nicky to say something in defense of her honor but too scared of the world to actually step up and defend whatever honor she had left herself.

Kate turned the smile on the chippee. Sit down, gash.

The woman was horrified by the term, but her only move was to clench a fist before sitting down and threatening Kate via her eyes.

…weak and watery and full of nothing…

"Easy, Kate, ain’t no reason to get all

Reviews for Jalapeño Poppers and a Flare Gun

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

If you like hard boiled Noir you can’t miss this series edited by Michael Bracken and written by some of the best writers of Noir writing today.This book is no exception. It is filled with violence, plot twists and turns, deception, criminals from the lowest levels to top level mafia dons. Highly recommended!