Revenge of the Widow Malmon

By Down & Out Books

In 2017, Kate and Dan Malmon edited Killing Malmon, a unique anthology with short stories featuring the death of “Dan Malmon”. 100% of the profits went to the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Some stories were scary, some were funny; some were random, some were heroic. But they all featured his death.

Dan Malmon’s widow would not sit idly while her husband was killed multiple times. Editors Kate and Dan Malmon are back with a second anthology, Revenge of the Widow Malmon. In this collection, all the stories feature “Kate Malmon” plotting and executing her bloody revenge. As with the first anthology, all profits from Revenge of the Widow Malmon will go to the Multiple Sclerosis Society. So if you hate Multiple Sclerosis as much as we do, or just want to see Kate get her sweet revenge on some fools, please join us as we continue to raise money to battle this disease.

Featuring stories by E.A Aymar, Sean Chercover, Joe Clifford, S.A Cosby, Libby Cudmore, Nikki Dolson, Matthew FitzSimmons, Jordan Harper, Shaun Harris, J.J. Hensley, Jennifer Hillier, Aimee Hix, Matthew Iden, Renee Asher Pickup, and Eryk Pruitt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Oct 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005615789

Book preview

REVENGE OF THE WIDOW MALMON

Edited by Kate and Dan Malmon

Collection Copyright © 2020 by Kate and Dan Malmon

Individual Story Copyrights © 2020 by Respective Authors

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 Brent Schoonover

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Revenge of the Widow Malmon

Foreword

Sing Her Song

Jordan Harper

149

J.J. Hensley

The View

Renee Asher Pickup

The Widow Bereft

Matthew FitzSimmons

Vengeance, Deep Fried

Libby Cudmore

A Regular Death

S.A. Cosby

Bloody-Minded

Sean Chercover

The Man Who Isn’t Dan

Jennifer Hillier

Shell Games

Joe Clifford

When the Widow Came to Dinner

Nikki Dolson

The Little Things

Shaun Harris

The Dying

E.A. Aymar

Mine Are My Daddy’s Scars

Eryk Pruitt

Anamnesis

Matthew Iden

Revenge of the Widow Malmon

Aimee Hix

Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

Preview from Headstone’s Folly by Robert J. Randisi

Preview from Below the Line by Steven Jankowski

Preview from Don’t Shoot the Drummer by Jonathan Brown

To my husband, Dan, I would absolutely avenge your death.

For my wife, Kate, who would absolutely burn down an unjust world.

Foreword

Fade in on a dimly lit room: beakers bubble, computers compute. Think the Batcave, but fewer…bats. There’s a size-eight Adidas shoebox on the table next to Kate. She turns to greet you. She knew you were there the whole time. Because of course she did.

Kate speaks, "I totally knew you were there. Welcome to the intro section of The Revenge of the Widow Malmon. This is the part where I say thanks for picking up this anthology and remind you that one-hundred percent of the proceeds from this collection of awesome crime fiction go to the MS Society, and then maybe give a you little peek into how the sausage got made for this book.

"But truth be told, I’m not going to do that. You see, I’m still pissed off about seeing my husband Dan die thirty times in the first anthology, aptly titled Killing Malmon. So now I’m out for my bloody revenge, and these fantastic fifteen crime writers are helping me get my satisfaction. Some of these stories are funny and happy, while others are dark or sad. But somewhere in each story, I will get my revenge."

Kate picks up the shoebox and a shovel.

Now beat it. I have to bury Dan in the backyard.

Back to TOC

Sing Her Song

Jordan Harper

The old convertible sitting in the cop shop impound lot still has streaks of dried blood down the side of the door. Kate should have known the cops wouldn’t have cleaned it up. Guess she figured it was just a human thing to do—after they took their evidence from the car, which was now a murder scene—to wipe up the rest of the blood. That’s what she gets for mistaking cops for humans.

A pulse thrums deep in the meat of her neck. A weird reminder that her body is still full of blood. Unlike Dan’s.

The largest streak down the side of the car door is shaped just about like Dan’s arm. Like maybe it dangled there when the Nazi Dope Boys were done with him. She could read the shape of the smears, see how his arm hung motionless against the car door for hours maybe—before the homeless tweaker found him down in the wash.

The cop with the clipboard hands her the Dr. Doom keychain, Dan’s keychain. The cop doesn’t smile. She doesn’t say anything a human might say.

You can call it totaled, she says, for insurance. That’s what most do.

Don’t have insurance, Kate says. Just liability.

You can still call it totaled, the cop says, like this was some favor. Send it to the crusher.

Only car I got.

The cop hands her paperwork, makes her sign her name and initial right there in front of the car. The insides of the car are covered in drop cloths. Kate knows what’s underneath. So much of Dan left there for her to clean.

You said your name was Kate Malmon.

It is.

ID says different.

Malmon’s my married name. The words are thick in her mouth. We were married last week. Haven’t got a new ID yet.

And the cop doesn’t say anything human. Just nods and says, copy that and gives her more forms to sign.

As Kate signs in triplicate she thinks about the sheet that draped over Dan in the refrigerated room, how they pulled it back to show her the awful truth of it and made her say it’s him even though it wasn’t anyone at all, just a cold dumb thing with gaping wounds like red yawns hacked all over it.

Now the cop is done with her and leaves her with this thing that can’t ever be anything ever again but a death car to her. She uses her phone to find the nearest car wash. Only when she’s sure of where she’s going does she get in, sit down on the drop cloth. She turns the key, thinking maybe probably it won’t start, how could it start, doesn’t it know it’s a death car now?

The car starts.

Convertibles are for a different California than this one. The California of white surf and wind off the ocean and rich folk eating funny little food arranged on plates just so. Not the sprawl of San Berdoo, the sky gunmetal grey from smoke- trash in the air. With the top down on the highway the wind whips her hair so it batters her face, so it flies wild in the roots, so that later, when she and Dan stop moving, she’ll feel each follicle in her head individually aching. But Dan loves having the top down, and Kate loves Dan. Anyhow, this whipping feeling, it matches how she feels inside just now.

They can do it. They can break free of this place. She’s done the math. Four thousand dollars is enough to launch them away from here. To achieve escape velocity.

She takes three breaths, slow in, slow out. It helps to dull the skittering feeling all over her skin. She turns to Dan, driving slouched, his left foot bent up so the foot is wedged up on the dash. Her hand steals over to him of its own accord, the way it always does when he’s near.

They’ve just come from the Nazi Dope Boy clubhouse over in Fontana. There they met men named Cyco and Max and Troy—not related but made triplets by their lives of crank and crime—same sunken cheeks, same dog-kibble teeth, same hunted, hungry eyes. Their leader a man named Beast Daniels, everything about him blunt and hard—even his gut was a hard hillock tenting his T-shirt. His skin is scribbled all over with white-power numerology.

He told them he’d heard they sold pure crank. Dan gave them a sample line. The triplets jockeyed for it. Troy won. He took it down in a gulping snort. It always made Kate shudder to watch. She had no taste for the electric madness of crank, or how snorting it gave you a nose full of knives and a mouth full of fish guts. It’s how she could sell it and make a profit. Don’t get high on your own supply and all that.

Troy had nodded at Beast, said the words Mother’s milk. Beast had nodded. Kate expected him to buy a ball, an eighth. But that’s not what he did. He told them he wanted four pounds of it.

They’d never sold more than a half ounce at a time. Both of them were smart enough not to say that out loud. Kate didn’t even dare look at Dan, try to talk to him with her eyes, not with Beast watching. They didn’t say a word, even as they drove away from the clubhouse. Like maybe Beast and the Dope Boys had ghost ears everywhere.

So, what are we going to do? she asks Dan now, safe in the roar of the wind. Dan smiles that way he has. It’s a big part of why she loves him, that smile like it’s all a joke and God’s told him the punchline already. Her hand climbs up him to touch the rose tatted across his cheek. The one with PRETTY BABY written around it. He says it’s for her, but she isn’t sure. He’s prettier than she is. So goddamn pretty you can feel him pressing against your eyeballs when you look at him. He is scribbled with careless ink—to him his skin is so much notebook paper to be doodled on. Bleached hair with pink streaks. His eyes heavy-lidded deep brown, eyes that shine like the light comes out instead of going in.

It’s a lot of weight, he says.

Hell yeah it’s a lot.

I don’t like dealing with goddamn Nazis.

Me either. But cash money is cash money. And they want to buy ten times more crank than we’ve ever seen at once. There’s not much more to it than that.

They sit for a beat in the hairdryer roar of highway air.

So, what are we going to do? he asks her, turning it around on her. And she looks at him, tries to see him for real. She knows he isn’t perfect. She’s past that first wild lie of fresh love. She knows there’s a splinter stuck in him somewhere deep down, some pain buried under the surface, and she knows better than to think if she could see it and get her hands on it and yank it free that he’d be whole and healed. She doesn’t need that. Even at twenty-three she’s past thinking anyone’s ever healed all the way whole. She only hopes he can be strong enough that she can lean on him sometimes. She’s strong but no one’s so strong that they don’t need to lean sometimes. She loves him so much, but she’s using him, too. It used to make her feel bad before she learned that the one you love is the one you use the most and all you have to do to make it right is make sure it’s a fair trade. Like how it is in bed; the trick is how to use someone and be used in just the right measure, so you both get more than you give. That’s why they used to call it making love, she figures.

So, she tells him how to her it feels like the earth spins faster every day. Like it’s getting closer to the sun and it’s picking up speed. Like if it keeps up this way shit’s gonna start flying off. And she tells him how The Inland Empire is always burning, even when it isn’t fire season. How it burns so slowly that no one notices they’re on fire. That’s the only thing that makes the two of them different, she figures. They know even slow fire can eat you all up. Kate talks about her mother, only forty-one but already starting to melt, her feet splayed ducklike from a life spent standing. About how Kate looks at her mother and sees herself in a decade. Kate knows she herself is cute enough now to hold her job at the Creepy Crawl for a few more years, and then Phil will fire her for some fresher face, and maybe she’ll get on at another bar or maybe she’ll try the factory and have kids she’ll love and hate about fifty-fifty. Her life stretches out in front of her, grey as the San Berdoo sky.

She says all this, and he listens. And then she stops and it’s just the roar of the wind and he still doesn’t talk. He knows she’s not done. He knows her so well. She hopes he’s the man she thinks he is.

I want to get out of here, she says. We do this deal—buy the crank from Sludgy and sell it to these Nazi Dope Boys; just this one deal, we can make four grand. And with what I have and what you have, if we put it all together and put four grand on top, it’s enough to go anywhere and get set up. So I think we should do it. Only first, I think we ought to get married.

There. She said it. He keeps driving for such a long moment, and maybe he doesn’t know how everything inside her has set like concrete with worry that he’ll say no.

It’s how he smiles that gives her the answer, and everything in her unlocks and she is flesh and blood again.

Where are we going to go? he asks.

She looks up at the gunmetal sky.

Someplace the sky ain’t dead.

Then that’s where we’ll go, he says. After we’re married and do the deal. That’s where we’ll go. Someplace the sky is blue.

And it’s all so huge inside her that she’s got to turn away from him.

She drives now with her hands ten and two. She drives safely and slowly. She cannot risk talking to a cop while driving a car full of dried blood. She drives with her jaw locked shut, holding in all these things inside her trying to get out. Wriggling things with claws.

There are speckles of him everywhere. She thinks about how life started in the ocean, and then we learned to carry the ocean inside us, in our veins. And sometimes our oceans spill out. The floorboard is papery with dried blood that once pooled and now flakes.

She parks in the back by the vacuums and trash cans. When she takes her hands off the steering wheel, she can see red dust on her palms. Her eyes go blurry, everything turns to prisms and rainbows as her tears split the light. And she cries, cries for him and for the two of them, and she wipes tears from her eyes. She looks down and sees that her hands are now bloody—the tears on her fingers have rehydrated the blood, brought it back to life.

They were supposed to do the deal together. The four pounds of meth in a plastic shopping bag, a midnight meeting down at the wash, the vast dry riverbed that wound down from the mountains and on through the city of San Berdoo. They had been just about ready to —Dan had grabbed his Doom keys from the bowl on the table by the door—when Kate had told him she needed to pee one last time.

She would always wonder, had he known she’d go pee one last time—she had a tiny bladder and almost always did—or was it a spur-of-the-moment decision that had led him to leave her there, to go and do the deal by himself. But there one thing she never wondered about. She never once, not even in those first few hours, thought he’d left her to rip her off. She knew he’d done it to protect her. It was his way of keeping her safe her own dreams. He’d gone to the wash by himself, and whoever he met there, if it was Beast or the triplets or some other Nazi Dope Boy, they hadn’t brought cash with them. They’d brought a machete.

When she arrives at the car wash, she tosses the floormats into the garbage can, scummed as they were with dried blood, and besides, she had never saw the use of them anyway. She puts a ten-dollar bill into the quarter machine and picks up the quarters in double fistfulls. She buys sponges and wipes. She starts with the vacuum, sucking up what she can. She jams the sucking mouth of the tube into the dried blood, breaking it into flakes that the plastic worm gobbles. She takes a towel from the dirty laundry bag in the trunk and goes into one of the stalls where she soaks the towel in the water that drips slowly from the wand. She goes back to the car where she runs the towel over the dried blood, rehydrating it and sopping it up at the same time.

A pickup truck pulls into the slot to her right. A raised chassis so the driver looks down from on high. He opens his door, stops halfway out with his foot on the runner, gaping down on her.

Gawd, who died?

In this moment she learns for sure that she doesn’t have psychic powers—his skull doesn’t crunch like an old soda can. But her glare makes him turn away fast.

She opens the glove box. It is stuffed with old papers, insurance cards. A deck of cards. A purple metal one-hitter, the insides thick with resin. She fishes out a lighter and hits the one-hitter, the resin softly crackling as it vaporizes, the smoke hollow-tasting and gross, unclean on her tongue. She rotates the pipe as the flame sucks up into the hole. She’s not sure it’s working until she exhales a dragon cloud. She coughs, her lungs working against her will like bellows, cleaning her out so her head rings. Right away she knows she’s too high and the terror is coming. Of course it is. She’s sitting in the dried muck of the only man she ever loved all the way down. Her too-stoned brain conjures every time she ever grew short with him, every time she had turned him down or made him feel small.

She does the only things she can think to do. She cleans. She cleans the blood up as best she can with the sponges and paper towels, scrubbing at the pleather seats until the white paper towels quit coming up pink. She buys more quarters and buys more cleaners, plastic sponges that turn pink almost instantly as she wipes and wipes, bringing the blood back to life so she can sop it up. She cleans until her arms burn from it and she’s dizzy from fumes, and when she is done, she takes off her ruined T-shirt so that the air bites at her belly.

She walks to the trunk again, opens the laundry bag, puts her face inside, and breathes in the sourness. She finds a hoodie—the least rank and most soaked with the smell of him—and pulls it on. She thinks on how smell works, that it’s not just a reflection or memory. When she smells him, he’s still there, flakes of skin and sweat, in her nose, running through her lungs, and she pulls the sweatshirt up over her nose and it’s so full of him, so wonderful and beautiful, that she breathes into the sweatshirt until it is wet with her breath and she’s dizzy from recirculated air. And anyhow her brain gets used to the smell and it disappears so that she can’t smell it at all, even when she puts her nose to it. She knows she can’t hold on forever. It makes her sick to think how it will go, how he will fade from her, same as the smell did, and that there’s nothing to be done about it, nothing at all.

And she thinks about those who did it—how their blood is still wet inside them. How they still get to fill the world with their stink. And how unfair that is. And she sits there knowing that this car will always be a death car, how even now with the blood gone it will never be gone, that the curse of this car will endure long past Dan’s smell.

That’s when she decides. That she can’t live with the world this way. She starts the car once more. She puts the top down the way Dan liked it. And she drives that death car into the night.

See a scar of smoke across the belly of the sky.

Follow it down to the trailer burning on the desert floor. Smoke boils up black as the void, greasy with particulates, fluming from the vent Troy hacked in the fiberglass roof a few years back during a failed attempt at homebrewing crank. Moths of grey-orange ember float on heat currents. Sparks cough out with the smoke, come to earth, briefly jewel the scrub before dying out. It is the brief and shrinking time between California fire seasons, and nothing catches. Not now.

But it will.

Hear no sound but the gobble of the fire. The cracking and snapping as its slow teeth chew.

Kate watches as she leans against her death car, close enough for the heat to water her eyes. She watches until she’s sure the job is done. She drives away in her death car. As she goes, she turns one last time to look behind her to see that scar of smoke rising up into the sky, as close to heaven as Troy will ever get.

Later, when the firemen find Troy inside the trailer, his corpse still smokes like a blown-out candlewick. Much of him has burned away. What’s left