Crime Spells

I strolled into the restaurant and took a table near the window. The smell of coffee, steak, and onions made my mouth water. I looked around for Mama and spotted her coming out of the kitchen. She strode straight over to my table, filled a cup with coffee, and set it in front of me.

“Why did you tell Pike he should send me in after that girl?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “You are strong, Allie girl. She needed you. Pike needed you.”

I took a drink of coffee. It was fresh, rich, and hot. “This is really good,” I said. And yes, I was surprised.

“You come here any day or night. Any time.” Mama nodded. “Coffee always be fresh for you, Allie girl.” I knew that was all the apology and thank you I was going to get out of her. That, and the best steak di

Eye Opening by Jason Schmetzer

Eddie Timmser didn’t know where Gong had gotten the pistol, but he did know he didn’t like looking down the barrel of it. He leaned away from the safe and held up his hands. “Hey, come on, man,” he said. “It’s not my fault. I can’t see this one.” Jesus, I should have stayed home tonight.

“What’s your deal, Eddie?” Gong asked. The light from Eddie’s penlight reflected from the burnished steel of the safe door and cast shadows across Gong’s narrow eyes. The pistol jerked an inch closer. “All the places we been together, buddy. Now you can’t see this one safe?” A sneer twisted across Gong’s lips, making the perspiration on his upper lip shimmer in the light. “I’m not buying.”

Buddy? The last time they’d worked together, Eddie’d spent three months in lockup before his public defender got him out on a technicality. Gong had make it clear away, with the loot and the rep to go with it. And now he was back, forcing Eddie to work again, to use his sight to make a fast score. As if there weren’t enough honest jobs where a guy who could see through walls could make a living.

“I can’t see it,” Eddie said. “It happens.”

He resisted the urge to rub the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. It hurt to look through metal, hurt right behind his nose when he concentrated and squinted and looked with the eye he couldn’t see. It hurt more when he looked at something he couldn’t see through, like now. There was a mother-big headache brewing behind his eyes, and his pills were in the truck.

This always happened to him. Every time he tried to go straight, something happened. Someone would call with a big score. A favor he’d forgotten all about would get called in. He looked at Gong. Someone would threaten him.

He looked away from the gun and played the light across the surface of the safe again. Something flickered. Eddie leaned in close, ran his fingers across the metal. There was a pattern etched in the tough steel, just barely there. He held the light close and moved his head alongside the safe.

“What is it?”

“There’s something here,” Eddie said. “Some kind of pattern.”

Gong lowered the gun. He bent down and held his head close as well, close enough that Eddie smelled the sweaty stink of fear and the beer on his fetid breath. Eddie wrinkled his nose and slid back a bit. “That’s got to be it,” he said.

“Got to be what?”

“That’s what’s blocking me,” Eddie said. “I don’t know how this works, but maybe somebody does. Maybe somebody knows that there are people that can see through metal like freaking Superman. And they know how to block it.”

Gong frowned. “What, like magic?”

Eddie stared at him. “I can look through metal, Gong. What the hell do you think that is?”

“It’s called magic,” a deep voice said from behind them.

Gong spun, the pistol already coming back up. Eddie just let himself fall backward off of his haunches, against the safe, and twisted to see what was going on. He didn’t have a gun-hated guns-and wouldn’t have used it if he did. Gong was shouting something, brandishing the gun, but Eddie barely heard or saw him.

Eddie was thinking about going back to jail. Not today, he thought.

A small man stood in the doorway to the study, an Asian man. His expression was calm, and he wore a simple white shirt with black trousers. His hairline was receding. He wore large wire-frame glasses. Eddie stared at him, blinked. Looked again, concentrating. He blinked again and then saw something else.

“Jesus Christ!” he muttered.

A black haze flowed around the man in the doorway. It filled the corridor behind him, peeking through over his shoulders and whirling like angry tendrils of dark-white cloud. When Eddie looked again at the man, a symbol burned in gold on his forehead. Eddie blinked again, lost his focus, and the cloud and symbol disappeared. The man appeared smaller.

“That is my safe.”

“We was just looking, man,” Gong said. His pistol was pointed straight. “And now we’ll be leaving. Come on, Eddie,” he said. He took a step forward, leading with the gun. The man in the doorway smiled, then shrugged his shoulders. Shivers raced up Eddie’s spine.

Gong screamed. His arm-and the gun-vanished. Eddie stared at it in horror. Gong screamed and screamed and screamed, waving the steadily shrinking stump of his arm as if he could fling whatever was eating it away. Eddie concentrated and looked again.

The cloud was climbing up Gong’s arm. Tendrils were already starting to encircle the small man’s head, caressing the loose ends of Gong’s hair and his ears. The screaming stopped. The Asian man at the door chuckled.

And then Gong was gone.

The Asian man smiled with satisfaction and turned to Eddie. Eddie felt the blood drain from his face. The cloud-was Gong really gone, or had it eaten him, or what?-rolled backward through the air and whirled around the Asian man’s head. “You can see it,” he said.

Eddie grunted and shoved himself up off the floor. The desk was between them, with Gong’s case still lying open. Rows of gleaming tools, a drill, and little odd-ended picks for locks flickered as the penlight played across them. Behind the case, off the edge of the blotter, were two ornate golden goblets.

“He called you Eddie,” the man said, softly, as if it were an everyday occurrence for a shimmering monster cloud to eat someone in his presence. “Is that your name?” The cloud flickered, shimmered a deepening blood red, and slid forward.

“Nope,” Eddie said, and took two steps forward-Jesus, here it comes!-and grabbed the goblets. The man’s eyes widened behind his glasses. He reached out, taking a step forward. The goblets were heavier than they looked. Eddie looked around, desperate. The window was large, a few feet behind him.

“Put those down,” the man in the glasses said. His voice held a tinge of steel, all the softness and humor gone.

“Where’s Gong?”

“Nowhere you would like to be,” the man said.

“Bring him back.”

“That’s not possible.”

Eddie shivered. The cloud was hanging between them, a malevolent mist, the haze a harbinger of pain and death and somewhere he’d rather not be. He hefted the goblet. “I just want to leave.”

“You never should have entered,” the man said. His mouth moved, whispering words in a language Eddie had never heard, not Korean or Chinese or Japanese or anything else he expected. The haze pulsed, deep golden, and then undulated larger, redder. The golden symbol glowed brighter. Eddie looked down at the goblet, expecting to see the golden light playing across the decorations, but he saw nothing. There was nothing to see.

Light reflected… not whatever he saw, whatever let him see through metals and walls and safes and the dressing room doors at Macys. What he saw wasn’t real. What he saw didn’t affect the real world.

But Gong was still gone. Damn it.

Eddie spun and hurled the goblet in his left hand at the window. It was heavy enough, but if the man had spent as much money on his windows as he had on his safe it would be transparent plexi and not glass, and the goblet would just bounce off it. He dove after the goblet, toward the window.