Tim fled from his afternoon nightmares to answer the insistent clamoring of the telephone. He tucked the receiver between the sweat-soaked pillow and his ear.
“Yeah?” he mumbled.
Godliness with contentment is great gain / those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare / into foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in perdition.
It was a chanted chorus, men’s voices, maybe something from the Bible. Tim wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember the last time he had attended Mass.
He levered his long legs from the bed, scanning the hotel room as he stood. An envelope rested on the threadbare carpet within a rectangle of wan sunshine, one corner still tucked beneath the door.
His name was printed on its smooth, white linen face and it held a single folded sheet of matching paper. The message was from Joey.
Call me. We can still make this right.
***
Tim Murphy and Joey Como met in third grade at Saint Joan of Arc. Even then Joey was a little wise guy, drawn to petty crimes and grand gestures, good at passing blame to others.
Almost every day during those years at Saint Joan, Tim would occupy a straight-back chair in the principal’s office, waiting for another session with the paddle. Joey never got sent to the office, not even one time, never sat on that hard wooden seat. And he accepted that as his due.
“The penguins won’t ever touch me, Murph,” Joey said. “Not as long as I got you to take the fall for me.”
High school came and went; thirty rolled into sight. Joey was a made man, but Tim remained Joey’s fall guy. Then one Friday night, Tim drew a heart flush against three jacks and won control of a two-bit bookie operation Joey financed.
To everyone’s surprise, Tim was good at it. The book grew under his stewardship and he soon found that he could even skim a few extra bucks his way without Joey ever noticing.
For ten years, Tim took away a nice chunk of unnoticed change and after a time he began to think of it as his due for all the crap Joey had shoveled onto him since third grade.
Then things went south.
Two grand not bet on a winning horse guaranteed to lose. Five grand on an insurmountable point spread that the Giants managed to scramble over. The bad luck rolled on until Tim was behind fifty thousand dollars and all of it mob money. There was no way to cover it, no way to keep everyone from figuring out what he had been doing.
People were asking questions, so Tim ran.
For nine days, he had stayed in one cheap hotel room after another, never sleeping on the same lumpy mattress more than once, never moving in a straight line. Hell, he didn’t even know where he was.
But Joey found him.
***
Tim was still considering the note when the telephone rang again. He snatched it up before it had a second chance.
The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil / for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness.
He remembered then. They were canticles, chanted Bible verse, and he was certain all the voices were the same. A single reading from one man layered onto a recording, over and over. Just the sort of gimmicked stunt Joey loved to pull.
Minutes later, when Tim stumbled from the room, zipping his jacket, another envelope waited on the hall floor. Another note.
Call now. Or else.
Tim crumpled the note and bounced it into the room, not bothering to close the door. He reached into his duffle and drew out an automatic pistol, scanning the hall as he did so. As if on cue, the door to a nearby service closet popped open and a skinny dude stepped into the hall, tricked out in the gear of a telephone repairman.
Right.
The beanpole spotted Tim and reached to his tool pouch. Tim closed the distance in three long strides, mouth set in a straight line, firing the pistol as he moved. Two slugs caught the would-be repairman in the chest and he collapsed in a clatter of tools.
Tim kicked at the pouch. A cellular telephone tumbled free of the tools.
He kicked again. No gun.
Tim spun on his heel and hustled toward the elevator. Its doors shushed open before he covered half the length of the hall and three figures stepped out. They were dressed in flowing black with starched white guimpe and wimples.
It had to be another of Joey’s games. His idea of a joke, his or else. Maybe the repairman worked for Joey, maybe not. It didn’t matter. The nuns were on the payroll and they were here to mete out punishment. Tim had had enough of that.
The pistol spit flames in the dim hallway and the nuns fell away before him, black and white habits soaked through with red. The hall reeked of cordite and the coppered scent of blood. Tim kicked through the bodies, looking without success for weapons, and slid past the elevator doors just as they hissed shut.
As he reached for the ground-floor button, the emergency telephone rang. He snatched up the handset.
“What now?”
“This one’s from the Old Testament, Murph, and it’s short.” It was Joey. He sounded tired. “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Tim stabbed at the buttons. They were dead.
“All these years, I let you skim,” Joey said. “Looked the other way because I figured I owed you something.”
The lights died, too.
“And this is how you pay me back. You put me on the spot when you ran, Murph. If you don’t take the fall now, I will.”
Something exploded above the ceiling and the elevator lurched. Out of the darkness, Joey murmured two last words.
“Going down.”
K.C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She lives in Seattle. In addition to Every Day Fiction, her flash fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Boston Literary Magazine and Murky Depths. Her flash fiction, “Hair of the Dog”, was included in The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and her short fiction, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. K.C. blogs about writing at A Moving Line.
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31 Responses to “CANTICLES • by K.C. Ball”
Comments
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October 1st, 2009 at 1:19 am
Guess which part of it reminded me of an old joke…
Q: What’s black and white and red all over?
A: A disembowelled nun.
October 1st, 2009 at 1:23 am
[...] Every Day Fiction My flash fiction, Canticles, is the story of the day today at Every Day [...]
October 1st, 2009 at 3:38 am
A good read K C and happy Grinklemas to you too
October 1st, 2009 at 3:52 am
Wonderful.
October 1st, 2009 at 4:31 am
LOL I love it. Gave it the five finger exercise. Er, I mean 5 stars.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:59 am
Terrific story, a great voice throughout. Sorry to say that elevators have so many safety mechanisms, Joey’s imaginative execution is unlikely to have worked; still, it’s such a fun read I’m willing to suspend disbelief.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:00 am
Yeah! Very nice. And I loved the ending! Five bullets!
October 1st, 2009 at 6:36 am
Wow! That was excellent. The ending was scary but I loved this peice.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:39 am
K.C., this is a seriously good mystery flash, worthy of some of the best I’ve been reading–and trying to write. Like a fine piece of jewellry, the charm is in the details. I’ve bookmarked your website, so keep up the good work!
October 1st, 2009 at 6:51 am
Liked this one.
The middle section, where all the backstory comes in, might could be shortened up a bit. The tension is wound up spring-tight early and then all the air goes out.
Writer’s perrogative on how you put it together…just my 2 cents as a reader.
–John
October 1st, 2009 at 6:58 am
Nice!
October 1st, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] Speaking of KC, she’s got an awesome piece of crime fiction of her own up today over at Every Day Fiction. [...]
October 1st, 2009 at 7:56 am
I got distracted with ‘levered his legs’, ‘wan sunshine’ and the narrator changing his voice and saying ’skinny dude’. Sometimes no description is great description. Good ideas though.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:47 am
Nice. Freakin’ canticles.
October 1st, 2009 at 9:45 am
Payback is hel–er…
Five pistol shots in a dim hallway.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:33 am
good stuff, thanks K.C. It’s a five.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:18 am
I don’t always have time to read the long stories, but this one captivated me from beginning to end.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:31 am
I say a five too. K.C. you had me going in a completely opposite direction. Loved it.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:35 am
If the elevator had taken out both Tim *and* Joey, I would’ve given it a 5.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:37 am
Wait…did it? I’m confused. Need. Coffee. Now.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:49 am
Good one, KC! So much suspense in such a small space.
October 1st, 2009 at 12:07 pm
K.C.
Got jarred slightly by things like “wan sunshine” Might benefit by cutting into the back story. Tends to pull away from the intensity of the action. I was going to scan this and then read it later. Got pulled in before I could close the screen down. Good story and I gave it a 5.
Tim
October 1st, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Nice one, KC. Welcome back to the dark side!
October 1st, 2009 at 8:06 pm
[...] the flash fiction Canticles by K.C. Ball at Every Day [...]
October 1st, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Terrific story, KC. Great opening and it didn’t lose pace for a second. Five stars from me.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 am
I agree about the elevator safety mechanisms that Bob mentioned, but I still give this a five.
Nice one
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 am
Actually, the multiple safety mechanisms on lifts only work to produce that degree of safety because of the low chance of multiple and independent failure. But with sabotage, it’s not like that. If I were doing it, I would put concrete slabs at the bottom so that the (usually hydraulic) buffers there wouldn’t soften the impact, then cut the springs on the brake shoes that make them engage when the cable breaks, then (at the moment of failure) somehow cut the cable (so the governor operated brakes on the pulley would be irrelevant). But it’s all so much work it would be better to do something else anyway.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Thank you all for the kind words. It’s great to be back on the “pages” at Every Day Fiction.
October 4th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
[...] CANTICLES – by K.C. Ball (everydayfiction.com) Category : News. Tags: NaNoWriMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Comments No comments yet. Leave a Response [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Great story, K.C. Well written and well paced.
October 13th, 2009 at 10:56 am
[...] K.C. Ball had a story in EDF earlier this month called “Canticles.” It’s a ton of action packed into the flash fiction format. And, if you want more stories, you [...]