Close Calls

Dark fantasy, Mississippi, 1988: “Hey, buddy. You done breathing down there?”

Short fiction: dark fantasy/Gulf Coast gothic. Moderate language, no other content warnings…this time. (I mean, blood, maybe. Spicy implications. It’s exactly what it says on the tin.)

Bridget Riley

said I should write this story—and the things she tells me to write always come out well, for some reason—so here it is. If you’ve read “Voicemail” (link at the end), I am still planning out that serial to write in the future. This prompt just screamed to be a backstory piece about the time Jonas Quinley met Lacey and Miguel’s mother.

Further context: “The vibe I bring to Substack” was trending on Notes recently. My vibe, obviously, is this Tumblr post personally calling me out on my plot choices.

In Biloxi back in the late ’80s, $200 meant something. It would have meant more in Picayune, where the liquor taxes were a sight lower, but Diana hadn’t decided yet whether she wanted to drive all that way tonight. She’d only collected her bounty about ten minutes ago, and it was raining so hard you couldn't tell what was the Gulf and what was the sky. The radio’d said something about a tropical depression, which sounded about right since the rain had been going since before five o’clock. It was getting on to eight now, the sun setting somewhere behind the clouds and the Air Force base. Another ten minutes’ walk back to the gas station where she’d left her truck with the tank empty. Drifts of wet sand crunched between the soles of her sodden canvas sneakers and the sloping sidewalk, and a single orange street light tinted the surface of the water running past her into the river that used to be a road. Thunder rumbled out past the coast. As the wind shifted, Diana angled her umbrella to keep the rain out of her downturned face and soldiered on.

Original photo by Brian Stalter on Unsplash

Two hundred dollars! It was worth getting soaked to her skin for that. Diana hadn’t made that much on one job in a while, and there was no partner to split it with this time, either. She’d tucked most of it away and left fifty in her pocket. Fifteen dollars to fill up the truck and twenty for a motel room, just for the hell of it. Five for dinner. The other ten…maybe for Picayune, maybe for cigarettes. Hell, maybe she’d go get herself run out of New Orleans again. Without Raúl there holding her back, nobody was going to nag her now to act responsible.

Somewhere behind her, the slow rumble of a stuttering engine emerged from the noise of rain. Diana moved further up onto the sidewalk to avoid the waves lapping up over the curb as the vehicle slowed down to keep from splashing her.

“Hey, beautiful, you want a ride?” somebody shouted out the window. She looked up to see three scrappy-looking young men sprawled across the bench seat of a pickup. They didn’t set any of her alarms off, exactly, but scrappy-looking was probably the nicest thing she could say about them. They clearly weren’t military boys, and the rain was only doing so much to ease the smell of shrimp juices and stale smoke baked into every soft surface on the other side of that door.

Diana hesitated, slowing her pace even as she kept walking. Ten years ago, there would’ve been no question; she’d have hopped right on in and picked a lap to sit on. She had a bag full of tricks, and either they’d have had some fun or she’d have put those boys out and taken them for everything they had. Maybe both. But she'd kind of gotten tired, recently, of things going sideways. This job, for example. She’d only made the trip because she thought they had a revenant spirit on their hands, and come to find out it was a stiff-legged bear¹ that had managed to wander down through the bayou. Monsters weren't Diana’s thing. If ol’ Big Man-Eater hadn’t already been hurt bad when she found him, she would’ve had to call the whole thing off, and Lord only knew where the gas money would’ve come from.

“Baby doll, we don't bite—”

“’Less you want us to!”

“You look like you’d want us to.”

“C’mon, girl, just get in. The whole damn bay’s pourin’ through this window.”

Diana shook her head. “No thanks, fellas. I’m good. I ain’t going too much further.”

Whatever they said next didn’t sound all that complimentary, but she’d already tuned them out as she left the sidewalk and splashed through the scrubby grass in front of the Missionary Baptist church, making to cut behind it where they couldn't follow her. Diana didn’t know the area too well, but she figured detouring over one block and back was easy enough. Better than those knuckleheads deciding to do something about having their hospitality scorned, anyway.

As she came around the back of the building, Diana stopped flat in a puddle that came up to her ankles, taking a moment to regain the presence of mind to step out of it. Just a few feet away, at the edge of the parking lot, the crumpled form of a dead man lay half-curled in the roots of an oak tree. She unclipped the flashlight from the belt loop of her cutoff shorts and inched closer warily, looking past the raindrops flashing through its beam. Diana was well used to things that weren't what they seemed—ghosts, the Good Brethren, what have you. As she started to get a better look at it, though, she relaxed some. Whatever else it might be, what she was dealing with here was definitely corporeal and almost certainly human.

The man didn’t look like the kind of luckless drifter or druggie you’d expect to die in the mud behind a Baptist church. He was maybe thirty-five, his hard face softened by the slackness of a long sleep, with muscular limbs echoing the branches above. His square chin had been shaved pretty recently and his clothes, which looked like they had been new, fit him well. Lord, though, he was a mess. Yellowing bruises under the hair on his arms, long parallel gouges in sets of three and four all over his body. There was so much blood on him, she couldn't even tell the color of the long hair matted against his neck. Looking down at his wounds, Diana thought of Big Man-Eater’s reaching claws and shivered. Her contact would want to know if there was another casualty.

She stepped in and gave the body a good nudge with the side of her shoe, just to make sure. “Hey, buddy. You done breathing down there?”

To her surprise, the dead man grunted and shuddered, blinking his bright river-muddy eyes open once before they closed again.

Diana dropped onto her knees and leaned over him, letting the umbrella go so she could shake his shoulder with her free hand. “Hey! Don’t you die yet. I got to talk to you.”

He opened his eyes again, just enough to squint at her through the light. “You can see me?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“Damn it.” The man groaned and, despite his injuries, pulled himself up to sitting. “Damn hoodoo lady charged me ten bucks and that piece of shit invisibility mojo didn't even last.”

“Mojo? Oh…” So he was in the same line of work she was, or at least adjacent. Despite the weather, Diana hadn’t bothered to take off her sunglasses after she wrapped up her more dangerous business. She lowered them to see nothing on the tree’s roots but a truly haunting amount of blood. “No, it’s still good. These are Second Eyes.”

“Great. Of course they are.”

She raised the shades again, dimming the scene slightly but revealing her new acquaintance poking thoughtfully at a shallow cut across his palm. “So, were you trying to bleed out in the dark, or what?” she said.

“Shit. Give me a little credit, huh? I'm waitin’ on this healing spell to finish up.” He met her incredulous look with a roll of his eyes. “It works from the inside out, alright. Just the cracked ribs probably took most of the afternoon. I figured I'd sleep ’til tomorrow morning and then go take another swing at the big guy what put me down here.”

Diana winced. “That stiff-legged bear, you mean?”

“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed at her again. “What about him?”

“He’s already done for,” she admitted. “I guess I owe you for softening him up for me.”

“You!” He laughed and then grunted in pain as he leaned his head back against the oak’s trunk. “Don’t that take all. A girl like you pulling my kill right out from under me.”

“I ain’t any girl,” Diana said, irritated, sitting back and searching out a spot where the rain wasn't dripping through so bad. She was twenty-eight, somebody’s mother, and either married or divorced—she still didn’t really care to know which. She hadn’t run home to her daddy neither, not in a long time. She paid her own way and didn’t let anyone tell her what to do. That seemed like a grown woman by anybody’s definition.

“Sure—sure, if you say so.” He ran his hand across the cleanest spot left on his blue jeans, and offered it to her. “Call me Jonas.”

“Call me Diana.” They shook hands and smiled at each other, her teeth crooked and his busted lip not quite knit back together yet. Smart boy, to get out of the habit of saying I am and my name. She might not think too much of monster-hunters in general, but she could get along with a man who knew his usual prey was just the first rung on the ladder.

Jonas hauled himself up to his feet and limped out into the rain. “I don’t guess you wanted to talk about how we were going to split our bounty,” he said as he let a gust of wind start to scour the blood from his face.

“Our bounty, is it now.”

“It’s only right. Eighty-twenty, maybe?”

Diana watched as even more dirt and blood began to soak through the shoulders of his T-shirt. He was good-looking under the gore, even more than she’d suspected. “Twenty for you and eighty for me? Maybe.”

“Aren’t you a joker.” He raised a hand to comb through the clumps in his hair, pulling up the shirt’s hem; in the light still hanging loosely from her hand, she saw a strip of sunburnt skin, muscle-taut, stretched between knotted white scars. Diana thought she might not mind hanging onto this one for a few weeks. Just for fun. And maybe, just in case the next job went bad too, for backup. “Tell you what, Miz Diana. For a hundred bucks, I’ll let it go and you can be on your way.”

“No deal,” she said. “You might’ve helped, but I killed him, not you. And I need the money.”

Jonas laughed again. “I’m out for a mojo and a major spell, and here I'm sleeping under a damn tree, and you think I don’t?”

“I had to use my last silver bullet. Real silver, solid. And I ran my gas tank empty getting here from Natchez.” Diana picked up the umbrella, like she wasn’t already wet as a fish, and shook the rainwater out of it before she got up again to join him in the parking lot. “But I’ll tell you what, Jonas. I’ll give you fifty bucks for your trouble and to pay off your hoodoo lady, and you can trade the tree for my place. It’s got a shower, and a bed, and everything.”

He smirked down at her, obviously seeing straight through that offer to the intent in her eyes. Good. She liked it when things were clear. “You’re not even gonna buy me dinner first?”

“I’m not gonna order for a ghost who’s bleeding all over the booth at the Waffle House, no.” Diana reached out to brush a little wet bark off his neck. “I’ll buy you dinner once you don't look like you just crawled outta your own grave. You can ride in the back of the truck until then.”

“Aw, hell. This deal keeps getting better all the time.” Jonas trudged back into the increasingly soupy grass and came up with a heavy rucksack slung over his shoulder. “It’d be kind of you to share that umbrella, at least.”

Diana chuckled. “It’s been a while since I been accused of kindness,” she said, lifting the umbrella just enough so he could stoop enough to get his face behind it. It was only ten minutes to the gas station, after all. “Long’s you don’t tell anybody about it, I guess once wouldn’t hurt.”

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, consider leaving a like or comment to let me know, and sharing to help others discover my work.

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+Archive/Directory: Links to all my published fiction.

+Voicemail: ~1700 words, urban low fantasy/horror. Lacey’s brother has been missing for years, and her private eye recommended a medium. Bad idea.

+Should You Choose to Accept It: ~2000 words, spy romance. Two ex-lovers meet in Paris on the same mission. By chance? Please…

1. Man-Eaters are one of several monsters common to Native lore across the Southeast US (though their range extends into Canada.) Few have seen these beasts and lived to describe them consistently, but they seem to combine characteristics of elephants, mountain lions, and bears in varying proportions. I believe that the ones living in the pine forests of southern Mississippi are mostly bear.