Free B009XDDVN8 EBOK by William Lashner

settling into her job, settling into the couch in front of the television at night with her glass of comfort, settling into the pale un-Willing leftover her life was becoming. As for me, I was hanging out with Augie and Ben.
    I don’t quite know how we became a gang of three, but in the weeks that followed my sad entrance into Pitchford, as I kept my distance from the rest of the neighborhood, first Augie started keeping me company, and then Ben joined in. I suppose each of us was an outsider in his own way and that was what drew us together. I was a filet-mignon boy in an olive-loaf suburb, Ben was the big black kid in a mostly white neighborhood, and Augie was just your average kicked-out-of-Catholic-school troublemaker. If you wanted to smoke, Augie would sell you the cigarettes he stole from his mom. If you wanted to stare slack-jawed at naked women—and, really, who didn’t?—Augie would sell you time with the
Playboys
he slipped from his father’s workbench in the garage. Later he would graduate to selling concert tickets and pornographic videos and drugs, yeah, but even in those early days he was the supplier of our darkest dreams and as such was always on the periphery. We were, all three of us, on the periphery. All we had was each other.
    “They say Derek Grubbins buried two b-bodies in the crawl space of his house,” said Ben as he flipped another card and placed it on the pile.
    “Only two?” said Augie.
    “One was his older brother. One day he was hanging around, then there was a f-fight, and the next day he was gone.”
    “Didn’t he join the army?” I said as I flipped a card.
    “They said he joined the army,” said Augie. “But have you ever seen him hanging around in his uniform?”
    “No,” I said.
    “There you go, bub,” said Augie, turning over a card of his own.
    “What about the other body?” I said.
    “No one knows who the other one is,” said Ben, “but every night Derek goes down to the crawl space and spits on the graves.”
    Augie hacked up a loogie and spat it onto the scraggly lawn next to the steps.
    “Funny,” I said.
    Tony Grubbins’s mother had died years ago and his father had been killed in a construction accident just the year before, when a steel beam shifted unexpectedly at a job site, smashing flat his chest. The accident had left Tony in the care of his older brother, Derek, who had moved back into the Grubbins house to take care of his sibling. Derek, a member of the notorious Devil Rams Motorcycle Club, was a bearded madman who roared onto and off of Henrietta Road on his chopped-up Harley, scaring little squirrels and potbellied war vets at the same time. And each afternoon, right about that time, as he barreled home from work, he inspected his lawn before parking in the driveway and stomping up the cement stairs to his front door.
    “And the things I heard about them D-Devil Rams,” said Ben. He flipped a card and took the entire pile with a bright smile. “Evil things.”
    “Like what?” I said.
    “Like how if you just look at one of them wrong they tie you in chains and drag you on the street behind their b-bikes until your skin peels off.”
    “Ouch,” said Augie.
    “How d-do you think you’ll look, J.J., without any skin?”
    “Lay off him, you pantywaist,” said Augie. “J.J. took a stand. He’s not going to let himself get pushed around for the rest of his life. Right, bub?”
    “Right,” I said.
    “He’s standing up for himself, just like I told him to.”
    “That’s the mistake right there,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Never listen to Augie. He’s what my mom calls an instigator. You should have forgotten all about it. It can’t end good.”
    “Maybe not,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach, knowing he was right, “but you didn’t get a football thrown in your face.”
    This whole thing started in a chaotic netherworld of violence and mayhem, where all civil rules are suspended and the law of the jungle is the law of