Free Rigged by Jon Grilz

that. In particular, he mentioned that a major weight pickup was scheduled to happen a few days, unfortunately Damon kept the details of that deal to himself.
    Charlie thanked Dick and patted him on the shoulder before he reached down and grabbed Dick’s wallet from his hip pocket, then did the same with Clarence’s lifeless body.
    “Are you kidding me? You’re robbing us too?”
    Charlie looked back up at Dick. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the good guy here, Dick, and even a guy’s gotta eat.” He pulled the cash out of the two wallets, folded it over, shoved it in his pocket, then he walked over to the counter to grab his hat.
    “What the fuck are you doing? Aren’t you going to at least untie me?”
    “Naw,” Charlie said as he grabbed an empty bottle from the counter and a pouch of pills from Dick’s backpack.
    “Wait…what the fuck are you doing now?” Dick repeated.
    “You already asked that,” Charlie said, “but I’m guessing it’s rhetorical.” Charlie dumped some of the pills into the bottle and added a few of the chemicals he found hidden under the sink. He also grabbed a few thumbtacks, screws and hanger nails that he found in a drawer, then set the bottle into the tumbler and placed the excess chemical bottles in a circle around it.
    “Hold up, you said you’d let me live,” Dick said, squirming violently from his place on the table.
    Charlie walked back over to Dick and looked down. “No,” he said, “I told you I’d kill the guy who didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”
    “You can’t turn that on. You’ll blow up anyone next door too,” Dick said in a brief moment of enlightenment.
    “Don’t worry,” Charlie said as he stretched out a piece of duct tape. “If you notice, I didn’t fill that bottle all the way. I know explosives, and this one won’t be too big. That’s why I added the shrapnel. It’ll finish cleaning up the mess that the meth explosion doesn’t.”
    “You can’t do this,” Dick said.
    “I can’t?”
    “You can’t kill me, man!”
    “And why not? You’re just a meth dealer .”
    “I did what you asked. Please, mister, I-I—”
    Charlie smiled. “I suppose not all meth dealers are bad. What, you’re trying to make money for your family because you have a terminal disease or something? Just tryin’ to feed your kids?”
    Dick’s eyes darted back and forth. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. My family. My kids are starvin’, man, and I can’t find work, so I—”
    Charlie clicked his tongue again. “Damn. Well, I hope you invested your money well.” Charlie then put the tape over Dick’s mouth, walked back to the entrance without looking back, and flicked on the tumbler just as he closed the trailer door.
     
     

Chapter 8
     
    Sergeant Nikki Hamill walked around the perimeter of the trailer home that looked like the Coke can she’d left in her car overnight the winter before; the sides were pushed out, the insides a total mess. Perez had gone off to interview neighbors with a couple other officers, on the off chance that they’d seen something and the even more off chance that if they had, they’d be willing to talk about it with police.
    The fire department cleared the area and chalked up the explosion as meth related. The fire chief made it a point to mention that the neighbors were lucky, as only a small batch blew.
    Nikki took off her not-too-bad looking knock-off sunglasses looked around inside the trailer after she had the go-ahead from the fire department, who made sure there weren’t any fumes or other explosives around. From the blast pattern, it looked like the two dead guys inside had used a velocity tumbler to shake up the meth, a tool usually used to clean bullet casings. When Nikki pointed out that the two dead men were tied down when the bomb went off, the captain just shrugged and said something about a big loss for society.
    “Well? What’s your