The Beasts of Juarez, R.B. Schow [books to read for self improvement .txt] 📗

guy finally rolled him over but, unfortunately, he hit Scotty in the face several times to get his attention. It worked. These morons had his attention.

Laid out on the ground, gasping for breath, he watched as some big ugly dude walked into his field of vision. He towered over Scotty and he didn’t look nice.

“I know you are new to this sort of thing but this is not the way we do business,” the big guy said. “You screw us; we screw you twice as hard and twice as deep.”

“I’m not involved in any sex clubs, thank you very much, but there are gay bars everywhere I think. If you want to screw other guys twice as hard and twice as deep, you should try there.”

The three guys looked at each other and started laughing.

“I kind of like this dude,” the big guy said.

“Why’d you trash my car?”

“Because you owe us money and you haven’t paid,” he said. Scotty noticed the guy was strapped. Were all of them packing?

“I don’t know who you’re even talking about, but I’m Scotty Chase—”

“A down-and-out detective who was once the best in the business, I know. You fell hard, the bottom dropping out, but you’ll get on your feet. Did you get on your feet yet, Scotty?”

“Just about, yeah,” he said, trying hard to put the pieces of this puzzle together. “Maybe I have a job from a guy who’s loaded in the next few weeks or something. But…what do I owe you, and what did I buy from you?”

The guys broke into laugher again like they couldn’t get enough of him.

“That’s cute, Scotty,” he said. “See, you rolled on one of our friends, and that friend just got a bullet in the local pen.”

Scotty was trying to follow the guy, but then he realized that getting a bullet in the pen meant a one-year sentence in the penitentiary.

“That means you owe us for one year’s worth of his earnings. We had this conversation before.”

“You have the wrong guy,” Scotty said.

“Frederick Smith, a.k.a. Shitty Fred Smitty,” the big guy said. “That ring a bell?”

Yeah, it did. Oh, damn.

“He was a two-time scumbag who liked to peep into his neighbor’s window watching their fifteen-year-old daughter change, right?” Scotty asked.

“It doesn’t matter what he did, he didn’t need to do a year in the slammer for it. But now he is which means we have a gap in our income. You’re going to fill that gap.”

“Smitty was a helluva earner,” one of the other morons said.

Scotty turned and spit a little blood onto the asphalt. “So, how much do I owe you donkey dicks for Shitty Fred’s annual earnings?”

“Twenty large,” the big guy said.

“How about twenty small? Because that’s what’ll be left over after I put nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-dollars worth of work into my car.”

The big guy looked over at Scotty’s older 7-series BMW and said, “That bucket ain’t worth nine-hundred-and-eighty bucks much less the nineteen large you’re tacking onto it.”

“I have something you’ll like then,” Scotty said. “Will one of you dick eaters help me up?”

The three of them looked at each other like they couldn’t believe it. “This cat’s about to lose his ninth life,” one of the trio muttered.

When no one bothered to help him up, Scotty stood on his own, slowly, staggering a bit at first before straightening up and chin-checking the big guy in front of him.

The white guy’s head rocked back and that’s when Scotty followed the jab with a huge right hook that hit the mark dead-on. The guy went stiff and fell straight backward. When he landed on his back, the other guys let out a collective “Oooh!” The big guy’s hands went stiff, his wrists curling his hands at his sides.

Scotty looked down and saw the big guy’s eyes had rolled up into his sockets and his entire body looked strained with a little shake to it. To the layman, it might look like he was being electrocuted.

“Now, there’s another white guy who can’t dance,” Scotty said with a laugh.

“You killed him, bro,” one of the guys said.

The second the two of them rushed in, Scotty cracked one in the jaw but got tackled to the ground by the other. He took two big shots to the side of his face—which rattled his skull—but then he dodged a follow-up shot, causing the man’s fist to smash into the pavement.

The guy cried out for a second, then looked at his hand.

“Hurts, don’t it?” Scotty asked, his face throbbing.

Something in the man’s hand was broken which was why Scotty grabbed it and started digging his fingers into the injured area. He quickly found the fracture and made it infinitely worse. After pushing himself free and getting to his feet, he pounded the man three times in the side of the head until he fell down with the other two.

A couple of people standing just outside the bar’s front door clapped their hands in a sort of half-hearted applause. One of them had been filming the entire fight but then she put the phone away and went back inside. How many people would they tell before the video went live? He looked over at his car and frowned. Shaking his head, cursing quietly to himself, he walked over to the only thing he’d really ever bought for himself—the 750i BMW.

Inside, on the front passenger seat, he found a fist-sized river rock sitting among a bunch of broken glass. He tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start. He popped the hood only to find it was already open.

“You crooked donkey dicks,” he growled, still looking at them on the pavement. A couple of guys and three girls were trying to wake them up. One of them was coming around.

Scotty lifted the beamer’s hood then stood