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This Land of the Strange by Math Bird

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Jernegan knew they’d come. He’d left enough clues for them to find him. Besides, Swain wanted him dead, so it was only a matter of time. Yet the moment he stepped off the bus and sniffed the air, such thoughts left, abandoning him to the smell of the soil, the pines, and the faint tang of the sea.

Jernegan took in the hills, the sky, and the faraway mountains, knowing this was the land that never changed, the place where he longed to be.

Thirty summers he’d waited, and with the passing of each season he had convinced himself it was special, magical even, the gradual reshaping of his memories telling him a better story.… Read the rest

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Broad Daylight by Eve Fisher

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When we arrived, Jack Olson was lying in a pool of blood on Carl Jacobsen’s study floor. The wall behind him, including the white frames around the broken window, was a mess, sprayed with dark red bits and blobs of Jack. He looked surprised at being dead. Carl looked angry at having killed him. Detective Jonasson sent me outside to look around.

There were no flowerbeds back here, and the grass was so dry from the summer heat that it crackled underfoot. Hoppers leaped around me as I sweated in the shade from a shagbark hickory.… Read the rest

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Honeymoon Sweet by Craig Faustus Buck

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For a sweet house, right on Santa Monica Beach, it was unbelievably easy to break into. Mickey found a window he could open with a putty knife, so the double-locked doors were a joke. And Lana disabled the alarm within the forty-five-second grace period before it would have triggered. They were in and no one knew. What a great way to kick off the honeymoon.

Mickey couldn’t imagine hijacking anything else that could have brought them any closer to heaven. Lana had told him she’d always dreamed of a house on the beach and he’d delivered: salt air, pounding surf, white sand, five-million dollar love nest whose owner was en route to Europe.… Read the rest

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Zero Sum Game by Doug J. Black

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He’d do anything for her. No, really. Anything.

Barstow was my paradise.

Not something you hear very often about a Mojave town with triple the violent crime of the average U.S. city.

Barstow, the idiot offspring of the gold rush and the continental railroad, is surrounded by registered sex offenders living in plywood shacks and one of the Wal-Mart greeters is a leathery two-dollar whore named Bamby.

Slanders aside, my knack for forgery and Sally’s uncanny expertise in growing the finest strains of bud, left alone and barely noticed out there in San Bernardino County, made this my own empire nestled within Desert Town, U.S.A.… Read the rest

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The World’s Best Coffee by C. D. Reimer

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One half-caf demitasse skim vanilla crime latte, please.

The coffee shop overflowed with people drinking coffee and eating pastries when Mark walked through the doors to step in front of the pastry display case, where the separate lines for paying and picking up orders at the opposite ends of the counter mingled together. Looking at the pastries with undecided interest, he listened to the new orders being given by the customers and the finished orders being shouted out by one of the Goth girls with multiple nose and ear-piercings.

The world’s best coffee is a simple affair.… Read the rest

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