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Dust to Dust, fiction by Richard Cass

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I t’s a truth universally acknowledged that people don’t hire PIs because they’re happy. I didn’t go into business specifically to deal with jerks, but too often that’s what I got. Alton Deane was polite, at least, a well-preserved seventy, lean and handsome with hair white as milk and a light tan, even in December. I didn’t see many suits that nice in my office. “It’s printed right on the carton. Human Remains.” He knotted his hands in his lap. “I can’t imagine anyone stealing them, except for a prank.” “Have to agree.” I’d run out of surprise at what assholes people could be. There were days I got tired of dealing with them, considered quitting the business. “What on earth would you do with them?” I read a book once where a serial killer fertilized his tomatoes with the bodies of his victims, but saying that out loud would send Deane scrambling for the door. I couldn’t afford to turn down even a simple case. It had been a dry fall. “Probably kids. Whose, uh, remains, were they?” “My
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Tubthumping, by Tom Andes

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C ertain people, Healy knew, had no sense of irony. They couldn’t see themselves in the lyrics of a song, not even when the song was about blokes like them, not even when they were being made fun of, and that was Stanhope all over, bobbing his head, singing off-key at the top of his lungs to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” where they sat at a beer-sticky table in the back of their local, the Spotted Cow in Littlehampton. “He drinks a lager drink,” Stanhope sang, “he drinks a cider drink,” and he grinned, showing the gap between his front teeth, the guy two-fisting a pint of Stella Artois and one of Strongbow. Why couldn’t he see that he was being made fun of, the song about regular lads like Stanhope, lager louts in their football jerseys and trainers out on the piss on a Saturday night? He was also Healy’s best friend, his pill and hash connection, and just at the moment, they were waiting for Stanhope’s supplier, a white South African named Colin who lived on a council estate in East Lon
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Scarecrows, fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem

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G ibson stumbled out of the woods with his orange jumpsuit covered in beggar-ticks and burrs. Maybe walking away from the county road crew wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done—he only had a couple of months left on his shoplifting sentence—but as his mama used to say her son wasn’t known for his smart decisions. “You got no self-control.” Mama was right. But Gibson believed in grabbing opportunities when they came, and their guard was young and not much good at guarding. The kid spent most of his time on his cell phone sitting in the truck. Gibson and another convict named Frank Moore were working in a ditch not more than thirty feet from the woods. It took them less than five minutes to get gone. Moore wanted to split up—Gibson had an unlucky reputation—and so they did. But Gibson had at least one good reason to take off. Two years ago, he killed a man in Memphis with a lug wrench after a quarrel in a parking lot—another lapse in self-control—and the police hadn’t figured it
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