Cigarette Lemonade

By Connor de Bruler

"It doesn't get much leaner and meaner and real than Connor de Bruler's CIGARETTE LEMONADE. An excellent novella that does more in a few pages than most fat novels. This is the stuff." - Joe R. Lansdale

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Swann Bedlam
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9780645958621

Book preview

1

She watched him disappear into the black willows and turned on the car radio. The first station was a holy-roller broadcast.

Enmity! You will be damned! Live by the sword, die by the sword! The preacher continued to yell while Smoak dragged the body into a thicket between the walls of chainlink topped with barbed wire. Some hippie or college punk had tossed Musa seeds into the overgrown lot a few seasons ago and now a fat-leaved banana tree grew out of the tangle of weeds and indigenous foliage. Everything looked phony under the sodium-vapor lamps, like a plastic plant display in the courtyard of a hotel or shopping mall.

Dizzie turned the dial and listened to a redneck rock anthem that reminded her of high school football games and summer evenings in the parking garage of the empty building where the technical school used to be.

Back in those days…in those days…

The night bird squawked and sailed out of the trees where Smoak had dragged the dead man’s body by his armpits. Dizzie started the engine.

Smoak got in and slammed the door shut. He started peeling off his latex gloves. I hate this song, he said. Maybe turn the volume down just in case there’s any security guards or doped-up kids wandering around here.

Dizzie lowered the volume. Did you rob him?

I left his wallet out and opened it face up in the shallow little creek back there.

It was a massive red flag to leave a dead man’s money on him. Robberies, on the other hand, were as common as the flu.

Smoak kept his eyes moving and his mouth shut for a long time. Dizzie wanted to ask him, just out of pure curiosity, how much cash he had on him, and whether he had found any drugs in the dead man’s pockets. But she could see how much inner conflict he was dealing with and didn’t. Smoak sat silently in the passenger seat, his head resting against the black mirror of the window. The woods and small impoverished houses rushed past the silvery outline of his face. Dizzie turned her neck, reminding herself to keep her hands at two and ten and her eyes on the road.

He hadn’t killed that many people yet. Each time was different. The worst were the ones he hadn’t expected. No one likes surprises. Smoak was a planner, not a ‘wing-it’ type like her.

When he finally said something over the rock radio station, it seemed that he was continuing a conversation that had started in his head.

Novak was right. We aren’t built for this, he said.

Dizzie grabbed his hand for the first time since they had met. Novak isn’t as slick as he thinks he is. You know what my dad told me once? My biological father, the Hell’s Angel, not the jack-off in Lake City, he told me, and of course, he said my real name first, not Dizzie, but you get the gist, he says to me, he says, ‘Dizzie, the older they get, the better they were.’ I think most of Novak’s stuff was horseshit.

Smoak appeared genuinely cheered up by this sentiment and finished taking off the other latex glove before balling them up and stashing them in a Burger King wrapper. He put the dead man’s money between them in the cup holder. Dizzie caught a faint glimpse of that distinctive bluish-green tint on the outer bill in the passing glow of a street light.

A hundred, Goddamn.

Is that all he had on him?

Smoak showed a little baggie of powder between his fingers.

What’s that?

Heroin, probably, he said.

That could get us in trouble, she said. You should toss that.

You think so?

Unless you want to use it. No judgment.

He gave her a look like he was offended. I don’t fuck with smack. Smoak rolled the window down. He let the baggie sail from his hand as if he were letting go of a tiny paper lantern.

Dizzie offered him one of her cigarettes.

It’s over, he said, taking it from between her fingers.

2

Dizzie had moved large amounts of cannabis across state lines before, but never anything harder than that. This time, she had accrued enough debts elsewhere that she wasn’t intimidated by the idea of trafficking narcotics: percs, xans, about a quart of Demerol, and a few bags of fented-up Molly Ringwald epoxied to the lining of two Adidas bags.

Dylan, her ex-boyfriend, gave her the appointment to meet the clients in an old mini-mall at the Asian spa. One of the workers, a jovial-looking Asian woman in her forties, gave her the up-and-down and asked in an accent if Dizzie wanted a massage.

Dizzie showed her the name on the scrap paper without saying a word and handed the woman twenty dollars for her trouble. The massage worker nodded and took her to the back room where a group of elderly Asian women sat around a cable-spool table in plastic chairs. No one deals drugs because life is going swimmingly. The gathering of elderly matriarchs had been feeling the heat since their main massage location was raided.

Goddamn nosy protestants.

The ones that got hurt were never in the inner circle. The lease was in a fall girl’s name, the business license in some Singapore LLC that barely existed. The girls always took the brunt of the risk and only a third of the reward.

Dizzie had thought about working there a few times. How bad could it be jacking guys off for eighty bucks a session? Better than serving at Waffle House. Of course, when the police in a small town started to lose everyone’s confidence, the first thing they did was bust the massage parlors.

The ladies got their pictures on the ten o’clock news for humiliation’s sake, and the officers got to pretend they hadn’t been on the take for the last ten years. Sometimes, the police had a martyr complex and asserted that they had saved these women from the bondage of human trafficking. Meanwhile, every Uzbek and Ukrainian girl dancing in the clubs went home to her pimp’s apartment in the back of a trunk and no one seemed to care much.

Dizzie stood with her back to the beaded curtain and told the coven what she had done and how well she had done it. They weren’t like the male gangsters she had pushed weight for in the past. The ladies were kind and enthusiastic about her. One of them, the younger lady who spoke English so well Dizzie couldn’t tell she was Chinese, spoke for the group.

We’re all in agreement. This is a good deal. But this is the first time we’ve done this kind of business and it’s the first time we’ve done business with these guys down in SC.

Dizzie smiled. I’m from South Carolina, she said as if that fact would give her an edge.

Well, if you’re willing to take on the responsibility, we’re ready to move forward. Do you own a gun?

Dizzie looked at the floor. Her shoes were scuffed with red clay.

One of the women said something in Chinese.

The translator turned to Dizzie. What if we gave you a partner?

Dizzie nodded. No problem. I work great with others. She felt like she was