Little Crew of Butchers

  Published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 by Francine Pascal

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover and book design by Alenka Vdovič Linaschke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982615-26-0

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982615-25-3

  Fiction / Literary

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  To my daughters, Jamie Stewart,

  Laurie Wenk-Pascal, and Susan Pascal Johansson.

  “A free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust…this execrable crew of butchers.”

  Gulliver’s Travels,

  Jonathan Swift

  CHAPTER ONE

  Friday, July 1

  From Charley Adler’s bedroom window, he can see Big Larry with his pilot fish, the vomitous Duncan twins, charging down the street heading right for his house. Instantly, Charley drops down so that he can’t be seen from the street. He carefully squiggles up, his nose inching just high enough past the windowsill so he can peek out and see the loathsome threesome pass the house next door. At the rate they’re moving, Charley figures they’ll be at his house in less than a minute.

  Even from this far away, just from his body language, Charley can see that Big Larry is in a mood. And it’s not a good one. It’s never a good one unless someone’s crying. And he’s made them do it.

  Big Larry is only big to his gang mostly because, at twelve, he’s two years older than they are, and he’s tall for his age and weighs probably twice as much as they do, a future fat man. He already has a fat man’s pink flush to his cheeks and the slit eyes that would one day be crowded even thinner by more fat. That’s what makes him Big Larry. It’s not like it’s all muscle, because it isn’t, it’s mostly blubber, but it still hurts when he whacks you because there is so much of it.

  There’s no way Big Larry can know Charley is home if he stays down out of sight. He’s not even going to risk peeking again. Last thing Charley wants is to be the one to put the big guy in a good mood ’cause that means he’ll be the one doing the crying.

  All he has to do is stay where he is and not answer the door. His parents always keep the door locked when they’re not home so Larry can’t get in. He’ll probably ring a few times then figure nobody’s home and go away.

  And right on cue, the doorbell rings, and then Larry bangs like four times in a row. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Hard. Even though it’s only a bell, it makes Charley jump because he knows Big Larry is on the other end and he’s angry.

  What if Big Larry doesn’t go away? Suppose he waits for him outside? Then Charley’ll have to lie on the floor in his bedroom all day until his parents come home and that’s not till five. Still, anything is better than messing with Big Larry and that’s even before he knows what he wants.

  Charley figures he’s safe upstairs and is practically smiling at outfoxing Big Larry even though he’s the only one who will ever know that he did.

  Just when he’s licking his chops, really enjoying his triumph, he remembers.

  Lucy!

  Too late! His stupid little sister is downstairs and she’s going to answer the door. But wait. She hates Big Larry even more than Charley does, so maybe she won’t let him in.

  Or maybe she will. Even though she’s three years younger than he is, only seven, you never know what Lucy is going to do. Not ever.

  Why does he have to have such a weird sister?

  It’s quiet downstairs. Maybe she’s not opening the door.

  “Hey! Charley! Get your ass down here!”

  She opened the door.

  The game is over for Charley. Nothing to do but get down those stairs quick as he can so’s not to make it worse like he was hiding from him—which of course, he was.

  Charley takes the stairs two at a time, jumping the last four and pulling at his shorts like he was just coming out of the bathroom.

  “Just taking a dump.”

  “Move it! We’re hitting Smilers right now. I need supplies.”

  “Yeah, c’mon, what’s takin’ so long?” Suck-up Benny Duncan, the twin with the white hair and stuck-out ears, gets right into it like he’s Big Larry’s lieutenant or something.

  “Yeah, c’mon …” Dennis, the other twin, does an echo thing. He’s the taller twin and he has dark hair and one of his eyes is blue and the other one is brown. Some twins; they didn’t even look like brothers.

  But they do everything Larry says and always agree with him even when they don’t mean it. Even so, he’s still mean to them. And when he’s mean to just one of them, like Benny when he bent his thumb way back, Dennis didn’t do anything to stop him.

  “Shut up!” Charley can say that to Benny, but he would never dare say it to Big Larry.

  “Get a shirt with long sleeves, like a sweatshirt,” Larry says.

  “But it’s hot.”

  “I told you, we’re going to Smilers for supplies. Don’t you get it?”

  But Charley is so nervous he doesn’t get it. Big Larry always makes him so he can’t think straight. And in that moment he’s starting to panic, and then Lucy pulls at his shirt and whispers, “The sleeves. To put the stuff in.”

  And then he remembers. “Yeah, I get it,” Charley says. “I just didn’t know if you wanted sweatshirts for everyone,” he makes a stab at a cover-up.

  But Big Larry’s not buying. “Yeah, right.” And to show him how much he’s not buying it, he gives him a whack upside the head with the heel of his hand. Hard enough to send Charley falling back into Dennis who slams up against the wall.

  “Hey! Watch out!” Dennis shouts and shoves Charley who shoves him back.

  “Cool it, you two!” Big Larry says, and then to Charley, “You don’t have a sweatshirt, forget it, you’re not coming.”

  Nothing would make Charley happier than not going with Big Larry on the shoplifting caper. He hates doing it, not because it’s stealing but because he gets so panicky his hands shake and he’s always dropping stuff. He knows he’s going to get caught and his parents will go through the roof. Besides, he never steals anything he really wants. Mostly it’s little things like screws or washers, whatever they are, or even worse, girl things. He only steals stuff that he can easily scoop up his sleeve. If they get anything good, Big Larry keeps it.

  One time, Dennis snatched an electric foot smoother. It was winter and he had on this big down jacket so he shoved it underneath. Even Big Larry made a big deal of it, patting him on the back, probably too hard, but Dennis was over the moon to be the hero of the day. Except nobody could figure out what to do with it so they junked it in the garbage. But first, Big Larry made them destroy it, rip it apart and smash the pieces.

  Charley tries to look disappointed about not going with them. And like a good sport, he shrugs, “It’s okay, I’ll go next time.”

  And he’d have been in the clear except Lucy, his weirdo sister, is shoving a New York Yankees sweatshirt into his hand.

  “Put it on,” Big Larry says, “and let’s get a move on.” An
d pointing to Lucy, “But not her.”

  “I gotta bring her,” Charley says. “But I’m gonna tell my parents they gotta get a babysitter.”

  “Yeah, like you didn’t say that last week.”

  Charley would never disagree with Big Larry, but he’s answering to a higher power this time. His parents. They both work and during school vacation time, he’s Lucy’s babysitter.

  “You better talk to them tonight. Okay, guys, let’s go.”

  And with Big Larry in the lead, the little band of thieves sets off down the street to walk the five blocks to Smilers Cool Shoppe in the middle of town. After Charley’s block, it changes; there’s still sidewalk, but on both sides of the street, instead of houses, there are trees.

  “Okay, everyone, off the sidewalk and get onto the dirt as close to the trees as you can in case someone is following us, like with a camera,” Big Larry says. “They won’t be looking for us in the trees.”

  Nobody asks why anyone would be following them. Everyone, except Lucy, does what he says and gets over into the trees.

  “You too.” Big Larry points at Lucy.

  She keeps walking on the sidewalk where she is and doesn’t answer.

  So Charley answers for her. “She’s not allowed to get off the sidewalk. That’s so’s she won’t walk in the street with the cars.”

  Big Larry doesn’t bother to point out that the trees aren’t even near the cars because when it comes to Charley’s weirdo sister it’s like none of the regular things fit. Most of the time he doesn’t even ask her to do anything because she probably won’t and it looks bad for him with the other kids.

  He hates her. A lot of the time he thinks about pushing her into the cars or off some ledge. He wishes she would get run down by a car.

  Like now, he just pretends she’s not with them.

  With the exception of Lucy, the other four walk as close to the trees and out of sight as possible until they get to the main street in Shorelane, called, appropriately, Main Street, with their target, Smilers Cool Shoppe.

  Despite the hip name and the attempt at Bloomingdale’s-like counters, it looks a lot like an old five-and-dime from the 1950s. The front window, framed in white-painted wood, is probably the original entrance. After all these years, it has picked up a charm from just being old.

  Big Larry stops his gang on the corner.

  “Dennis, you take the back of the store with the toothpaste and stuff. Charley, you take the front on the other side.”

  “That’s all girl’s stuff.”

  “So?”

  Charley isn’t about to argue. He’s been borderline, what with his not answering the door and not having the right shirt. And the Lucy thing. He’s not going to argue about this. It could be worse. Big Larry could make him go with him, and then he would have to swipe whatever he points to. “Sure,” he says. “I got it.”

  So Benny gets to go with Big Larry.

  Bad news. Looking in through the plate glass window, the store is almost empty. It’s a lot easier when there are crowds you can hide behind.

  “You wait out here and watch for cops,” Big Larry tells Lucy like it was a job.

  “Uh-uh,” she says, shaking her head no.

  Even though, like now, Lucy can say no to Larry, she’s afraid of him. From where she stands, he’s really big, and he always pushes everyone around and everyone is afraid of him. Definitely her brother, and absolutely the Duncan twins. Lucy is scared too, but she doesn’t show it the regular way. Still, when Larry is mean to somebody, nobody does anything to stop him. Even though Lucy doesn’t like it, she doesn’t either.

  But sometimes if she really doesn’t want to do something Larry says everybody has to do, like now, she would just shake her head no and say, uh-uh. Nobody ever tried to talk Lucy into doing something she didn’t want to do. Larry would say she was only a girl and too little and so what anyway, and Lucy would just stand there, cross her arms, and stare at him until he moved away.

  But that didn’t change the fact that inside her stomach was twitching. Like everyone, Larry made her nervous. That’s why she always watches him. She watched him so hard that lots of times she would dream about him, dream he was chasing her up a ladder and looking under her skirt and trying to grab her place.

  She would like it a lot if Larry got dead, not from something she did, not from anything special—just that one morning he woke up dead. That would be good because maybe then Charley could be the leader of their group and nobody would have to be afraid.

  The only reason Lucy hung around with them at all was because of Charley. He was supposed to be taking care of her. Lucy snorted. Like she needed someone to take care of her. Charley needed someone more than she did. And he was more scared of Larry than she was, but the most scared ones were the Duncan twins. Some twins; they didn’t look anything alike. She and Charley looked more alike. At least they had the same color red hair.

  Larry pushed Charley around a lot too, made him do things he didn’t want to do. Sometimes when Larry made him wrestle or they were just fooling around punching each other, Lucy could see Charley’s face getting redder and redder. She knew he was going to cry because Larry was so much bigger and stronger, and sometimes he did ’cause it really hurt. And then Larry would do the uncle thing with him, holding him down and making him say uncle before he let him up.

  Still, it wasn’t anything like what he did with the Duncan twins. They were like his slaves, his toys. They did everything Larry wanted. He would tell them to make a fart or a burp and then crack their knuckles at the same time, and they would. Then he would tell them to do it together and he would lead them like a conductor for an orchestra and they would go crazy trying to keep up.

  Actually, that was pretty funny. But it wasn’t funny if they didn’t do it like he wanted.

  One time he stuck a fork in Dennis’s arm and it bled and Dennis had to tell his mother and get a tetanus shot. But he never told her how it happened. Alls he said was that he was trying to stick his fork into a grape and he missed.

  Another time she heard Dennis talking about how Larry made them all do a circle jerk, a thing where they stood around in a circle and pulled their dick-boys until they peed or something, except Larry was the only one who peed or whatever.

  But they only did that when Lucy wasn’t there because Charley wouldn’t let her see. One time Dennis said Benny’s dick-boy got so red from pulling that it started to bleed and he got so scared he ran home crying. Nobody knows what he told their mother that time.

  When Lucy would say no to Big Larry, that would scare Charley. Like now.

  “Aw, Luce, come on.” Charley is almost pleading. “Please wait out here. If you wait inside, you’re gonna get me caught.”

  Lucy’s not big on favors, but if she was going to do one for someone, it would probably be Charley, so she says, “Okay.”

  The four boys, as inconspicuously as possible, go into the variety store one at a time so they don’t look like they’re together. This, despite the fact that they are all dressed in shorts with long-sleeved sweatshirts and it’s almost ninety degrees.

  Lucy waits outside, on the alert for cops.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Earlier that day, seventy miles west of Shorelane, at the toll booths that line the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, Lucas Baird was on the last leg of his journey hitchhiking from Los Angeles to New York City. Actually, it was more like escaping.

  Hitchhiking across the country had been difficult. He was always worried that the cops would pick him up. Once that happened, he was done for. He was a wanted man.

  Still, it helped that he was young, twenty-two, and handsome, a face that had lifted all its best features right out of the George Clooney/Brad Pitt gene pool. And he sounded good. His voice was deep and smooth, a light Australian accent with the hard edges polished down by American television,
leaving the slightest hint of British.

  He was very careful not to look scroungy. He kept his hair short and always tried to have on a clean T-shirt. Still, for the most part, ordinary people were afraid to stop for him, for anyone. Even truck drivers had become more cautious.

  It was hot and the noonday sun, with its rich yellow rays, beat down mercilessly through the cloudless early July sky. There had been nowhere on the exposed shoulder of the turnpike for him to hide from its searing heat. With his hand held up to shade his eyes, Luke plodded on, the bridge shimmering like a mirage in the distance. He’d walked the last couple of miles not even bothering to hold up his thumb. It was too hot to go through another bullshit story. Every ride got a new story.

  Hell, he’d rather walk.

  Once he got to the tollbooths, he figured it would be easy to pick up a lift into the city.

  Hitchhiking was illegal at the booths, but the heavy traffic was backed up and slowed to a crawl, providing an advantage for a hitchhiker aiming to work the cars unseen by the attendants or the cops stationed in the area.

  When he finally reached the tollbooths, he was right. At least eight people rolled up their windows at his approach. Funny to be thought of as threatening. It was hot and Luke was getting aggravated at the lack of welcome he was getting when he noticed that the collector’s booth at the far end was closed and barricaded.

  Too tempting to resist.

  Under cover of traffic, Luke ducked his way over to the last lane, then nonchalantly lifted the barricade and slipped into the empty booth. With a wave of his hand he directed the traffic over to his lane.

  And they came. Happily.

  Where did he get this stuff? It had to be in the genes. It was a talent, like playing the piano or tap dancing. Probably passed directly down from good old Dad, a brilliant scam artist who’d scammed his pregnant mother before he took off, never to be seen again.

  The first four cars had the sixteen dollars exact, and by the fifth car he was easily changing twenties. It was another three cars before an attendant in the next booth noticed Luke.