Today we have an excerpt from Things Get Ugly, a collection of The Best Crime Stories by Joe R. Lansdale. Published this week by Tachyon Publications, this excerpt is from the story “The Projectionist”.

First, though, here’s the synopsis for the collection as a whole:

In the 1950s, a young small-town projectionist mixes it up with a violent gang. When Mr. Bear is not alerting us to the dangers of forest fires, he lives a life of debauchery and murder. A brother and sister travel to Oklahoma to recover the dead body of their uncle. Edgar Award winner and bestselling author Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap and Leonard series) returns to the piney, dangerous woods of East Texas to reveal the best of his award-winning crime fiction.

In this collection of nineteen unforgettable crime tales, Joe R. Lansdale brings his legendary mojo and witty grit to harrowing heists, revenge, homicide, and mayhem. No matter how they begin, things are bound to get ugly—and fast.

Now, read on for the excerpt…!

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From “The Projectionist”

So later I was sleeping on the couch, and Missy and Bert were in their room, or so I thought, but I rolled over and there’s Bert across the way with a wooden box, and he’s taking something out of it and putting it in his coat pockets, and going out the door.

I got up and put on my clothes and went over and looked at the box. It was empty. The bottom of it was packed with cloth. Otherwise, it was empty.

Slipping out the door I went down the drive and looked around the hedges and saw Bert walking brisk-like. I waited until he was pretty far down, and then I followed.

It was a long walk and the wind was high and there was a misty kind of rain. Bert walked fast. He was a younger man then, but no kid, but still, he moved quick.

Bert came to a corner and turned, and when I turned, I didn’t see him anymore. I was out of the housing part of town, and there were buildings. I stood there confused for a moment, and then I eased along, and when I got to the far side of the big building, I peeked around it. I saw Bert on one of the little porches off the building, in front of a door. He was under a light. He reached up with something and knocked the bulb out, then he took that something and stuck it in the door. I heard a snick, and a moment later, he was inside and out of sight.

I eased up to the porch, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I waited there and listened, and after awhile I heard sounds like someone coughing loudly, and then there was a yell, and then that coughing sound again.

After a moment, the door pushed open and nearly knocked me off the porch. It was Bert.

“Damn, kid. What you doing here?”

“I followed you?”

“I see that.”

He took the automatic and held it up and unscrewed the silencer on the end of it. He put the silencer in one coat pocket, the gun in the other.

“Come on, fast. Not running, but don’t lollygag neither.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. But not your old man. He’s back at the apartments. That’s what the bald bastard said when I asked.”

“You asked?”

“Yeah. Nicely. And when he told me, I shot him. Couple times. There was another guy there I didn’t know about, came out of the toilet. I shot him too. Might as well be straight with you, kid. They’re deader than snow in July. Come on, hustle a little.”

Stunned is how I felt, but happy too. I mean, those guys back there, they hadn’t done nothing to me, not like Dad, but they were on his side. Probably thought I was telling lies. Probably thought a stove burn was something I deserved. Lot of guys thought like that around there. Your father’s word was the law. And all those guys, they believed in a strict law. You were either for them, or against them.

We came to the apartment where my dad lived, where I had lived with him. There was a hedge row that was never trimmed that led along both sides of the walk that went up to the apartment house.

Inside, you had to go down the hall and make a turn to the left to get to our place.

Standing in the shadow of the hedge, Bert said, “You sure about this kid? Dead is dead. And he is your father.”

“He’s nothing to me, Bert. Nothing. He gets me back, he’ll just kill me, and you know it. I’m nothing to him, just something to own and use and throw away. Like he did my mother. My mother was all right. I can still remember how she smelled. Then one day she wasn’t there, and that’s because of him. She’s gone. He’s here.”

“Still, kid, he’s your father.”

“I’m all right with it.”

Bert nodded. He took the gun and silencer out of his coat pockets and screwed the silencer into place. “You sit this one out. Go on home.”

“You used to do stuff like this, didn’t you, Bert?”

“All the time,” he said. “I ain’t proud of it. Except for tonight. These guys, your father. I’m all right with that. Maybe it’ll make up for some of the other things I done.”

“I’m staying with you, Bert.”

“You don’t want that kid.”

“Yeah, I do.”

We went along the walk then and when we got to the door, Bert handed me the gun. I held it while he worked the lock and got it open with a little wedge. He pried the wood loose at the door. I gave him back the gun. We were inside so quickly and silently, we might as well have been ghosts.

When we got to Dad’s door, Bert started with the wedge, but I grabbed his hand. We had an extra key stuck into the side of the door frame where it was cracked. You had to be looking for it to know it was there. We kept some putty over it the color of the wood. I reached around the frame and took out the putty and pulled out the key. I unlocked the door.

I could feel him in the room. I don’t know how else to say that, but I could feel him. He was sitting in a chair by the bed, smoking a cigarette, and about the time we saw him, he realized we were in the room.

“It’s best you don’t call out,” Bert said.

Dad clicked the lamp by his chair. He was soaked in light and there was enough of it he could look out and see us. We stepped closer.

“I guess I should have known you’d come, Bert. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done.”

“Shouldn’t have threatened me,” Bert said.

“Guy with me, Amos, he said you did some things some years back, for some boys he knew. He wasn’t in the racket then, just on the outskirts. He said you were a kind of legend. We saw you the other day, standing in that doorway, you didn’t look so legendary. Yet, here you are.”

“Yep,” Bert said. “Here I am.”

“I’m not going to be all right, I yell or don’t yell, am I?”

“Naw, you ain’t.”

That’s when Dad grabbed at the lamp and tried to sling it at Bert, but the wire was too short and the plug didn’t come out of the wall. The lamp popped out and back when the plug didn’t give, rolled along the floor tumbling light, and then Dad was on his feet, in front of the chair, and he had a gun in his hand he’d pulled from the cushions.

Bert fired his automatic.

There was a streak of light and stench of gun powder and a sound like someone coughing out a wad of phlegm, and then Dad sat back down in the chair. The gun he had dangled from his finger. He was breathing heavily. He tried to lift his hand with the gun in it, but he couldn’t do it. He might as well have been trying to lift a steel girder.

Bert reached over and took Dad’s gun from his hand and gave it to me to hold. He set the lamp up, then. The light from it lay on Dad’s face like it had weight. Dad was white. I looked at him and tried to feel something, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel bad for him, and I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel nothing. Not right then.

Dad was wheezing and there was a rattling in his chest. I guess the shot got him through one of his lungs.

“We can watch him die if it’ll give you pleasure, or I can finish him, kid. Your call.”

I lifted the pistol in my hand and pointed it at Dad.

Bert said, “Whoa.”

I paused.

“No silencer,” Bert said. He traded guns with me. “He can’t do nothing, like you couldn’t when you was a kid. Get up close and give it to him.”

I moved close and put the barrel of the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

The gun coughed.

*

Joe R. Lansdale’s Things Get Ugly is out tomorrow, published by Tachyon Publications in North America and in the UK.

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