Noreen Ayres is an accomplished poet as well as an Edgar-nominated writer of crime fiction. She’s best known for her Smokey Brandon mysteries, now getting a well-deserved second life under the imprint of Brash Books. Of Smokey’s debut, A World the Color of Salt, the Kirkus reviewer had this to say: “Sounding like an uncensored outtake from vintage Hill Street Blues, this introduction to ex-stripper, ex-cop, Orange County forensic specialist Smokey Brandon is tough, hip, visceral, and lusty enough to make both Wambaugh and Spillane sit up and wince…A macho heroine, with a ragged love-life (a long-standing affair with her former boss; a one-nighter with a co-worker; etc.), a soured past, and an unpredictable future, plus authentic forensic nitty-gritty and autopsy protocol.”
You won’t find Smokey in “Favored to Death.” Or much in the way of forensics. What you will run into is a dark and uncompromising story that you won’t soon forget…
FAVORED TO DEATH
by N. J. Ayres
Jason and Alfie sat atop pilings not far from the Laguna Beach pier, the posts cut low enough a tall kid could sling a leg over and not lose grip on a can of beer. The friends sat silent for a moment and focused on the blinking red light of a plane taking its time to forge through a night of flourishing stars.
“Laguna is the greatest place in the world,” Jason said. He felt no need to look at Alfie when he said it.
But instead of Alfie saying Ditto, man, he answered from deep in his throat, “Laguna sucks.”
Jason thought he didn’t hear right. He checked the tin-stamped face turned sideways to him and saw it was seriously sour. “You’re crazy, man,” he said, spreading his arms, teetering a little. “This is paradise.”
In honor of Alf’s birthday, they’d met with friends for pizza and beer. Now it was just them, waxing on life, politics, what Francie Stevens was wearing, and whether they should quit their dumbass jobs or not.
“So I’m twenty-one,” Alfie said. “So what?”
“What, what?” Jason asked.
“What-what? You’re more torqued than I thought,” Alf said and snuffled once, kind of like a laugh but not a real one.
“Spit it out, doof. What’s eating you?”
“I expected … I don’t know what I expected. Something else.”
“We gave you a party, you ingrate.” Jason was still nineteen, but he’d pull twenty in six months. He raised his beer high to the chrome moon and shouted, “To turning one hundred and twenty-one, the both of us. Yah!”
As he said it, steel‑gray clouds overran the moon.
“Damn, Alf. Did you do that?”
“Hey. Special powers.”
Jason could hardly see his friend’s expression now, just the spectral glow of Alf’s sun-tipped hair and the ghost of a “Dave’s Waves” tee‑shirt he wore so often the letters were fading away.
Soon the menacing clouds slid away from the moon, leaving the globe pure as a porch light. It lit up stringers of foam rolling like blown toilet paper on somebody’s lawn. The motion made Jason realize he’d folded one too many pepperoni pieces down his gullet. “Dude, I’m sick,” he said. “I think I’m dyin’.”
He crumpled his can and tossed it into the sea, screw the whales. Well, not really, but in his mind an aluminum can was something a whale could poop out.
“Get it over with,” Alf said, scooping an arm forward as if ushering. He raised his beer to the moon. “A toast: To death. To death, I say. For some, a favor!”
Jason swiveled on his post away from Alf to hurl out all that nasty, three full rolls of the stomach and a couple half-heaves. He twisted away from the puke that was being tidied-up by curls of water, then jumped into the wet on the other side.
Alfie was already off his post and headed for the spot on the sand where they’d left their sandals. Alf’s were the expensive kind. He told Jason once what they cost. Jason tried to forget it right away, because the idea just bothered him. How can people spend so much on stuff you wear? But he kept his opinion to himself.
Some days he wondered how he and Alf could even be friends. They’d known each other since middle school. Alf’s family was almost-rich, to his family’s … ordinary. Jason’s parents left the state when he was seventeen but out of high school, to open a business in Oregon. Jason didn’t mind. He took a room with a cousin and paid hardly anything for rent. The cousins worked different schedules, so they never got in each other’s way.
Further: Alf’s athletic build to Jason’s flab. Alf was born cut and ready, but he wasn’t a jock, wasn’t a star at school. Something about him held people off except for Jason. A couple of times Alf announced to Jason and a group of kids that he was the type who’d hit the wall young, go out in a blaze. Ride a Harley to heaven, that kind of thing. One time he told Jason the way it would end: somebody would kill him. Drama, thy name is Alf. “Yeah,” Jason replied, “and it’ll be me.”
When Alf first met Jason’s mother she sang a little of “What’s It All About, Alfie?” For some dumb reason Jason had never heard the song before. Alf screwed up his face in pain. Afterward, he kept asking Jason and other people to call him Al, but they’d forget, including Jason.
Lately Alf had been losing his temper over small things, like going past a street they meant to turn on, or store clerks not paying attention to customers the way they should, or tourist families spread out on the sidewalk so a person had to step in the street to get by. He needed a good kick in the butt, Jason vowed, tomorrow maybe, soon as they both got sober.
#
All that.
Then, in only a little more than a week, Jason walked the cusp of the beach alone. He stopped at one point, gazed out over the waves, seeing yet not seeing the gliding gulls, the muted orange horizon, the sun as it burned into the bruised skin of ocean.
He whispered, “You sonofabitch, Alfie,” and took up a lonesome stone to sidearm it into the sea as far as he could. Then he crouched, sat on his heels, and bawled. For Alfred Burbank Lucian Langdon had taken his life, and in a particularly gruesome way.
#
Which is more wretched? To delete, cancel, erase your own life, or to be murdered? Wait. One plus one equals … killer. Suicide is murder, isn’t it? God help you if your family’s Catholic; no forgiveness there. Alf’s family wasn’t, but they did go to church sometimes.
Jason told himself he saw it coming.
Jason told himself no way did he see it coming.
He had watched Alfie’s moods over the years. Funny one day, pissed the next. Jason hearkened back to the first time he and Alf jerked off together. Alf was fourteen, he still twelve. The act took place in the lee of a big cut-in rock down the beach from Hotel Laguna.
The sky showed barely dark. Before walking there, they had set off a few firecrackers that were almost duds from moisture but good enough to sputter a bit. Three girls down the beach looked over. Alf made some wisecracks to Jason and got the giggles. He pointed at the dim figures of the girls picking up their beach things.
A couple of fireflies flicked around the boys, as if volunteering help with the show. Alf stepped backward and leaned against the rockface. He brought a hand to his groin and massaged himself, said to Jason, “Do this, buddy, mm-m,” and half-closed his eyes. “Hey, Jace. Do this.” He turned to the rockface, made more sounds, and finished.
When it was over, Jason was surprised: Was this what all the fuss is about? Is that all there is? This wasn’t a new sensation. He’d felt it before, since around age seven, but he’d never touched himself like Alfie was doing; he would just press down on his bed while on his stomach, and after he felt it he’d fall off to sleep. That evening on the beach he did laugh himself silly with Alf’s jokes and groans. And now, in recollection, he laughed again about it, before he sat on his heels, one finger drilled in the wet sand for balance, and cried like a toddler.
Damn that Alfie. Damn him to a hundred-and-twenty-one and way beyond, forevermore. I will never get that close to anyone ever again, Jason told himself…
FAVORED TO DEATH by N. J. Ayres is one of 17 outstanding stories in At Home in the Dark. NB: Ebook and paperback editions are on sale now for immediate delivery. DON’T try to order the hardcover, as it’s sold out at the publisher, and while Amazon is still taking orders they’ll be unable to deliver.
