When Things Get a Little Western

Fiction by AD Schweiss

Hello, Callers. Thanks for being here.

Three months ago, Cold Caller launched with a goal of publishing the best in original crime and mystery fiction. But nothing could have prepared me for the response. In very short order, our submissions queue was full of brilliant, compelling short stories. An abundance of riches.

From these stories, we’re choosing our very favorites to share with you. And this one in particular holds a special place in my heart—it was the first piece Cold Caller accepted, and the first time I thought, “Holy shit, this might actually work.”

It is with great pleasure that we now present When Things Get a Little Western by AD Schweiss.

When Things Get a Little Western

Most of the time when I kill someone, I get to know them a little seeing them at work or the grocery store or the gym. The silent movie of someone picking up trash off the sidewalk; picking their nose. But when I kill a person in LA, my first look at them—maybe the only one—is seeing them behind the wheel of a car.

My dad used to say that the car we drive is ‘half-brag, half-confession.’ Meaning: what we want to tell the world about us. And what we can’t help saying at the same time.

I’m tailing a guy named ‘Brian Coleridge,’ an importer out of the Port of Long Beach. Drives a Defender 110 in waxed-marble onyx that’s spent about as much time off road as my Manolo Blahniks. I trailed him from the Erewhon Market to his home in the hills. A house, as an old boyfriend of mine used to say, ‘above the shopping cart line.’ The properties are fenced with stucco facades a dozen feet high, broken by gates for each home at the driveway.

Didn’t take me long to realize the gates open automatically whenever someone drives out from inside the property. It really makes you think about the guy who sold rich people on the idea of security gates that can open if anyone triggers a pressure plate or a laser beam in the right spot. Yadda-yadda-yadda, here I am: been outside his place in a rented pickup truck since just after four in the morning, a P80 semiautomatic I milled myself digging into my ladybits at the waistband.

I feel antsy, wasting time I could spend hiding in a bush on his property with a covid mask on, tagging this dude in his driveway and then getting a Double-Double before I leave town. But I got specific instructions for this guy: this has to happen at the port. I get specific instructions sometimes.

I used to ask questions. Don’t as much anymore.

His gate opens like somebody’s meemaw opening a screen door to let out a blind poodle and I get a better look at his ride. A jerry can bolted to one side at the quarter-panel has the same flat-glass shine as the rest of the SUV. I’d guarantee it’s never even touched the ground. I’d similarly bet the winch on the front bumper never had its cherry popped.

Strange how a truck so built up can make a man look helpless. Coleridge drives like a girl, kinda. (That’s okay for me to say—I drive like a man according to an old boyfriend. Different boyfriend than the one with the ‘shopping cart’ line.) When cars merge onto the highway he does this “no, after you” thing, and cars stack up behind him even though there’s almost no traffic. It actually makes him hard to tail. In different circumstances I’d get close and flip him off.

His SUV, with knobby tires that never touched gravel; the ladder running up the back to nothing, brings me back to my dad’s old S10. The groan she made when we opened doors or shifted weight on the truck bed like a dog with bad hips. The long bench seat, covered with a Pendleton blanket, where I fell asleep on road trips without being belted in. The duffel bag from my dad’s old rugby team on the floor underneath me.

I remember how that duffel was built up with all the things my dad learned never to leave behind over the years. Called it his ‘ready’ bag, for when he was working for the county or got a call at dinner and somebody needed him. Inside he kept a tourniquet, rubber gloves, and bandages to pack a wound. Five hundred in cash. Zip ties and little paper shoe covers. A white gas stove and ramen noodles. He’d bring the bag with him whenever he went out on a call, along with the lever-action rifle he laid on across the floor of the cab. All these things he kept for those times when—as he put it—‘things get a little Western.’

My kit bag is a bit different: an Arc’teryx daypack, like you’d expect from a grad student or a nurse on her day off going for a hike. Inside I’ve got a good tourniquet, of course, but also nitrile gloves and a small pharmacy of painkillers. Narcan to boot. Bear spray and Tri-Flow spray. A window punch, and a Visa gift card loaded for a thousand dollars. A spring-loaded knife.

The butt stock of my dad’s old lever-action rifle rests on the center console of this rental like the head of a loyal dog. The gun is a Henry chambered in .357. The lever runs smooth as glass from the way my dad kept the action clean, well used but never abused. I try to maintain it to his standards, so cycling a round through the receiver feels like striking a note on a grand piano.

I wonder, sometimes, if my dad was pissed I took the gun. If he got a new one. If he knows I’m back in California.

Coleridge makes his trek to the Port of Long Beach, the route taking us onto surface streets to the north; a mile-long shantytown of tents and RVs along hellstrips of bare earth, bivouacked against chain-link fences. In the predawn hours wind whips in from the coast and lashes at the rain-fly of each tent like dead bodies left behind on Everest. Closer to the port is a fenceline topped with concertina wire and shredded shopping bags. Sections of fence cut loose at the bottom, the chain link brushing against dirt and macadam. The cutaway sections nobody bothered to repair from when people snuck in.

Maybe the only nice thing about this city: Los Angeles digests crime scenes—the streets and people and collapsing infrastructure work like complimentary organs; an interwebbing ecosystem, flushing evidence like toxins from a bloodstream.

After a hit, a lot of people rush to the ocean or a culvert to huck the gun into the water. In LA, I can just ditch my gun in some homeless guy’s tent. (And thank you, California judges, it’ll take a search warrant to look inside.) From there, the gun gets traded between junkies, maybe to a dealer too dumb to know the gun is dirty. After a few days DNA profiles on the slide or trigger turn to a jambalaya of alleles: ‘No usable comparison due to number of contributors,’ is the language my father used to show me on crime lab reports—a dozen fingers pointing in a hundred directions.

If the cops ever find the gun, they have a murder weapon but no way to use it to get a conviction: the gun will have DNA from at least two or three other suspects.

When the man I’m going to kill badges in through the automatic gate outside the port—again with the automatic gates in this town—his car disappears into a city grid of shipping containers stacked four or five high that’s inside a high section of fencing. I’ve got a Chinese RFID spoofer for just such an occasion. I tested it last week to confirm that it works.

I’m going in on foot, of course. Trying to drive out of here after a hit seems like it has a few problems. Worst-case scenario—if I can’t drive out without trouble—I could hit the water, ditch my hiking boots, and swim about a mile. I could manage, assuming I don’t get chewed up by a cargo ship.

I wheel my rental U-Haul pickup around about twenty yards from the gate, nose pointing opposite of the way I came in so I can leave fast when this is done.

Hoodie up, I’ve been driving with a covid mask on for the last few miles like an Uber driver. When I get out of my truck to approach on foot, the smells of ocean and diesel hit like an elbow to the nose. Another reminder of how foreign Los Angeles can feel: even at sea level, it’s hard to breathe here. I steady myself with a breath; briny decay in the air goes to the bottom of my lungs.

Just getting out of the truck relieves a pinched section of skin against my abdomen from where the pistol was sticking, and not for the first time do I think back to my father taking me from the cab of his truck to take a shot at a whitetail. My senses go wide; slow my breathing in time with easy steps.

Coleridge has a lead on me but it’s still mostly dark. He’s driving with headlights on, so even on foot it won’t take me long to catch up to him. Rows of shipping containers aren’t big enough to lose a running car with the lights on.

The mark’s headlights are the LED ‘high-beam-no-matter-what’ variety, and I track the car to a shipping container that’s open like a set of double doors. Mostly there are no lights in this section, so I hold the gun at a low ready, moving with knees bent to absorb any sound.

The thought comes to me a second too late: I’m surrounded by a grid of storage containers. I should really clear my corners while I’m walking.

The punch-pinch-seize of a taser deployment; birthday confetti of silver mylar falling in barn swallow patterns around my eyes—whoever tased me did so at close range—and my rigid body pitches over to one side. Because I can’t put an arm out to break my fall, my head hits the concrete with a tinnitus crunch.

Before the lights go out behind my eyes, I have enough time to recognize the familiar boots on approach toward me.

I come to inside a shipping container, with my arms zip-tied to a lightweight folding chair at my sides; my legs and neck bound up by something I can’t see.

His face is a few feet from mine, standing over me and hunched a little, his hands hunched on his thighs. The concern on his face breaks a little and he frowns with just his eyes.

‘Hey, pumpkin.’

‘Hi, Daddy,’ is all I can say, the sight of him coaxing out the Bakersfield in my voice that I’ve spent eight years trying to sandblast away.

He’s wearing a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his old packer hat tilted up to the crown of his head. He’s gotten so much older since I saw him last: lean arms of a man who should have retired ten years ago if he could afford it. Hollow cheeks and crinkled skin of a man who never believed in sunscreen or health insurance or turning down a drink when the day is done.

He steps away from me, back toward the lip of the shipping container and peeks outward, and then steps toward me and removes a section of paracord from my neck—when he does, the constriction around my wrists and ankles vanishes.

My dad points with two fingers toward some direction that I’m guessing is the road. “We’ve got two men driving Coleridge back to his place.”

I raise an eyebrow. “We?”

He bobbles his head in the universal ‘I know, I can’t believe it either’ kind of way. “I got picked up by a private security outfit. Coleridge has had three attempts on him in the last year, all at his house. Guessing that’s why they had you try to get him on the move. Coleridge family is pretty popular. Unpopular. However you want to put it.” He pronounces the word as poplar, moving his mouth like he’s got a dip in.

He pauses, the way he used to: Thing about guilty folks is, they fill up the silence themselves. Don’t be in a rush to talk, he used to say.

I don’t say anything and after a beat his face breaks; the smile he uses when he’s being tough on me. “I hope you’re usually better at killing folks than this,” he says, and I realize how much tension I’m holding—worrying about what he thinks of me and thinking about the last time I saw him. It’s hard to get a full breath, I’m so ashamed. The things I’ve done and what I’ve become dissolve with the smell of him—cheap soap and Skoal—until the space between us closes to nothing. I smile back and I want to say something but the inside of my throat closes to a pin and the tears on my cheeks are warm; the words I miss you, Daddy are right there—the right words—and not being able to get them out feels like another failure on the pile.

He puts his forehead against mine, the way he would when I was small. “We’ve been following you since you left his house, you know.”

I gasp out a laugh: “No way.”

“I’m guessing you got distracted by his shit driving. I did too. Point being, I told the rest of the team I’d get whatever information I could out of you. One of the other guys figured it’d be easier to just shoot you. I had to,” he shrugs. “Not ‘pull rank,’ but something like that. So we’ve got two men driving Coleridge back home to put him on lockdown. But there are two more men at the gate we came through.”

I ask, “Armed?” like it was the right question and then feel like I’m about three feet tall as soon as the words are out.

My dad smiles his bills are overdue and Mom is scared smile; the kind he wore when we were rafting and the boat was coming up on rapids, or when a neighbor’s animals got loose in the dark. The smile that went all the way to his eyes and stopped there—scared everywhere but on the outside.

“Kiddo, they’re armed to the teeth. You should see what they’re doing here,” and he glances to both sides like he’s asking me to look around with him and for the first time I take in the space around us: medium-sized cardboard boxes that look smooth and new, like they haven’t traded hands much. One of the boxes on the ground close to my right foot, just where I can see it, has a jagged mouth where someone ripped the box open without being especially careful. Little brown bottles the color of maple syrup are stacked along the rim; a few more peek out from inside the ripped edge.

“Some kind of drugs?”

He picks one up like an egg, and then holds it up toward me so his eye is looking at mine through the hole between his thumb and forefinger. “Insulin. That’s the thing about these people. Boxes are always full of something different. Sometimes shredded aluminum. Sometimes saws for hand tools. One time was video game graphics chips,” he shrugs, pronouncing the word vid-ya, another detail about him I’ve missed; another one of a million things about my dad to warm me up. I think about getting a hug from him and wonder whether he’d give me one if I asked.

He takes the bottle of insulin and sets it down like he’s stacking a domino. “Point is: whatever they bring in—no matter what it is—I can basically set my watch. Some news article about how ‘nobody can find aluminum in Canada anymore,’ or ‘Germany isn’t making such-and-such power tool parts anymore.’ Whatever’s in their shipping container winds up being worth at least forty times more than it was when it got shipped over here.”

“Good business model?”

“I don’t think it’s business, sweetie. In business, people lose money sometimes. From what I see: these people don’t—”

And his voice cuts there, the way my father could go hunting dog-still while driving a pickup truck and come to a dead stop at the sight of something unseen—a deer or a big cat. The way he could read subtle sign in the side of a hill or spot rainbow trout lazing under glassy water in a creek.

He raises a finger and then comes in close enough that I can smell the mint of his chaw. “Get on the ground and cover your ears,” he whispers, and his hand on my shoulder helping me to the ground is strong as rebar, warm like the hood of his truck. I don’t want him to let his hand go and when I look up I see that he’s got a gun in his hand and he’s walking to meet the shadow darkening the entrance of the shipping container.

The man who steps in has size on him like a piece of construction equipment—the kind of neck that swells above the shoulders, skin like a stewed tomato from sun and drinking; a dozen different tattoos that all make the same point.

My dad points at me on the ground. “Can you tell me what that is she’s got on her belt buckle,” he asks the big guy. “Sum’in weird.”

My dad sells it so well I almost want to say, I’m not wearing a belt buckle, but when the big man passes him by, my father eyeballs me and pads his ear with his empty hand, tapping his cupped hand twice—a gesture so clear I hear the words cover them tight, sweetie without him saying the words out loud.

My dad still moves fast when he needs to. He raises his arm in less time than it would take a man to register the movement at his periphery. Action is always faster than reaction, he used to say, and I don’t clock that he’s using the gun he took off me until after he takes the shot.

The sound of the gun inside an oversize metal can makes my eyes ache; even with my ears shielded the ringing splits the top of my skull and the whole world is lost inside a whine like squealing brakes. My dad’s next words are hard to hear, but the way he grabs my hand and pulls me up makes his point.

We take running steps off the lip of the shipping box. The next shots that ring out are muted, the way they always are after the first gunshot numbs the ears. I register the silhouette of another big man maybe thirty yards away. He and my dad trade gunshots—my dad firing on the move, shooting so that the man opposite will have to move himself. A foot ahead of me the air shimmers and just to my left a shipping container pings—the thumbprint stamp of a bullet sprinkles my face with particle flecks of paint ricochet.

My dad turns on his heel. A moment’s pause while he gets his bead—I can hear him saying caliber is something people worry about when they can’t shoot for shit—another shot, and then he’s running beside me. A nod that says, don’t worry about it and the way he doesn’t look behind him to check for return fire tells me I don’t need to look back either.

We make it to my truck still at a dead run; I almost point out which vehicle is mine but remember that my dad followed me here in the first place. We’re in the truck quick and the way I go into the driver’s seat instead of him feels like putting shoes on the wrong feet. I try to drive as slow as my nerves will take.

“You took my gun,” he says, and brings his old Henry to a comfortable ready with the muzzle pointed into the passenger footwell.

The words it reminds me of you get into my throat and almost die there, just as a couple of black SUVs pass us on the service road to the highway. My father checks the side gate of the rifle and racks the lever. Tires scream behind us as the SUVs wheel around to follow us. They accelerate fast, and in my mirror I watch them split the road wide. The front grilles grow as they race to overtake us.

“It reminds me of you,” I say, and I was sure I wouldn’t get the words out but when I do the Bakersfield in my voice is there, like a cat that went missing who turns up without owing anyone an explanation; like something that couldn’t just get covered up forever.

“Don’t tinker with the sight anymore, okay?” and even though my eyes are on the road and the oversize GMCs and the men behind us, I can hear the way he says the words through a smile; the way he’s saying I love you as clear as he knows how.

“Okay, Daddy,” I say. “I won’t.”

I think ahead past the road, to getting Daddy a fake passport that will pass TSA, or whether we’ll have to get a boat. We’re driving fast enough that the pop-pop from the SUVs behind us barely registers as gunfire until I feel the strike on the bedside panel of our truck.

I goose the engine and take another service road, turning to the right so fast my dad grabs the oh-shit handle and cradles the gun in his elbow. “Where the hell you going?”

“I know a spot,” I say. And out of the corner of my eye I can see that he’s nodding—maybe not at what I’m saying so much as the iron behind the way I say the words.

“Fair enough,” he says, like someone just told him to keep his mouth shut and he doesn’t particularly mind. “Just you drive this next part smooth so I can shoot straight.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I say.

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AD Schweiss has worked as a prosecutor in California for 14 years. His recent short fiction has appeared in Rock and a Hard Place, Molotov Cocktail, and BULL. He lives in Northern California with his troublesome kids, his troublesome wife, and a well-behaved dog.