One Eyed Jack

I don’t play cards for money. That’s a rule I should have lived by.

Vegas before wedding, he said. We’ll be high rollers, he said. You have to live before the life sentence, he said. Like an idiot I listened.

Lucky was raking it in. I was losing my shirt. My fiancé’s father owned a joint on the strip so maybe I was adding to her inheritance.

The pit boss that snagged us from behind. He wasn’t gentle as he ushered us through the club. Lucky earned his moniker when it was my face they used to open the door to the back room.

The lights were dim but I saw a metal table that glistened moistly with rust and fluids best left unimagined. I counted half a dozen convicts, down on their luck dock workers, or refugees from the gorilla pen. The shadows of them loomed menacingly in the deeper shadows making up the room. They each held an implement of slow pain and death in one meaty hand. In case they ran out or wanted to get creative there were finer instruments on the table.

Then the lights went out. A black bag slithered over my head. It’s interesting how easily concern transforms to terror when you are robbed of sight at the same time your hearing is muffled.

I meekly squeaked a demand to know what was going on. The voice that responded held the smooth, soft menace only heard in black and white gangster movies. It informed me that Lucky had been counting cards and the proprietors of the establishment did not cotton to that. Great, a genteel thug. That was the first time I lost control of my bladder but not the last.

I was held in place by hands belonging on a monster in a midnight feature. Even through that bag I heard it all.

Thump, crack, thumps and cracks of iron on flesh and bone was how it began.

Screaming! That was Lucky. A part of me that is small rejoiced. This was his fault.

Long liquid ripping like tight Velcro separating, a cut started with blade then spread with unhygienic fingers. I regretted earlier joy at Lucky’s fate.

So many sounds, other sounds of pain and wrath, there were hours of them. Then came the last and worst two.

Purring, soft and wet, signifying the savage amputation of his tongue.

Deafening roaring of large caliber termination, until the last Lucky howled.

I got off light. They scooped out my left eye with the world’s smallest, rustiest ice cream scoop and no anesthetic. Then they dumped me in an alley.

I got patched up and assured the police I could not identify my assailants. They grabbed me from an alley I insisted. Finally I made my way home.

My fiancé left me before the wedding. Not because I was disfigured, she assured me. Jack, she told me, I could never marry a man that would bring a cheater to my father’s casino.

#dark #shortstory