Certain Little Cruelties
An Excerpt from the Forthcoming "The Sad, Violent Life of Sandy Preston"
The following is the first chapter of a forthcoming book entitled THE SAD, VIOLENT LIFE OF SANDY PRESTON. The book consists of two novellas published together. The first novella, HEARTBREAK & LECHERY, was originally published by Terror House Press in March 2024. That novella sees Sandy Preston as a low-rent private eye in Gainesville, Florida who gets ensnared in an elaborate blackmail and kidnapping plot designed to take down an organized crime syndicate based in Miami. The second novella, the still unpublished CERTAIN LITTLE CRUELTIES, takes place years later in a county that has made burying the dead illegal. Here, Sandy is no longer a gumshoe, but a funeral home worker who once again finds himself in the middle of a mystery.
THE SAD, VIOLENT LIFE OF SANDY PRESTON will be out soon via 1325 Publishing.
***
“Hey yo, Duke. It’s me. You up?”
The pounding on his front door was heavy. Sandy turned over on his mattress, grabbed his ancient alarm clock, and read the time.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Sandy had been so close to a full eight hours of sleep for the first time in ages, and yet, at the last minute, an asshole from work had stumbled into his pleasant dreamworld and ruined everything.
“Give me a minute,” Sandy shouted back.
Sandy rolled off his mattress and grabbed a fresh pair of sweatpants. He then snatched up a hoodie to protect himself from the springtime chill. He looked at his disheveled bedroom, with its little mountains of clothes and books, and decided that nobody needed to see it but him. He shut the door behind him. He would meet all company in the sparse kitchen.
“Yeah,” he said to the unwanted visitor.
“Duke, I have something heavy to talk about. Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
Sandy let the man into the kitchen and offered him a seat at his antique table. The seat was an antique, too, purchased for less than twenty dollars at a thrift store long since out of operation.
“Just move in?”
“No, been here for a year.”
The two men shared a laugh at Sandy’s minimalist apartment. Besides the table and two chairs, Sandy owned a coffeemaker, a few pots and pans, and a single bookcase that tilted a little to the right. Everything else, from the refrigerator to the semi-workable stove, had come with the apartment.
He offered the man, Logan, something to drink. Logan asked for a glass of water.
“It’ll be tap, if that’s fine.”
Logan grimaced. Sandy knew that the young man had a lot of strange ideas about water purification and the county’s lackluster standards when it came to removing fluoride, but nevertheless he accepted a cool glass.
“So,” Sandy said, “what’s so important that you have to bother a night shift guy?”
“It’s about one of your co-workers, Duke. I think you need to handle him before the county does.”
Logan and everyone else at the home knew Sandy as “Duke.” None of them knew his real name, and that’s because Sandy Preston liked it that way. Even his employers knew him as Raymond Dukeman, alias Duke. A name change in Mississippi, along with new ID papers mailed to a P.O. box in Georgia, kept Sandy free and clear of a past that he wanted dead and buried. Even though Sonny Ahern was an old man rotting in a prison cell in Colorado, and Carl Mick was a corpse feeding maggots somewhere south of Fort Lauderdale, Sandy still maintained a base level of paranoia since being sucked into the world’s worst bait-and-switch almost a decade ago. As far as he knew, the contract on his life was still valid.
“Which co-worker?”
“C’mon, do you really have to ask? Which one of you ghouls is the weirdest? You don’t even have to think hard; you already know who I’m talking about.”
“Peyton?”
“Yeah, Peyton. The guy born into your line of work. A natural ghoul.”
Sandy didn’t like hearing that. Logan had a way of talking that annoyed Sandy. The younger man had a childlike whine to his voice, which no amount of street speak or gangland inflection could change. Logan was a smalltown kid from across the border in Pennsylvania, but all his mannerisms and posturing came directly from the many streaming services he lived off of. He lacked the aw-shucks charm of his Somerset County upbringing. Instead, he walked like Christopher Moltisanti, talked like Lil Dunya, and usually only thought about whatever the current algorithm told him to think about. Sandy, who intentionally lived in a world much older and quieter, couldn’t stand hyper-intensive cyborgs like Logan, who voluntarily outsourced their humanity to pocket machines.
“Am I like that, Logan? Do I seem like a dude born to be a ghoul?”
“Naw, you’re just gramps. That’s what you were born to be—the unc of the jobsite. Everyone needs one.”
“So long as I’m not Grandpa Ghoul, we’re cool.”
Logan made a comment about the older man’s wordplay and rhyming, then killed his smile and returned to Peyton. “The weirdo kid is doing something that he shouldn’t. I’d rather your shift handle it than the sheriff’s department.”
“If it’s really that serious, then shouldn’t the cops be involved?”
“I don’t like cops,” Logan said with a stern voice and meaner eye. Sandy knew that the kid wasn’t a serious crook, but he also knew that Logan dabbled in many illegal activities, including some that occurred during the day at the home.
“Besides,” Logan added, “I think real evidence is needed anyway.”
“And I seem like the guy to get it?”
“C’mon, Duke. You’re the manager down there. You’re the authority. When you ask them to jump, they all ask, ‘how high?’”
“No, they all say nothing and stare into space because all you kids are social retards,” Sandy said. “I get what you’re trying to say, though. I can request a QAV just like that.” Here Sandy snapped his fingers, which caused Logan to jump a little.
“That’s right. Give Peyton a QAV and turn his space inside out. Dude spends too much time in his cubbyhole anyway.”
Sandy put down his water and made the switch to coffee. He still had some left in his coffeemaker, and he used his microwave to heat it up. Logan grimaced again and said something about radiation and cancer.
“Listen,” Sandy said, “we’re all dying, so let me do it in my own way.”
“Do you really want to kick the bucket in this county?”
Now Logan had a point. Sandy, Peyton, and the rest of the funeral home’s overnight crew handled and repurposed dead bodies for eight hours each night. Cellophane baggies of blood and flesh and minced appendages were delicately labeled and stored for shipping each shift. Sandy’s job was to make sure everything matched the correct cadaver, and that each repurposed part was adequately labeled, indexed, and correctly assigned. It saved Sandy from having to get his hands dirty, but it also meant that he had to deal with the sheriff’s department or the federal government (God forbid) when anything went tits up. Cutting up bodies was preferable to that.
“There are better places to die. And besides, I don’t want you morning boys touching me.”
“Better to be a sunshiner than a ghoul,” Logan added with a hint of defensiveness in his joking tone.
“Ok, whatever, but what am I supposed to be looking for exactly?”
Logan instinctively looked over his shoulder and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Peyton is taking product home with him. Theft, but you know damn well that we don’t work at no damn convenience store or Wal-Mart. The little ghoul is sneaking out body parts.”
“For what?”
Logan lifted his arms and shook his head. “Something freaky, I guess.”
“How do you sunshiners know this anyway?”
“I’ll tell you but you have to promise to keep it quiet. Can you promise?”
Sandy smirked and said, “Sure.”
“Zeke and Ed sometimes use the home for extracurriculars. A sale here, a fuck there. You know, bad kid stuff that would sully the clean reputation of all sunshiners. Well, they’ve told me that they’ve done a wake and bake in the parking lot before work a few times, and each time they’ve seen Peyton haul heavy trash bags out to the dumpsters.”
“Nothing weird about that,” Sandy interrupted. “Some parts we can’t repurpose, plus we have trash like any other business.”
“What’s weird is that Peyton always takes a bag or two home with him. Zeke’s seen the weirdo put several big bags away in his car and drive off. You think he’s taking wastepaper home with him? C’mon, you already know.”
“The kid’s stealing corpses, or at least parts of them.”
“Like a natural ghoul.”
“Like a natural ghoul,” Sandy reiterated. The older man wiped the last remnants of sleep from his eyes, set his coffee cup down, and studied the ceiling for a second. He had a premonition of danger—of bad luck and bad news down the line. But, true to his hard-headed nature, Sandy decided to make his job interesting, and he agreed to investigate the rumors.
“I’ll hit the kid with a QAV and see if I can’t turn something up. Probably spring it on him right before sun-up.”
“Sounds good.” Logan stood up and gave Sandy a fist bump. The younger man moved towards the door.
“By the way,” Sandy said, “why did you come in person and not call me?”
“Nobody knows your number, OG. Besides, I was in the ‘hood.” Logan flashed a smile and reached into his pocket. He produced a glass vial with several small white clumps. He shook the vial, and Sandy recognized the familiar rattle of the drug.
“That’s heavy shit that can earn you heavy time,” he cautioned.
“I know. A little side action, if done safely, boosts the bank account.”
Logan crossed the threshold and put his hands on a bicycle leaning up against a light post. Despite his youth, Logan already had enough DWIs that the state had taken away his license. He couldn’t reapply until 2040.
Sandy watched the kid cycle away. Even though he knew that the home attracted the scum of the earth, including former private eyes, he still marveled at the sheer amount of dope fiends and dealers who populated his workplace. Even the sunshiners, who handled the material and their grieving families, were no better than the nighttime ghouls, most of whom couldn’t get another job, even if they had cleaner records.
But corpse thief? Sandy couldn’t believe it. Even as weird and off-putting as Peyton was, the old man had a hard time believing the rumors. Disposable parts weren’t that good anyway—defective, overly marked up, or incorrectly cut. Not much use for such offal, Sandy thought.
So, what was the kid doing?