Shred of Evidence

My sister’s a graduate of SUNY Buffalo Law, and her birthday is August 27—which just happens to fall on a Monday this year. So as a birthday present to her, I’m looking for stories that center around lawyers.

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The punk kid slouched against the broken street light on 102nd Street obviously thought I was in the wrong neighborhood. Six years I’ve been in the City, but people still pick me out for a sucker. I guess it’s true what they say, you can take the girl off the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the girl. Or something like that. It generally works out to my advantage, except in dark alleys.

The kid sticks a hand in the front pocket of his hooded Black Death sweatshirt and pries himself off the pole. “Fancy lady like you,” he leers, “maybe you need some help crossing the street?”

“Look,” I say, “you sure as hell don’t look like a boy scout and I’m really not in the mood.”

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The YA Books Goddess: www.yabookscentral.com & www.kidsbookscentral.com

Once the police let me back into my house, I couldn’t believe the mess they’d left behind. They weren’t responsible for all of it (fingerprint powder—yes; bloodstains—no) but somehow I never expected to return to such an obvious crime scene. This was, after all, my home.

Where to begin?

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Coming awake into the darkness of a blindfold was shocking, and not a little disorientating. Jake Burrows could feel his heart pounding right up into his throat, the vibrations of real terror. He swallowed, trying to quell the pulse of it and with several deep breaths its rate did begin to slow.

He caught a grunt of laughter across the floor, and the creak of a chair followed by the heavy movement of someone rising to their feet. A big man, by the sound of it.

“Looks like our guest has finally decided to put in an appearance.”

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Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, works as a freelance journalist. His fiction has appeared in the USA in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Elysian Fields Baseball Quarterly and War Journal, and in Ireland in such publications as Southword, Ireland’s Own, The Big Issue, and the Holly Bough, among others. He has won the George A. Birmingham Award and the Lunch Hour Stories Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Francis McManus Award, the Sean O’Faolain Award, and the Faulkner/Wisdom Award.

I don’t slit Phil’s throat until he says, “I know you love me, too.”

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When filling out checks, I habitually write a story’s title in the memo field. And today, as I was writing “Killing Harry” on a check, I wondered if bank employees ever actually read those notes and wonder a bit.