Fiction: A Perfect Cover For Mayhem

By JD Clapp

Mason and Billy sat on lawn chairs in front of their rolling home—a 1998 Coachman R. Mason dumped the 30-rack of Coors Light on ice in the big Yeti they boosted outside of Flagstaff. Billy threw a log of the glowing coals in the dryer drum fire pit—their poor man’s Solo Stove until they could jack a real one—that they kept strapped to the roof.

“THAT, was a fucking blast!” Mason declared.

“Dude, so good. Perfect cover for mayhem!” Billy added.

Sitting by the fire pit in the RV lot, the boys recounted every butt squeezed, every tit fondled. Visiting Hell Hospital had been Mason’s idea. Billy saw $20 apiece for a haunted house a waste of beer money but the combination of the grab-ass and the two wallets they lifted more than made up for it.

“We should go again tomorrow night,” Billy said.

“Nah, man. We need to head to Riverside. My brother is gonna hook us up to move some of his cook. We can flip our cut to those motocross kids in Corona. That’ll be booze and gas money to keep till Christmas.”

“Or we can smoke it and keep jackin’ people. Keep moving…the advantage of living on wheels,” Billy countered.

“We can smoke some of it, but this petty shit is gonna get us caught. Sell it, lay low, party, and do it again.”

Billy didn’t answer. He got up and threw a log on the fire. Then he walked over and took a piss next to the RV. 

“I’m hitting the rack, man,” Billy said, then went inside.

Mason watched him go. I might need to lose this sketchy mother fucker. 

##

As they snaked their way up the Grapevine, Billy started hatching a plan.

“I think we could do anything in those haunted houses,” he said.

“I don’t know, man. Shit, if we went back to that Hell Hospital, they’d probably be looking for us.”

Billy stared out the window, hit his vape pen. Mason turned up his Bluetooth speaker. Slipknot blared. As they reached the top of the mountain, Billy turned off the speaker.

“Ok. You’re right we can only hit those places once. And we only have three weeks before Halloween and then they’ll all shut down,” Billy said.

“Yeah…So?”

“So, we can hit all of them between now and then.” 

“Fuck, man. This from the dude who didn’t want to go in the first place,” Mason said, shaking his head.

“I might pull some skank into a corner and bang her,” Billy said.

“Shit. Do that, you’d have to kill her, or she’d go for help as soon as you left,” Mason said.

Crazy mother fucker…

“Then I’ll kill her.”

Mason looked at his new partner, tried to see if he was just blowing smoke. Mason knew he’d done a bit in Folsom, but these days he was just a smash-and-grab meth head. Shit, I think he’s serious…

“Hey man. I’m not killing anyone. We got a good thing ahead of us. Raping and killing some bitch in a haunted house ain’t in the cards,” Mason said. 

Billy looked ahead at the road, nodded, and cranked the speaker back up.

##

That night the boys rolled into a campground at a pay-to-fish lake stocked with massive trout. They gave zero fucks about fishing, but the place was only $20 a night for full hookups and twenty minutes from Mason’s brother’s cook house. Billy rummaged around inside the RV while Mason got the rig hooked up to sewer, water, and electric.  

Billy emerged from the camper with a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and poured them each about four shots worth into In-N-Out Burger cups left over from their lunch stop. They started a fire in the dryer drum. As the moon began to glow in the October sky, competing with the last remains of daylight, they discussed business.

“So, what’s the deal with this brother of yours? I ain’t some low-level errand boy. Why the fuck should we take the risk driving his shit down to San Diego?” Billy asked.

“It’s a chance to get into his crew. We move this, he’s giving us a grand and two ounces. Next trip we’ll get a little more.” Mason answered.

“Well, shit. That’s a decent pay day. What is he, some Riverside Walter White?”

“Cooks for a bunch of different white power sets. His shitends up in prisons and clubhouses up and down the Central Valley.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Do they call him Himmler?”

“Yeah, man. You heard of him?”

“Every peckerhead in California heard of him. Even his stepped-on shit is fire. Hell yes!”

##

Mason parked the camper at the horse gate, just off the graded dirt road. 

“Cook site is up that road about a half mile. They got cameras everywhere. We walk from here,” Mason said.

They walked in silence for a bit, then Mason added, “I vouched for your ass. Don’t fuck this up and let me do the talking.”

Billy chuckled. 

“Sure thing, boss man.”

They climbed the gate and began walking up the dusty single track. Gunshots rang out from the next canyon. 

“The fuck? Is that coming from your brother’s place?” Billy said. He stopped walking. 

Mason laughed. 

“Nah, man. It’s wild boar hunters. There’s a commercial hunting outfit over there. They trap wild hogs in Texas and Oklahoma and sell them to stupid SoCal hunters for a grand a pop. Them boys are as crazy as my brother. They know what’s going on over here—got some side deal going. Having them as neighbors keeps hikers, mountain bikers, and off-roaders away.”

They continued up the dusty track, winding their way up the scrub brush-lined canyon. When the single track finally evened out, several trailers and shacks appeared behind a chain link, razor wire-topped fence. As they breached the last rise in the road, two mastiffs charged, snarling. The dogs barked and crashed into the fence, sending chain-rattling echoes into the canyon.

Mason’s brother Bart stepped out of a trailer and whistled them off. The dogs ran back straight away.

His brother pressed a remote and the front gate opened. He nodded at them both and walked back inside.

They followed him in. 

Five minutes later, they were walking back to the RV in the afternoon heat.

“Your brother’s a chatty motherfucker, ain’t he,” Billy said.

“I told you he didn’t fuck around. We screw this up, he’ll kill us both. Don’t matter if I’m his brother. Business is business. We have two hundred grand worth of uncut meth in this bag.” 

“Holy fuck…That’s serious weight.”

##

That afternoon, they binged on Taco Bell on their way back, then stopped and picked up two 30-racks of Natty Light, cigarettes, a dozen donuts, and a giant tub of Red Vines. 

By 10:00 p.m. the boys had eaten most of the sweets and smoked a third of the meth Mason’s brother gave them to make the delivery. Billy was back on the haunted houses.

“Hey man, I say we deliver this shit tomorrow and find one of them haunted houses down in San Diego. Some fucking mayhem to celebrate our new delivery gig.”

“Man, you need to drop that shit. We get pinched for thatand we lose our new gig. Stop thinking small,” Mason answered.

“Fuck you, man. I’m just trying to have some fun. We ain’tgonna get popped. Don’t be such a pussy,” Billy countered. This clown’s gotta go.

Billy reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out the ice pick he carried. He popped the cork off the razor tip with his thumb and palmed it.

“I gotta piss,” Mason said, and headed to the side of the trailer. 

Instead of pissing, he grabbed the jack handle from under the spare. I’m finishing this now.

##

Two nights later, Billy parked the RV a block from Fear Factory, a pop-up attraction on the outskirts of LA. As he approached the entrance, he pulled up his hoodie and tugged down the bill of his Padres cap. He paid the entrance fee and went in. 

Billy made his way through the first floor, walking past perverse displays of staged industrial terror—workers being smashed by malfunctioning machines, an assembly line of babies going through a shredder into a pet food canning machine, a chain gang shoveling coal into a raging furnace. 

He followed two girls heading for the second floor. Potential if I can split them up. He heard screams ahead. Somebody popping out ahead…Billy slid his hand into the pocket of his hoodie, fingered the wood handle. Bring it, bitch.

As he approached the stairs, he passed an office with a Dutch door and two hands emerged from the gloom, grabbed Billy by the shoulder, screaming “Get back to work, slacker!” In one swift move, Billy grabbed the man’s collar, drew the icepick from his pocket, buried it to the bolster in the actor’s eye, and withdrew it. The man slumped forward, moaned once, then fell to the floor, dead. 

Billy felt a rush. Fuck, that was beautiful. He wiped the ice pick on the inside of his hoodie and returned it to his pocket.

He mingled into a large group of teens. He stayed with them until they exited. Fuck yeah, I got out.

He laughed as he walked around the block to the parked van. Inside, he popped a beer and did a line of meth off an old CD case. He started the van and clicked on his speaker. He played his Korn playlist on Spotify. An ad for San Diego’s Haunted Zoo sat on the passenger’s seat. Himmler’s meth sat tucked under the back bunk in the duffle.

He pulled away, headed south. As he merged onto the 10 East, Billy smiled. I wonder if coyotes found that pussy yet. He conjured the image of Mason’s pierced eyes blankly pointed to heaven, lying there in that ditch, on the road leading to his brother’s meth lab. He laughed and drove on.

JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, The Dead Mule, Revolution John, Poverty House, and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition.