THE UGLY DEATH OF FERRARI MCGEE

Stephen M. Pierce
​
 
I told God if only one thing could go right today, it had to be this interview.

I had a 78 in Journalism, and only one week till finals. My last chance to pass was to make a damn good story. One with a mini-documentary, some million dollar shots, and a few killer quotes.

That’s why I was in God knows where on Monday morning, tightly clutching my rented film camera two feet from an overturned and rusted wheelbarrow. Emerging with the same exuberance from the secluded clearing in front of me was a rotting shack trapped in a web of vines. The perfect place to hide, or to die quietly.

“I’ll cut ya a deal, son.” Ferrari McGee leaned against the doorway of his shack.

“And what would that be?” I tried not to glower. I wasn’t a fiddler named Johnny, and I didn’t want a deal.

“I can’t let you film me at the still without givin the prosecutor an early Christmas,” he said. “But I got some mash in the cellar ready to go. I’ll fix you up a run a moonshine, we’ll do some samplin, and you can film that.”

“I’m only twenty.” I fiddled with my camera’s lens cap.

“Who cares?” His long gray beard shook as he laughed. “The cops around here’d give ya a shot of whiskey just for lickin their boots. It ain’t about you drinkin. It’s about me makin somethin out of nothin.”

“Fine, just make it quick.”

He smiled and led me into his shack. The space was simple but seemed like it could be warm if it wanted to. A woman with raggedy hair sat in the corner, eating some kinda meat from a Mason jar. His wife, Darla.

“This the journalist?” She asked.

“Yeah, Harry something or other.” Ferrari waved a hand at her. “You keep him entertained. Maybe fix up some lunch if you feel like gettin off your ass.”

“Careful what you say in front of the press.” She eyed me as she licked her knife.

“I’m really nothing special,” I said. “Probably only my professor will read the article.”

“Well, you’ll make sure that professor hears every detail of what you taste,” Ferrari pointed a calloused finger at me. “Savor it like one of them sommelier fellas! And you send me that article before it goes out!”

“Sure, if I have time.”

I sat across from Ferrari’s wife as the old man pushed aside a dishware cabinet and opened a small door in the wall. On the other side, stairs descended into a dark cellar.

“You sit tight,” he said. “I’ll have a run in a couple hours.”

He picked up a metal chain and went down the stairs, then shut the door. The chains rustled as he fastened them round the inside of the door and attached a large lock. I already knew how secretive Ferrari McGee was. Not a soul was allowed at the still while he worked, to protect his secret recipe.

I got bored and stepped outside. The wife followed me to take a smoke. I wished I’d brought my laptop to get to work, but I had to satisfy myself with talking to her. It was nice having a conversation without having to record it.

Time passed slowly. As I got hungry, I realized it had been almost three hours. I joined Ferrari’s wife in the house and asked when he would be done. His wife called through the door, but Ferrari wouldn’t respond. Her wrinkled eyebrows came together.

“You wait here,” she said.

As I watched her go out and grab an axe, I had a feeling I should start filming. She reared back with the blade and slammed it into the trapdoor until enough boards broke free that I could fit through.

I stepped through the hole we’d broken, but my foot slipped right off the wood. I screamed as I went tumbling down the stairs, getting a few splinters in my back and clutching that camera like my life depended on it. It was probably worth more than my life, honesty.

When I got to my feet deep in the cellar, I saw the copper still under the beam of two industrial lights. A flimsy figure lay like a flattened garbage bag at the foot of the stairs. It was Ferrari McGee, an arm stretched out to me and blood gleaming on the back of his head. He wasn’t moving.

This wasn’t the story I came to write.

***

It smelled like a swimming pool, so I got out quickly. The stairs were slicked over with some kinda fluid, but I could climb up by stepping carefully on the edges. At the top, I tore my way through the rest of the door and took deep breaths of the outside air.
 
“I don’t know much about moonshining,” I said. “But something’s not right down there.”
  
“Ferrari had weird methods,” Darla McGee wafted the stench from her face. “But that's why his stuff tasted so good. How is he?”
 
​“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think he’s dead.”
  
Darla’s eyes widened and her jaw went slack.
  
“Really?” she said. “Well, we oughta let the cops know.”
   
I followed her out the door and made two phone calls. One to 911, and another to my best friend’s grandmother. The second call was the one I really had faith in. Last semester, we solved a baffling mystery and lost my best friend--the man that brought us together. Our new friendship mostly came from having no one else left, but I found a kindred spirit in her and a guide to the strange and beautiful region where I studied. The old woman picked up and greeted me with a yawn.
 
“This better be important, Harry,” Mee-Maw said. “My tootsies are real cozy over here.”
  
“I’ll keep it short. You remember the interview with Ferrari?”
  
“That’s today?” Mee-Maw laughed dryly. “He’s a loon, ain’t he?”
  
“Yeah, a dead loon.” I glanced at Darla, who was shoving a rock under the shack door to prop it open. “And I think I’m up in the mountains with his killer.”
  
It wasn’t a complicated whodunnit. I doubted Ferrari had died in an accident. He’d done runs like this countless times, and they’d never ended in a grievous head injury. Darla wasn’t even trying to pretend she cared. Not to mention we were nearly half an hour from downtown on a twisty mountain road. No one else could have gotten to the shack without me noticing. There was only one problem.
  
“The thing is, I’m her alibi,” I whispered. “Ferrari had locked the cellar door with a chain. I wasn’t watching Darla the whole time, but I would have heard her break down the door. I don’t know how she did it.”
   
“Are the police comin?” Mee-Maw asked.
  
“I just called them.”
  
“I doubt they’ll care much. Ferrari was such a thorn in their side, they’ll give whoever killed him a medal. We’ll talk more once you’re done with them.”
  
I thanked her and hung up. Darla was already on the move, heading toward the woods. I had to keep her in my sight.
  
I followed Darla down the hill. She hobbled from one foot to another like a penguin, approaching a pipe that emerged horizontally from the dirt. A metal cover was fastened to the end, and she caught my eye as she stopped in front of it.
   
“You’re lookin at the only other exit from that cellar,” she said.
  
“That some kinda air vent?” I asked.
 
“Yessir. Ferrari fashioned it outta some old oil pipeline, but of course he was worried people could crawl in that way. You gotta open it with this.”
   
She pulled a large brass key from her coat pocket. I had seen it before, hanging from a hook by the cellar door, on my way up the stairs.
 
“And Ferrari kept it in the bunker while he was working, right?”
 
“You got it. And there was no openin that from the inside,” Darla slowly leaned over the vent. “Maybe the killer crawled in without knowin that, and we can catch em right now.”
  
She turned the key in the lock and pulled the heavy cover off the pipe. I turned my phone flashlight on and aimed it down the hole. There was nothing inside but a dirty puddle by the opening, though I could barely make out Ferrari’s still at the other end.
  
 But something came out of that pipe--the smell. I had to step back as I felt my lungs trying to close up. It was the same swimming pool smell, but there was something else in it too--the kinda revolting stench you usually find in the city.
  
“Is that piss?” I coughed.
  
“Probably,” Darla smiled. “We usually keep that vent open, so some animal coulda crawled in.”
  
“Smells like it’s fermented.”
 
“Well, no point cleanin it. Gotta preserve the crime scene, right?”
 
She cackled like life was a jester and she was its king. I held a hand over my nose and watched her start climbing the hill, swathed in her coat that had probably accumulated the whole soil texture triangle. Her hair poked out in raggedy patches like a finch nested in it.
  
“You know, it’s gonna be hard writing about this place,” I said. “You two didn’t exactly keep it looking pretty.”

“Beauty’s just another standard for oppressin folk like us. Live ugly, die ugly, that’s what I always say.” She turned and raised her sharp eyebrows. “Put that in your fuckin story.”

She continued up the hill, putting all her strength in each step, as the sinking sun peaked around the shack. I stopped for a second to raise my camera and take a shot, hoping later I’d see what she saw in the place. On the screen, it looked like something from a museum where some city slicker would lecture me about “the mountain ways.”

Darla was a dangerous woman. I don’t think Ferrari realized that. Worst of all, she was probably right about everything.

***

 
The police came and dragged me and Darla to the station. I waited in an empty room till they finished at the crime scene and got the detectives down to interview me. I didn’t have much to say. I tried to get some info from them, but they didn’t bite. They did tell me they weren’t opening a criminal investigation.
 
“Ferrari was asking for it, building his still down there,” the detective said as he showed me out. “I’ll admit he made some good moonshine, but he wasn’t a genius. He mixed some chemicals he shouldn’t have mixed. If he hadn’t shut that damn vent tube, he’d still be with us.”

I had a feeling they were missing something, but I wasn’t gonna argue. I thanked them, and they sent me on my way.

It was night when I left the station. The old courthouse loomed at the top of the hill, casting the threat of justice across the street. I checked my phone and saw an email from my journalism professor.

“Would be tone-deaf to publish a feature about him after he’s dead,” she wrote. “If the police make an arrest, use your insider knowledge to report on the crime. Otherwise, I’d look for something new.”
 
I mumbled indecent words under my breath. I didn’t have time to look for something new. It could take weeks to schedule even a simple interview, and I only had a week left. The school certainly wouldn’t run special events during finals week, and I had too many exams to run a story anyway. I didn’t have enough info to report on Ferrari’s case either. It sucked that the poor man had died, but he could have picked a more convenient time.
   
I didn’t have much choice now. As bright trucks passed me on the main street, I gave Mee-Maw a call. We had another case to solve.

***
   
The next day, I drove with Mee-Maw bright and early up to the crime scene. With yellow tape crossing all over the windows and door, it looked like it had been condemned, but I could see Darla’s silhouette through the window. Evidently, she hadn’t felt like relocating.
    
As I pulled to a stop, Mee-Maw opened the door and unfolded her walker. She was wrapped in her big brown shawl and wire-frame spectacles like an insect emerging from its chrysalis. Mee-Maw gave a wrinkled smile to Darla as she opened the door and peered through the tape.
  
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Mee-Maw said.
 
“Could say the same to you,” Darla said. “What brings y’all here?”

“My professor sent me back.” I closed the car door. “I guess death sells better.”
  
It was a blatant lie. Our papers were free.
  
“Does that professor know you’re trespassin here?” Darla smiled.
 
“You’re hardly one to talk,” Mee-Maw said. “You’re doin the exact same thing.”

Darla nodded and shrugged a little. She stepped aside as we approached. We pushed the tape away and entered the shack.
 
It still looked roughly the same. A minefield of evidence markers lay on the ground, but Darla easily drifted between them from the bed to the pantry to the sink and even to the toilet. The cellar was covered in even more tape but with enough room to squeeze through.
 
“What was it like livin with the great Ferrari McGee?” Mee-Maw asked.
  
“He really wasn’t that great,” Darla sipped coffee from a tin cup. “He studied with Popcorn Sutton but learned almost nothing. You wanna know the big secret to Ferrari’s recipe?”
 
“If you’re sharin.”
 
​“Store-brand chili powder.”
  
I laughed. “Regular Captain Cook, huh?”
  
“But he was such a genius.” Darla waved a hand in front of her face. “Such a genius that I had to entertain guests all the time while he did who knows what down in that cellar. I won’t lie, his stuff was good, but was it worth shuttin me outta his life for nearly three hours a day? Not during the mountain winters.”
  
“Forgive me for bein brash,” Mee-Maw said. “But sounds like you’re quite pleased he died.”
  
“Take a look downstairs before you throw around accusations.”
   
We didn’t need further prompting. I linked arms with Mee-Maw and helped her down the stairs. They were less slick now, thankfully, and before long we were bathed in the electric light reflecting off the copper still.
 
Ferrari’s body was gone, but its outline was traced on the floor with a large bloodstain over the head. A few evidence markers were scattered around, and three large fans were set up by the lights and turning away. The place smelled a lot better now.
  
I felt a bit weird stepping into an active crime scene, but the threat of a failing grade can make students do strange things.
  
I raised my camera and took a shot of the still. It was one big jug connected to two smaller kegs with copper tubes. One end was placed over a furnace, and the other had a spout for the moonshine and a tube for the wastewater. I didn’t know what all the kegs were for, but I knew the whole thing distilled the good stuff from the fermented mash.
    
Four large jugs sat near the spout. One was filled about to the brim with a rich liquid the same copper as the still.
 
“So I guess he finished his last run,” I knelt down to take a picture of the liquid.
  
“Not quite,” Mee-Maw looked over my shoulder. “You’ll go blind if you drink that.”
  
“Huh?”
 
I looked at her. She gave me a warning glare in the light like a modern-day Cassandra.
 
“You don’t know much about moonshinin, do ya?” she said. “Once you’re done at the still, you’ll end up with four liquids. One is the heart of the brew, what you can drink. The other three either taste bad or could give you a killer hangover.”
  
“So this is all those parts mixed together?” I looked at the filled jug.
   
“What you got there is basically rocket fuel,” she said. “Only a stupid moonshiner would fix that up, and that ain’t Ferrari. I’ll tell you what that means.”
   
She cast a hand around the cellar.
  
“You said Ferrari already had the fermented mash ready, so to finish the run, he had to strain out the mash water and distill it. He must have got the mash water in the still, or those jars would be empty. But since only one was full, he never got the chance to separate out the deadly foreshots.”
  
“And what does that mean?”
 
“It means he was killed during the distillin process. Not right after he came down, and certainly not after you found the body.”
  
“So he died while he was in the cellar…despite every entrance being locked from the inside?” I got to my feet and shook my head.
  
“Assumin the police know their shine, they woulda realized that. Makes sense they chalked it up to an accident.”
   
I was impressed she’d worked all that out from a few jugs. I was still learning things about the local community from her that I couldn’t learn on campus.
  
​The rest of the cellar was pretty sparse. A wooden shelf on one wall held a big mash pot and a small pot covered in cheesecloth for straining. The ventilation tube burrowed through one wall; I could see trees on the other side. Some ammonia cleaning supplies and ingredients were piled under the stairs, and a jug of bleach lay in the corner of the room.
  
I approached a bucket that was tipped onto the ground. I righted it and peered through the ragged hole cut in the lid. Traces of a smelly liquid swirled in the bottom.
  
“I reckon that’s Ferrari’s piss bucket,” Mee-Maw said.
  
I dropped it with a clatter and stood up, pinching my nose.
 
“Really now?”
     “There’s no other bathroom in here, and Lord knows he was drinkin like a horse.”
     A cooler under the stairs was stuffed with PBR by the can and Cheerwine by the bottle. Empty containers of each were scattered nearby.
  
“Get a good look,” Mee-Maw said. “It may be the key to this whole thing.”
 
“The piss bucket?” I raised my eyebrow at her. “Sorry if I don’t believe you.”
   
“No matter. I think I’ve seen everything we need here. Help me back up these stairs.”
 
I gave the room one last look and gave Mee-Maw my shoulder for support. We took the stairs one worn step at a time.
  
“So do you know how she did it?” I whispered.
  
“I know how he died,” Mee-Maw said. “But not why he died.”

“Seems like Darla had plenty of reason to want him dead.”
   
“I don’t mean motive. What we’re lookin for will be upstairs.”
  
Once we reached the top landing, the remains of the door swung open. Darla stood there with her arms crossed, aiming her stalwart glare through the lines of police tape.
 
“Y’all satisfied?”
   
“Mostly,” Mee-Maw nodded. “We’d like to take a quick peek round the rest of the house, if you don’t mind.”
  
“Well bad news--I do. That cellar was Ferrari’s domain, but the rest of the shack’s mine. I get to choose who wanders around, and I’ve decided that you two won’t.”
  
“You’re not even supposed to be here,” I shouted. “You want us to tell the police you’re still in the house?”
  
“You think I care? They can’t touch me where I’m goin,” Her eyes took a dark shade. “But you got a whole college career ahead of you. I’d be glad to tell the administrators you were here.”
  
My journalism professor would probably give me an instant pass if I got arrested for the sake of the truth, but the disciplinary committee might not see it that way. I doubted trespassing would mean an expulsion, but it was best to be careful.
  
“We should probably go, Mee-Maw,” I sighed. “She’s probably got a shotgun in there somewhere.”
   
“Fair enough,” Mee-Maw nodded. “Shame I left mine at the nursing home.”
   
Darla stepped aside, nodded her head toward the door, and practically shoved us out, barely giving Mee-Maw time to grab her walker. Once we were outside, she held the door open and watched with hawk eyes.
 
“I know what you’re up to,” she said. “Tryin to pin this on me--even though Harry was watchin me the whole time Ferrari was down there.”
  
“You were out of my sight a couple times,” I said.
 
“Yeah? And how’d I get through that door? And don’t say the vent--even if I had the key, I would have broke my back crawlin in that way.”
  
“The answer’s simple, Darla,” Mee-Maw said. “You killed him without stepping foot in the cellar.”
 
Darla looked aside, her expression boiling.
  
“I wonder how you deal with it, Mee-Maw. Your whole family gone, and now your grandson…Everyone forgettin ya. No one knows how it used to be around here.”
 
“The years get a bit fuzzy for me too,” Mee-Maw said. “But I remember when you and Ferrari got married. Your big white dress in that barn, all the moonshine. I’ve forgotten the after-party--but we all did, didn’t we?”
 
Darla laughed--not a cackle, but the giggle of a young girl.
 
“Weren’t those the times? I hate seein how it turned out. All the times Ferrari pissed me off, and now you’re callin me a murderer. What the hell happened?”
 
“I think you’re still livin in the past,” Mee-Maw said. “Look around you. We’ve got people like Harry in the mountains. Future biologists and doctors. People from France, Nigeria, Japan even. But you stayed up here and let an old man run your life.”
   
I could see something new in the rise and fall of Darla’s shoulders: exhaustion. She looked at Mee-Maw one last time and slammed the door.

***
   
It was raining. I had my brights on as I weaved down the road, ever mindful of the steep drop through the trees to my right.
  
“So what now?” I said. “You think you have enough to go to the police?”
   
“Not likely. I’m missin the last thing that makes it all fit. They won’t buy my story yet.”
   
She leaned against the door, gazing out the rain-soaked window.
 
“If only I’d been there when the murder happened,” she said. “I bet I could figure it all out. Darla had plenty of time to clean up that house, so that’s the moment that mattered.”
  
My music faded out for a bit as I got a text. I hoped it was my professor agreeing to give me an extension. That thought finally jogged my memory, and I pulled over right when the music faded back in.
  
“I don’t think this is our stop, Harry,” Mee-Maw said.
  
I was already pulling out my camera and scrolling through my photos to the day of the interview. I handed it to Mee-Maw.
   
“See if what you need’s in there.”
 
Her eyes widened. She grabbed the camera and flipped slowly through the pictures, only stopping a few times.

First, a picture of Ferrari heading for the cellar while Darla watched. A big pitcher of iced sweet tea was behind her, which I don’t recall having seen since.
  
Second, the shot I took of Darla busting through the door. It was a nice action shot, showing the wood splintering apart. A towel lay under the door, pushed into the opening.
  
She put down the camera and turned to me.
  
“Harry, turn this car around!”
  
I whipped around the driveway and careened back up the slope, heading for Darla’s shack.

***
  
The police were already on the way. We just had to keep Darla busy before they arrived.
  
When we pulled up to the shack, all the lights were off. For a moment, we thought she’d run off, but then we saw her face in the window, fixing us with a wrinkled scowl. We climbed out of the car and walked up to the door, noticing a towel wrapped up and pressed into the frame.
 
When I opened the door, I was hit with another stench--this one unmistakeable. It was the smell of carbon dioxide.
 
“Jesus,” Darla leaned against the doorframe in her nightgown. “Could you at least let a woman die in peace?”
  
I noticed all the doors were blocked up, and the gas was on in the fireplace. I pushed past her to turn it off.
  
“Really, Darla?” Mee-Maw asked. “This how you wanna go?”
  
“I could tell y’all were fixin to figure it out. I’ve lived a long life, and I’m not gonna spend the tail of it in jail.”
  
“Sorry, but you won’t be so lucky. You ain’t no Popcorn Sutton. You ain’t even a Ferrari McGee. You’re a murderer, plain and simple. And now, we’re gonna make you relive your whole stupid plot.”
  
“If you think you got me, then no use waitin around. Out with it! How’d I get into the cellar?”
  
I leaned against the counter, intent on watching. Mee-Maw and Darla faced each other in the middle of the room, stalwart as stone soldiers stuck in an endless war.
  
“Obviously, you never got into the cellar,” Mee-Maw said. “You killed him anyway, and the key was in that smell. Harry, what do you think?”
  
I flinched as she turned to me.
  
“What? Uhh, you mean what I smelled when I fell down there?”
  
“Yeah. Describe it for us.”
  
“Well, it made my throat burn, and it smelled a bit like a swimming pool…I guess thinking now, it reminded me of chlorine.”
 
“Exactly. More specifically, it was chloramine gas,” she turned to Darla. “Not far removed from chlorine gas, which they used in World War II. It’s deadly in large quantities, but I don’t need to tell you that.
   
“When we came back, the police had set up fans to blow it all out. Though by then, most of it had dissipated, since you made a point to open the ventilation tube right after Ferrari died and prop the front door open.”
   
“Well, ain’t you brilliant,” Darla said. “You figured out what the police already did. But they called Ferrari’s death an accident. Not murder.”
  
“And I wouldn’t blame them. Most poisonings by chloramine gas are accidents. You know how you make chloramines, Harry?”
   
The question jogged a memory somewhere deep in my brain.
 
“You mix bleach and ammonia, right?”
   
“Exactly.”
   
I remembered when I was first moving into my dorm, I brought a bottle of bleach and my roommate happened to bring a cleaner with ammonia. My mom immediately took the bottle back, saying if we accidentally mixed those two it could kill us.
 
“And yes,” Mee-Maw continued. “Ferrari had both bleach and ammonia cleaners in that basement. But there’s actually a more common substance with traces of ammonia in it. You know what it is? Good old-fashioned piss.”
  
Darla laughed. “So the old man cleaned up piss with bleach and it killed him. How’s that my fault?”
   
“Ferrari wasn’t that stupid,” Mee-Maw said. “It was the other way around. The bleach didn’t go into the piss. The piss went into the bleach.
  
“You’ll remember when Ferrari was makin shine, he never used the bathroom upstairs. He had a bucket he went into. Kinda disgustin, but the artist had his ways. Sometimes he’d even leave the bucket there until it filled before pourin it out, right?”

“When I say it was tough to live with him,” Darla smiled. “I’m referrin to shit like that.”
“So while he was down there,” Mee-Maw said. “Drinkin his beers and making his product, he eventually had to go, and he didn’t look into the bucket first. Why would he? He could barely see through the lid anyway.
  
“Last time Ferrari left the house, you put your plan in action. All you had to do was grab that bucket, dump the piss somewhere, and rinse it out. Sounds like you dumped it at the other end of the ventilation tube, judgin by what Harry found there. Then you poured in the same amount of bleach and put it downstairs.
  
“When Ferrari relieved himself, he mighta seen the piss starting to foam up. He kicked the bucket aside, but that didn’t stop the gas. He probably didn’t understand what happened, but he knew it was bad.”
  
“But what stopped him from gettin out?” Darla pointed at the cellar door. “The door was only locked from his side. No way he woulda stayed down there and waited to die.”
 
“That was what I struggled with,” Mee-Maw said. “It was a cunning plan, but there was no guarantee it would kill him. You had to take steps to make sure he stayed down there with the gas. I think Harry knows somethin about that.”
  
I glanced down at my camera.
  
“Well, thinking back, you had put towels around the door like you did now,” I said. “That would have kept the gas in. And I bet Ferrari couldn’t get up the stairs for the same reason I couldn’t get down.”

“When we were lookin at Harry’s pictures, we noticed a pitcher of iced tea had disappeared from the counter after the murder,” Mee-Maw said. “You poured that down the stairs through the gap in the door frame, making them slick enough that Ferrari slipped on the way up. If the resulting collision with the floor didn’t kill him, then lying down there in the gas sure did.

“Remember, this wasn’t a young man you killed. Ferrari had old joints and weak lungs. A fall that Harry brushed off woulda done him in.”

Darla clenched her fists and closed her eyes. Then she collapsed in front of the table, letting out a ragged breath and leaning over the surface.

“Real great theory there. Can you prove it?”

Mee-Maw paused and blinked a few times.

“Well, there’s the photos, and the fact that Ferrari’s cleaning supplies are still on the rack. Doesn’t make sense if he died accidentally.”

“That’s all circumstantial,” Darla said. “I know you want a confession--some pretty words to tug at your heartstrings. You ain’t gettin that, but I can give ya one thing.”

She took a flask from her pocket, took one last swig, and slammed it on the table. She nodded to me.
“The last of Ferrari’s moonshine. He woulda wanted you to have it.”

I watched her, curled up by the table. She seemed a bit pathetic now, offering this last drink to a random guest. I wondered where her children were. Probably gone far away.

I took a drink of the moonshine. I’d never had liquor before. I keeled over and coughed like there were chloramines in my lungs, my face twisted in disgust. Darla seemed about to laugh herself to death, doubled over the table.

“How was that?” she asked.

I wrinkled my nose. “I could taste the chili powder.”

“You always could with Ferrari,” she said. “Such a stupid bastard.”

She was still laughing, even as the police sirens got closer and I saw red and blue lights outside the shack’s windows. Even when the handcuffs went around her weathered wrists and she left the shack for the last time.

***
 
I had a free evening, my computer, tunes playing, and a flask of moonshine on the desk.
  
I stared at the headline I’d written: “The Ugly Lives of Ferrari and Darla McGee.”
  
It was going well. It was too early to report on details of the investigation beyond Darla’s arrest, but having the moonshine made it easier to memorialize Ferrari. The drink was starting to grow on me. Probably a bad sign.
  
I still needed a few quotes. I pulled out my phone and opened the voice memo app. I had a few recordings of Ferrari here, and I started to play one.
   
The silky quality of his voice struck me first, faintly muted like it was coming through cotton. He spoke with so much pride that it tore me up thinking about how I last saw him.
  
“Funny story about my name,” he had said. “Obviously my parents didn’t christen me Ferrari. That came much later. I was workin my first job, at some chain restaurant. Mighta been a Cracker Barrel. Hell if I remember. Times were hard as ever back then. One a the waiters named Jimmy, his daughter had the flu, and medicine prices were on the rise. You can probably guess what happened to her.
   
“So here we are mournin, and the store’s owner turns up--some Yank drivin his fancy new Ferrari. Cause heaven forbid he spare a few dollars on our wages. He gotta shell out on his shiny cars.
   
“So I had a bat in my car for safe-keeping. While he was in there checkin the joint, I smashed in the headlights. I keyed some well-chosen expletives in the side, let the air outta the tires. Fucked the thing right up. That was my first offense--my introduction to the system.
   
“I could talk ya ear off about the waste of time cars are. I’d rather have an ugly one that gets me where I need to go than those fancy ones built for the garage. But there’s a more important story there.”
   
“And what would that be?” my voice asked.
  
“There’s two kinds a laws,” Ferrari said. “Those made for everyone, and those made for the folks in charge. I don’t regret bustin that car. I only hate that the laws for our country and the laws for humans still ain’t the same. That’s why I made my moonshine. I’d rather live on the side of humanity than the side of the law.
   
“Because decency ain’t always decent to folks. What’s pretty is almost never good. So listen, young man, I want you to live the life that’s right for you, not the one that looks good on a resume.”
   
The recording went quiet for a second. I took a shot of moonshine and kept it down this time.
   
“And if I’m fixin to die soon,” Ferrari said. “I hope to high heaven it’s ugly.”


Stephen Pierce is a technical writer living in Asheville, NC, who previously served as head editor of his university’s undergraduate literary magazine The Nomad, where he also studied journalism. In addition to publications in The Nomad, his work has appeared in Bone Parade, Bridge, Glass Mountain, and Sundown, a Gordon Lightfoot Anthology. He blogs about mystery fiction at https://stephenmpierce.wordpress.com/.