The Days & Doings of Richard Christmas #23
How Richard Christmas Earned the Nickname Dicky Shitmas
Nobody in the game called Richard Christmas by his name to his face. His nickname, or nom de guerre, I suppose, being a cold-blooded killer, was Dicky Shitmas. Not like Dicky Christmas. More like Shitty Christmas.
Here’s how.
Dicky had killed Casino Joe at the top of Joe’s stairs in the evening hours of Christmas 1982. Casino Joe did that thing a lot of Mafioso’s did, where they “gave back” to the very came community they terrorized and stole from. Some bald-headed guy in Toronto named Honest Ed tried the same thing. “Have a turkey. I’m not from hell or evil or anything.”
Casino Joe’s front door was wide open, and resting on a glass table in the foyer was an enormous bowl of candy, cookies, cheese, salami, and other meats. There was even a fully-cooked turkey. It didn’t seem to occur to Joe that people were far too afraid of him to enter his home and take food with them, but the door was left open anyway.
Dicky Shitmas quietly entered the degenerate gambler’s house, then tip-toed upstairs. But when he got to the top of the stairs, Casino Joe’s bulldog was waiting for him. Without a sound, narry a bark nor bellow, the dog languidly latched his great jaws onto Dicky’s right thigh.
Falling to his unencumbered knee, Dicky managed to stifle a scream but was unable to stop himself from aiming his .45 Magnum at the dog’s head and pulling the trigger, which brought Casino Joe running.
The dog fell dead at Dicky’s feet, its head exploded into pieces – a reasonably accurate instance of Jackson Pollock mimicry – bones and brain and bits of viscera still sliding down the yellow wallpaper when Casino Joe barged through his bedroom door, shotgun poised at head level where he assumed the intruder’s head would be, and probably would’ve been had Dicky not gone to one knee.
Casino Joe’s forward momentum was propelling him across the ten-foot space between his bedroom doorway and the top of the stairs, a ten-foot spot rather densely populated by a newly departed dog and an assassin. Joe lowered his gun, but slipped through his own dead dog’s guts, which was a good thing, cuz he was about to kill Dicky when Dicky aimed up and took his shot.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment of marksmanship. The bullet entered the underside of Casino Joe’s jaw. It destroyed his sinuses, then sliced through his brain like a hot knife through butter.
Casino Joe’s arms and legs turned instantly limp, like flailing noodles. It took less than half a second for Dicky to see that Casino Joe was going to take a tumble down his stairs anyway, so he stuck his leg out and tripped the dead-or-dying man, who dropped his shotgun, and started dead-walking down the stairs. Like a zombie.
On the third stairs Joe began to fall to his knees, but his crotch caught on his own shotgun, which went off without warning (Dicky caught the bright muzzle flash and ducked).
Casino Joe’s penis and testicles were severed entirely from the body, along with Joe’s lower intestines and bowels (along with their odious contents), which rocketed upward to the ceiling in a brown-and-red blur, connected in another mini-Pollock, at which point they began to rain down on Dicky.
He shut his eyes until the shit storm was over, opening them just in time to catch Casino Joe’s hilariously bouncing body, taking one step at a time, dancing like a scarecrow on meth or those puppets in Team America, stagger out the front door, his head catching the frame which halted the corpse’s momentum just enough for the rest of its guts and organs to come spilling out, just as a dozen Christmas carollers arrived at his doorstep, singing “ Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.”
And that is how Richard Christmas got the nickname “Dicky Shitmas.” He’d gone and turned Christmas into Shitmas. He couldn’t understand why the carollers were so upset. They were only covered in blood and viscera. He was covered in so much more viscera, shit, piss and blood.
“Oh my god!” screamed a red-faced woman, the chaperone or church lady or whatever.
Dicky knew enough about crime to know that there are two types of criminals. Those who get away with it, and those who leave witnesses.
But he also knew that kids made lousy examples of the latter. They remembered things wrong, exaggerated features, made men sound like robots and women like witches. They got the colors of cars wrong. Besides, he was no kid killer.
Which is why, running down the stairs he yelled “POLICE!”, so that the chaperone would calm down and turn, and just as her face began to relax out of its squint of suspicion, Dicky squeezed the trigger of his Magnum yet again and, for the second time in ten seconds, shot someone in the head and watched them die.
The kids screamed and ran away and he let them.
Bounding through the front door, he stepped on what was left of Casino Joe’s head, through the fog-like stench of shit, and emptied a few more rounds into the woman’s head, just to be sure. She’d seen his face, sure as shit she had. So had the kids, but Dicky had morals. He wasn’t going to shoot twenty unarmed children just because they saw him wack a dude.
Anyway, all that had happened 12 years ago, in ’71. It was ’83 now and Dicky hadn’t been seen since 1981.
He’s probably dead now. Or something worse.
The Complete Novels of Richard Christmas (on sale at your local thing! probably)
Ghosts of the Great Highway
I Killed A Man Who Looks Like You
Prairie My Heart