Present time...

"Alright, man, you ready?"

Steven "Psycho Steve" Troublefield — a thirty-one year old, fair-skinned, dark-haired con-artist with all the looks of a Calvin Klein model, sans tattoos — drummed his hands on the steering wheel of his late father's 1969 red Camaro. He let out a howl of excitement, his characteristically deep voice delving even further down in pitch, so much that he could imagine making Vincent Price flinch. There was a faint jitter in his bones, but he barely noticed it. He was too hopped up on meth to notice anything, really. Including the wide-eyed, borderline terrified expression of his partner-in-crime, — literally — Ricardo "Slick Ricky" Hernandez.

Steve reached over the passenger side and slapped the back of his hand against the thin, Hispanic man's chest. Steve had a wolfish grin, and his eyes were blazing. "Come on, Slick, get excited!"

"About what?" Ricky panted. He was shaking and sweating so hard that he thought, for a moment, he was about to have a seizure. "We're about to rob this place with nothin' but little fuckin' mouse guns and... and I swear to God there was something else in that meth, dude. I can't stop twitching!"

Psycho Steve laughed with a maniacal edge to his tone. He sounded menacing in his amusement, almost like what one would expect a serial killer to sound like. Steve had beaten the shit out of plenty of people, but at least, to his credit, he never killed any of them. Then again, it was never too late to start.

The last time Steve had gotten into a real knock-down, drag-out rumble was the night before his release from prison six months ago. His opponent was a larger-than-life black man who many of the inmates referred to simply as Bruiser. Bruiser never talked much, and no one really knew why he was given his life sentence, but there had been a plethora of variations in circulation to the rumor that he murdered an entire, armed street gang with his bare hands, and when the police arrived, Bruiser was covered in blood, sitting on the stack of bodies with a smile as wide as the pacific rim. Steve thought it was absolute, pure, unadulterated bullshit, and with an ego as big as Steve's, he wanted to prove how wrong everyone was. That day, on the shift of an older security guard that slept for most of the time, Steve lunged at the idle Bruiser with a metal meal tray. Steve busted Bruiser over the head, and from then on, it was a bloodbath. There was no clear winner by the time a few other inmates pulled them apart, but Steve walked away with a broken arm, several broken ribs, a cracked collar bone, and a punctured lung. As he was carried to the infirmary, he let out a bloodied laugh as hellish as a patient with psychosis. As far as he was concerned, he had proved his point; if Bruiser was really a cold-blooded killer, Steve would have been dead.

It was that kind of behavior that branded him with the nickname Psycho Steve in high school... and the fact that, in his sophomore year, he stole the principal's car and tried to run her over with it.

"Plus, I ain't trying to do prison time," Ricky wailed, his gaunt face slick with sweat. His whole life he had been known for his perspiration, of which he denoted to a 'glands condition.' That so-called condition marked him with the moniker Slick Ricky — he, however, preferred to believe that the name derived from his artful ability of evading the police. "After what we did to that girl, I've been nervous as hell. I can't even take a shit without looking over my shoulder. I'm hearing police sirens in the back of my head right now!"

That aforementioned "girl" had been a beautiful black woman that sported a designer pantsuit at the bank three days ago. Steve was trying to extract the last few dollars out of his account, arguing back and forth with the teller about something pertaining to insufficient funds, when he saw the woman sashay into the bank. Any other day he might have tried to get her number, but when he overheard her withdrawing a little over a thousand dollars from her account, the beginnings of a plot developed. As she left the bank, Steve flipped the bird to his teller, and followed behind the woman. She got into a nearly brand new VW Bug, and spend off down the street. It required a lot of bobbing and weaving through traffic, and running a few red lights, but he followed her all the way back to a fairly nice house. Steve jotted down the address for memory's sake, picked up a tweaking Ricky and a couple of ski masks, and they robbed the beautiful woman blind. It was a shame that they had to beat her up as horribly as they did, but she would not shut up. She had some fight in her. That was a trait that Steve normally liked in a woman, but considering the circumstances, he beat her until he damn near crushed her windpipe. She fell unconscious after that. Steve took off through the house like a tornado, raiding her purse for the money, snatching every valuable thing he could from the house, and destroying what had little to no value. All the while, Ricky stood over her with an expression of shock so bottomless and cold that it felt like a glacier. Despite his own participation in the beating, he hoped she would wake up on the mortal side of life.

"Prison time might do you some good." There was a subtle mockery to Steve's words. "Toughin' you up some."

"I'm gonna piss myself just thinkin' about it!" Ricky practically shouted, dragging his nails down his arms aggressively. "I can't stop itching, dude. There's something in that meth, I'm tellin' you!"

"My foot's gonna be up your ass in a minute if you don't get your shit together," Steve growled. "You know why we have to do this — to keep our asses above ground instead of six feet under it."

"C'mon, man," Ricky whined. His voice rose an octave. "Can't we just ask Mr. Sweet for a little more time?"

Mr. Sweet's name was not actually Mr. Sweet. In fact, no one other than the man's own mother knew his given name, and there were rumors that he had killed her just for speaking it. The details of the tall, bald, black man's name were more enigmatic than how he rose to prominence as the kingpin of the biggest drug syndicate in the Midwest. Accordingly, a more accurate name for him would have been Mr. Sour, for he was what some would call an acquired taste, and even after that he was still liable to kick you in the teeth and rip out the jugulars of every last one of your family members before pissing on everything you ever loved. Especially if you owed him money. And, boy, did Psycho Steve and Slick Ricky owe him a lot of money.

Steve's jaw fell unhinged. It took him a moment to recover, and when he did, he balled up his fist as tight as he could, and punched Ricky across the face. Not hard enough to break anything, but certainly hard enough to leave a nice, purple bruise there for awhile.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" Steve shouted. "How about we just ask Satan not to stab us in the eyes with his fuckin' pitchfork after Mr. Sweet sends us straight to Hell!"

Ricky held his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, Steve could make out a pained expression.

"This is all your fuckin' fault, anyway!" Steve added, punching the dashboard so hard that he cracked it. "If you had done your goddamn research like I asked you to, and made sure there were no competing drug dealers around, then we wouldn't have started selling dope in the territory of the biggest fuckin' kingpin in the tristate area, and we wouldn't have gotten our asses beat by his henchmen, and we wouldn't owe him five thousand dollars for stealing his business, and we wouldn't have to rob shit to get the money so he doesn't fuckin' KILL US!"

Ricky looked like he was on the verge of crying red, hot tears. "Why can't we just go sell some more dope and give him the money we make off of that?" he muttered.

Steve laughed like a lunatic. "Where the hell have you been for the past week, asshole? Mexico?! 'Cause, the last time I checked, Mr. Sweet had three of his boys watching our apartment to make sure that we're not slingin' anymore dope! And to make matters worse, all of our lab equipment is in there, so it's not like we could covertly move our entire operation without Mr. Sweet noticing, dumb ass!"

"All right, man," Ricky's voice rose, "you don't have to bring Mexico into it. For your information, Mexico is a real nice place!"

Steve smirked. "Yeah, if a shit-load of spics don't comin' runnin' out of their 'hood to jack your tires and leave your shit sittin' on bricks."

"HEY!" Ricky shouted. "You a fuckin' racist now, gringo?"

Steve laughed loudly again. This time he sounded like a normal person having a lively conversation, rather than a serial killer after a dismemberment. "There's the little Ricky that I grew up with. I thought you lost your cojones when I went to prison. At least you still have one of 'em."

"Shut up," Ricky grumbled, dragging the back of his hand across his damp forehead. He shook his hand off; little specks of sweat clung to the passenger-side window.

Steve slipped his ski mask on. His light brown, cooper-flecked irises stood out brightly in contrast to the black of the mask until he took another hit of the pipe he and Ricky had been passing back and forth for the past thirty minutes. His irises became swallowed up by the grim darkness of his pupils. Only a thin ring of the cooper was left visible.

Ricky followed suit. The mask clung to his bronze skin uncomfortably; the momentum of his perspiration nearly doubled.

"Ready now?" Steve asked.

Ricky shook his head, but Steve did not notice. His dilated pupils were trained across the street, on the pawn shop that sat nestled between Burman's Bar, the highlight of Steve's memories as a teen with a fake ID, and the old strip joint, Lucky's, that Steve also seemed to have a fondness for until the place was shot up and never reopened. The pawn shop, Press Play Pawn and Loan, was a withering anthill of brick and plate-glass between the much taller buildings on either side. Steve had been scoping out the dingy little shop for awhile. It was nowhere near as risky as robbing a bank, and, as far as he could tell, only one person worked there; the old, crooked-body owner. Steve had a good feeling that they could jack the register, the sizable collection of jewelry, and the guns, and make a swift getaway all before that old owner could even pick himself up off the floor.

"Oh, shit," Ricky hissed. "That's gonna be a problem."

Steve's head snapped left. Up the sidewalk swaggered an intimidatingly large dark-skinned man with a heavy duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He walked with a purpose — a purpose that seemed to shout that he could snap someone's neck with one hand. He looked about as easily swayed as a goddamn rhinoceros. And, as Steve and Ricky's luck would have it, the man entered Press Play Pawn and Loan.

Steve recalled that old saying about how often lightening strikes in a single place, and he thought it was bullshit. Lightening had struck him on multiple occasions. He could not catch a break. It all seemed to start with his prison sentence on a drug charge. For the past ten years of his life he had been dabbling in the drug trade, and the day that he decided to leave the business, is the day his apartment got raided and he was arrested for possession of illegal substances. Oh, the irony. Since that day two years ago, and his subsequent imprisonment, everything spiraled.

"What the fuck are we gonna do now?" Ricky shouted. "We didn't plan on takin' any hostages, Steve! Especially anyone that looked like that guy!"

Steve loaded his gun with a threatening series of clanks. "Plans change," he spoke lowly.

"Ay dios mío." Ricky clutched the gold cross hanging from his neck. "Please, Jesus, don't let me go to prison."

Steve rolled his eyes.

"I'm so sorry, God," Ricky continues, rolling the cross between his sweaty palms. "I know I should go to church more. I'm gonna start, I swear."

"God doesn't exist," Steve cackled, and then he paused. He looked thoughtful for a moment, until that predatory grin twisted his expression. "Or maybe He does and He just hates me."

Ricky went slack-jawed before he screwed his face up and growled. "I'm surprised you haven't burst into flames yet!"

"I almost did, once," Steve smirked. "It was after I got done fuckin' a hooker in the confessional."

Ricky's eyes nearly projectiled out of his skull.

Steve laughed loudly as he snatched a large canvas bag out of the back seat and all but jumped out of the Camaro. Ricky was not too far behind, though, at a much clumsier pace.

As Steve's hand reached for the entrance of Press Play Pawn and Loan, Ricky shrieked.

"What the hell?" Steve snapped, crouching out of the view of Press Play's window front.

Behind him, Ricky was plastered against the building, his eyes as wide as his sockets would allow. Steve could almost see the bronze drain from his complexion. Ricky looked on the verge of shitting his pants.

"D-Did you see that shit?" Ricky stuttered, holding out a shaking finger across the street.

Steve scoffed. "The only thing I see is a idiot."

"I swear to God," Ricky trembled, hints of his Mexican accent present in his voice, "I just saw a garden gnome run across the street. I told you there was somethin' in that meth, man! I'm tweakin'!"

Steve grabbed Ricky by the shoulders and shook him harshly. "Get your fuckin' shit together, or I will knock your ass out, rob this bitch, and you leave you here to get arrested!"

A flicker of realization seemed to dawn on Ricky. He nodded his head vigorously. Once Steve released his shoulders, he slapped himself. Not once, but three times.

"Okay, I'm ready," Ricky said.

Steve placed his large, gloved hand on the door of Press Play. In his other hand, he adjusted his grip on the gun, his finger resting over the trigger. He let out three heavy breaths. Then, in a flash as quick as the proverbial lightening that seemed to terrorize Steve's life, the masked, drug-fueled duo burst throw the shop's doors. Like a hurricane, they took out stacks of worthless junk that sat near the door, and rammed into the first aisle of abandoned crap, scattering the 'merchandise' across the matted carpet in a shoddy collage.

"Put your fuckin' hands were we can see 'em, Blacky!" Steve shouted at the intimidating man with the duffel bag.

Much to his surprise, the man lifted his hands off the glass case of jewelry. His duffel bag dropped to the floor with a loud thud.

"You do the same fuckin' thing, Comb-Over!" Steve added, waving his gun wildly in the air towards the pale, scraggly shop owner. Steve had no intent of using the gun, but the more scared-shitless he could make them, the less of a chance there was of them becoming defensive.

"Oh, Jesus Christ, we're gonna get shot!" the owner screamed in a pitch reminiscent of a little girl with pig-tails.

As Steve sized up the surrendering men, his wolfish grin returned. "This will be easier than I thought."