Theodore Jerome Cohen Wins Flash Fiction Challenge

Theodore Jerome Cohen is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In the case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:

 

basin NH flash fiction prompt copyright KS Brooks
Photo copyright K. S. Brooks. Do not use without attribution.

Chute
by Theodore Jerome Cohen

Something was wrong. Señor Alcaino’s face went ashen. Stalling the cartel’s foot soldiers had been meant as a distraction . . . to give his men in a trailing limousine time to come to the pier and provide backup for the meeting, just in case a little persuasion was needed to force the cartel to accept his counteroffer. But Alcaino knew that if there was just one slipup, that even if the tiniest of things went wrong, he was a dead man.

Dammit! Where are they? He did not need to be reminded of what had happened in Huasco years earlier.

For more than three years, the Izurieta brothers had run a relatively small gambling, drug, and prostitution ring—part of a nationwide cartel—in the port city of Huasco. During that time, the brothers had been taking less than one-half of one percent off the top of their all-cash operation and using it for their personal expenses. This would have been almost impossible for the cartel to detect. However, one of cartel’s accountants, while visiting the local bank in Huasco, was told that the Izurieta brothers had a reputation for throwing money around town.

Within a week, their corpses, from which the hands had been severed, washed up on the banks of the Huasco River, just below the chute at Huasco Bajo. The cartel’s enforcers easily could have dumped the bodies in the ocean. But they wanted to send a message: “If you touch our money, you die.”

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