Sweet Benny and the Sanchez Penitentiary Band was first published in Thuglit Presents: hardcore hardboiled (2008).

It’s a Thursday night and Sue’s is packed. Old buddies are trading dirty stories over pitchers at the top of their lungs and the barbacks are earning their tips—been shaking out fruity martinis since eight-thirty. The dance floor, the dark corner where the tables are pushed back, is crowded with necking kids and single girls in miniskirts sending out the signal. Jukebox hasn’t worked since I got here in ‘72, so half the floor is taken up by some college band murdering the memory of a blues musician nobody ever gave a fuck about.
It didn’t used to be like this; one time Sue’s was a whiskey and beer hole. If you were on the other side of my bar, it was a while since you had friends to drink with. I was just another one of those bums when Big Earl died and left me the place in ‘86. He was a professional alcoholic, so I guess you could say he died on duty, which is as honorable a thing as a man could hope for. He always used to say that sometimes in life it’s hard for a man to hold his head up and keep on walking, and if he’s walking through El Paso, he stops at Sue’s for a drink. Everyone in Sue’s had a story about those times; it was that time for me when I started working here, and it was that way until just a few months ago. A few months ago I never knew margaritas came in strawberry, and Thursday night was slower than the last highway out of Hanoi. But all that changed when I met this young con name of Sweet Benny.
Sue’s had many regulars, some more like furniture than customers, but Benny was the closest thing I ever had to a favorite. The yat-spittin’ son of a bitch first swaggered in here not even a year ago, dressed in a boot-marked and blood-stained blue tuxedo. He ordered a beer and asked me for work before I was even done pouring. I told him the first round was on me, but he best look elsewhere for that job. Whistler’s Place over on San Jacinto used to hire boys fresh out of Sanchez because they would drink their wages, but then every night the bar was full of hammered ex-cons. One rowdy weekend the place burned to the ground, Whistler turned up missing, and nobody asked any questions because we didn’t have any. Sanchez was like an asshole factory built on Hell’s own oasis in the desert, distilling men into the most vile and ruthless bastards ever to roam Texas. Benny seemed harmless enough, a skinny little mulatto with a voice as light as his skin, but I’d seen Sanchez do worse with less…

You can read more about Sweet Benny and the Sanchez Penitentiary Band in the short story and novel.