Novels

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

35.

I knew The Second Coming of Alt James was going to ram the cops the moment he herded us into his sleek, stolen SUV with the heated seats and the individual television screens, and winked at me as he backed away to slam the door, gun trained on us. “Let’s see if we can’t draw my twin out from the shadows with a little rumpshaker, huh? Fasten those seatbelts, y’all,” he said, smiling.

“Shit,” The Bumble said, sounding happy. “He’s going to fucking ram them.”

We both sat there with ridiculous, inappropriate smiles on our faces. I wasn’t sure what The Bumble was thinking, but my heart was racing as I pictured it: Bodies in the air, sparks grinding between the vehicles, the thud and thump of the tires rolling over people, the chaos, the pain, the excitement of it. The glorious part of it was that I was a prisoner, powerless, and thus free from guilt.

The Second Coming of Alt James put the SUV into gear and it rolled soundlessly down off the overpass. With a little goose of the gas pedal he hopped the curb and cut over a small island of sidewalk, popping out onto the main approach to the warehouse parking lot. The lot was surrounded by a chain link fence sprouting from a low concrete wall, but the entrance was a double gate thrown wide open. Headlights off, he moved at a crawl towards the huge structure ahead. We could see the cops clearly enough; there were evenly spaced streetlamps sprouting from the blacktop every twenty feet or so, giving off an eerie orange glow. The cops, still milling about like they owned the fucking world, secure that their badges and guns would protect them from anything, didn’t notice us. For a few seconds we glided along in silence, wrapped in darkness. The Second Coming held his automatic up in the air so The Bumble and I could see it, one hand casually on the steering wheel, his own seatbelt cinched tight over his wide chest.

When we were half a long block away, he hit the gas, and we all jerked back into our seats.

It was eerie, but no one noticed us until right before we slammed into them. At the last second there was this moment of stillness, shock, paralysis, where all of them turned almost as one and stared into the grill of the truck. A surge of adrenaline swept through me, carrying away all the pain and aches, all the weariness, filling me with electricity and making my mouth dry up like a desert. Then we crashed into a knot of people as the night erupted into screams, and time snapped back to normal speed, everything in flashes. The SUV clipped the butt end of one of the Rape Vans and we spun, moving sideways and scraping over three or four bodies before smacking into the side of the warehouse, my teeth leaping in my mouth.

The Second Coming was out of the SUV before I could even orient myself, popping out with guns in both hands. I watched him feeling something akin to awe as he moved low and easy, throwing shots. With one hand he almost casually put bullets into the prone bodies littered around the truck, while with the other he tracked the surviving cops as they ran for cover behind the vans and trucks, pulling their own weapons and shouting. He put down one more with an impossible shot before he’d chased them all behind cover.

The Bumble started to move, but I put my hand on his shoulder. “Wait. No one but James knows we’re in here, and this is the whole damn point: Let them kill each other.”

He sagged back into the leather, grimacing. “Yeah,” he said, and turned his head to watch out the passenger window.

Almost casually, The Second Coming moved behind one of the vans between us and three cops who’d gathered behind one of their own SUVs. Two more were using the other van as cover. I counted five of them down, most likely all dead, and wondered how fucking lucky we were as a universe to have gotten my Stanley James, who hadn’t been above a shakedown and been kind of a pain in the ass, but generally a good enough cop, a good enough person. Reasonable. Not a bloodthirsty killer like every other Stanley James I’d met so far.

The Second Coming was moving, then, gingerly backing his way down the length of the van, popping out from behind it on the other end, completely exposed to the five cops crouching ten feet away. He poured fire at them, hitting two of them almost instantly and flushing the other three up and out, firing back as they scrambled to the next truck for new cover, their shots wild. The Second Coming took his time, following them to their previous spot.

Suddenly, some distance away, there was a second or two of a loud, eardrum searing noise, like static from the world’s largest radio. It there and gone, making my whole body tense up. When I focused on the parking lot again, James and the cops didn’t seem to have moved, but Frank’s men were pouring out of the warehouse, shouting, moving behind the SUV we were in for cover. Mentally I set my stopwatch for police involvement at about five minutes, with all the noise going on. Although it was Newark. That was a variable I couldn’t handicap.

Frank’s guys didn’t know what to do, at first. They didn’t know who any of these other assholes were. Just as Frank himself emerged from the warehouse, smoking a cigarette and holding his bandaged hand up like a talisman in front of him, his men spotted The Second Coming. With shouts and yells they started firing at the SUV he was hiding behind. The cops—who I was actually starting to feel sorry for—started firing their weapons more or less in every direction at once, displaying the sort of training and calm I’d come to expect from city police. I had to admit, in all fairness, that your Captain and chief dirty cop suddenly ramming into you with a truck and shooting at you was probably unsettling, and probably hadn’t been covered at the fucking academy.

Bullets slapped into our SUV, surprisingly loud, sending a shuddering vibration through the whole chassis that made The Bumble and me sink down in our seats, cursing and jerking. Frank’s men as one unit decamped for the Van The Second Coming had recently been using as cover. Peeking up over the dashboard I could see Frank just standing there smoking, like nothing in the world could ever hurt him.

I leaned over and eased the lock of my door open. “Stay here,” I said to Billy. Without waiting for a response, I pushed the door open just enough for me to slip out onto the pavement, silently pushing it closed behind me. Not ten feet away, Frank stood watching, red in the face and puffing away at his cigarette. It was amazing, but no one was paying any attention to him. The idea that I’d gotten everyone together just so Frank could miraculously survive was a sudden and heavy anxiety, and I thought if there was ever a time to get over my phobia of guns, this was it. All or nothing.

I dropped to the greasy, gritty pavement and pushed myself under the SUV. On the other side lay one of the dead cops, a big guy with a shaved head burned red and angry from the sun, peeling in spots, his gingerish hair in a monk’s halo just over his ears. His gun was still holstered in the small of his back, and I crawled under the car towards him, reaching out gingerly as shots banged out just a few feet away, making me cringe and wince each time.

Another drawn-out second of ear-bleeding static filled the air just as I managed to unsnap the holster and take hold of the gun, a snub-nosed revolver of some sort. By the time I’d rolled back towards the other side of the car, the noise had stopped again. I didn’t pause to think on it. I had a few moments while everyone was busy, while Frank was distracted, in which to enact a little insurance.

I crawled out from under the SUV and pushed up onto my feet. Moving slowly, I crept over to where Frank stood, holding the heavy gun down by my leg and angled away from me so if it went off I wouldn’t shoot myself. I’d fired a few guns in my time, when circumstances had forced me to, but they always seemed to vibrate in my hand like an unexploded bomb, waiting for one more little jerk or tremor to set them off. My heart was beating fast and my hands shook a little as I angled my way back towards the warehouse wall in shadows created by the amber streetlights I got myself lined up directly behind Frank’s pudgy, slump-shouldered form. Reminding myself not to get in too close where he could grab at me—Frank had gotten fat, but he was a scrapper, and knew how to fight—I crept forward until I was close enough to reach out and push the gun into the small of his back.

“Hi, Frank.”

I felt like an asshole. He went stiff and jerked his arms a little, then caught himself and went still, not turning around to look at me. I felt the moment draining away even as I arrived. I should have just shot him, I knew it. I told myself to just do it, to not stretch this out and let him think. But I couldn’t. I found myself frozen. I’d never just killed a man like that, cold, mechanical. I’d had a few moments where I knew I could have killed someone, but I’d warmed up to it, the violence boiling up and over and carrying me along until The Bumble or someone pulled me away, dragging me off. This was clinical and I found I didn’t have the belly for it.

“Jesus,” Frank said loudly over the roar of gunshots, turning his head finally to get me into his peripheral vision. In front of him, The Second Coming dashed behind the other rape van, dropping clips from his guns and crouching low, hunted by a dozen people but still looking like he was in charge. “You’re fucking supernatural, you know that?”

“Shut up,” I said. Ridiculous. I’d started the fucking conversation. Sweat rolled into my eyes and I thought I should just start beating him, get the blood flowing, and then I’d be able to do it. But I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel angry and strong, untouchable like I usually did when I got into the mood to hurt someone. I felt stupid and hollow.

As I watched The Second Coming, the original Alt James walked into my vision behind him, like my vision had blurred.

He was wearing full police riot gear: SWAT uniform, body armor, helmet with visor up. A semiautomatic rifle was slung over one shoulder, and he held an automatic in one hand. He didn’t hesitate or say anything; he walked up behind The Second Coming, put the auto to his head, and pulled the trigger. There was a brief geyser of red jetting from The Second Coming’s forehead, and then he crumpled to the ground. I stared in dumb shock; it was like one Stanley James had been plucked away, rubbed out of the picture, replaced by a new version.

I heard something behind me, and then the barrel of a gun was pressed into my back.

“Drop it, asshole,” Chino breathed into my ear, his breath smelling like cigarettes and hot dogs. “I don’ wanna have to shoot you, and miss out on knockin’ your teeth out, entienda?”

Alt James looked over at us, and smiled, pointing his gun at Frank carefully. All the noise had suddenly stopped.

“What do you say, Mr. McKenna?” he shouted cheerfully. “How about a truce?”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

34.

The Bumble handed me the binoculars and leaned on his elbows, snapping gum in his mouth as he shifted his weight, leaning it all on the old yellow stone of the overpass, hunching down so that his head was even with my shoulders. The warehouse Frank had given us was a straight shot away, bathed in orangey streetlights, an empty parking lot out front, a single window glowing with yellow light on the second floor. A faded, splintered sign on the wall proclaimed it to be the home of Dawson Wood Treatments. I held the peepers loosely in my hands and proclaimed it to be the home of several million termites, cockroaches, and fat, lazy spiders.

Newark smelled like it was built on the dried up carcasses of their ancestors.

“You got the number for the motel, right?”

The Bumble snorted. “I got it, Boss. Don’t worry. I’ll check on ‘em.”

I opened my mouth, but as I did so two black vans appeared suddenly in the parking lot, moving smoothly to the center of our field of vision.

“Jesus,” I said, awed. “They’re fucking rape vans.”

They were cheap cargo vans, all the windows blacked out so that once you were inside no one would ever know. I couldn’t see, but I was certain the windshields were tinted, and there was probably some sort of soundproofing too. The kind of vehicle designed for snatching people off the street and swallowing them whole. Billy chuckled as the two vans came to a stop. Immediately all the doors opened as if on one automatic cue, eight guys spilling out into the night. One, I could tell from his pot belly and sloped shoulders, was Frank. Chino and Mikey D I knew from the stiff way they moved, their bandages gleaming in the fake light. Frank Junior, of course, unfolded from the front seat next to his father and bobbed about, light and airy, smoking a cigarette with his hands in his pockets. Through the binoculars he looked bored.

They extracted several big green duffel bags from the vans and headed for the warehouse door, which opened mysteriously as they approached.

“Jesus,” I said again.

“They’re lookin’ to have a little fun with you, I’m thinking,” The Bumble said, then paused for a second. “Before killin’ you, I mean.”

This was The Bumble’s idea of a joke, I knew from bitter experience. I didn’t look at him, because I knew he’d have a sly, amused look on his face, holding in the mirth and wondering if I’d gotten the joke. Seeing it would make me want to hit him, so I kept my eyes on the warehouse.

As I watched, three more vehicles arrived, all black SUVs of some sort, with tinted windows. They screamed plain-clothes police, and the dozen or so mean and one woman who emerged from them confirmed my suspicions: The guys were all in sloppy T-shirts and jeans, baseball caps, with handcuffs hanging from belt loops and neat little thirty-eights tucked into the back of their waistbands. The lone woman was short and had her brown hair pulled back into a pony tail that erupted from the back of her own baseball cap, and wore sneakers instead of boots. Alt James had a squad of dirty cops on his payroll and I was looking at them all right now.

I didn’t see James himself, though, and the cops all milled about around the SUVs like they were awaiting orders. I wondered if Frank’s people would spot them from inside, if things were going to erupt a little too soon.

“Call the motel,” I said. “Just make sure we’re not missing something.” I didn’t like that he wasn’t there, in sight. It made me jumpy.

The Bumble sighed and pulled the cell from his pocket. Flipping it open, he dialed the number, asked for our room, and waited a moment. “Me,” he said. Another second. “Okay.”

He snapped the phone shut. “They’re fine.”

We’d set up a simple code just in case: If everything was fine, whoever answered the phone would say they were fine. If there was anything wrong at all they couldn’t talk about (say, Alt James standing there with a gun on them) they would say they were okay. It wouldn’t sound weird to anyone else, but we’d know right away. I had a moment of terrible doubt that The Bumble could keep it all straight, but calmed myself down. If he couldn’t keep a two word code straight, we had bigger problems.

I squinted back at the cops in the parking lot. They’d noticed the Rape Vans and were going over them, but showed no real initiative or ambition—they were waiting for James, I guessed, and since he’d told them to be there they didn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary. That made me feel better; if they were waiting on James then I figured he was coming.

Tires on the road made Billy and me startle. We turned and watched a black SUV, part of the same litter as the ones down by the warehouse, roll slowly towards us, lights on, music dimly thumping out of the microscopic gaps between the steel. I watched, dumbfounded, as it rolled to a stop directly across from us, and just as I managed to think how in fuck did he know we’d be up here the driver’s side window rolled down, revealing Alt James, his teeth white and straight.

“Hello, boys. I thought we were meeting down at the spot. I came up here looking to park, and here you are. That’s fucking fate.”

My brain felt like it was in slow motion, filled with syrup. I looked around, but there was no sign that anyone else had followed James here. I spun around, trusting Billy to keep an eye on James’ doppleganger, and looked back down at the warehouse with the binoculars. Nothing had changed; the cops were still milling about, chatting, Frank and his people were still inside, apparently oblivious. I looked around again, but there was absolutely no sign that James had brought anyone else to the ambush.

Paranoid, I just watched as James opened his door and stepped out onto the cracked pavement of the overpass, lugging out a sizable briefcase as he did. He slammed the door behind him and then started walking towards us, his posture relaxed, still smiling.

“I don’t see my boy anywhere. Maybe he’s invited to the party down there?” He cocked his head. “You didn’t maybe plan on me walking into a trap or anything right?” He stopped a few feet away from us and stood there, shaking his head, grinning. “Naw, you’re a straight shooter, I can see that. That’s why I said to myself, when I saw you in court, I said, just hand this man your card, Stanley, just hand him your card and go have a good dinner, get some sleep, because he’s gonna call you and make a deal.” He set the briefcase down on the ground and pushed his big hands into his pockets, spreading his coat back enough to reveal a pair of shoulder holsters, each crowded with large guns. The cut of his suit was dramatic. I liked the way it moved on him, and wondered if the tailor lived here or … somewhere else.

He made a show of looking around. “So, where’s my boy? I brought your cash.” He nudged the briefcase with his foot.

I looked at the briefcase and then back at James. I started to say wait, you actually brought money? and then stopped myself. I swallowed and shrugged, struggling to kick my brain back into gear.

“I didn’t trust you,” I said slowly. “So I thought I’d play it safe and see what you did.”

James smiled. “Well, see, you ain’t a fucking bitch. That’s clear. Not going to wander in like some five-and-dime hood from Bayonne or some shit, thinking you’re tough. I get it. So, here I am. I’m keeping my end of the deal. Where’s my boy?”

I licked my lips. I was trying to see the angle. He wasn’t possibly really just going to pay me and walk away. There was something I was missing. “Let me see the money,” I finally said.

He laughed. “My man,” he said, shaking his head and bending down to pick up the case. He flipped it over and popped the clasps, revealing neat stacks of crisp-looking bills. If it wasn’t just cut-up newspaper with a single bill on top, it looked like plenty to cover Falken’s debt and even leave me something left over as a reward or a finder’s fee. I stared at it until he snapped the case shut again, trying to figure this out. Alt James had gone to some extremes to get rid of me, and now he was polite as hell and offering to buy me off. Maybe it made sense. I reminded myself that I didn’t know this man.

“All right,” he said, setting the case down again, relaxed and completely confident that any attempt by The Bumble or me to take it from him by force would fail. “Where’s my man? I drove all the way to Newark for this shit.”

I hesitated one more second, luxuriating in it, and then shrugged. “Falken’s not here,” I said, figuring I’d see where he took us from that, play for time. In the end, I could lead him to the warehouse myself, hope my supposed immortality kept me alive.

He nodded, thrusting out his lower lip and looking around, as if considering things carefully. “Falken’s not here,” he said slowly, then snapped his eyes back to me, his face blank and hard. “Who the fuck,” he said slowly, “is Falken?”

I blinked. Whatever Alt James’ game was, I waved at it sadly as it sailed over my head. “The man you came here to kill,” I said slowly. “He isn’t here. He’s—” I hesitated again, trying to think through the possibilities, and suddenly decided to take the risk. “He’s down in the warehouse.”

James nodded again. “Okay, Falken’s in the warehouse. That’s good news. But I don’t give a shit. I ain’t here to kill anyone named Falken.” He pulled one of his guns from its holster slowly, smoothly. “So let’s quit the bullshit, right? I’m here to become like you, to become a Terminus. And to do that, I need to kill Stanley fucking James.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

33.

The door opened and I smiled at Rachel, hands in my pockets.

“Jesus,” she said, making a show of looking me up and down. “You were in jail or the sewers?”

I smiled, making no move to enter. I glanced past her into the room; The Bumble was sitting on one of the beds, reading a newspaper with the frown of a the barely literate, and Rusch sat at the greasy little table, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window. “Jail’s a lot less pleasant than you might think,” I said. “And I wasn’t sitting here, taking like fifteen showers a day.”

She made a face. “Well, at least you’re better at showering than Billy.”

This last in a mock whisper, with a comic face of horror. I laughed.

“Got a second?” I said, stepping aside and waiting. She blinked, cocked her head in an adorable way I liked, and then nodded, stepping out and closing the door behind her.

“Let’s get a coffee,” I suggested.

The World’s Tiniest Coffee Shop shared floorspace with the office in the motel; you turned around at the front desk and found yourself facing a strange kitchen-like area. In the mornings they set out a selection of continental fare—muffins, cereals, coffee urns. The urns were kept hot and filled all day and night, sluicing out a bitter, thick coffee that made me want ham sandwiches and cigarettes. There were two tiny little tables with squeaky plastic chairs in a space that was just too small for four people to occupy comfortably. We trooped there in silence, made our complimentary coffees under the eyes of the desk attendant, a skinny black kid with a blooming afro he spent a lot of time grooming, wearing a clip on tie that was almost, but not quite, the color of rust—and took them outside to watch the traffic worming its way into the Holland Tunnel.

“Wow,” she said, sipping her coffee, the wind pushing her hair around. “New Jersey really is awful.”

I shrugged. “This is just up here. It’s been poisoned by New York—this is where all the toxic runoff gathers. Down south its nice. Farms and shit.”

“Which you know because of your extensive travels.”

I didn’t look at her. I sipped my coffee, laden with fake milk and fake sugar, sweet but horrible, and tried to feel my way around her. I’d been out of physical touch for hours and hours—long enough for Alt James to ferry in a pair of ringers to play head games, long enough, maybe, for him to ferry in some insurance.

“Do you remember,” I said, watching a beautiful late-1960s Mustang convertible edge its way past us, the driver yelping on his cell phone, gesticulating wildly. “The first night I drove for you?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Now, why are you bringing that up?”

This was dangerous ground for us, I knew—and on top of that she didn’t like being reminded of how she’d made her way. But I needed something that no one else could know.

“You remember what happened.”

She nodded, not looking at me. “I remember.”

“Tell me.”

She kept her face turned away from me, standing there with her arms crossed, her coffee held by her shoulder, like she was hugging herself. For a second I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. “You didn’t say two words to me for the first hour, just drove and ignored me. I liked you. Most of the guys driving always chatted us up, like they were going to get a tip at the end of the night, keep us company. Then that guy in the hat got frisky and I hit the panic button. And you almost beat him to death. Literally almost to death.” She finally turned a little to look at me. “And you fucking enjoyed it.” Away again, studying the gentle slope of highway on-ramps off to our left. “You looked up at me, blood droplets all over your face, and you were grinning. I’ve tried to get that grin out of my head, but I can’t. Sometimes even today I look at you in the right light, or rain’ll be shadowed on your face from the car window, and I see that grin again.”

I nodded. “I saved you,” I said.

She nodded without looking at me. “Yes.”

Sipping coffee, I took three precise steps away from her. “Rusch, Billy, and Falken—any of them out of your sight?”

“What?”

“Any of them out of your sight for an extended period of time? Any of them acting weird?”

She turned back to me. “Weird?” She shook her head. “No. Everyone’s been in and out, but no one for very long—coffee runs, cigarettes. We’re fucking bored to death and Elias’s terrified—he’s trying to look tough but he jumps at every noise like James is going to appear in a puff of blue smoke and strangle him—but aside from that everyone seems normal. Why?”

I nodded. “Last night I got picked up by you and Billy. ‘Cept it wasn’t you and Billy, right? It was another you and Billy.”

She stared at me for a second, then bit her lip and looked down at the ground. “Oh, shit.”

I felt awkward, standing there, this huge black memory between us, like I’d pulled it, wriggling and alive, from a box and dropped it onto the ground, where it twitched and bled, begging for mercy. We’d spent the last few years burying it, long, slow work, and now here it was again. I remembered the look on her face as our eyes had met: A last glimpse of fading, electrifying admiration, affection, joy, crumbling and collapsing into a singularity of horror and disgust.

We walked back to the room in silence, that night hanging around us, heavy and immobilizing. When I’d delivered her to the first address of the evening, I’d taken her hand and helped out of the car. Her hand had been small and dry, the nails lacquered and softly pink. I could remember the feel of her hand in mine, the way her small fingers moved as she shifted her balance and got to her feet, the way they slipped out of mine. It was the last time I’d ever touched her casually, when I wasn’t bleeding out from a knife wound.

I touched my abdomen where I’d been stabbed. I could feel the hard line of a scar, but felt nothing. It was like I’d been stabbed many years ago, in a another life.

When we stepped back into the room, everyone was standing and staring at us like they’d just been talking about us—about me. The Bumble grinned, conveying a general satisfaction that I was alive and at liberty. Rusch pursed her lips at me, eyes swimming behind her thick glasses, liver-spotted hands washing each other nervously. Falken, looking bloated and pale, like a guy on day three of a Vegas bender who’s just realizing he’s going to have to win big if he’s going home to the wife, just stared at me with his mouth slightly open. He was at the end of his endurance, I thought. He’d been running—between fucking worlds—for who knew how long, and this was the last bit of energy he had.

I smiled at The Bumble, I couldn’t help it. “Make the call, Billy,” I said. “Let’s get this over with. I’m tired of being hunted like a dog.”

He hesitated, then shrugged his eyebrows and fished for his cell phone. We all stood very still and quiet while his thick fingers worked the buttons, and watched him as he put the phone to his ear, looking around nervously.

“Give me Frank,” he said, looking down at the greenish carpet. We all waited, making a dumb show of examining things, looking into dark corners, inspecting the housekeeping.

“Frank, Billy. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, fuck you.”

I smiled down at my feet.

“Listen, I want out o’ this. I got into—I made a mistake, Frank. Lenmme buy my way. Pay a fine.”

I turned and walked slowly over to the window. The traffic seemed unchanged, as if the same cars were still sitting there, props for our amusement.

“Yeah, okay, I get that. Sure, I—I mean, I don’t feel good about it, y’know. But yeah, okay, if I haveta I can give him up.”

I nodded. Frank would have one price for Billy: Me.

The Bumble grunted a few times, assenting to terms. “Right. Okay, Frank, we’ll be there. And me? I’m wiped clean, right?” He nodded to himself. “All right, Frank. Thanks.”

I heard his phone snap shut and turned. The Bumble looked sad, his sagging eyes heavy, his face blank. He looked down at his phone.

“Tonight. Ten-thirty, a warehouse Frank owns in Newark. I’m supposed to bring you out there for some reason, he’ll grab you up.”

I nodded. “Give me the address,” I said, reaching for the phone. I pulled out the card Alt James had given me on the street outside The Tombs and dialed the number. He picked it up on the second ring, the familiar, smooth voice.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me. You still want to hear from me?”

“Sure, why not? We can always do business. I’m a businessman, where I come from. Why not?”

I nodded, turning away from everyone and looking back out the window. “All right. Good. Let’s make a deal, then, okay? I’ve got what you want.”

He chuckled. “Oh yeah? Okay: You’ve got him. What you want in return?”

I shrugged. “You leave me and mine the fuck alone.”

There was a moment of silence. “That’s it? Shit, man, I don’t trust fucking philanthropists.”

“The money I’m out. The debt. That has to be paid off, with interest, so I can level everything off.”

The chuckle again. “That’s more like it. I’ll even throw in a bonus. You take your lady out, show her a good time. How we do this?”

I gave him the address of the warehouse. “Ten thirty,” I said. “I’m going to lie to him, give him a story, so we won’t be coming in tied up and kicking, okay? Don’t spook him.”

“Sure, sure. I get it. Keep it smooth until the last minute. I’ll be there.”

The line went dead. I turned to face everyone, snapping the phone shut. They were watching me like I was supposed to do something dramatic. A smoke bomb, a flash of lightning, something. I grinned.

“Well, we’re all sold out.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

32.

I hesitated, a fuzzy feeling of shock and indecision settling over me like something heavy, hot, and wet. Behind me, I could hear steps coming up—Frank and his boys, guns reclaimed, and Frank so fucking enraged he might even pop me right on the sidewalk in full view of everyone. I looked at The Bumble, an eerie feeling of displacement rippling through me—he was standing right in front of me but it wasn’t him, and even though I’d spent the last two weeks with my head in this situation I still felt dizzy thinking about it. If this wasn’t Billy Bumbles, who the fuck was it? Doubles, brought by Alt James to trick me, sure, but that didn’t feel like an answer. It felt like a story.

Angry voices pushed at me from behind, though. I could run, but my legs felt rubbery and blood dripped onto the sidewalk where I stood, a dozen tiny wounds sizzling nicely, making me look like a lunatic. I still didn’t have a dime to my name, though I had a phone—I saw myself sprinting somewhere and hiding until Rachel and Billy—my Rachel and Billy—came to get me. Then I saw myself being shot to death in some booth in a dive bar, and leaped for the car.

“Let’s go,” I said without looking at either of them. “I think I may have irritated Frank a little.”

Just as Alt Rachel slammed the door and Alt Billy put the car in gear, three loud bangs made us all jump. Alt Billy gunned the engine reflexively and the car darted out into traffic, smacking into a beat-up old SUV with jersey plates.

“Go!” I shouted, mashing my foot into the carpet, gunning my phantom accelerator. “Go fucking go!”

Alt Billy steered the Caddy smoothly around the SUV and its screaming driver and punched it into traffic, goosing it up to fifty in a matter of seconds, eating up blacktop. I twisted around to look through the back windshield and saw Frank and his guys standing just outside Lee’s Empire, getting small. At the red light he tapped the brakes once for luck and popped through the intersection, and made his first right. I sat back and felt my heart pound, thinking if nothing else these fucking dopplegangers knew what the fuck a gunshot sounded like.

“Pull over,” Rachel said from the back seat. “Come on back here, let me clean you up.”

“Don’t stop,” I said immediately. I sucked in air and tried to look relaxed. “Frank’s got the word out,” I said, plausibly enough. “He’s got guys in cars trying to spot us.” I thought of Alt Rachel’s hands on me again and shivered at the memory: I could still feel where she’d touched me, like she’d left a slime trail.

“Where we going?” Alt Billy said again. On to me, a little; he’d nonchalantly locked all the doors when he’d put the car in gear. Falken, I thought. Alt James had set me up here so I could lead them to Falken, thinking we were all friends, that I’d just lead them straight there. I knew I couldn’t string them along forever; I needed to think of a place to take them where I could give them the slip, now that we’d shaken Frank for the moment. I’d done a pretty fucking good job of baiting Frank; I figured when he got the idea I’d be somewhere, he’d come running for some personal revenge, and that was exactly how I wanted him.

I pictured Alt Rachel in the back seat, the spitting image of my girl, but different. She was wearing makeup, for one, dark eye shadow and fake lashes, lip gloss—lip gloss, for fuck’s sake. And her manner—hard edged but sexy, fake sexy. I’d met a lot of girls like Rachel back when I’d been driving them around, and seeing her like that was fucking depressing.

The Bumble was more or less the same. More beard. A scar under his right ear that shouldn’t be there. A little more nervous in his manner than I was used to. But basically the same guy, it seemed. That was depressing, too, for some reason.

“Back to Queens,” I said, trying to make it sound casual. “Take the 59th Street bridge, I think, this time of day.”

Alt Billy nodded, steering smoothly. I settled back into my seat and hoped I looked sleepy and relaxed. I didn’t want to talk to them, and I had the feeling they didn’t want to talk to me, to try to guess what I was thinking, keep dancing. We floated along in uncomfortable silence, each one of us pretending it wasn’t.

The silence became almost unbearable as I pretended to nap. I wanted to open my eyes and make sure we were going where I’d told them to go, that I wasn’t going to find myself in another fucking deserted alternate world. I rode it out, my whole body tense as I strove to make it roll and pitch with the car like a disconnected puppet, ignoring every shift and noise they made even as I imagined them slitting my throat. Every time the car stopped I slit my eyes and tried to gauge where we were, and when I thought we were paused right outside the toll booths on the bridge, I sat up and stretched, looking around. Traffic was just a little clogged; Alt Billy inched the car forward a few feet here and there, never coming to a complete stop.

I realized with a start that I’d never gotten my knife back from Mr. Useless back at the restaurant.

I wrote a eulogy to that knife in my head, a second or two of powerful regret. Then I leaned over and put both hands on Alt Billy’s knee, mashing his foot down on the gas pedal.

The Caddy surged forward three feet and smacked into the bumper in front of us, a rusty old Nova from a previous age. Not hard enough to cause any real damage, but hard enough to jerk us in our seats and get the guy in front of us to pop out of his car, red in the face, arms in the air. I looked around, satisfied—unlike the streets of Manhattan, there was no place for Alt Billy to drive us, keep us moving, gain some speed. We were blocked in on all sides by the traffic.

“Pop the fucking lock,” I said, reasonably enough, I thought.

The Nova guy was outside Alt Billy’s door, tapping on the window gently, but calling him a motherfucking asshole in a stern if controlled voice. Alt Billy ignored him, smiling at him in such a perfect imitation of The Bumble I almost wanted to hug him. “Ah, shit,” he said. “How long you knew?”

“Fuck you, and open the fucking door.”

He looked around, tapping his fingers on the wheel. Stalling for time. I clenched my teeth, pulled my arm in towards me, and with a gleeful expectation of pain I slammed my elbow into the passenger window, shattering it. My arm went numb, fuzzing and vibrating, and the Nova guy shut the hell up, taking a cautious step back from the car as he realized with a sudden pulse of brainpower that this maybe wasn’t a routine fender bender.

I flipped myself around and pulled myself up and out of the car ungracefully, half expecting them to grab my feet. But we were in the middle of the highway, surrounded by people and cops just a short jog away. Grunting and twisting, I got my feet under me and staggered back from the car. I had a long way to go, but at least I was under my own power again. I looked around—the sun was up and the skies were clear, the air was crisp and smelled like gasoline and asphalt. Horns, a sad chorus, had started blaring around us as traffic choked up.

Before I could turn away, the back window slid down, and Alt Rachel leaned out a little, looking up at me.

“Too bad,” she said. “I woulda laid you. For free.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

31.

“Where to?”

I stared out the passenger window and watched Manhattan get classier as we moved through midtown, reveling in the lush agony that had spread all over me. I felt like I’d torn every muscle in my body, and it had settled into me like a pleasant burn, keeping me warm and awake. I turned to look at The Bumble and took a deep breath; the car smelled funny, though I couldn’t place the smell. It reminded me of burned plastic, but the interior was pristine.

I twisted around and glanced at Rusch and Rachel in the backseat, the old lady apparently asleep, Rachel staring cooly back at me, a half smile on her lips. They all looked like they’d gotten a shower and a change of clothes.

“The first Junior’s Papaya you see,” I said, turning back around. “Just pull over. I’m fucking starving.”

Billy frowned. “What?”

I waved a hand at him and closed my eyes. “Hot dogs, Billy, hot dogs.”

After a moment of dark silence, Rachel said “We need to make sure Falken’s all right.”

I closed my eyes and imagined a world where Rachel didn’t worry about Falken. “He was okay when you decided to leave him alone, right? I mean, the situation was so calm and relaxed you didn’t even leave the old lady behind to back him up.”

“What?”

I held my bloody hand up behind my head. “Hot dogs, Billy. They came through with peanut butter sandwiches. No jelly, just peanut butter. Fucking jail.”

“I like Rudy’s,” he said after a moment, eyes locked on the road. Traffic was firming up around us, rush hour blooming.

“Oh, fuck you,” I groaned. “You like Rudy’s because the hot dogs are free, you cheap bastard. You don’t mind breathing in three or four decades of other people’s cigarettes while eating them?” I snorted. Rudy’s hot dogs were store brand bought in plastic packages at a supermarket, boiled endlessly and given away free to drunks. They tasted like dog food wrapped in plastic. I wanted that sizzling, greasy taste of real beef and spices, fresh buns, tart onions.

No one said anything to that, and I kept my eyes closed. I had almost dozed off when Rachel leaned forward and put her face between Billy and me.

“I really think we ought to check on Mr. Falken.”

“Just tell me where to go,” Billy said.

I sighed, something smart on the tip of my tongue, but then I paused. “What time is it?”

“Almost seven,” Rachel said after a moment.

I nodded, smiling, my lips cracking open, tiny slivers of pain shooting through them. “Chinatown,” I said. “Mott Street.”

Frank didn’t run any gambling in Manhattan; the city had made too much of it legal enough for it to be worth his time. Small gangs worked neighborhood lotteries and after-hours card games, more or less running them straight just like the casinos and government did, taking their fair cream off the top and otherwise letting the odds go natural. Why not; you didn’t have to sex the numbers to make gambling work for you. It was god’s natural screw.

Frank did like a high-stakes game of old-fashioned poker. He didn’t like Texas Hold’em—bellyached endlessly about how that’s all anyone wanted to play any more. But put enough money on the table and you can find a bunch of guys willing to play you at anything, anywhere, and Frank’s weird obsession with five-card stud was easy enough to cater to. A Dominican gang had a couple of basements rented under restaurants in Chinatown; one grand buy in, free cocktails, professional dealers, custom-made chips. Couple of mornings a week you could find Frank still playing as the sun rose, moving thousands of dollars back and forth between him and the house.

We pulled up outside Lee’s Empire and I stepped out onto the sidewalk. The Bumble was in the street immediately, coming around the front. “Where is he?” he asked.

I waved him back towards the car. “Stay here,” I said. “I’m just going to break Frank’s balls a little. Bring it on home what we’re doing. Make sure he sees it the way I want to, so he’ll dance the moves I want.” I smoothed down the grimy lapels of my jacket and smiled at the tall Indian man leaning casually in the doorway of the restaurant. I sensed Billy hesitating, and then fading back towards the car.

I spread my hands and grinned. “Henley,” I said. “How the fuck are you?”

He smiled, extending a hand without shifting the rest of his body. “Hello, mate—you’ve looked better.”

Henley had a round accent that was sort of English, sort of something else. Each word fell to the ground like it had been carved from ice, melting through the air and tinkling around you, little tinny echoes everywhere. He was young and rakish, well-dressed in last year’s suit and shoes shined to a mirrorlike finish. He was one of those rare people I’d inexplicably liked the moment we’d met and continued to like. He was Middle Eastern of some extraction I’d never bothered to clarify, and had perfect coffee-colored skin and a bush of thick, lush black hair that grew straight up and then did interesting things.

“I’m in the air,” I said.

“So I’ve heard. Your former boss is downstairs. I suppose I shouldn’t let you in.” He put his hand on his chin and rubbed, looking off into the distance. “Then again, no one has ordered me to keep you out.”

I grinned. “I’m supposed to be dead. I’m going to haunt the son of a bitch. Can I owe you the cover?”

He nodded. “Sure, darling, why not. They’re closing up shop down there anyway.” He pushed his hands back into his pockets and looked up the block. “Rumor is you’re a dead man anyway. Can’t stop a ghost.”

I walked into the dim restaurant, through the empty dining room and kitchen and down the back stairs. As I descended I could hear the murmur of voices, and I could see a layer of bluish smoke literally hanging in the air around the halfway point of the staircase. The game room was a damp cellar, but it was done up in style, with a full bar at the far end of the room shining and glittering like a jewel, manned by a sleepy-looking black kid in a white dinner jacket. There were just six people aside from the barman: Frank, slumped at a green felt table with a feeble pile of chips spread out in front of him, his two bodyguards, seated at the next table over and trying hard to look attentive, two old men in suits sitting opposite Frank and sporting large piles of chips I assumed had once been his, and the floor manager, a big dark-skinned guy in a terrible light blue suit. He was bald and heavy-chested, like a guy who worked his arms constantly in the gym and did nothing else. He glanced at me as I entered and closed his eyes.

“We closin’,” he said, and shook his head a little, murmuring “Fucking faggot shouldna taken yo’ cover.”

“I just came to have a chat,” I said. Frank went noticeably still.

The fat manager sighed. “Then I gotta take yo’ weapons,” he said, pushing aside his jacket to show his holster off. “Even if it’s jus’ for a second.”

I held out the knife towards him; there was no point in being fancy. I wasn’t a killer, anyway, even if slitting Frank’s throat was kind of an appealing option. Fat Man looked at the knife, then at me from under his eyebrows, and finally plucked it from my hand like it was made of dead spiders, dropping it into a strongbox on the table beside him. He didn’t bother frisking me, and looked disgusted.

I circled around and took the seat next to Frank; his security detail rippled a bit, but he held up a hand and they both sat down again. I smiled at them. I didn’t know them, but they didn’t look like anything special.

“How you doing, Frank?” I said, still smiling at his bodyguards. “How’s your cash flow?”

He didn’t look at me; he stared down at his cards. His hands were shaking. “You got a lot of fucking balls, coming here like some asshole, to clown me.”

I looked around at Frank’s fellow players and winked. “What’s the matter, Frank? You can’t stand the competition?”

He slowly raised one hand and planted a finger on the green felt of the table and began tapping it slowly. “You had it good, kid. You earned, you were on your way up the ladder. Now you fucking steal from me. You work with that piece of shit cop. You fucked yourself up, kid. And now you come here and disrespect me?”

That pissed me off. Frank had fucked me over—needed my cash, maybe, or just didn’t like me much, and the moment I had a hiccup collecting on someone he’d hung me out, tossed my apartment, and now he was rewriting history—but I reminded myself that I’d come in to bait Frank, to make sure he was primed to jump after me wherever I went. I leaned forward a little.

“I came here with a message: Back off, or you’re gonna have more cops up your ass than you can handle. James will shut you down, Frank.” I sat back and thought I’d done my bit, it was time to stop pushing my luck and get going. “Back off, and there’s plenty of this city to go around.”

I started to stand, but Frank twitched, one of his hairy hands diving to his shoulder and coming up with a small automatic, pointed right at me.

“You piece of shit!” Frank snarled, his face dangerously red. “You’re gonna fucking steal from me?”

“Hey!” The useless guy working security in his borrowed suit said mildly, startling a little. “You supposed to hand over your fucking guns.”

“Shut up,” Frank spat.

“Hey!” Useless Guy said, a little more loudly, like he was actually getting pissed. “You can’t fucking waste a guy in here. Faison’ll fucking flip out.”

“My guys’ll handle it. It’ll never touch Faison.” Frank said, his eyes on me. This wasn’t potbellied, lazy-looking Frank you couldn’t believe ran half of Manhattan’s numbers. This was Frank McKenna, suspect in thirteen unsolved homicides. This was Frank McKenna who, if you believed the rumors, had killed his stepbrother when they were nineteen years old because he’d gotten in his way. I forced myself to look back at him and kept still. I told myself I was immortal. Everyone said so.

The gun looked bigger every time I glanced at it.

Useless stepped forward, producing his own gun, a nickel-plated cannon. He was smart enough to just show it, and kept it pointed down at the floor for the moment. “No way, Frank. Not here. Take it outside.”

“I’ll make it up to Faison,” Frank said, breathing hard. “I’ll pay him a tax.”

I promoted Useless as he rolled his shoulders—maybe a guy who’d earned his bones and a soft job because he’d done hard things. Because I suddenly very much believed he was willing to shoot Frank and Frank’s two slabs of muscle because those were his standing orders: Any trouble in Faison’s joint, put the fire out fast and heavy. “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “You want to waste someone in here, you talk to Faison, you get a permission slip. You got a permission slip?”

I took a deep breath. Immortal, I thought, and I stood up.

Frank twitched and pulled his trigger. There was a flash and a dozen sharp pinpricks of pain appeared over my face and neck, hot blooms. Frank was still sitting there, the gun in his hand smoking, fragmented, the hand itself a pulpy mess of blood. He just stared at it dumbly. My heart thudded in my chest as tiny rivulets of blood dripped off me—shrapnel, I realize, tiny fragments of Frank’s gun.

I stepped past him. I felt numb, like I was floating along—unreal. I’d stood up, with a gun two feet from my head, I’d stood up, and instead of being just another asshole mope killed while leading a dirty, criminal life, I was a Terminus. For the first time since I’d heard the word, I started to believe it.

Behind me, Frank started to scream, and then there were a collection of blurred, overlapping voices. I pushed myself up, floating on a humid cloud of numb air. When I passed Henley, still standing his post at the door, he didn’t look at me. I could just hear the shouts from below, but if I were Henley I wouldn’t want to know, either.

As I approached the car, The Bumble snapped his cell shut and turned to me expectantly, then blinked in surprise.

“What the—?”

I waved him off. Rachel leaned against the car with her hands in the tight pockets of her jeans, looking sleepy. Beautiful, warm, sleepy. The sort of thing you liked to wake up to. As I got close, I realized I was shaking. She squinted at me and then stepped forward.

“You okay?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said. I did feel good—alive, energized, healthy. But I was shaking like a lead in the wind and couldn’t stop myself.

She stepped up close to me and before I knew it she was pressed against me, her hands on my neck, her face close. The feel of her against me was electric, and a shock rippled through me, her hands burning on my skin. She smelled like soap.

“C’mon, baby,” she said quietly, looking down at my chest. I wanted to lean forward and smell her hair. “Let’s go check on Falken and get you cleaned up.”

My eyes stung like there was smoke, and I pushed away from her, the unfamiliar feel of her hands on me lingering like burns. I spun towards The Bumble. “Give me your cell,” I snapped.

He reached into his pocket. “Where we goin’, boss?” he said, tossing the phone at me. I snatched it from the air and turned away from them, looking back at Henley. As I dialed Rachel’s cell number, we stared at each for a moment, and then he shrugged and smiled a little, looking away. Enjoying himself.

Rachel’s phone didn’t ring anywhere near me. After a moment, Rachel answered.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

30.

There wasn’t a pay phone left in the entire city. The city woke up as I walked, carts appearing on the corners serving up hot coffee and buns, donuts and bagels, trucks pulling up to the curb and tossing stacks of newspapers onto the sidewalks, people out cranking up the metal shutters on their businesses. I kept walking, thinking I’d find a phone and give The Bumble a call, get a pickup, but by the time I realized there wasn’t such a thing as a pay phone in the city any more, I’d noticed a pair of professionals tailing me, two middle-aged guys in pretty good shape, dressed casually in sports jackets and corduroy pants, ignoring me pointedly but always about a block behind. Out of town, I thought, freelancers. Frank spending a little money now trying to get his revenge, save his good name.

The bits of business impressed me. Every time I paused to check on their progress, they were buying coffees or browsing fruit at a bodega, or studying newspapers intently through the thick glass of a vending machine, or waiting for a bus. Waiting for a fucking bus every six or seven blocks when I suddenly noticed my shoe was untied. They were good at it, making it look almost natural, and I never caught them looking at me, or even moving towards me. There was an art to tailing someone on foot, and these guys were maestros.

The streets were still pretty empty. I’d made it to the meat-packing district where no one even owned an alarm clock, and I realized with a chill that if someone wanted to choose a neighborhood to abduct you off the street, this one was perfect. I headed east towards Hudson, and figured if I could hook onto Eighth Avenue I’d have plenty of people around me. For a few blocks as I cut up Greenwich Street I didn’t see my new friends behind me, but when I got to the corner of Bank Street they were on Hudson already, somehow, fucking psychics. I squinted up into the brightening sky, looking for helicopters. It was creepy.

Lingering at a newsstand on thirteenth street, I took stock while amusing myself by watching their cycle of pantomimed business: Scanning magazine covers in a store window, buying packs of gum at another newsstand, having a conversation that involved a lot of hand gestures and very little looking in my direction. My blessings were refreshingly sparse: I had a knife they’d likely be surprised by, and I still had my clothes on. And I wasn’t in deserted Alt Hoboken, being eaten one nip at a time. On the down side, I was tired and hungry and didn’t have a friend left in the city, and I couldn’t walk all the fucking way to Queens without getting into a spot where they’d have me against a wall. I had a quick, dirty vision of having my throat cut in a filthy restroom in some bar in Hell’s Kitchen after an unsuccessful attempt to climb out the narrow transom window.

I remembered almost being run over by a car, as a kid. I remembered getting the Mumps and everyone telling me I almost died. There were worlds where that’s what happened: I died. I wondered if now there was a world where I died exactly like that: Gutted like a fish in a bathroom somewhere. But I was already the only one of me left, Rusch had said. I was immortal.

Turning away from the newsstand, I looked uptown and immediately spotted another pair of shadows at the corner, two skinny guys in leather overcoats, one in a pink shirt whose cuffs ballooned out of the sleeves like flowers, his dark hair swept up in an Elvis bouffant, the other wearing just a sweater, a gold chain popped out of the collar so we’d all know he was an earner. They didn’t make any effort to hide from me, and when I looked over my shoulder my original pair of tails were walking briskly in my direction. If they got close enough to pen me in, I was going to start my day in the back of a fucking Econovan with plywood nailed over the windows, and end it in a dumpster in the Bronx.

I was a fucking genius. In the course of two weeks I’d acquired an immense debt, had my apartment trashed, and had my button pushed by Frank McKenna.

I spun, ready to give them a chase, and slammed into two more of my fans who’d crept up behind me. I staggered back, off balance, and they lunged forward, each taking hold of my coat as a beat-up white van with blacked-out windows swelled up from the prophetic visions I’d been having for about thirty seconds now, screeching to a halt at the curb, the side door sliding open on cue. There was nothing but dark inside it.

I spun and let them have the coat, sliding it off my arms as I bent down and threw myself backwards under their arms and onto the floor of the van. Turning my head, I found a leg near the door and with a yell I rolled over and took hold of it, pushing up the pant leg and biting down hard into the soft skin just above the heel, rusty blood pouring into my mouth. The owner of the foot howled above me and kicked at me. I let go as the pair on the sidewalk got back to the open van door. Reaching up, I grabbed hold of the third guy’s belt and pulled myself up by it, pushing off from him and swimming up towards the front of the van, diving down just as someone took hold of my ankle and getting my hands on the gear shift between the front seats, pulling it down towards me.

The van, engine running, lurched into slow motion.

I clawed my way up the back of the driver’s seat and clapped my hands onto the driver’s face, digging my fingers into his eyes. People were mass-produced; they all hurt the same. He freaked out and began twitching and dancing, one leg stiffing out and slamming down the gas pedal, sending the van into overdrive for three seconds. Then we crashed into a signpost at the crosswalk, the van skidding sideways like some invisible giant had pulled a string taut and humping up onto the sidewalk. I bounced off the back of the seat, biting my tongue badly, and landed on the hard plywood screwed down to the floor of the van’s interior.

They were on me, two of them, then three. I kicked both legs like a madman, just using my body any way I could to land blows; my left foot smacked into something definitively and one set of hands on my right arm fell away. I swung my freed arm around and laced my fingers into someone’s hair and yanked for all I was worth, getting a satisfying scream in return and finding myself held down by just one guy. I rolled into him and reached up, taking hold of his belt and pulling him down onto me with all my strength, then rolling again, getting on top of him.

I spun away, throwing myself at the square of brightening daylight and rolling out back onto the street, knocking my head, hard, on the pavement. A hum set in, a vibrating noiseless sound in my head that spread out to my arms and legs, making me weak and unsteady. I got to my feet in a shuffling stagger, my legs struggling to catch up with my center of gravity, and fell into telephone pole, splinters sinking into my palms and worming into my healing cuts as they skidded across the rough surface, catching my weight.

Someone was shouting. I turned my head dreamily and saw two men standing in the street next to their cars. Both were short, stocky Middle-Eastern-looking men, their cars black sedans. Car Service guys, cheap suits and bad haircuts, but they didn’t care for this sort of daylight abduction-cum-beating thing and were making their feelings known.

I turned around and leaned against the pole. There were three guys on the street moving towards me, and one in the driver’s seat of the van, turning the ignition and trying to coax it into running again despite the caved-in grill. The previous driver’s legs were visible on the street next to the van—pulled out and dumped by his fellows. I had to hand it to them: They were still trying to make this work. I was obviously a point of pride with Frank.

With shaking hands, I reached into my coat and pulled out the knife I’d taken from the kid in The Tombs. I unfolded it and held it in front of me, grinning, running my bleeding tongue over my teeth.

“Come on, then, you cunts,” I said, breathing hard. “First one to me wins a prize.”

I hurt, and it felt good to hurt. Every nick and scrape, every cut and broken piece of cartilage felt like it was sucking energy, pure solar energy, from the air and feeding it into me.

The trio hesitated for just a second, and then kept coming. They’d seen knives before, and they’d seen shaking, bleeding desperation before. They did the math and liked the sum. I braced myself against the pole and tried to size them up through my sizzling, blurry vision. Before they got within five feet of me, tires screeched behind me. The three of them paused, uncertainty passing over their faces.

I turned and found a dented-up Cadillac, dark blue, with Taxi and Limo plates pointed the wrong way down Eighth, a foot or so behind me. The Bumble sat in the driver’s seat. Rachel popped out of the back, holding the door open, almost casually pointing a small caliber pistol at my attackers.

“Come on, beautiful,” she said. “Time to go.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

29.

When I woke up, I was still in the holding cell. My back ached nicely, and my arms had both gone to sleep under my own weight, numb and useless. As predicted, Officer Hunt hadn’t even looked at me when she’d finally come back to retrieve me from the interview room; I was the right size and physical type, wearing the same clothes. Two detectives had gone in, and two had come out. The math didn’t worry her.

I sat up, suddenly, realizing that James had never come for me. Or if he had I’d slept through it, and he’d left me to rot. I looked around, a shooting pain in my neck my souvenir from the night; the cops had about fifty people in the cell now, everyone just taking up whatever real estate they could find, everyone exhausted. The steel toilet and sink combo on the raised cement pad in the rear had overflowed at some point and the whole place smelled like other people’s shit. But it was quiet, and cool, and I sat for a moment chewing over the fact that Alt James hadn’t come for The Bumble, or had decided to leave me be if he had. Both possibilities were distressing.

Moving quietly, I stood up and stretched, wincing. I felt like everything had been removed over night and shoved back in at a slightly wrong angle, wires connected to my muscles pulling in weird ways. Limping a little, I worked my arms to try and get some feeling back in them and walked over to the front of the cell, where a payphone was just within reach. Keeping the greasy-feeling receiver a half inch from my ear, I dialed The Bumble’s cell collect. When he answered, a wave of relief swept through me.

“I’m still here,” I said, looking over the wheezing forms. “What fucking time is it?”

He told me it was four in the morning. He was with Rachel, Rusch, and Falken at an all night diner in Queens, keeping their eyes open with the worst coffee he’d ever tasted.

I sensed someone standing near me, looming, their gravity pulling at me. I turned and found a skinny piece of tatted-up trash at my elbow, looking hollow-eyed and jittery; a fucking junkie. He hadn’t been in stir when I’d arrived, and I hadn’t heard him sneaking up on me. He had yellow-brown skin stretched taut over his bones, and his face was all brow and chin, his nose receding into shadow, his limp black hair hanging like curtains on either side of his face.

“Need the phone,” he mumbled.

I held up one hand towards his face. “If James doesn’t collect me,” I said, keeping half an eye on my new friend. “They’re just gonna arraign me as if I was you. I doubt he’s gonna show up to press the charge, so they’ll probably dismiss the case in about five seconds. I’ll let you know when I’m out. If you don’t hear from me in a couple of hours, make some fucking inquiries, okay?”

The Bumble said he would. The Junkie suddenly leaned forward.

“Didn’t ya hear me? I said—Frank McKenna says hello.”

I let the phone drop and stepped back quickly, letting his weak jab with the knife slice the air between us as I reached out and took hold of his Adam’s Apple, pinching it hard between my fingers. He staggered backwards, coughing and heaving, his head down in his chest. I snatched the phone back from the air.

“Billy? Yeah, OK. Someone’s trying to kill me. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up the phone and turned back to the skinny fuck. A couple of other people had woken up, but everyone just watched us sleepily, disinclined to worry about it.

The Junkie was still trying to remember how to breath, the knife held loosely in one hand. I stepped over, the wound in my side burning now as if in sentient sympathy, sized him up—weight, height, the extra drag the layer of dried sweat and dirt would cause—and gave him a jab to the ribs. He hadn’t gotten his breath back, so he didn’t make any noise as he smacked backwards into the bars of the cell. They didn’t move or rattle for him. The knife popped out of his hand and I bent with a wince to pick it up.

It wasn’t his, I figured. It was a good hunting knife with a sold wood handle, smooth to open and close, the blade sharp and oiled. Someone had cared for this knife until about three hours ago when they’d made the criminally neglectful decision to hand it over to Stinky Rodriguez here. I folded it up and slid it into my pocket, walking over to him. His eyes had bugged out of his head and his hands were wrapped around his own throat, his mouth open and pale tongue sticking out. He’d locked up and couldn’t breathe. He’d pass out soon enough and wake up in a few hours feeling groggy, so I knelt down in front of him.

“Frank McKenna?” I said. He nodded, comical with his mouth open and his eyes wide, staring past me.

“Jesus, what’s he doing, hiring shitheads like you. I’m fucking insulted.” I wagged a finger at him and leaned forward, holding my breath as I pushed my hands into his pockets, coming up empty. I leaned back on the balls of my feet and studied him, looking at his pain points. He blinked dreamily at me, still struggling to force his seized lungs to work. I brought out the knife and unfolded it, holding it in my hand and studying this asshole, tracing with my eyes where I could cut that would produce the most pain, the most blood, without really hurting him, where I could cut deeper and leave a scar, how I could approach it to keep him alive for a long, long time.

After all, he’d tried to kill me.

Slowly, I folded the knife up and got to my feet. It didn’t feel right. He hadn’t come here for me personally; he’d been pushed into this cell by Frank fucking McKenna and told if he did this, he’d be forgiven something, something broken would be fixed. He’d have it hard enough when he got popped from the Tombs and had to explain me walking around.

I pushed the knife back into my pocket and turned around, feeling tight and sweaty, feverish.

Two hours later two new cops came in with a clipboard and shouted out fifteen names, including Billy’s. We were herded into an elevator and then into another cell, where we sat for another forty minutes or so. Everyone just stared around, numb. Most of them had been arrested fifteen, twenty hours ago and had gone through hungover to angry to plain tired.

One by one we were called out. I was the sixth name called, and shuffled between two cops up a flight of stairs to the courtroom, an uninspiring place with a dropped ceiling, cracked plaster walls, and a few rows of dirty-looking pews filled with relatives and friends and curious gawkers. I stood for a few minutes while the judge, a fat woman with flat dark hair on her head like someone had ironed it there, handled the case before mine, firing questions at the attorneys and the plaintiff. Then they were done and I was led to the big table, where a young man who looked like he’d borrowed his father’s suit sat behind a huge pile of tan file folders, writing into a legal pad.

I stumbled a bit as I scanned the pews; all the way in the back, staring right at me, was James. He was huge compared to everyone else, wearing a blue pinstripe suit that looked like it had been painted onto him, the cut so perfect. He smiled a little and nodded his head.

“You have your own lawyer?” the kid asked as I sat down.

I shook my head, which was suddenly beating with an intense headache. “Nope,” I managed to croak. I didn’t know what James was up to, and it bothered me. After a second I twisted around to look back at him, but he was gone.

“My name’s Simms, and I’ll be representing you,” the kid said, still scratching away at the pad. He finally looked up at me, his eyes red and tired, and I felt a rush of mellow feelings towards him this kid who was trying to defend five hundred morons from their own stupidity, for free. “In thirty seconds, tell me what happened.”

I shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, kid. They’re dropping the charges.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Humor me,” he said with a faint smile.

I winked. “Watch.”

He gave me The Stare for a few more seconds, then shrugged, clearly thinking he’d seen it all and if his own client was hostile, he couldn’t be blamed. He decided to get caught up on some other casework, and we sat in silence for three minutes before the judge barked at us. Simms stood up and did his best, working from the file he had. There were paperwork problems, and the judge demanded that the arresting officer explain themselves, and was annoyed when none of them were present, and dismissed the case with a rap of her gavel. As the guards undid my cuffs, Simms smiled up at me.

“You cheated. You’ve been in this room before.”

I laid a finger alongside my nose and winked again, and walked away, looking around for Alt James or Alt Rusch or anyone else who might be from another fucking universe, looking to kill Falken and make me a very poor man.

Outside, it was nearly dawn, everything getting bright, and James was leaning against a lamppost, smoking a small brown cigar and smiling.

“You were pretty cool in there,” he said, pushing off from his post and falling in next to me as I walked. “All certain you were getting the boot.”

I shrugged and kept my eyes open, made sure he was between me and the walls of the buildings, so I wouldn’t get trapped. I watched the traffic, looking for a car that would swoop in and gobble me up.

“We should talk,” he said. “You could help me.”

I frowned, but kept my mouth shut. This was distraction. This was keeping my mind off what was happening around me. I was tensed and ready to move. We took a few steps in silence, and then a car was pulling over, a sleek big black SUV gleaming in the pre-dawn light. But it was coming up to the curb slowly, and when I stopped on the corner across from it nothing happened.

Alt James held a white business card out to me. “All right, playin’ it cool, I understand,” he said, sounding reasonable, smiling at me. “Here’s my cell. Call me any time, day or night, you decide you might want to help me out. I’ll make it worth your while, no doubt.”

I reached out and took the card like I was in a dream. This motherfucker had left me for eternity in a dead world—a dead fucking Hoboken, New Jersey, of all fucking places—and now he was all smiles and handshakes. I looked down at the card; it was just a phone number in bold in the center of the card: PE6-5000.

I looked up, and the SUV was pulling away, leaving me standing on the corner. I was starving.Shaking myself, I stepped to the curb and raised my hand to hail a cab; one that had been sitting on the corner idling pulled out into the street and zipped over to me in a moment. I pulled open the back door and paused to stuff the card into my pocket and found the pocket empty. I quickly patted myself down and sighed—someone had picked me clean when I’d been sleeping in the cell. I had the Junkie’s knife and Alt James’s calling card, and the clothes on my back.

“Sorry, pal,” I said, slamming the door. “Guess I’m walking.”

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28.

Officer Carol Beering was thirty-six, divorced, lived in Queens with her three children, and had a father dying terribly slowly in a private hospital that bled her dry. She was six weeks behind on her payments and the terror in her face every time I mentioned her kids was wonderful. I made a call and asked for her, had a thirty-second conversation with her, and then Rachel and I were standing outside The Bernard B. Kerik Complex on White Street, trying to look like cops.

I was wearing sunglasses at night like a fucking asshole, and found it was kind of fun. Being an asshole. Being an asshole was also pretty much the sum total of my Cop Costume.

Officer Beering emerged from the front doors with wide, terrified eyes, seeing me and crossing over to us, looking in every direction as she walked. She was short and ridiculously big-chested, looking like she was going to topple over.

“Jesus Christ,” she hissed, pressing in close to us. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

I pushed my finger into her chest. “You’re standing here, so you already made your decision, so forget the theatrics.” I pulled my hand back and dialed it down a little. “All you have to do is escort us down to the holding cells. Then you go back to your desk and forget all about it.”

She studied me. “And the whole debt, it’s forgiven, right? Because this bullshit could get me—”

I nodded and waved a hand. “Forgiven. The whole thing.”

Rachel shook her head. “You can’t say that.”

I looked at her and grit my teeth. “Rache—”

She leaned in to my ear. “You cannot tell her that.”

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. I ran numbers through my head. I’d never kept any written records—writing things down tended to swing around and bite you in the ass. When I opened my eyes, Officer Beering looked about ready to attack me.

“You’ll be seven weeks on the 23^rd,” I said. “She’s right, I’m not associated with Frank McKenna any more. I can’t forgive the debt.” I sighed, holding up a hand. I looked at Rachel and stared at her as I spoke. “So what’s in it for you is cash, exactly what you owe plus all the outstanding juice on it. You get it tomorrow morning, and if you deliver it to Frank by the 23^rd you’ll be free and clear.”

Rachel nodded, once. It was the most expensive nod I’d ever seen.

Beering looked at Rachel and then nodded. “Okay. How do I get it?”

“Delivered,” I said. “To your address. Eight o’clock. It’ll be cash. It’ll be exact. Don’t skim any, and don’t be late paying, or you’ll nail yourself another week of interest.”

She didn’t trust it, I could see, but it was too good a deal to just pass up, and she struggled for thirty seconds, biting her lip and muttering to herself a little in her throat. Finally, she nodded. “All right,” she said, suddenly decisive. “Follow me. Don’t stop. Don’t talk to anybody. I do the talking, I do the door opening. The minute you step off the elevator, I’m back up and I don’t hear from you any more.”

I nodded. “That’s the plan.”

The Tombs was always filled with undercover cops, dropping off arrests, following up on investigations, hanging around for a free cup of coffee or visiting old associates. She took us around back where the buses and vans and cruisers pulled up to unload the penny-ante crooks, drunk tourists, and unlucky idiots from the various precincts. It was like a loading dock, a tall metal garage door, a slab of concrete, three fat cops in uniform drinking coffees and smoking cigarettes, eyeing us up and down as we approached and then dismissing us like they’d seen every kind of asshole in the world and weren’t impressed.

I was nervous. Cops fucking everywhere, and I realized I didn’t know any of the codes or the secret handshakes. I might say or do something to raise suspicions at any moment, so I elected to keep my mouth shut, my face blank.

We passed through a checkpoint where we were expected to disgorge our weapons into a bin for retrieval upon our exit; I made a dumb show of placing something in the box and the two cops working the gate didn’t even glance at me, and buzzed us through without another glance. It suddenly occurred to me to worry about meeting some cop who knew me by sight, and I started watching my feet as we walked, keeping my face down, then realized I’d never know how to get out again once Beering dumped us off and forced myself to look up with the blank expression on my face.

She led us down a dizzying sequence of concrete halls, through steel gates with flaking glossy paint rubbed down by thousands of sweating hands, down narrow, winding stairs and up narrow, winding stairs. The place was a fucking maze and smelled uniformly like piss and fried chicken. I’d spent a few nights in the Tombs over the years sleeping on narrow wooden benches or disturbingly damp stone floors, being woken up six times to change cells and arraigned at four in the morning just to have the charges dismissed immediately, but I had no interior map of the place in my head. Finally we started descending down some fire stairs, the shaft hot and stuffy, all the heat of Manhattan pumped into it, and pushed open a dirty yellow steel door, holding it open.

“In here. He was in cell three last I checked, but he might have been moved. We gotta keep shuffling people as more come in, trying to keep the incompatibles apart. We good?”

She started to turn away but I grabbed her arm, squeezing just a little too tightly, an expert calibration. “How many cops?”

She blinked, wincing a little. “Four. Two at the desk, two on the block.”

I let her go. I thought about asking her which one was fucking cell three, but let it slide, and she was gone, almost running back up the stairs, leaving us to bluff our way through the four guards on our own. I looked at Rachel, she nodded crisply at me, and we stepped into a narrow, dim corridor. I felt like the whole building was leaning in on me, the walls shifting in a few centimeters with each step, subtle and suffocating. At the desk, a young, good-looking cop in a neat, crisp uniform sat leaned back in his ancient green mental swivel chair, the cushioning all long gone, his hands laced behind his head as he chatted up his partner, a middle-aged woman who still looked good in her trousers and buttoned-down shirt. Rachel stepped forward and flashed the ID Anto had sold us. I didn’t bring mine out, and kept my head turned away from them. I wanted to seem uninterested, bored, and unconcerned with protocol.

“We need to talk to someone in cell 3,” she said. I studied the female cop’s shoes. They looked comfortable, and my toes ached suddenly in my own pinching pair.

“Well, hello, darlin’,” the kid said, and I heard his chair squeak as he sat forward. I glanced up under my brow; he was leaning forward with her ID pinched between his thumb and forefinger, pulling it closer so he could copy her fictitious badge number into his log book. She hadn’t let go, and they were linked by the little booklet. “You’re too pretty to be a detective from fucking Inwood,” he said, smiling down at his desk.

I looked down at my hands and worked a nonexistent hangnail. Rachel had heard something along those lines every night I’d driven her around town, and it had always seemed vaguely threatening. Somehow this kid with a badge and a gun made it sound ridiculous.

“Born Staten Island,” she said, striking just the right tone: Not interested, but not nasty, either. Nothing to get his blood up, nothing to make him think he should come back there with us. “I think I finally got the accent chiseled off.”

He laughed and let go of her badge, glanced at me, and then nodded. “Go on back. Officer Hunt will escort you back and remove the prisoner to an interview room. Give a shout if you need anything.”

We followed the trim Officer Hunt down another narrow, grim corridor, the smell of piss and sweat baked into the walls, trapped under layers of glossy gray paint. We passed the first two holding cells—the first filled with tired, unhappy-looking women of various ages and circumstances who watched us silently from their spots on the narrow wooden benches, the second filled with what looked like a single group of Hispanic men in nice casual clothes, looking like they’d been out to the clubs and gotten into a scrape. Cell 3 was packed with an assortment of assholes—you had your crackheads, scratching themselves and muttering, your run-of-the-mill mopes trying to get some sleep, your angry, drunk tourists in their Midwest-nice outfits looking dazed and horrified. And then The Bumble, watching us with clear, steady eyes as we approached. His face never wavered from the blank, sleepy expression I was used to, but he stood up slow and casual and edged towards the front of the cell as we came near. All the benches were filled with sleeping forms, and the floor was covered in bodies, people just laying down in the slimy dirt and passing out.

“That’s him,” Rachel said, pointing. “We just need five minutes.”

Officer Hunt didn’t say anything. She made a racket waking everyone up and ordering them away from the entrance to the cell, one hand on her taser as they sleepily complied, red eyes turned on us for one incurious moment before they shifted to another spot on the floor. The Bumble stood a few feet back as ordered, hands down at his side, and seemed to be impersonating a shrubbery. Officer hunt was formidable, and spun Billy around, slapping cuffs on him with a jerk of her wrists, and leading him back out into the hall.

She opened up a tiny interview room, just eight square feet with a small desk and two chairs, a camera mounted in the corner, and pushed Billy in and around to the back of the desk, where he obligingly dropped into the hardbacked metal chair and let her recuff him directly to it. She breezed for the door, all efficiency in her snug trousers, and paused with one hand on the knob.

“Just leave ‘im here when you’re done,” she said. “We’ll collect him.”

The fucking lazy cops. You could move a circus through the place one monkey at a time and no one would look up from their newspapers to notice.

As the door shut, The Bumble jerked his arms and rolled his shoulders and tossed the cuffs onto the desk. “Fucking bitch doesn’t know how to do it,” he said, grinning. “The assholes on the street, they knew. Almost lost my hands shit was so tight. I still got pins and needles.”

I smiled. “We got to move, Billy,” I said, peeling off my coat. “Strip.”

He blinked, shrugged, and started pulling off his shoes. The Bumble thought questions were a burden. I emptied my pockets onto the desk, placing the fake badge on top, and stripped down to my boxers, tossing The Bumble my stupid Detective costume.

“You’re walking out of here with Rache,” I said, threading one leg into Billy’s pants. They were warm and kind of damp, facts I studiously ignored.

He nodded, pulling on my shirt. “And you?”

I shrugged, buttoning up. “He can’t kill me.”

The Bumble picked up the ID and examined it. “We don’t look anything alike.”

I sat down behind the desk and picked up the cuffs, slipping them on and cuffing myself to the chair. “If anyone actually looks at it,” I said, settling myself and wiggling my toes in Billy’s dirty socks, “I’ll eat it. Now go.”

They looked at each other and then at me. Billy looked a little rumpled and wrong for the clothes, but when he slipped on the shades I thought he looked like every other douchebag undercover in the building, and no one was ever going to notice the difference. I looked at Rachel and our eyes met.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He can’t kill me, and it’s not like he’s going to beam me out of this room into an alternate universe. I might catch a charge, but I’ll be out of here in a day, tops.”

She looked away and then turned and opened the door. The Bumble waved at me with a grin, and followed her out into the hall.

I took a deep breath. The room smelled like coffee. I settled in to wait.

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27.

This was how it would happen. This is how it was done.

I sat in Pirelli’s explaining it to Rachel, a cold cup of coffee in front of me, an uneaten hamburger between us. We’d shared not taking a bite. Instead of eating we’d smoked an entire pack of my cigarettes, the ashtray packed full of our butts and the air dense with the heavy blue smoke.

“He timed it,” I said, staring down at the vaguely pink surface of our table. “He must have been watching us, and he called in the bulls just when it would be too late to be booked, so he won’t go in the system until tomorrow morning. So only James and his team know Billy’s on ice.”

This was how it would happen. This is how it was done.

“During the dog watch, only a supervising sergeant on duty, James will just walk on in and flash his badge, and tell everyone Billy’s a witness and he’s got to take him upstate. No paperwork. It’ll be weird, but there’ll be nothing in the system, so no one’s going to argue with a Detective. It’s his badge, his career—if it was really James, he’d worry about that, about getting away with something, because the next morning there’ll be an arrest report entered into the system and no criminal to go with it, and questions will be asked and six months, a year from now Detective Stanley James is charged with something after weeks and weeks of newspaper stories. But what does Alt James care about that? It’s not his job.” I swallowed bile. “Detective James is already dead.”

Rachel was staring at me with red eyes, her arms crossed under her breasts, looking puffy and beautiful. She was maybe thirty now, I wasn’t sure. Some lines had crept onto her face, a gray hair here and there. She was beautiful and always would be, but she’d had some hard years, some traffic. I wanted to reach over and take her hand, but didn’t. She didn’t think I could be gentle. She was probably right. I could be gentle if I concentrated, but we moved in different ways, felt in different ways, and the fucking universe got its cruel jollies by having me show up as her driver all those years ago.

“Please stop,” she said, her voice hoarse, one leg bouncing under the table. “I know. I get it. Billy’s a friend.”

I nodded, but I didn’t stop. “So he’ll walk Billy right out of The Tombs in a few hours and no one will bat an eye, say a word, ask a question. Cops do it all the time. Take someone on a ride, beat the tar out of them, get information, revenge, whatever, then slip him back into his cell, and no one ever asks any questions. Everyone knows, but no one says anything, that’s how it works—the cops are worse than the fucking mafia. Except Billy won’t come back: James’ll take him somewhere and he’ll make a call. He’ll make me an offer: Falken for Billy. He won’t accept Falken’s location because he doesn’t trust me. He’ll want me to bring Falken somewhere physically, make a trade.”

Rachel was shaking her head. “You can’t do that.”

“I can’t?” I felt sick and sludgy, but wanted another cigarette anyway, just to have something to do with my hands. “Billy’s … important to me.”

The words were oversize, and I had trouble speaking, my throat throbbing.

Rachel suddenly leaned forward. “He’ll kill Falken. Falken is—”

I pounded the table with my fist. “Not my friend. Billy’s my friend.”

We stared at each other. She didn’t blink. After a few seconds I leaned back against the vinyl. “All right. Then I have to go get Billy out.” I stretched and fished into my pocket for cash, tossing some on the table without looking at it. “Tonight. Before James fetches him.”

She nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”

We stared at each other again. I put my hands flat on the tabletop and took a deep breath. “You ever been in The Tombs?”

She shook her head. “I never did a bit. Not even overnight.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to hit it before the shift change, before James comes by for him, which means there’ll be more cops to deal with.” I paused and ran through my thoughts, getting them organized. “There’s a cop, a kid, in deep with Frank and I been letting her ride a little, doing her a favor because cops got credit to burn other folks don’t.” I waved a hand. “I don’t collect on Frank’s book any more, but she don’t know that. I can press her and she can get us in without notice.” I closed my eyes. “There’ll be at least eight or ten guards—this is the holding level, not the fucking booking office. We’ll go straight down. So say—a dozen. A dozen fucking armed cops.”

Her stare was steady and dry. “Guns?”

I shook my head.

She blinked, slow and languid. I loved her. I could watch her blink and be entertained. “So, we’re going to sweet-talk them into letting us walk out of there with him?”

“No one said you couldn’t shoot some people, you wanted.”

And there it was: She smiled.

####

The face that appeared between the door and the jamb was old and wrinkled, squinting despite the darkness. “Who the fuck,” he said with a thick accent, a complete declarative sentence, not a question. Then his shrunken pale face puffed out suddenly into a balloon of surprise, and he tried to slam the door. He moved in slow motion, though, and by the time he got his body behind it I’d had my foot in the gap for about six hours.

“Be friendly, Anto,” I advised as he grunted and huffed, trying to shut the door despite my foot. “This, by way of reference, is not friendly.”

“You trying to get me hurt?”

“Anto.”

“You fucked up, you trying to get everyone in your trouble?”

“Anto,” I repeated patiently.

He gave up with a snarl and backed away from the door, throwing up his hands and turning away. “Fine. Come in and get me killed. Frank—”

“I know,” I said, stepping into the hot, dim apartment foyer, followed by Rachel. “Frank put the black spot on me. So I’m a customer, and I’ve got cash.”

The old man was short and stocky, the body of an old dock worker under a bright white button down shirt and a pair of dark trousers held up by fraying leather suspenders. His white hair spurted from his pink scamp in thin, wispy shrubs, like clouds circling his skull. He paused just before the narrow entryway widened into his living room and cocked his head. “Cash, eh,” he said.

I turned my head and nodded at Rachel, who bit her lip and shut the door behind her. We followed the old man into his living room, a large green couch and matching chair facing a huge television that still flickered the news at us, the sound off. It was cozy, the tiny kitchen behind us and another short hall leading to the rest of the apartment—the bedroom, his office, the bathroom. A tidy place, excepting the office, no dust, no mess. No booze. I’d been in Anto’s apartment plenty of times before, picking up packages for Frank in my spare time.

Anto glanced at Rachel as she stepped around me and straightened up. “Forgive me,” he said suddenly, the words mushy. “Welcome to my home. My name is Anto Picinich.”

She smiled a little shyly. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Picinich. My name is Rachel Murray.”

He nodded, smiling, then looked at me and his smile fell away instantly. “Come,” he grunted. “I make tea in the kitchen for the young lady and you tell me why you have killed me.”

“No tea for me?” I asked as we followed his compact frame.

“Ha! You hear how he jokes about my execution. You watch, I will slip away and make a call and some men will come to take him off my hands, give me a reward.”

I shook my head at Rachel. Anto was always like this. You were forever waking him from a nap, or interrupting dinner, or getting him into trouble, or, if you were unfortunate enough to be black or Spanish of some persuasion, you were always stealing things from him.

The kitchen was so small Rachel had to work hard to keep from touching me as we tried to stay out of the old man’s way. I gave him a minute, and as he filled an ancient kettle with tapwater I said “Anto, I need to buy some documents.”

“Running?” He said. “Frank has pushed your button, and you run. Passports? Driver’s license? Birth Certificate? Very expensive. You have brought photos? If I must take your photos myself, it costs extra.” He shut off the water and turned towards the stove. “And when you are found living in Mexico under an assumed name and they bring your documents back to Mr. Frank McKenna, they will say, no one but Anto Picinich does such quality work, and I will be in trouble.”

“Not passports,” I said, ignoring his ranting and glancing at the time on the battery-powered clock on the wall. “Badges. Detective, NYPD. Manhattan precinct, preferably way north – 34th Precinct, maybe.” I held up my hand with fingers splayed. “Two. In an hour.”

The old man turned from the stove and looked at me, then at Rachel, then back at me. “Jesus,” he said. “How much cash did you bring?”

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26.

I spun around and with a surge of glee I leaped onto Chino’s back, both hands on his head, and slammed him down onto the bar, knocking him cold. He slumped under me like an avalanche, and I tried to surf him down and failed, slipping backwards with a tearing sensation slicing along my side and cracking my head on one of the tables, sending it up and over, its former tenants scrambling out of the way. Feeling like a knife had been shoved into my belly all over again, I pulled myself up to my feet and turned myself around, breathing heavy. The Bumble stood over the Dandy, who was crumpled on the floor unconscious next to Chino, his hands spread.

“Cops,” I said, staggering forward. The place had gone quiet and staring as The Bumble and I walked briskly back towards our table, where Falken stood next to Rachel, their drinks untouched. I waved my hand back and forth, indicating the rear of the bar. “Out the back, out the back,” I hissed.

Rachel spun immediately—I’d flushed her out of too many shitholes in our past life for her to ever forget the instincts that kept her alive—but Falken stood there gaping at me until she stopped a few steps away, spun, and took hold of him by the shoulder, giving him a yank that got him into motion. As we caught up with them, The Bumble and I simultaneously paused to kick over our table and the empty one next to it, and a war whoop burst out of me. We crowded into the tight, dark vestibule outside the kitchen and the single toilet while Rachel struggled with the heavy steel door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONELLE ONLY, finally dragging it open with some help from a wide-eyed Falken, who appeared to be experienced the longest sustained elevation in his heart rate ever.

We burst into the alley behind the bar just as a blue and white police cruiser turned the corner, and we took off to our left, towards the pair of slimy green garbage bins set back against a high cinder block wall. I felt ridiculous. Normally when the cops took an interest, I kept my dignity: Let the motherfuckers frisk you, give you a few pokes, maybe even arrest you just to hold you for twenty-four hours and sweat you out a little. Here I was scrambling for a fucking wall climb like I’d just gotten caught tagging some car on the Bowery.

Falken leaped up on top of the dumpsters like an athlete despite his belly, like he was connected to some invisible wire, and was up over the wall in a flash. I didn’t blame him. Billy, no stranger to rushing out of places just ahead of the heat, crashed into the dumpster like he hadn’t seen it, bounced back, then heaved himself up onto it in a messy, awkward scramble that left his suit a stained, greasy mess. I took a little jump, hearing shouts behind us, and put my palms flat on the black plastic lid and vaulted up onto the slick surface, the smell, hot and rotten, enveloping me instantly. I got to my feet and glanced over my shoulder down the alley, where two fat uniforms were running towards us like their shoes were made of glue. I smiled—I knew these guys. In my business you met every cop in the world, eventually. Breathing a little heavily, I looked down; Rachel was still on the ground, looking at the Dumpsters like they were fucking Mount Everest, one hand on her chin like she was doing equations in her head involving the curvature of the earth or some shit as our tiny window of advantage closed up.

I dropped back down next to her. “You fucking midget,” I whispered, smiling at the cops and shooting my cuffs. I started towards them, spreading my arms wide and smiling. “Jesus, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for uniforms, huh? All this for little old me?”

The cop in the lead was named Murray: fat, pale, and hairy, his face covered in a massive graying beard/mustache combination that swirled out into whimsical handlebars. No one ever made fun of his whiskers, though, or if they did they found out that a baton could be worse than a fucking gun in the right hands. His blue shirt was stained with sweat already, and I wondered how long it had been since the academy for him.

“Sorry, pal,” he said, grinning, everyone friends. “The boss says pull him in, we pull you in. You got any complaints, file ’em with James.”

I nodded. “You can let her slide, though, right? I mean, James wants me, right?”

We were a few feet apart by now. Rachel, smart even if she wasn’t tall, remained back by the dumpsters. I hoped she was shedding a tear for me, manfully acknowledging my sacrifice, because I was about to flush a decade of good will between me and the crushers down the fucking toilet. Cops were all just failed hoods, people who wanted to crack heads and walk into rooms and make them go quiet. All your average cop wanted was respect: If you treated them well, shook their hand, and let them run the show, they loved you. Piss them off once and you arrested every Thursday for drunk and disorderly like fucking clockwork.

Murray shook his head but his partner answered. Ruiz was a slimmer version of Murray but with just a porn mustache hanging on his upper lip like a well-fed caterpillar that matched his eyebrows in fucking disturbing ways. “Sorry, word o’ God is, take everyone,” he said.

I shrugged. “All right,” I said, stopping a foot or so away from Murray, who was fishing out his handcuffs. All very gentlemanly, all very civilized. A week ago that’s exactly what would have happened: I’d have let them cuff me, we’d have cracked jokes all the way to The Tombs, and I’d have asked them to order me Chinese food around seven, and they would have been happy to do it.

As it was, I stepped forward and punched Murray in the gut.

There was a lot of gut to try and impress, but I’d compensated for every pastry Murray had absorbed in his career and he doubled over like he was on a spring, letting out a wet moan and suddenly becoming a dead weight hanging on me. I drove him forward and crashed his bulk into his partner, knocking them both to the ground. I sprang back and danced around to the left, aiming a solid kick at Ruiz’s face.

This was fun. This was exercise. Ruiz’s head snapped around and sent a spray of blood onto the greasy pavement, and I was eleven again, breaking Tommy Dukone’s nose, feeling the cartilage break, the gummy gritty feel of it against my knuckles, the sad squeaking noise he made in the gutter. And every time I kicked him, I got a spray of blood and a squeak. I kicked Ruiz and I got a spray of blood and a squeak. I turned to see what I could make Murray do, Murray who probably thought we were fucking friends or something up until ten seconds ago. I took his head by the mustache and gave it a yank, slamming his skull back down onto the uneven pavement.

I kicked Ruiz and got a spurt of blood straight up into the air, beautiful in its way. I could feel every part of me working in concert, every system and vessel clicking in, smooth and strong. It was like dancing, floating, like I weighed nothing, like all my mass and fatigue was transferred to Ruiz with every kick.

Then Rachel’s hand was on my shoulder, weighing me back down until my feet were back on the ground, and I was panting, my chest burning, my suit jacket sweated through, my hip sore and stiff. It had only been thirty seconds.

“Jesus,” she hissed. “Come on, you fucking psychopath.”

She sounded exactly like she had all those years ago, me saving her life, her horrified at the manner in which I was saving it. I wanted to laugh, but I swallowed it and followed her, feeling so good I actually stared at her ass as she hustled ahead of me. I settled my jacket onto my shoulders and felt good, young. We took a left at the mouth of the alley, next to the empty cruiser with its doors open like wings, and walked around the block, circling back around to The Ear on the other side of the street, ducking into a shadowed doorway, our collars popped up and our chins down in our chests. Three cruisers sat at crazy angles in the street, lights flashing, three uniformed cops standing around chatting. As we settled in, an ambulance pulled up to add its own shade of cherry to the lights, the EMTs scurrying out and around the back.

“Psychopath,” she breathed suddenly, but it sounded affectionate, or so I told myself. I smiled, but then we both froze, watching as six cops, looking angry and sweaty, led Billy in handcuffs up the street towards the cruisers.

“Shit,” Rachel breathed.

James emerged from The Ear smoking a cigar. He looked the same: Flash, a beautiful dark green suit and a gold watch you could see from the fucking Moon. He glowed. He stood for a moment, watching as Billy was pushed into one of the cruisers. He scanned the street, his eyes moving right over us, and then flicked his smoke into the street, said something to the cops around him, and climbed into the back of another car. We watched the cops drive off, lights going dead, a small crowd of The Ear’s regulars emerging to gawk on the street.

“They can’t charge him,” Rachel whispered. “They can only hold him for twenty four hours.”

I shook my head. “Hell, Rache,” I said. “He’s the fucking Executioner. In twenty-four hours Billy’ll be dead.”

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