Dark City Lights Read online

  Dark City Lights

  NEW YORK STORIES

  EDITED BY

  Lawrence Block

  THREE ROOMS PRESS

  New York, NY

  Dark City Lights: New York Stories

  A HAVE A NYC EDITION

  EDITED BY

  Lawrence Block

  © 2015 by Three Rooms Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For permissions, please write to address below or email [email protected]. Any members of education institutions wishing to photocopy or electronically reproduce part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Three Rooms Press, 51 MacDougal Street, #290, New York, NY 10012.

  ISBN 978-1-941110-22-5 (ebook)

  COVER AND BOOK DESIGN:

  KG Design International

  www.katgeorges.com

  DISTRIBUTED BY:

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  Three Rooms Press

  New York, NY

  www.threeroomspress.com

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A FOREWORD by Lawrence Block

  AMSTERDAM IN THE 90s by Ed Park

  THE BIG SNIP by Thomas Pluck

  BOWERY STATION, 3:15 A.M. by Warren Moore

  CHLOE by Jerrold Mundis

  THE DEAD CLIENT by Parnell Hall

  THE GARMENTO AND THE MOVIE STAR by Jonathan Santlofer

  HANNIBAL’S ELEPHANTS by Robert Silverberg

  JIMMY TAKES A TRIP by Elaine Kagan

  KNOCK-OUT WHIST by David Levien

  THE LADY UPSTAIRS by Jill D. Block

  MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK WITH HARRY by Jane Dentinger

  OLD HANDS by Erin Mitchell

  THE SAFEST FORM OF CONVEYANCE by Jim Fusilli

  SEE/SAW SOMETHING by Peter Carlaftes

  THE SOLDIER, THE DANCER, AND ALL THAT GLITTERS by Tom Callahan

  SPIT THE TRUTH by Eve Kagan

  THIS POSE IS A PROBLEM by Bill Bernico

  THE TOUR GUIDE by Kat Georges

  WANG DANG DOODLE by Annette Meyers

  WEDNESDAY IS VIKTOR’S by Brian Koppelman

  WET DOG ON A RAINY DAY by S. J. Rozan

  WHY I TOOK THE JOB by Peter Hochstein

  KELLER THE DOGKILLER by Lawrence Block

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  IT’S TIME TO LOWER THE LIGHTS . . .

  A FOREWORD BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  THE WORLD, ACCORDING TO DANNY Boy Bell, is in urgent need of two things: a dimmer switch and a volume control.

  Now Danny Boy’s an albino, which might help explain his perspective. (He’s also a recurring character in a series of novels I’ve written about a fellow named Matthew Scudder.) Still, one needn’t be genetically predisposed toward photosensitivity to share his sentiments. The world, I’d submit, is often louder and brighter than a person might wish it.

  And, if Paris is the City of Light, New York is certainly the city of bright lights, burning away twenty-four hours a day. No wonder it’s the city that never sleeps. How could it, without ear plugs and a sleep mask?

  And yet it’s also the capital of Noir.

  Thus Dark City Lights.

  WHAT DO SHORT STORIES NEED with an introduction? The twenty-three that constitute Dark City Lights can certainly stand on their own without any words from me to prop them up. But a volume of this sort seems to require some compendium of prefatory remarks, if only so that the reader will have something to skip. (And please feel free to do just that if you’re so inclined. The book’s first story is Ed Park’s “Amsterdam in the 90s,” and it’s terrific. Why don’t you slip out and read it now, without further delay? My feelings won’t be hurt, honest.)

  Still here? Well, okay. I promise I won’t keep you long. I’ll just take a few minutes to tell you a thing or two about what’s in store for you.

  First of all, the one common denominator here is that all of these stories are set in New York City, which is home to many but not all of the writers.

  Aside from their New York setting, the stories vary widely. Many of them are crime stories, but quite a few are not. Most of them have a contemporary setting, but several are set in the past, and Robert Silverberg recounts a fictional event that occurred in 2003, when visitors from outer space landed in Central Park. (You don’t remember the incident? Really?)

  Bob’s story was set well in the future when he wrote it. It’s one of two reprints in Dark City Lights; the other is my own “Keller the Dogkiller,” one of that thoughtful assassin’s few New York adventures. All the other stories appear here for the first time.

  Most—but not all—are dark. Noir, you might say, or at least noirish. Many are the work of writers who’ve been doing this for decades, but a few constitute their authors’ first published short fiction. (And that’s unusual in an invitational anthology, because who would be daft enough to solicit a contribution from someone who’s never done this before? Well, I would, as it turns out, and it paid off bigtime, as you’ll see.)

  BESIDES WHEEDLING STORIES OUT OF people with plenty of other ways to spend their time, my chief contribution has been to put the contents in order. One could waste hours, even whole days, trying to figure out what story might best follow what other story, but I decided to be guided by the example of a literary hero of mine, John O’Hara. He published many collections of his short fiction, and in later years simply put them in alphabetical order by title. (I took that tack in my own most recent collection, and so far no one has complained.)

  There’s one exception. I’ve placed my own effort last, as evidence of the modesty and humility in which I take so much pride.

  AMSTERDAM IN THE 90s

  BY ED PARK

  I. MINDFULNESS

  SOMEONE ON WNYC IS TALKING about mindfulness, how it’s not about quote unquote checking out at all.

  I am sort of interested and sort of not. Mostly I am thinking about my medication.

  I only need to take two pills a day, one in the morning, to stop the dizziness, and one in the evening, to counteract the possible side effects of the first pill, which include nausea, discolored discharge, and—I don’t understand this part—dizziness.

  Something’s off, I realize.

  But around the time I’m supposed to take each pill, whether it’s the main pill or the counteracting pill, I will forget whether I’ve taken it or not. I’ll visualize myself opening the pill container, but that might just be a memory of all the dozens, hundreds of times now that I’ve pushed down and turned the lids off containers and tapped out a pill and knocked it back with a glass of water.

  I listen to the radio when I’m in the kitchen. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m easily distracted.

  Duane Reade loves me. I wonder what the fetching pharmacist thinks.

  The mindfulness guy is still talking. He’s talking about anger, how it’s causing divorce, it’s causing assault, it’s causing war.

  So today: have I taken my pill, my morning pill? This is the question. I remember I did, or do I? My wife told me to get one of those day-of-the-week pill sorters, but I said those were for old people.

  Then it occurs to me that I am old. I’m staring forty in the face. How did that happen?

  It seems like only yesterday I was staring thirty in the face.

  I can remember staring twenty in the face, though I know that was a long time ago.

  Nearly twenty years ago, as a matter of fact. Twenty doesn’
t seem like a huge number, except when it does.

  It’s hard to believe, but I remember being nine and staring ten in the face. There was no terror then, only excitement at achieving the zero I could tote around for a full year.

  So here’s an example of forgetfulness. I just forgot that I actually do have a day-of-the-week pill sorter. I got one about a month ago, while walking by some sort of community health camper van on Amsterdam between Ninety-ninth and 100th, near that strange cluster where the police station and the Department of Health and the Bloomingdale branch of the public library are. I’d never seen the van before, though who knows: Perhaps it’s always on that particular stretch of road, at that particular hour—around 2 p.m., not my usual time for being out and about in the neighborhood.

  An extremely pretty woman in a blue smock was handing out the pill sorters. As I walked toward her, I couldn’t tell what she had in her basket. I saw her offer one of these mysterious slim objects to an old lady, an old man, another old lady. She did not offer any to a pack of teenagers, nor to a young woman strolling a tot.

  She offered one to me and before I even saw what it was, I extended my palm to accept. Anything for a few seconds’ communion with her.

  For a second I thought she’d given me some kind of toy. Then I thought it was a device to mold very small popsicles.

  I told her it was just what I needed. She smiled. I thought about how sometimes you get handed promotional food samples, bottles of a new energy drink, and how you just consume them without thinking: What if this person is trying to poison me? What if it’s all a weirdly orchestrated mass-murder scheme?

  The pill-sorter seemed okay, though. Plastics aren’t ideal for hot liquids, I read, because of leaching. BPAs get into your system. I don’t know what BPA stands for, but in general you don’t want anything to get into your system that isn’t already there. Especially anything that just goes by its initials.

  This pill-holder won’t hold liquids, hot or cold. Only pills. Dry, room-temperature pills.

  Worrying doesn’t add any value, says the mindfulness guy. The host jokes that she certainly hopes her mother is listening to the program. Her mother, she says, is a chronic worrier.

  I didn’t spend any more time at the health van, which maybe was the point of the freebie, but the pill-sorter has the web address on it so I will probably look it up online sometime.

  So I said to myself back then.

  The upshot of the pill-sorter episode is that I started using it but then had trouble remembering whether I’d put a pill in the appropriate daily compartments in the first place, and also whether, assuming that I had stocked the sections correctly, I’d taken the pill from its box and swallowed it.

  That’s not supposed to happen, I know. But somehow my pill-sorter predicament was just as confusing as my regular pill-taking amnesia.

  It’s ten minutes to noon right now. Soon it will be too late to take the morning pill. Though, of course, I might have already taken it. In which case, all is right with the world.

  What I need is a third kind of pill, one to counteract the forgetfulness. It’s not a general forgetfulness. It’s not amnesia. It’s just a very precise bit of fogginess that surrounds whether or not I’ve taken my pill.

  The host is talking to another guest. She says, It is a real treat to have you here today.

  II. RUNNING THE RED

  I know what I saw that day, but I understand why no one will believe me. Not that I’ve told a soul. I’m not that dumb.

  I was in a bad way at work—nothing dramatic, but I was coming in later and later, making more mistakes. It was getting so that if I didn’t course-correct, my boss, Dr. Awkwa, would notice. But still. I could have my mornings, couldn’t I? A little slice of time to myself. After I dropped off Emma at school, I’d grab a coffee and a muffin or a breakfast sandwich at the bodega, ham and egg on a bagel, and talk to the guys working the counter or Miranda who worked the till. We didn’t discuss important matters of the day, just boom our greetings. They’d call me boss and I’d call them boss. Who’s the boss, I’d wonder. I sat with the paper for a long time. Sometimes do the crossword. The puzzles get harder from Monday to Friday, butI always had a smoother time with the later ones. Mondays were too simple; I would second-guess every other answer, read hidden depths into the clues. By Friday, though, I was in my zone; I could polish off the puzzle in twelve minutes, even ten, and reward myself with a second pastry.

  One morning, puzzle and pastry disposed of, I was walking the eight blocks home when a long black car peeled around the corner, from Ninety-eighth to Amsterdam, nearly decking an old man who was using his rolled-up umbrella as a cane. Something got into me. What if the car had hit the man, or hit me? What if I’d been with Emma? Earlier that year, indeed on the very same corner, a sixteen-year-old joyrider had jumped into an unattended Acura in the East Village, whizzed across town and up the West Side, until finally coming to rest by smashing into a Japanese restaurant at ten past eight—just seven minutes later than the time when Emma and I typically walk by. A little girl and her grandfather were there in our place. He suffered a broken leg and two broken arms; his granddaughter, pinned between the stolen car and the grating, was dead by the time the EMTs arrived. The item in the Times struck a portentous and somber tone: “The teenager had no destination in mind, just an urge to press down on a pedal and see the blocks go by. But the city had misery on its agenda.”

  I wasn’t remembering this on that morning when the long black car ran a red in order to snag a parking spot on Amsterdam. The pedestrian who had almost been hit shook his head, eyes wide open in fear and fury.

  “I can’t believe that guy!” I said.

  “It’s no good—no good at all,” he replied, as we passed each other in the middle of the crosswalk. I saw the long black car backing into its precious parking space, the driver making adjustments as the back wheel neared the curb.

  I got back on the sidewalk, stomped back in the direction I had come from. I was going to peer into the driver’s seat. If the guy was big—well, I wouldn’t say anything. No sense in being stupid. The last physical fight I’d subjected myself to was in the seventh grade (it was a draw). I am not what you would call a formidable specimen—I barely clear five foot five and my arms are jokes—yet I wanted so much to make the driver . . . what? Apologize? To whom—me? The old man, now already heading east and out of sight? The ghosts of the grandfather and his precious charge, run down on this same awful stretch of pavement?

  Why not.

  Apologize.

  Break down.

  Beg forgiveness on the sidewalk.

  As I approached the car, I saw that the driver was a man of roughly my height, older by at least five years if not a decade, face plump but by no means fat. His arms could be strong but somehow I didn’t think so. He had a Mets cap on, a little mustache thin and dark.

  Strange glasses with round frames. I could see a wide, almost cartoon version of myself, miniaturized. He must have been too cheap to spring for the anti-reflective lenses that the eyeglass shops always push on you. Maybe it just meant he could stand his ground. I thought and I thought, during those two seconds as I moved past him, me on the sidewalk, him in the car, gripping the wheel. Finally I decided the glasses meant he was weak. Someone I could confront. Torment a bit. Why not? Make him at the very least never attempt such a maneuver again.

  “Hey,” I barked, my voice louder than I had anticipated, like the quality of the air was amplifying it. “You ran that red.”

  He paused his parking job and turned around to face me through the window. He pushed a button and it lowered halfway. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  “You just ran it.”

  “Thank you.”

  His calmness was infuriating. I could read his mind: Don’t engage with this nut in the raincoat.

  What was I going to do—punch him through the crack in the window, which even now he was closing noiselessly? Pretend to call the cops? The long
er I stood there, the more foolish I felt.

  I wheeled around, blood thrumming in my head. I walked a bit. Then I whipped out my phone, turned back.

  Flicked open the camera app.

  Pointed and shot.

  An image of the front of the car swam up in my screen. I closed the camera, buried it in an inside pocket, and walked quickly away. “Hey,” I heard him behind me. “Hey, motherfucker.”

  I knew he wouldn’t come after me—he wasn’t done parking. I picked up the pace on 98th, though, and hustled toward the subway station once I got to Broadway.

  All day at work I congratulated myself on my quick thinking. He had thought he’d gotten rid of me, made me look like an idiot. But now I had him. His face. His car. All day, who knows, all week, he’d be living with the fear that his misdeed would be reported to the police. Maybe he’d begin to imagine that I’d been photographing or recording him all along—that I’d captured the moment when he turned that corner so violently, nearly clipping the old man with the umbrella. Right there, right on the same corner where the girl had been killed by a thoughtless joyrider. The cops couldn’t ignore that, he’d think, especially now that the mayor had come out with a program to eliminate pedestrian fatalities.

  I was fantasizing about what the driver might be fantasizing. I loved thinking about him squirming.

  When I got home that evening, after another shapeless and pointless day at the office, I told my daughter what I had done. “Are the police going to get him, Daddy?” Emma asked, looking up from her book. She had, in the last few months, been formulating her ideas of crime and punishment. When the little girl had been killed on Ninety-eighth, the fate of the teenage driver troubled and fascinated her for weeks. Shouldn’t he be run over, in fairness to the girl’s family? Who would do the running over? The grandfather should, once his casts came off and he could get behind the wheel. But then the teenager’s family would be sad. And would demand justice.

  “Did the man see you take a picture of the car?”