Staten Island Noir

by Patricia Smith

  Sweat-soaked and aching, it dawned on him that the chaos had slowed. A few more tugs, another pull, and suddenly, quiet on their side of the improvised dam. They stood side by side on the glistening catwalk, breathing hard. Overhead, the overlapped, battened tarps quivered, shivered, but didn’t give, not where the hole was or where they’d covered and buttressed the panes in danger. They stood and watched for a long time. Kelly felt the temperature rise.

  A pretty sound: He looked up. She was pointing at their handiwork and laughing. “That’s really ugly.” She shook her wild head.

  “You mean we were going for art?” He folded his arms. “Damn!”

  She smiled, right at him, right into his eyes. “Really,” she said, “thank you.”

  “Hey. It was fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “Okay, it was terrible. But,” he shrugged, looked around, “I’m from the South.”

  Her gaze followed his. “I’ve been looking after them for eight years. Some are rare, very valuable.”

  “But that’s not the point, is it?”

  Again, a direct look. Her eyes were an impossible blue, a lazy afternoon on a windless sea. “No.”

  He smiled too, lifted a hand, stopped just before he touched her. “We’d better take care of that.”

  “What?”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “Me?” In true surprise she put fingertips to her brow. She found blood. That made her laugh too. “Okay,” she said, taking a last survey, “I guess we can go down.”

  They climbed into the basket, leaving the catwalk littered with fabric, with rope.

  As the hoist inched down, she asked, “What do you do here?”

  “I . . . ”

  She waited, still smiling. A volunteer, he’d said he was a volunteer. He’d gotten a phone call. How could he answer her? What do volunteers do at a place like this?

  “Lots of things,” he settled on. “Variety, you know.” The start of doubt shaded her eyes. He didn’t want that, so he said, “I build things. Temporary barriers, that kind of thing.” Every place needed those. No matter how carefully you planned, there were always changes in what was allowed, where you could go, how close.

  She nodded. Maybe she was going to speak, but a shout blasted up from below. “Doctor Morse! Is that you in that thing?”

  They both peered over the basket rail, found a uniformed man craning his neck below, obscured by foliage. “Of course it’s me!” she shouted back, her voice full of disgust. “Wilson,” she said quietly to Kelly. “An asshole.”

  Takes care of Wilson. And when they reached the glasshouse floor, it got worse.

  “Who’s that with you? Dr. Morse, you know you can’t take people up without a signed waiver! You—”

  “Shut up, Wilson. This is John Kelly.” Don’t tell him my name! “A volunteer. He almost got killed helping me plug the break. Which you weren’t about to do, so shut up.” She jumped from the hoist’s basket, gave the guard a hard stare. He flushed. Once that happened she turned her back, clambered onto a bark-mulched mound to inspect a broken frond, a casualty.

  The red-faced guard regrouped. His glare bounced off her back, her riotous hair, so he turned to Kelly. “John Kelly?” He said it slowly and squinted, and shit, it was that guard.

  Kelly climbed from the basket too, spoke to the horticulturalist worrying over her plants. “Listen, I better go, see if—”

  “Kelly! I thought so!” Wilson’s bark was full of nasty triumph. “They gave us your photo. They want you back, boy. Big reward. Saw you the other day, didn’t I? At the gate.” He came closer, still talking. “This guy’s dangerous, doctor.” He said doctor like an insult.

  “No,” Kelly said, backing. “Keep away.”

  “You’re busted.”

  “No.”

  “What’s going on?” She jumped down, between them.

  “He’s a killer. Escaped con.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re wrong,” Wilson sneered. “Cops passed out his picture. He sliced his wife up.”

  She turned to Kelly.

  “That was someone else,” he said, and he also said, “I’m leaving.”

  “No!” the guard yelled, and drew a gun.

  “Wilson, are you crazy?” Her shout was furious.

  “Doctor, how about you shut up? Kelly! Down on the floor!”

  “No.” Walk past him, right out the door. He won’t shoot.

  “On the floor!” Wilson unclipped his radio, spoke into it, gun still trained on Kelly. “Emergency,” he said. “Dispatch, I need cops. In the conservatory—”

  That couldn’t happen. Kelly lunged, not for the gun, for the radio. Pulled it from Wilson’s grip, punched his face, ran.

  And almost made the door.

  Two shots, hot steel slicing through soft, spiced air. The first caught Kelly between the shoulder blades. To the right, so it missed his heart, but all it meant was that he was still alive and awake when the second bullet, flying wild after a ricochet, shattered a pane in the arching dome. Glass glittered as it burst, showered down like snow, with snow, on waves of icy air Kelly could see. The wind, sensing its chance, shifted, pulled, and tugged, poured in, changed positive pressure to negative and ripped through an edge of the tarp patch. Collected snow slid off the tarp onto a broad-leafed palm. Kelly saw all this, heard a repeated wail: “No! No! No!” He tried to rise but couldn’t draw breath.

  Looking around he saw blood, his blood, pooling. She knelt beside him, wild blond hair sweeping around her face, and he heard her knotted voice, choked with sorrow not for him. “All right, it’s all right. An ambulance is coming.”

  In this storm? And he didn’t want an ambulance, he just wanted to go home. The trees, he tried to say to her, watching the palms cringe away from the cataract of frigid air. But he couldn’t speak, and what could she do for them? I’m sorry, he told the trees. I’m sorry none of us ever got home. Sprinkled with glass shards and snow, losing blood fast, Kelly started to shiver. As darkness took the edges of his sight, he stared up into the recoiling leaves. At least it wouldn’t be as bad for them as for him. Freezing, they say, is a warm death.

  End of Excerpt

  More about Bronx Noir

  The Bronx Noir e-book (eisbn 9781936070220) is available from Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, the iTunes store, Kobo, the Sony eReader store, Google Play, and from the websites of participating independent bookstores. The print edition ($15.95, ISBN-13:9781933354255) is availabe on our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere.

  Brand new stories by: Jerome Charyn, Lawrence Block, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Patrick W. Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., Kevin Baker, S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and others.

  The Bronx is the only New York City borough on the mainland of North America. Which doesn't stop it from being a country all its own. As any Bronxite will tell you, being from Da Bronx is a permanent condition, no matter where you end up, and Bronx Geography is played from Alaska to Florida, from Paris to Trinidad. Originally a huge farm estate belonging to one Jacob Bronck ("Yonkers? Where's that?" "Just north of the Broncks'." Get it?), the borough has as many diverse social ecosystems as the Amazon has biological ones.

  For a time in the '70s and '80s the name was synonymous (to non-Bronxites) with a vast urban maelstrom of lawlessness and decay. But the place was always more complicated than that. There's the Bronx Zoo, and the Botanical Garden; there are universities and Yankee Stadium, grand estates and squalid housing projects, the sinking Concourse and nautical City Island.

  This is not to say crime isn't, potentially, everywhere. Just that the Bronx has more everywheres than most people imagine. The writers represented in Bronx Noir know the borough so well that, reading the book, you'll smell it, feel it, see it, hear it. The sights and scents will be multitudinous and as distinct as the neighborhoods. And every one of them, in all their glorious mutual contradiction, is the Bronx.

  S.J. Rozan was bo
rn and raised in the Bronx and is a life-long New Yorker. She's the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and the standalones Absent Friends and In This Rain. Her book Winter and Night won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity Awards for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards. Two of her previous books have won the Shamus for Best Novel and another won the Anthony for Best Novel. Her short story "Double-crossing Delancey" won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She's at work on another series novel, Shanghai Moon.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I: BRING IT ON HOME

  "White Trash" JEROME CHARYN (Claremont/Concourse)

  "Gold Mountain" TERRENCE CHENG (Lehman College)

  "Hey, Girlie" JOANNE DOBSON (Sedgwick Avenue)

  "The Woman Who Hated the Bronx" RITA LAKIN (Elder Avenue)

  PART II: IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

  "Rude Awakening" LAWRENCE BLOCK (Riverdale)

  "Burnout" SUZANNE CHAZIN (Jerome Avenue)

  "The Cheers Like Waves" KEVIN BAKER (Yankee Stadium)

  "Jaguar" ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ, JR. (South Bronx)

  PART III: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  "Early Fall" STEVEN TORRES (Hunts Point)

  "Hothouse" S.J. ROZAN (Botanical Garden)

  "Lost and Found" THOMAS BENTIL (Rikers Island)

  "Look What Love Is Doing to Me" MARLON JAMES (Williamsbridge)

  PART IV: THE WANDERER

  "Home Sweet Home" SANDRA KITT (City Island)

  "A Visit to St. Nick's" ROBERT J. HUGHES (Fordham Road)

  "Numbers Up" MILES MARSHALL LEWIS (Baychester)

  "The Big Five" JOSEPH WALLACE (Bronx Zoo)

  PART V: ALL SHOOK UP

  "Ernie K.'s Gelding" ED DEE (Van Cortlandt Park)

  "The Prince of Arthur Avenue" PATRICK W. PICCIARELLI (Arthur Avenue)

  "You Want I Should Whack Monkey Boy?" THOMAS ADCOCK (Courthouse)

  Queens Noir Excerpt

  The following is editor Robert Knightly's contribution to Queens Noir.

  ___________________

  First Calvary

  BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY

  Blissville

  The little girl is playing there by herself. She's off in a corner of the yard by the alleyway where the girls come out of the Good Shepherd School at 3 o'clock when the bell rings and walk through to the street. But it's already late, getting dark, time for all little kids to be home with their mothers. Nobody can see her there in the alley, he knows, because he's been watching her awhile from behind the iron picket fence. She doesn't see him, nobody sees him. For about the hundredth time, she takes her baby out of the carriage, fixes its clothes, talks to it, and puts it down again. He's on the move now, out from behind the fence, walking quick on stubby legs down the alley. She can't see him coming, she's got her head in the carriage again.

  "Be good now, baby," he hears her say just as he reaches her and she straightens up and sees him. "Oh!" she says.

  He pushes her hard and she flops down like a doll on her behind. He's down the alley, out the gate, onto Greenpoint Avenue almost before she starts bawlin'.

  He crosses the avenue, pushing the carriage in front of him fast as he can along the high stone wall between himself and the dead people buried in First Calvary. He dares not look left for fear of the Stone Saints high up on their pedestals standing watch over the graves. Even though he knows they can't see him because their backs are turned to the street. He knows why this is so because his Nan has told him. Saints give fuck-all for the likes of the shanty Irish, Nan says. As he rolls across Bradley Avenue, he sneaks a look at the front door of the Cork Lounge, where Nan takes him and the dog on Saturday afternoons, after the stores for a growler of Shaeffer "to go."

  The carriage is big as him but he can push it all right. He hurtles past the people sitting on the front stoops of the houses, there like always, the mothers hanging out the windows in their parlors, resting big folded arms on windowsills all up and down the block, watching. He knows this, so he keeps his head down behind the carriage, pushing it up the block fast as he can, up and on his toes, leaning into it like the football team he's seen practicing in the vacant lots off Review Avenue alongside the Newtown Creek.

  Still, he feels the eyes on him, watching. He trips! Hits the pavement on hands and knees. The carriage rolls forward by itself, already two squares of sidewalk ahead, but he's up! After it! Tears stinging his eyes, he grabs the handlebars, just missing the cars parked at the curb. He rights his ship and sails on up the sidewalk. His hands are dirty, right knee scraped where his overalls ripped. They'll ask about that, he knows. He'll say: I fell, it don't hurt. At the corner, he wheels around onto Starr Avenue.

  For the only time he can ever remember, there's nobody on his stoop. Home free! He backs up the stoop, dragging the carriage by its handlebars up the four stone steps and into the vestibule of his tenement, then down the long, carpeted hallway to the door to the basement stairway, and parks it there in the dark. No one can see him reach in and take the doll in its frilly dress into his arms.

  "Be good now, baby," he cautions, then lays it back down in the carriage, covering it, head and all, with the pink blanket so no one can see.

  He climbs the four flights of stairs, holding tight to the wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands, all the way to the top where he lives with Nan and Aunt May. Nan's his grandmother and Aunt May's mother and his father's mother. He knows this because they told him, and his home will always be with them as long as he's a good boy, and his mother drinks and his father's a whoremaster. He does not remember his mother because she dropped him off when he was eight months and didn't come back. Nan keeps house and Aunt May goes to work at the phone company. And Aunt May is the boss of all of them, Nan says when Aunt May can't hear her. There's an old dog named Dinah lives with them, it's Aunt May's dog, it won't let him walk it. He reaches up for the doorknob and goes inside.

  "Young man!" Aunt May calls from the parlor. He goes in to her. She's in her housecoat, sitting in the arthritis chair by the window. Nan calls it that because Aunt May has that, and sits in it all the time. Nan's not there, she went to the store. He sees the open window and pillow on the sill, the sheer curtain wafting in and out on the summer breeze, before dropping his eyes to the little fox terrier sitting alongside the chair, studying him, alert as if also waiting for him to account.

  "I found it," he says, staring at the dog who stares back, weighing his words with beady, angry eyes. Then, curling its upper lip to show fangs, growls from deep down in its little chest.

  "Where did you find it?" Aunt May snaps.

  "In the schoolyard."

  "Liar!"

  "She gave it to me."

  Aunt May makes him push it all the way back. As he runs the gauntlet, he again keeps his head down, eyes to the pavement. The little girl is still there, bawlin', with her mother and a bunch of little girls. The other little girls are bawlin' too; he has no idea why. When the little girl sees him, she stops, runs to the carriage, snatches up her doll and hugs it. But when Aunt May holds him by the scruff of the neck in front of the little girl and tells her to give him a good slap right across his face, she starts bawlin' again. Staked out by bloodthirsty hostiles, his face burns under their piteous stares. In sight of the Stone Saints across the street giving him the ass, he prays with all his might that all the windows in all the houses on every block be nailed shut.

  End of Excerpt

  More about Queens Noir

  The Queens Noir e-book (eisbn 9781617750595) is available from Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, the iTunes store, Kobo, the Sony eReader store, Google Play, and from the websites of participating independent bookstores. The print edition ($15.95, ISBN-13:9781933354408) is availabe on our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere.

  On the heels of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, the borough of Queens enters the chambers of noir.

  Featuring brand-new stories b
y: Denis Hamill, Maggie Estep, Megan Abbott, Robert Knightly, Liz Martinez, Jill Eisenstadt, Mary Byrne, Tori Carrington, Shailly P. Agnihotri, k.j.a. Wishnia, Victoria Eng, Alan Gordon, Beverly Farley, Joe Guglielmelli, and Glenville Lovell.

  Queens used to be dismissed as the "Bedroom of Manhattan"— daily disgorging its sons and daughters by elevated rail and the Queensboro Bridge to their jobs in "New York" (as Manhattan was known to us in the outer boroughs). In 2007, Queens is the Borough of Immigrants— 2.2 million residents, forty-eight percent of whom are foreign-born, the vast majority of them Asian. In fifty-plus distinct neighborhoods, speaking 140 different languages, reside: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, Mexicans, Filipinos, not to mention Greeks.

  Queens County is the largest borough, accommodating two beaches, two airports, Aqueduct Racetrack, three elevated train structures, and Shea Stadium. Queens Noir has set twenty original crime stories in the neighborhoods and at the "Big A," Shea Stadium, JFK Airport, Rockaway Beach, and aboard the elevated Flushing 7 subway line.

  Robert Knightly relocated from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1994 (marriage and a bigger apartment). He spent his first forty-four years in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just a hop, skip, and a jump over the Pulaski Bridge spanning Newtown Creek between Greenpoint and Long Island City, Queens. He works as a criminal trial lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens. Once upon a time, he was a New York City policeman, but that was in big, bad Brooklyn.