New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  Fred scored on a driving, twisting lay-up off the glass, using a classic crossover move that left his defender flat on his back. The small crowd screamed. Fred ran back down the court pumping his fist in the air, yelling, “You forgot your jock, bitch!”

  The next time down the court, Fred took a pass on the wing and without breaking stride elevated past a closing defender for a rim-rattling dunk.

  People were whooping and hopping up and down and spinning around in circles of disbelief.

  “Did you see that?”

  “No he didn’t!”

  “Replay! Replay!”

  “Jordanesqe.”

  “Better than Jordan.”

  Phisto’s black BMW pulled up on 155th Street behind a white Explorer. The doors of the truck were open and Jay-Z’s latest joint was blasting full force. Phisto wanted to tell the idiot to turn his music down, but decided to ignore the disturbance and walked the short distance across the grass to the courts.

  There was a hush as Fred got the ball back on a steal. He veered left and was met by an agile defender. He slipped the ball between his legs and dribbled backward, looking for another opening. Shifting the ball from side to side, through his legs, and then a glance to his left as if searching for someone in the crowd. Everyone knew what was coming. Fred jabbed to the right and the defender bit on the fake. The elusive youngster changed direction and in a split second flew by his defender for another dunk.

  Oh, the ecstasy of the crowd. Fred soaked up their response for a full second, posing under the rim.

  And then, praack! praack!

  Heads jerked around. Too loud for a firecracker. Too close to be the backfire of a car. People scattered when they saw Fred stumble and fall to the ground. Even his friends on the court ran and left him.

  Seconds later, only five people were left. Phisto handed the .45 to someone in his three-man posse to dispose of it. He walked over to the only person who hadn’t run away.

  “Do I know you?” Phisto said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Phisto took hold of the man’s face, digging his fingers through his scraggly beard into his jaws. “Do you know me?”

  “Yeah, I know you.”

  Phisto laughed. “Why didn’t you run away like the rest?”

  The man hesitated. “Why?”

  Phisto’s eyes screwed up and he lifted the man’s dark glasses from his face. “What’d you say, muthafucker?”

  “Why? I didn’t think the game was over.”

  Phisto laughed. “You think you’re funny.”

  “I mean, he was so amazing, the way he defied gravity. I thought he was Superman. I thought he would get up and fly above that rim again.”

  “He was amazing, wasn’t he?” Phisto said.

  “Yeah. Amazing.”

  Phisto said, “Did you see anything else here?”

  The guy took his sunglasses from Phisto’s hand and put them back over his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly. That’s what I mean,” Phisto replied, turning away. “You better bounce. Cops gonna show any minute.”

  “I am a cop,” the man said.

  Phisto turned slowly, his face scarred with a dark smile. “For real?”

  The man adjusted his dark glasses and smiled. “Just fucking with you.”

  Phisto relaxed. “I should kill you for fucking with me.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t. I’m really a cop.”

  The man opened his jacket. An NYPD detective badge hung from a chain around his neck. Phisto also noticed the 9mm stuck loosely in his waistband.

  Phisto gauged the distance between him and the man. “You gonna arrest me?”

  “No.”

  “If you ain’t gonna arrest me, what you gonna do?”

  “Shoot you between the eyes.”

  Phisto laughed.

  The man wriggled his fingers. “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re gonna shoot me between the eyes?”

  “Yeah.”

  Pointing at the dead baller, Phisto said, “For him?”

  “No.”

  “Is this personal?”

  “Remember the cop you ambushed in that crack house?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He had a son. That son became a cop.”

  “And that son . . .”

  “Would be me.”

  Phisto turned to the member of his crew holding the .45. “Shoot this muthafucker.”

  Nobody moved.

  Phisto made a quick grab at the .45. His hand closed on the grip and that’s when he felt a jolt to his chest as if he’d been kicked by a mule. He bounced against the white wall of one of the racquetball courts and slid to the ground on his back.

  Phisto had often thought of what this moment would be like for a person. The moment that separated life from death. Was there some brilliant light to illuminate your path into the next world, as some people claimed who’d had so-called near-death experiences? Was there such a thing as coming close to death? He knew what death looked like. His father had made sure of that.

  He looked up and saw streams and streams of white clouds. And then he felt a strange relief swell in his chest, a sort of bonding with an energy entering him. A sadness overcame him and he wanted to cry. He saw the faces of his crew and knew that he’d been betrayed. By one or all of them. He also knew it didn’t matter anymore. The light was approaching fast.

  LIGHTS OUT FOR FRANKIE

  BY LIZ MARTÍNEZ

  Woodside

  Frankie tapped his foot and wished the clerk would hurry up. How long could it take to scan a couple of items and punch the keys on the cash register? He lifted his baseball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped it back on, pulling the bill lower. The heatwave was taking its toll on everyone. The air-conditioning inside the store helped a little, but the customers still looked like they were wilting.

  Finally, the cashier got her act together. She handed him the transaction slip and her pen. He scribbled Gerry Adams in the signature space. In the past, Frankie had passed himself off as Billy Clinton, Charles Prince, and Johnny Depp. The cashier counted out crisp currency and gave it to him along with a command to have a nice day. Her name tag read Rochelle.

  “Thanks, Rochelle,” he said, and asked her for the receipt. She stared vacantly at the piece of paper. “Oh. Sure,” she said, then handed it to him and wandered off.

  Frankie glanced around the customer service desk. What a misnomer. The three clerks behind the counter were doing anything but servicing customers. One was chatting on her cell phone with her back to the store. Another was deep in thought, staring intently into the middle distance. The third mindlessly folded and refolded the same article of clothing. He spied a roll of thermal cash register tape sitting out on the counter. Somebody had probably started changing the tape and then forgot about it midstream. Nobody was paying any attention to him, so he swiped the tape and tucked it into the white plastic bag. He was sure he could find some use for it.

  He hopped into his black SUV and merged into traffic on Northern Boulevard. He headed toward his next stop near the Queens Center Mall. Most of his NYPD colleagues worked extra jobs on their RDOS. Having regular days off gave them an opportunity to land good gigs like guarding one of the Commerce Bank branches. Stand there for eight hours in uniform, flirting with the tellers. Nice.

  Frankie sighed and looked at the list his wife had made for him. This was how he spent his RDOS—running from store to store. He thought about his wife and their two kids and sighed again. For the millionth time, he questioned the way his life was unfolding. Shouldn’t he try to land a private-pay job with a bank for his days off? Or maybe with a store? He grimaced. It was only July, but the kids would need new school supplies soon, and then Christmas . . . Always something.

  He pulled into the left lane on Queens Boulevard and waited for the light to change. One of the guys in the livery cab that sailed through the light on his ri
ght looked familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. He tried to think who it might be. The memory came to him just as he pulled into the Marshall’s parking lot.

  On his first day in the Police Academy, Frankie had buddied up with three other recruits: Thompson, Edwards, and . . . the third guy’s name escaped him. The group had coffee before classes, studied together, and ate lunch in a diner two blocks from the Academy. The man in the black car reminded Frankie of the last member of the Fearsome Foursome. (How young they’d been! That name had sounded so cool at the time.) He was a lanky, raw-boned shit-kicker from the hills of West Virginia. The guy had heard an ad for the NYPD on his short-wave radio and had spent a day driving northeast to take the test. Everybody thought he was stupid because of his hillbilly accent, but Frankie copied his homework every chance he got.

  Williams—that was his name. Frankie must have been the first Mexican-American Williams had ever seen. Right off the bat, the guy made a remark about Frankie’s nose. Frankie, who thought his nose was regal, like the profile on the statue of an Aztec warrior, was slightly insulted. “What do you know?” he’d asked Williams. “Your last girlfriend was probably a sheep.”

  The other guys chuckled, but Williams took it seriously. “We never had no sheep in our family,” he said. “I had an uncle once, kept goats. He was pretty tight with one of them— called her Priscilla.” He looked puzzled when the other three recruits doubled over with laughter. He must have figured he’d made a slight miscalculation because he tried to backtrack. “I don’t think he was improper with Priscilla or nothin’,” he protested. “They was just real good companions.”

  Frankie could hardly catch his breath, he couldn’t stop laughing. “They never got married, huh, Williams? Your uncle and his goat?”

  “That’s disgusting,” Williams said. He refused to speak to the other three for the rest of the day.

  One of the guys found out later that Williams had a degree from some Bible college, but it was too late. He’d earned himself the nickname Officer Goatfucker. Nobody called him that anymore. He was a captain now, working out of the 115th Precinct. Now they called him Captain Goatfucker. Behind his back, of course.

  Frankie smiled, thinking about the old days. Fifteen years had slipped by. He sometimes regretted that he didn’t have more to show for the time besides a few gray hairs and occasional heartburn. He’d been so naïve when he first came on the job. Thought everything was the way they showed it on TV. Boy, did he know better now.

  * * *

  Frankie pushed open the heavy entrance door to the store and made a beeline for the customer service desk. “I’d like to return this merchandise,” he told the clerk, and handed her a receipt. This one’s name tag said Shaquanna.

  She gazed blankly at the clothing he pulled out of his shopping bag and lifted her electronic scanner. She passed it over the tags and pressed a key on her register. “A hundred and eighty-six dollars. Would you like a store credit?”

  “Cash, please,” he said.

  She ripped both layers of register tape off and held them together with her thumb and forefinger. Her nails were painted tomato-red and had rhinestones embedded in the polish. “Fill out your name and address and sign on the line here.” He scrawled on the paper and handed it back. The clerk pressed a button on the register with her long, fake fingernail. There was a noise like a lawnmower starting, then everything went dark.

  Silence enveloped the store for a long moment, then shouts erupted. Frankie’s first thought was another terrorist attack. He’d spent 9/11 pulling people out of the World Trade Center. A part of him had been on edge ever since, always halfway expecting a repeat performance. His heart raced into fourth gear. He whipped out his phone, praying that the cell towers were still relaying calls.

  “Seven-three Precinct,” a voice snarled. Frankie never thought he’d be so glad to hear PAA Malloy’s nasal twang.

  “Hernandez here. What’s going on?”

  “I’m busy. Whadaya mean, what’s going on? With what?”

  Lovable old Malloy, the best police administrative aide in the department. Frankie gritted his teeth. “With the lights. The lights are out. Is it citywide? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no lights out. We got plentya light here. Whyn’t ya come in and use the lights here? Maybe you could see to make out the reports right once in a while. Say, is that it? I gotta get back. Somebody has to do some work around here.”

  “Yeah,” Frankie said, “that’s it.” He pressed the End Call button.

  His heart downshifted to third gear. The chaos that had threatened to erupt calmed to a dull murmur. Late afternoon light streamed in through the front windows, diluted by the grime. Drawn like moths to a flame, shoppers swarmed in the sunlight, their intended purchases clutched uncertainly to their chests. Store security was already in action. Uniformed guards gathered with the store managers near the exits to make sure no one took advantage of the power outage to sneak merchandise past the electronic monitoring pedestals.

  Electric signs on businesses across Queens Boulevard were illuminated, so maybe it was just the store’s system that had given up the ghost. That’s why the PAA at Frankie’s Brooklyn precinct didn’t know anything about it. He smiled grimly, gently chiding himself for jumping the gun and heading right to thoughts of disaster. He turned back to the cashier. “Uh, what about my refund?”

  She looked at the cash register without focusing. “It won’t open without electricity,” she said.

  “I understand that,” he said slowly, patiently. “How can I get my money?”

  “We’ll mail it to you, I guess.” She consulted the tape where he’d identified himself as Colonel Parker, with an address at 12 Finger Lickin Lane in Fried Chicken, Kentucky. “You’re from Kentucky?” She squinted uncertainly. “They got mail there, I guess. We’ll send it to you.”

  A knot formed in Frankie’s stomach. “I need it now,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I can’t give it to you. Hey, I got kids. I better pick them up from day care.” She shuffled off, leaving Frankie standing at the customer service counter by himself in the dark.

  Fuck! Who would have thought giving a wrong name and address would come back to bite him in the ass? No cop in his right mind handed over that information to strangers. Now he was out the money and the merchandise. He glanced behind the counter, but efficient old Shaquanna had hustled his returns to the back, so he couldn’t even take them with him.

  The crowd thinned rapidly as people poured outside. Maybe he could find the manager. And then what? The guy would grab the money out of petty cash and hand it over to Colonel Parker? Shit. Frankie cursed himself silently. He’d just fucked himself out of almost two hundred dollars.

  He got back into his family-sized gas-guzzler and took off to finish the rest of the errands on his wife’s list. Her family came from the Mexican state of Puebla. Frankie’s family, which hailed from the West Coast state of Jalísco, secretly looked down their regal noses on Puebla, which they considered to be the asshole of Mexico. (When you looked at Puebla on the map, it really did look like the end of the long intestine, which made Oaxaca and Chiapas and a few other states the shit end of the country, as far as Frankie’s parents were concerned.) Frankie himself didn’t really have an opinion, having never spent more than a few school vacations in any part of Mexico. All he knew about the people from Puebla was that the food they cooked in the local Woodside restaurants wasn’t as good as his mother’s.

  He had to admit that his wife came from a long line of savvy politicians. In Mexico, that meant that they stole with both hands and lied out of both sides of their mouths. Some of the family had emigrated to the States, where they continued the family tradition by becoming involved in New Jersey politics.

  María was a perfect blend of North and South. She ran their little tribe with an iron fist, the way the matriarchs in her lineage always had. And she was clever, much like the rest of her family members. She had a number of
friends, but the relationships were always transactional, rather than emotional. María had no interest in socializing with anyone who didn’t trade in the currency of favors. If she couldn’t get something on somebody, she wasn’t interested in pursuing the friendship.

  Of course, she had plenty to hold over Frankie’s head. She was also bewitching. She would dazzle you with her smile and enchant you with her personality. Once in a while, Frankie caught glimpses beneath María’s charming veneer to a heart of stone. Other times, he thought he must be imagining things and that she was the best thing to ever happen to him. Occasionally, he thought that if it weren’t for María, he could have had a much different—probably better—kind of life.

  He followed the directions on his list, the chores taking him out to Nassau County, on Long Island but close to the Queens border. He listened intently to the radio, changing stations to catch any news about the power situation. The oppressive heatwave that was plaguing the New York Metropolitan Area was taking its toll. A blackout was focused mostly in western Queens, caused by excessive demands on the power grid. Too many people in illegal apartments running extra air conditioners. Astoria, Woodside, and Sunnyside bore the brunt. But, the announcer said, residents in that area shouldn’t feel too badly—people in other areas of the city were also suffering.

  Frankie felt much better hearing that. Wow, other people were suffering too. Yippee.

  His wife called his cell to report that their lights were still on, but their neighbors’ houses had lost power. “Thanks for the update,” he said. “Does that mean you’re gonna cook dinner?” She hung up on him.

  On his return trip to Queens, he was going against rush-hour traffic, but the cars still crawled. He decided to stop on the other side of Woodside before heading home. He owed Tía Alba a visit. He lived only a five-minute drive away, but didn’t see her as much as she wanted. He parked outside Seán Óg’s, the Irish pub on Woodside Avenue. It was 8:30 and the darkness was settling in slowly. He loved the way the day took its time ending during the height of summer. The extended daylight brought back memories of riding his bike at dusk and playing ball with the other children. Remote, simpler times, when the most important decisions he made revolved around which kids to torment for the day.