New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  They first showed up when he was fourteen. He supposed he’d been a peculiar kid—God knows his mom always thought so—but he wasn’t a loser then. (“Oh, of course you were,” Stoom said, but Paul knew he was wrong.) It was them, making him do weird shit, distracting him so he started flunking out, giving him those kick headaches—they were the ones who screwed him all up.

  And the third point, get help? He’d tried. What did people think, he liked it like this, these bastards giving him orders, making him hurt really bad when he didn’t do what they said? When he was sixteen and he knew for sure The Guys weren’t leaving, he went looking for someone who could tell him what to do. Somebody at NASA or something. But NASA didn’t answer his e-mails and his mom dragged him to a shrink. The shrink said she believed Paul about The Guys, but she didn’t. She gave him drugs to take but the drugs made the world all suffocating and gray, and they didn’t make The Guys go away, it just made it so Paul couldn’t hear them. They were still there, though, and he knew they were getting madder and madder, and when the drugs stopped working he’d be in bad trouble. So he stopped taking the drugs, and The Guys were so pleased he’d done it on his own that they only gave him a little kick headache, not even a whole day long.

  What The Guys liked best was Paul breaking into places and boosting stuff, so that’s what he started to do.

  He didn’t live at home anymore, not since he stopped seeing the shrink and taking her drugs. He knew his mom was relieved when he moved out, even though she pretended like she wanted him to stay. He still went home to see her sometimes. She acted all nervous when he was there, which she tried to hide, but he knew. She especially got nervous when he talked to The Guys. He’d asked them to just please shut up while he was with his mom, but of course they didn’t. So he still went, but not so often.

  He had a basement apartment in St. George. It had bugs and it smelled moldy but it was cheap and no one bothered him and it was easy to get to whatever neighborhood The Guys wanted him to hit next. It was also easy to get to his dealer, and it was a quiet, dark place to shoot up.

  The first year after he moved out was the worst of his life. The Guys wouldn’t shut up, and they were really into the headaches that whole year. It was part of some experiment they were doing for their planet. Even sometimes when Paul did exactly what they told him, they’d just start kicking. Sometimes he thought they wanted to kick his brains out from the inside.

  Sometimes he wished they would.

  That year it especially sucked to be him—until he discovered heroin.

  Damn, damn, damn, what a find! The only bad thing: he hadn’t thought of it years ago. Shooting up wasn’t like taking the shrink’s drugs. The Guys liked it. A needle of black tar, and everyone just relaxed, got all laid back. Made him laugh the first time, the idea of a bunch of wasted aliens nodding out inside his head. He was a little afraid right after he laughed, but while they were high The Guys didn’t care, didn’t get mad, were so quiet they might as well not have been there at all.

  It was the only time anymore that things were that way, the only time Paul could even pretend it was like it used to be before The Guys came, when he could do what he wanted and not what he was being told to do.

  He reached the top of the hill and turned around. His long, loping strides down were such a relief after the pain of fighting his way up that he almost cried. He guessed that was another thing Larry was right about, though. If The Guys didn’t make him do it this way, he’d be just another junkie passed out on a stinking mattress with a needle in his arm. He wouldn’t be pulling B&E’s, he’d be mugging old ladies when he got desperate for a few bucks to buy the next fix. The running kept him in some kind of shape, kept his muscles working, and cleared his head for planning his jobs.

  “Well, sure. Glad to help. Because I don’t think you really want to go to prison, do you?” Larry asked as Paul passed the bright line of flags again. Paul didn’t answer. Larry’s questions were never supposed to get answers. “There’s no heroin in jail, you know.”

  Paul knew, and that was enough to make the idea terrifying. No skag, and for sure The Guys would come with him. How shitty would that be? If he thought they wouldn’t, he’d let his ass get picked up in a New York minute, but no such luck and he knew it.

  Though on his bad days—and what day wasn’t bad, really?—he wondered how long he’d be able to stay out anyway. He had an arrest record, had been fingered twice for B&E’s, but he was good (“We’re good,” Stoom said. “Whose idea was the surgical gloves?”) and the cops were way overworked and no one had gotten hurt either time, so they cut him loose. But lately there was a new problem.

  Lately, The Guys had started liking for people to get hurt.

  The first time he’d hurt someone it was by accident. Well, all three times it was. But that first time, it was a year ago and fucked if Paul wasn’t as scared as she was. He’d just slipped into the garage window of a square brick house in Huguenot, and like he knew it would be, the car was gone; and like he expected, the door to the kitchen had this cheesy old lock. (“Even you can pick that,” Stoom said. Roman whined, “Oh, come on, kick it in,” but Paul hadn’t. He didn’t have to do what Roman said if one of the others said something different.) The lady who lived there never came home before noon on Tuesdays. Paul wondered where she went, to the gym, to a class or something, and if it was a class, what did she like to learn about? The Guys jeered at that but no one kicked him, and he jiggled the credit card down the doorjamb and got in.

  The girl at the kitchen counter dropped the coffee pot and screamed.

  Paul almost pissed himself. He’d never seen her before. She didn’t live there. Curly brown hair, brown eyes, she looked like the lady, maybe a sister or something, maybe visiting, shit, what did it matter? Good thing he was wearing the ski mask. He backed toward the door, was trying to run but she threw a plate, brained him, and he went down, slipping in all that spilled coffee. He thrashed around trying to get up and she whacked at him with the broom, so he had to grab it and pull at it and she wouldn’t let go. He yanked really hard and she slipped too, went down with a thud, and then gave a loud moan and a lot of, “Ow-ow-ow!” Rolling around on the floor clutching her arm. Paul sped back through the window and ran down the street, ripping the mask and gloves off as he went, shoving them into a dumpster behind the bagel place, where he stopped and threw up.

  As he was wiping his mouth he realized with a chill that The Guys were laughing.

  Not at him; they did that all the time and he was used to it. But with each other, like he and his buddies used to (when he was a kid and had buddies) when they’d ring old lady Miller’s doorbell and run away, or when they’d boost a couple of chocolate bars from Rifkin’s. It wasn’t the thing, the event itself: it was the rush. That’s why they’d done it, and laughed like hell afterward, from the relief of not getting caught, and the rush. That’s the kind of laughing The Guys were doing now.

  “Glad you thought that was funny,” he said, straightening up. “You like it that she clobbered me, huh?”

  “Seriously? Who gives a shit?” Roman cracked up again. “Did you hear her screaming? Ow-ow-OW! I bet you broke her arm!”

  “I enjoyed that face she made,” Larry said. “When she screamed. I didn’t know people’s mouths could open that wide. That was very interesting.”

  Even Stoom was chortling, though he didn’t have anything to say. Paul couldn’t wait to get home, get his works, shoot up.

  It was more than six months after that before the next person got hurt because Paul was in their house. Another accident, same kind of thing, a man coming home early, Paul barely getting out, The Guys close to hysterics. The one after that, just last month: the same but not the same. Paul had a bad feeling that time. He liked the house, full of small, fenceable stuff, he liked the layout—lots of trees and shrubs, once you got to the back door you were seriously hidden—but the lady who lived there had this funny schedule, you couldn’t trust her not to come h
ome. He was thinking maybe he should look for somewhere else but then Larry chimed in. The Guys never had an opinion before on where he should hit—at least, they’d never expressed one—but this time Larry said Paul should just go ahead and do it. Paul wanted to explain why not, but Roman started chanting, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” and when Stoom said, “I think it’s a good idea too,” Paul knew he was sunk. He did everything he could to be sure the lady would be away, and she was when he broke in and she was while he emptied her jewelry box into his backpack and shoved a laptop in with it and a nice little picture from the wall that might bring a few bucks, but before he could go back down the hall toward the stairs he heard her car crunch gravel in the driveway. He flashed on different ideas—hide in the closet, go out the window—but they were all stupid and he slammed down the hallway and flew down the stairs hoping he could get out while she was still wide-eyed staring and thinking, What the fuck? He didn’t, though. She was like the girl the first time, this lady, she came right at him, screaming and cursing, smashing at him with her handbag, her fists, she was like a crazy lady. “Just move!” he yelled at her. “Just let me out of here!” But she wouldn’t, so he pushed her. She stumbled backward and fell, banged her head on the floor. She made a long, low, sad/angry sound, tried to get up, couldn’t get up. She pushed at the floor and flopped back, just glaring at Paul with eyes full of hate. When she tried to get up and he thought she’d be able to, he grabbed for something from the coat rack, it was just an umbrella but it was a big heavy one, and he raised it over his head.

  Two things happened.

  One: the lady’s eyes got wide, her face went white, and she froze like a lying-down statue.

  And two: Larry said mildly, “Hit her.”

  Paul froze too. Two frozen statues staring at each other. He dropped the umbrella and backed away, stumbled past the lady, yanked open the door, and ran. The Guys started kicking him even before he got the ski mask off. By the time he arrived back at his place his whole head was pounding, even his nose and his cheeks, like they were trying to kick his face off. It was one of the worst headaches ever and it took a long time to go away, partly because it was so bad he could hardly see to light the match and melt his tar.

  When the smack wore off The Guys kicked him some more—they were really mad Paul didn’t do what Larry said—so he had to have another fix. After that one, though, they calmed down for a while. By nighttime Paul was able to move his shaky self out of the apartment, get a cup of coffee and a slice.

  The next day he felt okay enough to do some business. The lady’s jewelry pawned pretty well, and he sold the laptop for some nice bucks. The picture, it turned out, wasn’t worth shit, but his fence gave him a little for the frame, and for a couple of weeks Paul could spend the days running, eating pizza and Chinese, and shooting up. The Guys stayed pretty mellow, not like they weren’t there, but it was just a lot of bullshit ragging on him, no headaches, no stupid ideas like the time they told him to jump off the ferry and he had to squeeze the rail so hard he thought he’d break his fingers. That time, they finally told him okay, he didn’t have to, and then they laughed and laughed. Nothing like that now, and he relaxed a little and got into a rhythm. He saw his mom, and things were as close to good as they ever were, since The Guys had come.

  Eventually, though, it got to be time to plan another job.

  Paul had this idea, thinking about it only in that no-words way so The Guys wouldn’t catch on. The little museum on Lighthouse Avenue, the Tibetan Museum, it had a lot of art in it, small statues, some made of gold or silver, some even with jewels on them. He told The Guys about them, how easy they’d be to fence and how much he could get for them, as long as he took them into Manhattan. He knew The Guys would like that, they liked that trip, which sometimes Paul made for skag if his dealer was in jail or something. He told them about the skylight into the square room and the alarm that even if it went off—and he didn’t think the skylight was wired up, but even if it was—no one lived there and the precinct was at least five minutes away. Paul could stuff half a dozen, maybe even more, of those strange statues into his backpack and be out the door and sliding down the overgrown hill out back before the cop car ever pulled up in front. The police would walk around for a while with their flashlights, anyway. They’d try the doors in the wall, and by the time someone came to let them in, Paul would be home stashing the statues under the bed and breaking out his works.

  The best part of the plan was the part he wasn’t thinking in words. No one lived at the museum. No one would stop him. There’d be no one for him to hurt.

  Long ago some people used to live there. Long, long ago the lady who built the museum lived next door, and the gardens were connected and she’d have come running. But there was a wall there now and the people who lived in her house didn’t even like the museum all that much. He wasn’t worried about them. And in the hillside below there were two little caves, for monks and nuns to meditate in. When Paul was a kid and used to come here, sometimes there’d be one of them in a cave for a few days, just sitting and thinking with their eyes closed. They used to leave their doors open and Paul would tiptoe over and hide behind the bushes and peek at them. Once, one of the nuns opened her eyes and saw him and he thought she’d be mad but she just smiled at him, nodded like she was saying hi, like she knew him already, and closed her eyes again. The nuns didn’t look like the ones he was used to. He’d never seen real monks, only in Robin Hood comics, but they didn’t look like this either. These monks and nuns had shaved heads—all of them, the nuns too—and gray robes and big brown beads, like rosary beads but not. He liked the way they seemed so calm and peaceful, though. That’s why he liked to watch them. Even when he was a kid, even before The Guys came, he’d never been calm and peaceful like that.

  But that was a long time ago. No one had used those caves for ten years, maybe more. The museum stopped having monks and nuns come and no one was ever there when the place was closed, and thinking without words Paul knew this was a good idea.

  Even though he also knew he didn’t have a good idea for next time.

  He wasn’t worrying about that now, as he finished his run and swung onto a bus for St. George. He couldn’t. He needed to go get himself together. He’d have loved to get high but there was no way he could shoot up now and still be able to do this job when it got dark. So he went back to his basement apartment, pushed some pizza boxes and takeout cartons out of the way to find his black shirt and pants. He took a shower, even though the clothes were filthy, and then lay down, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept. He hoped The Guys would give him a break; sometimes they liked to scream and yell and wake him just as he was falling asleep. He was braced for it but they didn’t and he slipped away.

  When he woke up it was just after sunset. Excellent. He took his black backpack and stuffed his ski mask and his gloves into it, plus a rope, and a hammer and a pry bar for the skylight. He stuck in a light-blue sweatshirt too, for afterward when they’d be looking for a guy all in black. If anyone saw him to describe him to the cops. But no one would see him; that was the beauty of this plan.

  At the bodega he bought two coffees, lots of cream and sugar, and threw them both back before he got to the bus stop. Now he was buzzed; good. He took the bus up to the corner past the museum and walked down. It was dark, with yellow squares of light glowing in people’s windows, the kind of people who had normal lives and no aliens in their heads. Except for one dogwalker, no one was out. The dogwalker had gone around the corner by the time Paul got to the fence. He climbed it easily, trying to avoid the flags. He didn’t know much about them but they were called prayer flags so he thought it was probably bad to step on them. He slid a little on the wet leaves on the north side of the building but he was completely hidden there from both the street and the next house. Because the building was buried in the hillside he was only maybe ten feet below the roof, and the rope tossed around a vent pipe took care of that. (“Lucky you’re a broken-down sk
inny-ass runt or that pipe would’ve busted,” Stoom pointed out. Paul didn’t answer.) The skylight, like he figured, was some kind of plastic, and the panels were even easier to pry loose than he’d hoped. He lifted a panel out, laid it aside, and waited. Right about that too: no alarm. He grabbed onto the edge, slipped over, and he was in.

  He dropped lightly into the center of the square stone room, almost the same spot on the floor he used to sit on when he was a kid and came in just to stare. The lady who sold the tickets thought it was neat that a little kid kept coming around, and didn’t make him pay anything. Sometimes if he’d boosted some candy bars he’d bring her one, and she always took it with a big smile and a thank you.

  He slipped the headlamp on and turned slowly, watching the beam play over the room. The place hadn’t changed much, maybe not at all. On the side built into the hill a couple of stone ledges stepped back. Most of the statues sat on them, lined up in rows. A bunch more were in cases against the other three walls. Two of the cases stood one on either side of the door out to the balcony. The space smelled cool and damp, like it was one of those caves where the nuns and monks used to stay. It was still and silent, but not the heavy silence of the shrink’s drugs or the skag. Those made him feel like everything was still there, he was just shutting it out. This, it was a quiet like everything had stopped to rest.

  “What a lovely little trip down Memory Lane,” Larry said acidly. “Can we get to work now?”