Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  One long summer afternoon, my mother had been home from work just long enough to change into her pedal pushers and Keds when we heard screaming from next door. Julieta came barreling into our carport shrieking, “Snake! Snake!” and Mom was out the kitchen door and into the utility room off the carport to grab her shovel.

  Next door, Mrs. Mendoza was standing at the backyard gate. “Luis has a gun but he’s not home yet. Please help her!”

  Luisa was in the corner of the backyard, in a little slot between the fence and the shed. Blocking her path was a pygmy rattler, a coiled ball of fury, its tail vibrating with that unmistakable warning. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Stand real still, honey,” my mother said to Luisa in her kindest voice. “Don’t move.”

  The snake was focused on Luisa, but when my mother took a step forward and stomped one foot, it swung its head around. She struck, the shovel blade flashing through its extended neck. The coils convulsed, the jaws snapped, the tail fell silent.

  She swept the beheaded snake aside with the shovel, then grabbed Luisa, who was still standing frozen as a little statue. “Did it bite you, baby?”

  Luisa shook her head and began to cry as her mother swooped in, kissing her all over and inspecting her for bites at the same time.

  Julieta craned toward the snake.

  “Don’t touch it,” my mother said quickly. “They can bite even after you cut their heads off.” By way of demonstration, she touched the severed head with the tip of the shovel blade, and the snake’s jaws jerked wide, then snapped.

  Mrs. Howard was standing wide-eyed on the sidewalk, hugging herself. I wouldn’t have thought she could look any paler, but she did. I realized I’d never seen her cross the street. She motioned me over.

  “Has your mama done that before?”

  “Yes ma’am. She’s the Rattlesnake snake killer. She’s not afraid of anything,” I boasted, reflecting a little of my mom’s badass glory.

  Mrs. Howard seemed as frozen as Luisa had been a few minutes ago. Then she took a shuddering breath and said, “Could you tell her I’d like to speak to her, please?”

  I did. Mrs. Howard stood on her carport waiting until my mom had stashed the shovel and swaggered across the street. I went inside to watch TV, and when my dad got home I realized Mom was still at the Howards’.

  They were on the carport, huddled in a corner. Mom was was talking intently, her voice low. Mrs. Howard was nodding but looking utterly miserable, tears standing in her eyes.

  I got close enough to hear my mother say, “You have to. You have to go now. My God, the little one is his own child.”

  Mrs. Howard closed her eyes, and my mother took hold of her shoulders and shook her a little bit, so that the tears ran down her face.

  Then they heard my feet crunch on the dry grass. Mom turned and said, “Go tell your father to get a pizza from Maria’s. And you go with him.”

  When we got back she was home. My dad raised his eyebrows; she cut her eyes at me and shook her head. At least I got pizza. They talked long after I went to bed, though they shut my door so I couldn’t hear what they said.

  * * *

  The next day I took a bus to swimming lessons at the Davis Islands pool, as I did a couple of days a week in the summer. The lessons consisted of a couple of teenage lifeguards throwing us all in the deep end and laughing, but the pool cooled us off.

  The bus dropped me near home just in time for a classic Florida summer thunderstorm. I was drenched in a minute. I didn’t mind that—I was still damp from swimming—but I was terrified of lightning, so I started sprinting the four blocks home.

  A car pulled up beside me and slowed. It was the Thunderbird. The colonel cranked down the passenger window. “Jump in.”

  I felt frozen again. He swung the door open just as a thunderbolt crashed so close I could smell the ozone. I jumped.

  He pulled into the empty driveway of my house, then turned to me and smiled. “This storm will pass in a minute. I can tell you don’t like that thunder. Let’s wait.”

  Rain hammered the roof. He reached over the back of the seat and fished out a towel. He rubbed my hair with it briskly, then slid it over my shoulders.

  In the tiny car, his face was close to mine. “So pretty,” he whispered. His hand moved over my wet shirt. I was as flat-chested as a boy, but his fingers found my nipple and pinched it, hard. His arm tightened around me and his mouth was at my ear.

  “You remind me of the little girls I used to know in Saigon.” He sighed deeply. “All those sweet little girls.”

  I swung the door open, twisted sideways from under his arm, and bolted into the dark house. The Thunderbird sat in the driveway for a minute or two, then slowly drove away. It didn’t stop across the street.

  This time I knew I hadn’t dreamed anything, but I didn’t know what to do. That night my parents seemed distracted, sending me to watch TV and murmuring in the kitchen. When my mother came into the living room, she said, “You look tired,” and I realized I was exhausted. I went to bed without argument, figuring if I slept on it I’d know what to say tomorrow.

  * * *

  Voices woke me deep in the night. My parents talking in low tones, but someone else too. From the hall I could see Mrs. Howard and her girls in the kitchen. Susie was asleep on my father’s shoulder. Nancy was backed up against the counter, weeping silently and sucking a lock of her hair. Out on the carport, I could see the back end of our station wagon, piled with loose clothes and my mother’s tan suitcase.

  Standing so close to her mother their noses almost touched, Brenda was shaking with anger. “I’m not going anywhere, you old bag,” she said. “I’m staying here with him.”

  She turned toward the door, and fast as a cat my mother blocked her. She seized Brenda’s arm and hissed in her face, “You get in that car now, or I’ll hogtie you and throw you in the back.”

  Brenda wrenched her arm loose, and I thought she would strike my mother. Instead she whirled and slapped Nancy so hard she staggered. “Come on, you fucking moron,” Brenda said.

  I crept back to bed before anyone saw me. In the morning my father told me that my mom got a phone call in the middle of the night and had to go visit her aunt up the coast in Masaryktown because she was in the hospital; she’d be home soon, he added. I didn’t ask him why I hadn’t heard the phone ring.

  * * *

  A day later, walking home after swimming lessons, I spotted the T-bird on the carport across the street and saw the colonel standing at our front door. I cut off through the alley before he could see me and went into our house as quietly as I could through the back.

  “Where are they?” the colonel was saying, not shouting but in that voice that sounded like he was giving an order. “I know you know. I know that damn wife of yours has something to do with this.”

  “My damn wife is my business,” my father said, “and I’d appreciate you not talking about her that way.”

  The colonel snorted. “They’re mine. You have no right. She has no right.”

  “All I can tell you is they’re not here.”

  From where I stood in the kitchen, the colonel couldn’t spot me, but I could see a gun in his hand. He held it loosely, pointed toward the ground, but he twitched it back and forth in a nervous way I didn’t like.

  My father must have heard me. Behind his back, he flicked his hand toward me in a get-back gesture, then pointed toward the Mendoza house. I went out the back door, holding it so it wouldn’t slam, and jumped the fence into the backyard next door.

  “The colonel is yelling at my dad,” I said quietly through the Mendozas’ kitchen screen door. “He has a gun.”

  “The colonel has a gun?” Sergeant Mendoza was already moving, his hand swinging the holster toward him. “Call the base,” he said to Mrs. Mendoza. To me he said, “You stay here.”

  As soon as she was on the phone, I snuck out and slid behind the hedge along the side of our house so I could see the front yard.

&nb
sp; Mendoza moved even more quietly than I did, stopping a few feet behind the colonel. “Drop the gun, sir.”

  The colonel grew still. He didn’t drop the gun, but he stopped twitching it. “I’m your superior officer,” he said without turning.

  “Drop the gun, sir,” Mendoza said again. “Then put your hands up.”

  For an instant my father’s eyes met Mendoza’s, and my father took one step back from the doorway, pivoted, and flattened himself against the wall. The colonel’s hand twitched once. Mendoza moved one foot a little forward. Once again I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

  Then we heard the siren.

  The colonel never looked at Mendoza, but he put his gun down on the driveway, very slowly. Mendoza kept his weapon trained on the colonel until the MPs handcuffed him and drove him away.

  After Mendoza holstered the gun, my father shook his hand. They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then my father said to me, “Come out of those damn bushes.”

  * * *

  For about a week, Mendoza came over while Johnny Carson was on TV and slept on a lawn chaise on our carport, his holster on.

  My mother pulled into the driveway two days after the colonel was taken away, just her and her suitcase, and she never said a word to me about where she’d been. I never saw the T-bird again. By the time school started, the Howards’ house had new tenants.

  A few weeks after she returned, my mom had to go to some kind of hearing on base. She came home looking tired and poured a double Scotch.

  “Did you tell them where you took her and the kids?” Dad asked.

  “They didn’t even ask,” she said. “But I told them what he did.”

  I was babysitting Julieta and Luisa late one afternoon not long after that. Mendoza and my dad got home at the same time, and I walked out to see them talking in our driveway.

  “You know how the brass are,” Mendoza said. “They cover each other’s asses, sweep everything under the rug. All they did was transfer him. But they did send him someplace that might make him regret what he did. Things are getting real hot there.”

  My dad’s eyebrows went up. “Where?”

  Mendoza smiled. “They sent him back to Saigon.”

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Ace Atkins is the author of twenty-four books, including nine Quinn Colson novels, the first two of which, The Ranger and The Lost Ones, were nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. He is also the author of eight New York Times best sellers in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. Before turning to fiction, Atkins was a crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune and played defensive end for the Auburn University football team.

  Colette Bancroft has been the book editor at the Tampa Bay Times since 2007. In addition to writing reviews and interviewing authors, she directs the annual Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading. She served two terms on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Bancroft earned degrees in English from the University of South Florida and the University of Florida, and she wishes she had finished her dissertation on the novels of Raymond Chandler.

  Karen Brown is the author of two novels, The Clairvoyants and The Longings of Wayward Girls, and two prize-winning short story collections, Little Sinners and Other Stories and Pins and Needles: Stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and many literary journals, most recently Kenyon Review and One Story. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Florida.

  Luis Castillo grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of Southern California. For three decades he has been a television sports producer, working for CNN Headline News, TBS Sports, and Fox Sports. He currently lives in Largo, Florida, with his wife, son, and daughter.

  Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-two novels, including the #1 New York Times best sellers Dark Sacred Night, Two Kinds of Truth, and The Late Show. His books, which include the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than seventy million copies worldwide. A former newspaper reporter, he has won awards for his journalism and novels and is the executive producer of the Amazon show Bosch. He spends his time in Los Angeles and Tampa.

  Tim Dorsey grew up in a small town an hour north of Miami. He graduated from Auburn University, where he was editor of the student newspaper. He was a reporter for the Alabama Journal in Montgomery before joining the Tampa Tribune in 1987, becoming the night metro editor. He left the paper in 1999 and has since published twenty-two novels in several languages, most recently No Sunscreen for the Dead, and regularly hits the New York Times best-seller list.

  Sarah Gerard’s most recent book is the novel True Love. Her essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her work has appeared in T Magazine, Granta, Electric Literature, and the Baffler. She was the 2018–2019 New College of Florida writer-in-residence.

  Ladee Hubbard’s debut novel, The Talented Ribkins, was published in 2017. Set in Florida, the book received the Ernest J. Gaines Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has published short fiction in Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Guernica, and Copper Nickel, among other venues. Her latest novel is The Rib King.

  Danny López (a.k.a. Phillippe Diederich) is the author of the novels Playing for the Devil’s Fire and Sofrito, and the Dexter Vega mysteries The Last Breath and The Last Girl. The son of Haitian exiles, López was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico City and Miami.

  Gale Massey’s debut novel, The Girl from Blind River, received a 2018 Florida Book Award. Her award-winning stories and essays have appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, Sabal, Seven Hills Press, and other places. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise, and has been nominated for the 2019 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Massey, a Florida native, lives in St. Petersburg.

  Yuly Restrepo Garcés was born in Medellín, Colombia, and came to the United States nearly twenty years ago as an asylee. Her writing has previously appeared in Catapult, PRISM International, Natural Bridge, and Zone 3. She is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, a MacDowell fellow, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa.

  Lori Roy is the two-time Edgar Award–winning author of five novels, the most recent of which is Gone Too Long. Her work has been named a New York Times Notable Crime Book twice, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and included on numerous “Best of” lists. Her debut novel, Bent Road, was chosen as a Notable Book by the state of Kansas. Roy lives with her family in Florida.

  Eliot Schrefer is the New York Times best-selling author of Endangered and Threatened, both finalists for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. His novels have also been named Editors’ Choice in the New York Times and have won the Green Earth Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He grew up in Clearwater and now lives in New York City, where he reviews fiction for USA Today.

  Lisa Unger is the New York Times best-selling author of seventeen novels, including The Stranger Inside. Her novel Under My Skin was an Edgar Award and Hammett Prize nominee. Her short story “The Sleep Tight Motel” was nominated for an Edgar Award. Her books are published in twenty-six languages and have been named Best of the Year or top picks by Today, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, Amazon, and IndieBound.

  Sterling Watson is the author of eight novels: The Committee, Suitcase City, Fighting in the Shade, Sweet Dream Baby, Deadly Sweet, Blind Tongues, The Calling, and Weep No More My Brother. His work has been widely praised, including by Dennis Lehane, who says, “The novels of Sterling Watson are to be treasured and passed on to the next generation.”

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

/>   Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series,

  edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.