by Johnny Shaw
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF JOHNNY SHAW
Plaster City: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco
Winner of the 2015 Spotted Owl Award
“Violent, hilarious, and touching . . . Joe R. Lansdale perfected this brand of compassionate mayhem in his Hap & Leonard stories, but Anthony Award–winner Shaw does it extremely well, too.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Anthony Award–winner Shaw’s second installment in the award-winning “Jimmy Veeder Fiasco” series hits the right note. Violent and ribald without being salacious, the novel maintains a tongue-in-cheek attitude that keeps the reader wholly entertained . . . Readers who enjoy mysteries and suspense novels with plenty of action and humor will delight in this series.”
—Library Journal
“Mixing comedy with the ugly side of human experience is never an easy trick, but Shaw is well on his way to becoming a master at this difficult craft.”
—Booklist
“Johnny Shaw has a way of making the ugliest, roughest, most insane misadventures feel honest and hilarious. Underneath all that vomit and blood is real affection, even tenderness, for a world that Shaw obviously knows well. His writing is brutal and profane and absolutely beautiful.”
—S.G. REDLING, bestselling author of Flowertown and Redemption Key
“If you do not love Johnny Shaw’s new novel Plaster City, I will fight you.”
—CHRISTA FAUST, author of Money Shot and Choke Hold
“Johnny Shaw is a Scott Phillips of the American Southwest, like Phillips setting his novels in bleak, flat landscapes, and populating them with dangerous, violent characters who, call them bad or call them immoral, are almost always endearingly human. Oh, and, like Phillips’s, his books will always make a reader laugh out loud while only rarely descending into jokiness.”
—Detectives Beyond Borders
Big Maria
Winner of the 2013 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original
“Comic thrillerdom has a new star.”
—Booklist Online (starred review)
“This is one you’ll soon be recommending to your friends. It’s lighthearted but not lightweight, funny as hell but never frivolous. Shaw writes like the bastard son of Donald Westlake and Richard Stark: There’s crime, and criminals, but there’s also a deep vein of good humor that makes Shaw’s writing sparkle. Combine that with his talent for creating memorable characters (the supporting cast, including a mute, severed head, often threatens to steal the show), and you get one of the best reads in recent memory, an adventure story that might just make you mist up every once and awhile, especially during the book’s moving finale.”
—Mystery Scene magazine
“Funny, fist-pumping, rockin’, right-on, righteous fun.”
—BARNES & NOBLE MYSTERY BLOG
“Shaw has invented ‘dust bowl’ fiction for the twenty-first century. Funny, sad, madcap, compulsively readable, and ultimately, so very, very wise.”
—BLAKE CROUCH, author of Pines
“Johnny Shaw has an incredible talent for moving from darkness to hope, from heart-wrenching to humor, and from profane to sacred. His latest, Big Maria, is an adventure story that’s equal parts Humphrey Bogart and Elmore Leonard, with just a little bit of the Hardy Boys thrown in. I loved every page.”
—HILARY DAVIDSON, author of Evil in All Its Disguises
“I loved every page of Big Maria. You don’t often read a gutbustingly funny book that manages to maintain its fundamental seriousness and bad-ass sense of plot. This proves what many of us suspected after Dove Season, that Johnny Shaw is one of the majors already.”
—SCOTT PHILLIPS, author of Rake
Dove Season: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco
Winner of the 2012 Spotted Owl Award for Debut Mystery
“[Johnny Shaw] is excellent at creating a sense of place with a few deft strokes . . . He moves effortlessly between dark comedy and moments that pack a real emotional punch, and he’s got a knack for off-kilter characters who are completely at home in their own personal corners of oddballdom.”
—TANA FRENCH, author of Broken Harbor
“Johnny Shaw calls Dove Season a Jimmy Veeder Fiasco, but I call it a whole new ball game; I enjoyed this damn book more than anything else I read this year!”
—CRAIG JOHNSON, author of A Serpent’s Tooth
“Dove Season is dark and funny, graceful and profane, with beating-heart characters and a setting as vivid as a scorpion sting on a dusty wrist. Debut author Johnny Shaw is a welcome new voice. I’m already looking forward to Jimmy Veeder’s next fiasco.”
—SEAN DOOLITTLE, Thriller Award–winning author of Lake Country
ALSO BY JOHNNY SHAW
The Jimmy Veeder Fiasco Series
Dove Season
Plaster City
Stand-Alone Novels
Big Maria
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Johnny Shaw
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503952195 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503952193 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503950351 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503950352 (paperback)
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
This one is for Mickey Batts.
CONTENTS
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
1929–1986
LONG PAST DAYS
1986
CHAPTER 37
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1929
LONG PAST DAYS
It wasn’t the stench I knew. Woke up coughing. Sat up in bed, board straight. A lungful of smoke. Throat seared. Different from the burnoff from the rubber factory. Acrid, black, thick. This was something else. A something else on fire. Wasn’t until Sal showed that I learned it was the whole city.
“You got a gun?” Sal at the
door. Jumpy. Maybe scared. A first for Sal.
If I had money for a gun, I wouldn’t be a hood. A hood in training, at least. An errand boy. Drove. Collected. Backed Sal, maybe twice. Gun on loan both times. Sal knew this. He was wishing, grasping. I shook my head.
“Get dressed, kid. Grab the biggest knife in the kitchen.”
“What’s going on out there?”
“War.”
Sleep in my eyes. A late night working for Fat Jimmy. Still waking up. Threw on my clothes. Fingers shaking. Three tries to get my boots tied. Ma at my door. Me undoing a knot.
“What’s going on, Rocky?”
“Nothing, Ma.”
“Don’t give me ‘nothing.’ That’s Salvatore Carrelli.”
“You smell the smoke, right?”
“What do you got to do with it?”
I didn’t know. Walked past her to the kitchen. Dug through drawers. Big spoons and cooking wares. Copped an ice pick and a meat cleaver. Looped twine through the handle of the cleaver. Draped it around my neck. The ice pick slid in my boot. Ma and Sal watched me. Ma unnerved. Sal impatient.
“Fat Jimmy’s waiting,” Sal said.
“What about my ma?”
The look on her face. Like she’d drunk lemon juice with a castor oil chaser. Not intimidated by Sal or her hoodlum son.
“She’ll be fine,” Sal said, gave her a smile. She gave him a scowl. “She looks tougher than well-done horse meat. Besides, all the fighting is north of Cement Factory Road.”
Ma didn’t let us leave right away, insisted we take food. God forbid we starve before we got killed. Hit the street armed with a sandwich and a piece of cheese wrapped in paper. The stink of not-so-fresh liverwurst, the burn of smoke.
Sal was wrong. The fires burnt below Cement Factory Road. In five, six, seven places. The whole Feldstein’s Pianos block ablaze. The closest fires three blocks away. Smoke rose into the swelling gloom. Blackness hovered over the city. Midday, and the city dark as a moonless night.
People filled the streets. Fleeing south. Cars and wagons. Foot and horseback. Headed for the King Olaf Bridge. Trying to get out of the city. Away from the fires. Away from the warring gangs. The innocent of Auction in retreat. As the guilty built hell.
An old woman fell. Nobody helped. The surging crowd driven by fear and momentum. They trampled her underfoot. I took a step toward her. Sal had my shirt, threw me toward his Packard. Heard the woman’s screams under the sound of the boots and shoes that killed her.
“You’re going to see people die today,” Sal said. “You’ll kill yourself. But you ain’t going to save a damn soul. You can’t. Don’t try.”
The car crept upstream through the human current. The throng grew denser. The crunch of bone when Sal ran over some poor bastard’s foot. People hit at the glass, kicked the fenders. The Packard clipped a horse-drawn wagon hauling birdcages. Brightly colored parrots and tropical birds squawking, feathers flying. The front bumper tied up in the wagon’s spokes, locked together.
The wagon man jumped to the ground. Full of swearing and fight. Sal got out, drew his revolver. He won the argument. The man fled on foot. Absorbed into the crowd. His wagon and birds abandoned. The panicked birds violently flapped their wings.
“Somebody should let them go. Or shoot them,” Sal said.
“The car’s no good,” I said, getting out. “Where we going?”
One last look at the birds. Sal said, “Turkish baths on 110th. Through Redling Park.”
I turned to go on foot. Sal held my shoulder, stared me in the eye. As serious as I’d seen him. And he was a serious man. Seen him smile one time. When we found Ether Joe Poloni with a whore in Darktown. Ether Joe dressed like Laura La Plante. Had a string of pearls, but not around his neck. Sal got a kick out of that. He still beat Joe to death for stealing from Fat Jimmy. But with a smile.
“We’re fighting everyone,” Sal said. “The Tongs, the Wretches, the coppers, every bastard with a gun or knife or ax. It’s a riot and a rampage. If you see a Negro or Chinaman or Irish, they’re going to move to kill you. Kill the sons of bitches first.”
I clutched the cleaver under my jacket. Hoped I’d have the backbone to use it. Hoped I wouldn’t need to.
Took all of fifteen minutes to learn how worthless hope was.
Redling Park was no safer than the streets. Tops of trees burning like struck match heads. Clusters of folk, lost and scared, trying to hide. We ran through the woods. Flaming leaves tumbling down on us. Out into the central pasture. The open field where people used to picnic. Now they wandered, dazed. No cover or safety. Eyes wide with fear. Ready to run or fight or die.
A company of Tongs appeared. Bloodred sashes. Stained hatchets. Four men and a woman. Only the Chinese could imagine a female assassin. A group crossed their path. Regular folk. Unarmed. Scared. Nowhere to run. The attack was a blur. Like wild dogs cornering a scurry of squirrels. Not a fight. A massacre. Screams turned silent. Bloodstained grass blades.
“Sal, we got to go.” I pulled at him.
“To hell with these savages,” Sal said. “They need a punish.”
“You said it. We can’t save no one.”
“Does it look like them folks can be saved?”
Sal pulled his pistol. Aimed. Fired. One of the Tongs spun, fell to the ground. The butchery ceased. Blood-spattered faces searched for the shooter. We weren’t hiding. I swear the Orientals smiled in unison. Charged the length of the field, hatchets in the air like Indian braves in a cowboy picture.
Sal stood his ground. Revolver ready. Waiting. Someone should erect a statue of Sal in that spot. A noble pose. Thug turned hero. I wanted to run. Couldn’t. Ice pick in one hand, cleaver in the other. I got ready to die.
“I can’t shoot them all. The she-devil is yours,” Sal said.
“The girl?”
“She’s the enemy. Not a person. It’ll make stabbing her to death easier.”
The Chinese ten yards away. Sal fired. And again. And again.
And on that day, I killed another human being for the first time. Fifteen years old. It happened quick. She fought ferociously. Her hatchet clipped me. On the shoulder. The skull. Fight ended with the Chinese girl slumping to the ground. Me clutching the ice pick lodged in her neck. She wasn’t any older than me.
Before the sun set, more people would die by my hand. My life and Auction City changed forever.
Sal was wrong. About a lot of things. Girl or she-devil, killing was not easy. And Ma wasn’t fine. Annabella Colombo, like thousands of others, died on that December day. In a matter of hours, the city burnt out of control in the largest gang war in recorded American history. An unnatural disaster.
The papers called it the Flood.
1986
CHAPTER 1
I met me a girl. She was oh, so pretty.
Never shoulda took her to Auction City.
We had us some fun, but end of the night
She met her a rough man. Man wanted to fight.
Now I ain’t no lily, no stranger to scuffles,
But I ain’t done heard of no Auction City Shuffle.
The Auction City Shuffle.
A bloodthirsty dance them hooligans do.
The Auction City Shuffle.
One wrong step, that city’ll kill you.
A jab and a hook and an uppercut later
Heard my girl laughing, knew then that I hate her.
And if bleeding and crying weren’t even enough
Man had him a boot razor. That city play rough.
I got up and ran. From that town with no pity.
And I ain’t never gone back to that damn Auction City.
—From the song “The Auction City Shuffle” by Blind Willie Maxwell (1933)
Andy Destra liked complicated things, but that didn’t mean he understood them. The more moving parts, the more fascinating. The more intricate the patterns, the stranger the connections. None of it necessarily led to any practical solutions. He liked the complexi
ty for the sake of its complexity. The problem was that he got lost in the thing. Andy could not just see the forest for the trees. He would spend five days examining the bark of a particular cypress only to realize it was a birch. And upon the realization, he would become aware that he was lost and starving and dying of thirst and also missing his legs.
At the moment, that’s where he found himself. In the metaphorical wilderness. Lost in the mechanism. A forest of circuits and wires and tubes. He stared and wondered what that red wire did. He could see where it attached to the rest of the device, but he couldn’t discern its function. The green wire made sense. So did the black one. But that red one. It was screwing with him. He worked the process of elimination, searching for the answer in the absence. What did the other wires not do?
“I’m going to cut the red wire,” Andy said.
“Don’t cut anything,” Champ said. “Your guesses aren’t worth a tinker’s damn.”
“I can’t not do something.”
Andy closed the wire cutters, snipping the red wire. The television immediately lost its broadcast, and white noise loudly rushed through the room. He reached around to the front and turned the volume all the way down.
Champ crossed her arms in front of her chest, giving him a look that he had seen too many times during his childhood and teen years. “At least you figured out what the red wire does. It makes the TV work.”
“Sorry, Champ,” Andy said. “I’ll fix it back.”
“You got two minutes,” she said. “Steve and Kayla are about to get down to business. It’s been a long time coming, and I ain’t missing it.”
Days of Our Lives was sacrosanct. If Champ missed one second of the opening, Andy would catch hell. He quickly stripped the ends of the red wire and reattached them.
“How’s the picture now?” Andy asked.
“It’s a good thing you’re a cop and don’t need any real skills,” Champ said.
Andy moved to the front of the television. He had picture and sound again, but the vertical hold sent the image scrolling up the screen only to reappear on the bottom. Like sands through a crappy hourglass. He played around with the dial and got the screen to hold. Just in time. The opening theme of Days filled the room.