Pulp Ink Read online

  PULP

  INK

  Editors: Nigel Bird

  and Chris Rhatigan

  Assistant Editors: Aldo Calcagno

  and Melanie Reichwald

  Special thanks to Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw

  Published by

  Chris Rhatigan, Nigel Bird and

  Needle Publishing

  Individual stories Copyright 2011 by the individual authors of each story.

  All rights reserved.

  Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Individual stories Copyright 2011 by the individual authors of each story.

  First eBook Edition: August 2011

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living, dead, or somewhere in-between, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

  Cover by Nigel Bird using http://www.makesweet.com/tattoo/

  Table of Contents

  Editor’s Note

  By Nigel Bird

  Requiem for Spider

  By Reed Farrel Coleman

  Jack Rabbit Slim’s Cellar

  The $5 Mil Hak

  By Jodi MacArthur

  Padre

  By AJ Hayes

  The Creation of Ice

  By Sandra Seamans

  Zed’s Dead, Baby

  By Eric Beetner

  Your Mother Should Know

  By Allan Guthrie

  You Never Can Tell

  By Matthew C. Funk

  A Whole Lot of Rosie

  By Nigel Bird

  The Lady & the Gimp:

  A Peter Ord Investigation

  By Paul D. Brazill

  A Night at the Royale

  By Chris F. Holm

  Clouds in a Bunker

  By David Cranmer

  The Wife of Gregory Bell

  By Patricia Abbott

  If Love is a Red Dress – Hang Me in Rags

  By Michael J. Solender

  A Corpse by Any Other Name

  By Naomi Johnson

  Surf Rider

  By Ian Ayris

  The Slicers’ Serenade of Steel

  By Gary Phillips

  The October 17 Economic Development Committee Meeting

  By Chris Rhatigan

  Threshold Woman

  By Richard Godwin

  Redlining

  By Jim Harrington

  Jungle Boogie

  By Kate Horsley

  This Little Piggy

  By Hilary Davidson

  Comanche

  By Jason Duke

  Misirlou

  By Jimmy Callaway

  The Only One Who Could Ever Reach Me

  By Matt Lavin

  Editor’s Note

  By Nigel Bird

  Someone had scratched an ‘e’ from the sign on the door, so I ended up going into the care#rs office to find my vocation.

  “I love writing,” I said. “Music. Films. I want to be either Jack Kerouac or Charlie Parker. Sinatra or Presley of The Velvet Underground. Gary Cooper or James Dean. William Burroughs or Barry Levinson. Think you can swing it?”

  She wrote it all down, scratched her pretty little head and went over to the files. Pulled out a few and dropped them on the table.

  “Pizzaland need a kitchen porter.”

  I didn’t move. She went to the next one.

  “There’s a job at the cement works. Two meals a day and as much cement as you can use.”

  Two meals a day? Had me interested, but I wasn’t going to let on.

  “There’s this crazy notion of an anthology. Take the soundtrack and snippets of dialogue from a crime movie that defined the 90s, send prompts out for inspiration to a host of writers that are right at the top of their game, get them to write stories about them. All you’d need to do is read them all, check out what works and what doesn’t, smooth out the bumps and put it all together. And you don’t do it alone. You get to work alongside the most talented and generous Chris Rhatigan. Pay’s lousy, long hours, you’ll have music and stories flooding your dreams and echoing round your head for months. You’ll get to read some of the best stories written, but they won’t all be nice. In fact, some pretty nasty things are going to happen to some pretty bad people. Good people, too. Imagine being at the helm of one of the most exciting and best quality projects around and you pretty much have it.”

  “Free meals?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  I picked up the card for the cement works job. Nodded to the lady and left the room ready to make a call.

  Requiem for Spider

  By Reed Farrel Coleman

  Her heart was lonelier than Sergeant Pepper’s and the whole fucking band. I could see that from across the bar, not that across the bar was like seeing across space and time. It was more like twenty feet and, at that time of night, the view was relatively unobstructed. She had last call girl written all over her. Don’t misunderstand, she wasn’t a call girl. She wasn’t even much of a girl anymore. Thirty, at least, she hadn’t fit that description for quite some time. What I mean to say is that she was the kind of woman who probably had more than her share of men, but only because she understood that desperation was her ally. She was that pair of shoes on the discount rack you bought because you needed shoes and you only had so much money and the store was closing. When the bartender screamed “Last call for alcohol,” it was her mating song. She was a last call girl.

  I watched her quarry approach, lean into her, buy her a drink; watched them leave, him on unsteady legs, her propping him up. I imagined the sting she would feel tomorrow morning when she saw that look in his eyes, when he was no longer too-full of drink and desperation, no longer in need of that last pair of shoes, when dashed hopes would again break her lonely heart. But as fascinating as she was, she wasn’t why I was here.

  I was here because I was bored. It was that simple. I couldn’t stand another minute as a shopkeeper, selling wines to nouveau riche assholes who understood even less about quality than I understood about the role of subatomic particles in the structure of the universe. What they thought they understood was the implication of price, which meant they understood very little about substance or value. Well, fuck, when your president is an ex-actor – and not a very good one – and the world of high finance turns on junk bonds and hostile takeovers, value and substance don’t count for much, do they? I was here because I’d taken the kind of gig I vowed never to take when I got my investigator’s license. I was here to watch Spider’s back and this particular spider lacked the evolutionary adaption of rear-facing eyes to do the job himself.

  Having grown up around the corner from one another, Spider and I had been friends for as long as I could remember. Dick Thomas got the handle Spider because he was a gangly bastard as a kid, all arms and legs, each limb seemingly with a mind of its own. He wore thick glasses and dressed like an unmade bed, but he stuck out for all sorts of reasons in the old neighborhood. In a place where you were either Jewish or Italian, a place where Jews could recite the Hail Mary and the Catholic kids ate bagels and lox, being a Wasp marked you as a freak. We had no clue what Protestants did or what they were about. Another thing about Spider was that he always had a book in his hand. Always. He once told me he had visited worlds the rest of us couldn’t even imagine. I suppose he told me because he thought I was
smart enough to understand or maybe it was because I was the one kid in the neighborhood who, even then, had his back.

  If our senior class at Lincoln had voted on the least likely among us to become a gangster, Spider Thomas would’ve won in a landslide. Yeah, but you can’t pay attention to that kind of shit. Spider sure as hell didn’t. He graduated from Baruch College with a degree in accounting and promptly set about building an empire. He ran underground gambling parlors all over the five boroughs of New York City, a few in Yonkers, and one or two on Long Island. He made sure not to step on anyone’s toes; gladly, even eagerly sharing as much as fifty percent of the profits with either the local Mob families that controlled the territories his clubs were in or with the gangs that ran the remaining territories. They were thrilled to get the cash without taking any of the risk. Because of Spider’s largesse, his de facto partners provided protection against robbery and police raids.

  “Moe,” he once told me, “when you spend your whole childhood trying to not get the shit beat out of you, you get good at figuring out effective survival strategies. After the first time I got held up for my lunch money, I started keeping half the money hidden in my sock. It kept everybody satisfied. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.”

  Spider was happy to take his percentage of profits from the clubs and invest them in a wide range of legitimate businesses. Though the corporate structures were thickly layered to hide his interests, Spider Thomas now owned small pieces of two off-shore banks, car dealerships, fast food restaurants, a string of convenience stores, gas stations, and a chain of laundromats. Laundromats, I liked the irony in that. Spider had turned his legitimate businesses into a money laundering juggernaut. That’s what this meeting was about. The Russian mob was known for controlling its own money laundering, but a group of young up-and-comers from Brighton Beach were considering farming out a sizeable chunk of their laundering operations. They weren’t of the generation that had spent hard time in Soviet prisons and they weren’t particularly interested in American prisons either. They wanted to spread the risk around. That was always Spider’s foot in the door, his understanding of risk versus reward.

  “You ever play golf, Moe?” Spider asked me a couple of years ago.

  “Not much. Why?”

  “It’s my favorite sport.”

  Spider was the most unathletic person I’d ever known and I couldn’t picture him driving a golf ball more than fifty yards using a Howitzer. “You play?” I asked, trying not to sound completely incredulous.

  He laughed. “No, but I love it. Every decision a golfer makes is a calculation of risk versus reward.”

  I once had a client who compared golf to chess. In his opinion it was the ultimate thinking man’s game. I didn’t know what it was about golf, but people seemed to see all kinds of deeper truths in it that were lost on me. Maybe I’d take it up someday. Yeah, right after cliff diving and lion hunting with knives.

  McGee’s Tavern on 7th Avenue in Park Slope had once been an old school Irish pub, but was now a bastion of Yuppie-ness. The bar menu featured things like grilled figs and goat cheese on focaccia crisps, and the bar itself offered twenty brands of single malt scotch at prices that would curl your nose hairs. Park Slope was where people who weren’t from Brooklyn lived in Brooklyn precisely so they might remain apart from the hordes of the great unwashed. Native Brooklynites like Spider and me and transplants like the Russians detested Park Slope. The Russians hated it because it wasn’t Brighton Beach and, in this neck of the woods, they stuck out like circus clowns at a funeral mass. Because both parties despised the neighborhood, McGee’s was deemed a perfect place for the meet – Brooklyn logic. In spite of McGee’s unfortunate turn to fusion cooking and pricey scotch, the owner was amenable to renting out his backroom after closing time. He didn’t give a shit about who was renting it or why. For him it was simply a matter of when the room was needed and how much you were willing to pay for the privilege of its use.

  The idea was that there was to be no muscle at the powwow. Each party was allowed to bring an unarmed and unaffiliated second as sort of security blanket. That’s where I came in. I was definitely unaffiliated and, for the only time since I got on the job in the late ’60s, unarmed. I didn’t like it, but those were the rules. In a nod to paradox, the seconds were to arrive first and neither was to participate in the meeting itself. I suppose that made sense. When your goal is to discuss the process of turning huge sums of dirty money into piles of nice clean cash, you don’t want any witnesses to the proceedings. The meeting alone amounted to a criminal conspiracy under the RICO Act and could earn each party a long bid in a federal penitentiary.

  Neither of the principals had yet arrived, but I’d spotted my opposite number the moment I walked into the joint. It would have been tough not to. He was ugly as a rotten peach and big in a very unflattering way. Fat? He wasn’t fat exactly. He was what my mom used to call husky or chubby, not terms you heard much anymore. Not very ego-affirming and definitely bad for self-esteem. Worse for his self-esteem was his outfit. In a crimson, double-knit leisure suit, he was about as inconspicuous as a steamed lobster at a white sale. He was fifty if a day and what little hair he had was gray and unkempt. Still, I knew better than to judge him as no threat. Just because he was supposed to be unarmed didn’t mean he was and I’d had the piss kicked out of me by some pretty rough motherfuckers who looked like they’d go down in a stiff breeze. I wasn’t sure he’d made me right away, but since we were the only two guys left at the bar and the stickman was busy restocking the beer cooler, my guess was he’d figured it out.

  I raised my glass of Dewar’s to him as a gesture of kinship. He kind of snarled his lip and grunted. He was no threat to Billy Idol, believe me. I shrugged my shoulders, went back to sipping my drink and gnawing on bar mix until the Spider and his potential business partner arrived.

  When Spider first approached me about the job, I asked him why he wanted me there.

  “You’re a Russian Jew. They’re Russian Jews,” he said as if that explained it all.

  “It’s not that simple, Spider. It’s not like the Masons. We don’t have a secret handshake. They’re not Russian Jews like I am. First off, I’m a Ukranian Jew. There’s a big difference. When my family lived over there, my zadeh’s two biggest worries were the foot pedal on his sewing machine breaking and the Cossacks raiding the shtetl. These guys… that’s not how they were raised. Their parents and grandparents were suckled on Stalin and the State. These guys are rough characters.”

  But it was as if he hadn’t heard me. “Shtetl, I like that word.”

  “Spider, listen –”

  “I heard you, don’t worry. But they’re Jews,” he said. “I’ve grown up with you, surrounded by Jews my whole life.”

  “Oy, Spider,” I said. “These guys aren’t Jews the way you know Jews. They pretty much grew up godless, without religion like you know it. I may be as lapsed a Jew as there is, but I’m the chief rabbi of Jerusalem compared to them.”

  “Moe, the bottom line is I trust you to have my back. You always have, even when it cost you. That’s why I want you here.”

  Argue that.

  The Russian arrived first. I’d been told his name was Yuri, not that I believed it was his real name. Whatever his name, he was rather more elegant than his second. Then again, that wasn’t saying a whole lot. I’d seen dancing bears who were more elegant than my opposite number. This guy, Spider’s counterpart, was in a different league. His gray, chalk-striped suit was Italian with a thread count in the millions and his alligator shoes, also Italian, cost more than the bartender was going to make this week, next week, and the one after that. His shirt was custom made. His yellow power tie was Hermes all the way from Paris and his watch was handmade in the Alps. I wondered if it yodeled every hour on the half hour. He had piano fingers with manicured nails and slicked-back black hair like Pat Riley, but I wasn’t dumb enough to think America had softened him up. He had nice white teeth, but a hard mouth
and a cold expression that nearly frosted my glass.

  “I am Yuri,” he said to me. He gave his vicuna topcoat to Dancing Bear, ignoring the man completely.

  “I’m Moe.” I nodded, not offering my hand. Yuri didn’t strike me as a handshaker. “You don’t mind if I take a look at your topcoat, do you?”

  Yuri smiled, though it didn’t exactly thaw my glass. “Very thorough. This reflects well on Spider,” he said. “Sergei, give the coat to Mr. Moe.”

  Sergei. So, Dancing Bear had a name. He handed me the coat. It was lovely and I treated it with respect. It contained no weapon that I could find and I handed it back to Sergei.

  “It’s clean,” I said.

  “So, Mr. Moe, to be equitable, would you mind if Sergei were to… what is the phrase?” Yuri pretended not to know. I believed that about as much as I believed his name was Yuri.

  “Frisk me. Pat me down.”

  “Yes, exactly that.”

  I raised my arms up to shoulder height and spread my legs wide so that Dancing Bear might have full access to the goods. Sergei was even uglier close up and he didn’t smell much better than he looked. He didn’t seem like much, but, as I suspected, Sergei was a nasty piece of work. I could tell he’d done this a thousand times before. His hands were practiced and strong. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he’d been a cop somewhere along the way.