USA Noir - Best Of The Akashic Noir Series Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2013 by Akashic Books

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-189-9

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-184-4

  eISBN: 9781617751998

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938529

  All Rights Reserved.

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: TRUE GRIT

  Animal Rescue

  DENNIS LEHANE

  Dorchester (Boston Noir)

  The Confidential Informant

  GEORGE PELECANOS

  Park View, NW (DC Noir)

  The Golden Gopher

  SUSAN STRAIGHT

  Downtown (Los Angeles Noir)

  The Book Signing

  PETE HAMILL

  Park Slope (Brooklyn Noir)

  Run Kiss Daddy

  JOYCE CAROL OATS

  Kittatinny Mountains (New Jersey Noir)

  Still Air

  TERRANCE HAYES

  East Liberty (Pittsburgh Noir)

  White Trash

  JEROME CHARYN

  Claremont/Concourse (Bronx Noir)

  PART II: AMERICAN VALUES

  Alice Fantastic

  MAGGIE ESTEP

  Aqueduct Racetrack (Queens Noir)

  The Gospel of Moral Ends

  BAYO OJIKUTU

  77th & Jeffery (Chicago Noir)

  When All This Was Bay Ridge

  TIM MCLOUGHLIN

  Sunset Park (Brooklyn Noir)

  Crazy for You

  BARBARA DEMARCO-BARRETT

  Costa Mesa (Orange County Noir)

  Mastermind

  REED FARREL COLEMAN

  Selden (Long Island Noir)

  The Clown and Bard

  KAREN KARBO

  SE Twenty-Eighth Avenue (Portland Noir)

  PART III: ROAD RAGE

  Mulholland Dive

  MICHAEL CONNELLY

  Mulholland Drive (Los Angeles Noir)

  Our Eyes Couldn't Stop Opening

  MEGAN ABBOTT

  Alter Road (Detroit Noir)

  Public Transportation

  LEE CHILD

  Chandler (Phoenix Noir)

  Too Near Real

  JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

  Princeton (New Jersey Noir)

  Ride Along

  JAMES W. HALL

  Coconut Grove (Miami Noir)

  Second Chance

  ELYSSA EAST

  Buzzards Bay (Cape Cod Noir)

  PART IV: HOMELAND SECURITY

  After Thirty

  DON WINSLOW

  Pacific Beach (San Diego Noir)

  Missing Gene

  J. MALCOLM GARCIA

  Troost Lake (Kansas City Noir)

  Loot

  JULIE SMITH

  Garden District (New Orleans Noir)

  The Prison

  DOMENIC STANSBERRY

  North Beach (San Francisco Noir)

  Helper

  JOSEPH BRUCHAC

  Adirondacks, New York (Indian Country Noir)

  Easy As A-B-C

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  Locust Point (Baltimore Noir)

  The Rose Red Vial

  PIR ROTHENBERG

  Museum District (Richmond Noir)

  PART V: UNDER THE INFLUENCE

  Amapola

  LUIS ALBERTO URREA

  Paradise Valley (Phoenix Noir)

  The Tik

  JOHN O'BRIEN

  Scotch 80s (Las Vegas Noir)

  Lighthouse

  S.J. ROZAN

  St. George (Staten Island Noir)

  Secret Pool

  ASALI SOLOMON

  West Philadelphia (Philadelphia Noir)

  Bums

  WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  West Side, St. Paul (Twin Cities Noir)

  PART VI: STREET JUSTICE

  Vic Primeval

  T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  Kearny Mesa (San Diego Noir)

  Feeding Frenzy

  TIM BRODERICK

  40 Wall Street (Wall Street Noir)

  Promised Tulips

  BHARTI KIRCHNER

  Wallingford (Seattle Noir)

  If You Can't Stand the Heat

  LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Clinton (Manhattan Noir)

  Phelan's First Case

  LISA SANDLIN

  Beaumont (Lone Star Noir)

  A Nice Place to Visit

  JEFFERY DEAVER

  Hell's Kitchen (Manhattan Noir)

  About the Contributors

  About the Akashic Noir Series

  Also in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards and Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  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.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Gir
ls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.

  In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.

  He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.

  Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)

  Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.

  There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing popularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.

  I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.

  * * *

  This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.

  When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.

  And part of me—the noir part—is expecting a phone call from the writer, inviting me over for a smoke.

  Johnny Temple

  Brooklyn, NY

  July 2013

  ANIMAL RESCUE

  BY DENNIS LEHANE

  Dorchester, Boston

  (Originally published in Boston Noir)

  Bob found the dog in the trash.

  It was just after Thanksgiving, the neighborhood gone quiet, hungover. After bartending at Cousin Marv’s, Bob sometimes walked the streets. He was big and lumpy and hair had been growing in unlikely places all over his body since his teens. In his twenties, he’d fought against the hair, carrying small clippers in his coat pocket and shaving twice a day. He’d also fought the weight, but during all those years of fighting, no girl who wasn’t being paid for it ever showed any interest in him. After a time, he gave up the fight. He lived alone in the house he grew up in, and when it seemed likely to swallow him with its smells and memories and dark couches, the attempts he’d made to escape it—through church socials, lodge picnics, and one horrific mixer thrown by a dating service—had only opened the wound further, left him patching it back up for weeks, cursing himself for hoping.

  So he took these walks of his and, if he was lucky, sometimes he forgot people lived any other way. That night, he paused on the sidewalk, feeling the ink sky above him and the cold in his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the evening.

  He was used to it. He was used to it. It was okay.

  You could make a friend of it, as long as you didn’t fight it.

  With his eyes closed, he heard it—a worn-out keening accompanied by distant scratching and a sharper, metallic rattling. He opened his eyes. Fifteen feet down the sidewalk, a large metal barrel with a heavy lid shook slightly under the yellow glare of the streetlight, its bottom scraping the sidewalk. He stood over it and heard that keening again, the sound of a creature that was one breath away from deciding it was too hard to take the next, and he pulled off the lid.

  He had to remove some things to get to it—a toaster and five thick Yellow Pages, the oldest dating back to 2000. The dog—either a very small one or else a puppy—was down at the bottom, and it scrunched its head into its midsection when the light hit it. It exhaled a soft chug of a whimper and tightened its body even more, its eyes closed to slits. A scrawny thing. Bob could see its ribs. He could see a big crust of dried blood by its ear. No collar. It was brown with a white snout and paws that seemed far too big for its body.

  It let out a sharper whimper when Bob reached down, sank his fingers into the nape of its neck, and lifted it out of its own excrement. Bob didn’t know dogs too well, but there was no mistaking this one for anything but a boxer. And definitely a puppy, the wide brown eyes opening and looking into his as he held it up before him.

  Somewhere, he was sure, two people made love. A man and a woman. Entwined. Behind one of those shades, oranged with light, that looked down on the street. Bob could feel them in there, naked and blessed. And he stood out here in the cold with a near-dead dog staring back at him. The icy sidewalk glinted like new marble, and the wind was dark and gray as slush.

  “What do you got there?”

  Bob turned, looked up and down the sidewalk.

  “I’m up here. And you’re in my trash.”

  She stood on the front porch of the three-decker nearest him. She’d turned the porch light on and stood there shivering, her feet bare.
She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She watched him as she got one going.

  “I found a dog.” Bob held it up.

  “A what?”

  “A dog. A puppy. A boxer, I think.”

  She coughed out some smoke. “Who puts a dog in a barrel?”

  “Right?” he said. “It’s bleeding.” He took a step toward her stairs and she backed up.

  “Who do you know that I would know?” A city girl, not about to just drop her guard around a stranger.

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “How about Francie Hedges?”

  She shook her head. “You know the Sullivans?”

  That wouldn’t narrow it down. Not around here. You shook a tree, a Sullivan fell out. Followed by a six-pack most times. “I know a bunch.”

  This was going nowhere, the puppy looking at him, shaking worse than the girl.

  “Hey,” she said, “you live in this parish?”

  “Next one over. St. Theresa’s.”

  “Go to church?”

  “Most Sundays.”

  “So you know Father Pete?”

  “Pete Regan,” he said, “sure.”

  She produced a cell phone. “What’s your name?”

  “Bob,” he said. “Bob Saginowski.”

  Bob waited as she stepped back from the light, phone to one ear, finger pressed into the other. He stared at the puppy. The puppy stared back, like, How did I get here? Bob touched its nose with his index finger. The puppy blinked its huge eyes. For a moment, Bob couldn’t recall his sins.

  “Nadia,” the girl said and stepped back into the light. “Bring him up here, Bob. Pete says hi.”

  * * *

  They washed it in Nadia’s sink, dried it off, and brought it to her kitchen table.

  Nadia was small. A bumpy red rope of a scar ran across the base of her throat like the smile of a drunk circus clown. She had a tiny moon of a face, savaged by pockmarks, and small, heart-pendant eyes. Shoulders that didn’t cut so much as dissolve at the arms. Elbows like flattened beer cans. A yellow bob of hair curled on either side of her face. “It’s not a boxer.” Her eyes glanced off Bob’s face before dropping the puppy back onto her kitchen table. “It’s an American Staffordshire terrier.”

  Bob knew he was supposed to understand something in her tone, but he didn’t know what that thing was so he remained silent.