Kwik Krimes (18 page)

Marion nods, tugs at a lace on her filthy green canvas shoe. Both feet are covered in writing from a Sharpie she stole from a
shelter last winter. Friends’ signatures. Crude flowers. A quote her brother, Sam, had liked, before the powder and the needles got to be too much and they found him open-eyed and lifeless down by the shore.
Had we but world enough, and time.
Marion doesn’t know where her brother heard that. She likes it, though. She’d liked everything about Sam.

“Who’s the new boyfriend?” the Postman asks, jutting his chin at Jason.

Marion glares. The Postman takes too much interest in her, but, despite being brittle and glassy as a Midtown high-rise, Sam had always told him to fuck off. Now Sam is gone and all the daylight with him, and Marion doesn’t feel like arguing.

“He’s a customer,” she says, pushing up the wall. Jason rises behind her, slouching with his cap pulled low.

The Postman cocks an eyebrow. Marion sees his sour breath when he exhales a drag from the cigarette, and she could gag on his peculiar reek of lowlife skittishness from yards away. The higher-ups smell of well-oiled power no matter the situation, she imagines. The casual dealers sweat paranoia.

“Figured you’d have moved along since Sam,” the Postman remarks. Beyond, the trash fires flicker, and the hiss of a bottle opening snakes through the gloom.

“Where would I go?” Marion asks.

And fuck if she doesn’t wonder as she asks it. Every piece of her is stitched up with Sam. It has been since they left home, because, well, they had to leave, didn’t they, once belts and fists were replaced with boots and memorably a tire iron, but Sam rode too close to the sun, didn’t he, wanted to touch the stars and feel their hard edges slice into his skin, and ever since the Postman’s last delivery killed him dead, it doesn’t really matter anymore where Marion goes.

“What’s on offer?” Jason asks.

And the Postman launches into his vague, reedy pitch. Marion knows his entire inventory, of course. She and Sam started coming to him over a year ago. Smack and oxy are a two-minute transaction, and if they want crank, he can get it, though that’s a walk to a den in Alphabet City. Jason’s eyes glitter from under his cap brim. Marion reads her shoes upside down.

Shivering, Marion stares at an iron girder thrusting through the shadows like a giant’s spear and wonders where Sam is buried. She’d called the police from a pay phone. But she hadn’t talked to them, had watched from up by the highway. She wonders if they’ve found out who he was.

Now Marion also wonders if, wherever he is, Sam is angry with her.

Jason is talking and the Postman is pulling out little bags full of dreams and racing hearts and Marion has never wanted to go home but she feels as if she can’t breathe until she is somewhere else other than beneath this goddamn bridge.

“Fifty dollars covers it,” the Postman says to Jason. “First-time discount.”

The Postman assumes Marion wants eighties, so she pays him for the pills without saying anything. Her lips feel numb. The smack he’d last sold her brother had been poison-laced, cut with God knows what. He as good as put a gun to Sam’s head.

“Hope to be seeing more of you,” the Postman says to Jason.

“You will be,” he answers.

When Jason’s gun comes out, the acid light gleams along its barrel as if it’s a sword, and Marion backs away. The Postman is outraged, shrieking a metallic whine that pierces her eardrums.

Marion shoves her hands in her pockets when Jason snaps the handcuffs over the Postman’s thin-boned wrists. Her empty gut churns as the cop talks to his prisoner. Jason is bigger suddenly,
filling out his ratty sweatshirt, and it occurs to her that he’s good at this. She’d wondered.

The Postman screams at her now, calling her a whore and a rat bitch and worse, but he’s fading into the background as she fades into the shadows. Jason will be angry that she’s not going to the station house as promised. That she won’t be testifying. Jason will be furious that she lied to him, she thinks, as she slips from the ledge and lands in a crouch on a wet hill littered with shredded plastic and beer cans.

But the Postman will do time for possession if nothing else, and Marion doesn’t live here anymore. She heads north, squeezing past chain-link guarding weed-choked lots. The rain needles to earth from the place where her brother Sam watches her now, high above the silent bridge.

Lyndsay Faye is the author of the critically acclaimed
The Gods of Gotham,
the first in a series of historical thrillers featuring New York copper Timothy Wilde, as well as the Sherlock Holmes pastiche
Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings.
Her short story “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness” was selected for inclusion in
Best American Mystery Stories 2010.
She lives in Manhattan with her husband and cats.

Christopher Fowler

S
heila grew up in Sheffield, a northern English town that had once been famous for the magnificence of its cutlery and the bravery of its air force pilots. By the time she was seventeen, its glory had faded, and the grand Victorian lady had become a disappointed drab. It still had eleven cinemas, the smallest of which showed weekly French films after the town’s remaining students turned Roger Vadim’s
And God Created Woman
into a surprise success.

Sheila had been taken on the ferry to Boulogne when she was seven, a day trip with her father before he was put away for running a disorderly house. Now she lived in a sooty boarding house with her mother, and her life was closer to depressing English dramas like
A Taste of Honey
. Every Friday she fled to the Roxy to watch Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, and Simone Signoret. She learned to smoke Gitanes and Gauloises, and spent her earnings on red lipstick, high heels, and bare-shouldered blouses. She knew the Montmartre backstreets better than the alleys of her hometown. In her mind’s eye, the gangs on the banks of the canal were replaced by lovers on the banks of the Seine. Looking down into fetid water filled with shopping carts, she saw only the reflected towers of Notre Dame.

She saw him sheltering from the rain, leaning against the coffee-stall counter outside the Roxy. He was wearing a gray fedora, a crumpled Givenchy suit, and a narrow tie of midnight-blue silk. He had a pencil moustache and was chewing a matchstick. He seemed to have stepped down from a Gaumont picture. Perhaps he needed his dreams just as much as she needed hers.

He studied her openly as she ordered a tea and told her his name was Jean-Guy Melville. She gave a shrug and turned her back to him while she added sugar, but only so that his eyes might linger on her bare shoulder, her exposed bra strap, the curve of her waist. He waited patiently. She had expected an over-practiced pickup line, but none came. He asked if she had seen
Àbout de souffle
. She told him it was her favorite film. They talked about
Vivre sa vie
and
Jules et Jim
. She said she was seeing
Les diaboliques
tonight, and he offered to accompany her. After, they discussed it in a café that felt French apart from the menu. There were checked tablecloths and candles in wine bottles and accordion music played on a transistor radio.

Jean-Guy explained that he had worked as a croupier in Marseilles but a problem with a colleague had forced him north. He had settled in Clignancourt and set up a business importing black-market foie gras from Perigord to Paris. Sheila could not understand what he was doing in such a town as this, and his inability to explain excited her.

He had left his wallet on the dresser in his rented room, so she paid the bill. They lingered so long in the café that she missed the last bus home, so he walked with her in the rain. When it fell too hard, they sheltered beneath the red-and-white awning of a butcher’s shop, and he placed his jacket around her shoulders. He smelled of strong coffee, wine, cigarettes, and something indefinably fleshy, as if the plenitude of engorged geese lingered on his skin.

They reached the part of town where the roads split from littered ginnels to wide suburban wastes. Knowing that the rundown boardinghouse where she lived with the keening old lady would disturb the delicacy of their shared dream, she told him she would see herself the rest of the way. He elicited her promise to join him next Friday to see
Judex
.

She sold dresses in a store that owed little to the umbrella shop in
Les parapluies de Cherbourg
, but it had a place at the window from where she could watch the falling rain, and if she fixed her blonde hair in barrettes she could at least feel like Deneuve for a moment. On Friday Jean-Guy collected her and they ran through the neon puddles to the Roxy. In the café afterward he closed his hand over hers as he lit her cigarette. In the candlelight he looked a little like Jean-Paul Belmondo. She wore a dress similar to the one Anna Karina had worn in
Vivre sa vie
and tried not to cough as she smoked.

For a month she shut out the sound of her complaining mother and lived only for the cinema, the café, the walk home. As they watched
Contempt
, his hand settled in hers like a cuckoo curling into another nest. After, they drank house red and smoked, watching the rain-chased windows, and he told her he was returning to Paris. There was a deal that was too good to miss. She waited for him to ask, and waited.

Finally he said, “I thought you might consider coming with me. But I must tell you, my past is full of lies.”

And she quoted Karina from
Vivre sa vie
, telling him “Shouldn’t love be the only truth?”

There was no English timidity in his kiss.

As they were leaving, the café door opened and a grizzled man in a tweed flat cap bustled in from the drizzle.

“Blimey, Charlie, you gave me a fright,” he said with a laugh. “I thought you was still inside for desertion. Then Chalkie told
me you was up to your old tricks. This a new little chickie for your henhouse?”

A small boy fishing for eels in the canal snagged the Givenchy-clad body with his line. In 1958, Sheffield had made an aircrew release knife that had become popular in the French underworld after the end of the war. Such a knife was found buried in the man’s heart.

Sheila’s mother said she had no daughter, and if she did the foolish girl was probably living in Paris.

Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and twelve short-story collections, including ten Bryant & May mysteries.
Red Gloves,
a collection of twenty-five new stories, marks his first quarter century in print, and his memoir,
Paperboy,
won the Green Carnation Award, with a sequel in the works.

Matthew C. Funk

D
idee Fuller looked about half his age, slumped across from me in his pajamas with the specter of a black eye floating above one cheek. Looked about six. Small, skittish, and unafraid.

“You know who I am, Didee?” I gave him eyes as unblinking as my star tattoos under them.

Didee chuckled. Maybe more of a giggle. “Yeah. You’re Jurgis.”

“Why’s that funny?”

He slid on a wry smile. “We got similar interests.”

“You know why I’m here, then.” I flipped open my notepad.

“Mhm.” The smile dawned big. “You want to know how a twelve-year-old could take down Giant.”

I clicked my pen. Didee got talking.

Didee spent Saturday mornings busy. When other kids were shoveling cereal in front of cartoons, Didee had already cleaned his room and sorted his comic collection.

He liked
Teen Titans
the best. Robin was his hero.

“Robin’s ten times as brave as Batman,” Didee told me. “Batman’s a grown dude, spent all his life training how to mess somebody up. Robin’s just a kid. Not much training. Not even a pair of pants. Takes a special bravery to run around, getting in fights, without pants.”

Didee would be out helping charities in the Desire district by nine.

Giant came by Didee’s house Saturdays at noon. Didee didn’t even know why his mother was crying until he asked three months in.