Shoot the Moonlight Out : Longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger 2023 E-Book

William Boyle

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 489

Beschreibung

Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighborhood wrongs through acts of violence. A simple mission to strong-arm a Bay Ridge con man, Max Berry, leads him to cross paths with a tragedy that hits close to home. Fast forward five years: June 2001. The summer before New York City and the world changed for good. Charlie French is a low-level gangster-wannabe trying to make a name for himself. When he stumbles onto a bowling alley locker stuffed with a bag full of cash, he brings it to his only pal, Max Berry, for safekeeping while he cleans up the mess surrounding it. Bobby Santovasco - with no real future mapped out and the big sin of his past shining brightly in his rearview mirror - has taken a job working as an errand boy for Max Berry. On a recruiting run for Max's Ponzi scheme, Bobby meets Francesca Clarke, born in the neighborhood but an outsider nonetheless. They hit it off. Bobby gets the idea to knock off Max's safe so he and Francesca can escape Brooklyn forever. Little does he know what Charlie French has stashed there. Meanwhile, Bobby's former stepsister, Lily Murphy, is back home in the neighborhood after college, teaching a writing class in the basement of St. Mary's church. She's also being stalked by her college boyfriend. One of her students is Jack Cornacchia. When she opens up to him about her stalker, Jack decides to take matters into his own hands. A riveting portrait of lives crashing together at the turn of the century, Shoot the Moonlight Out is tragic and tender and funny and strange.

Leseprobe

Praise for William Boyle

‘Acidulously funny’ – Telegraph

‘An Elmore Leonard-style caper that hits the ground running… funny, touching and exhilarating in all the right places’ – Guardian

‘A blood-splattered crime caper with a wonderful cast of characters’ – Mail on Sunday

‘A mad bunch of characters, a wild plot, plenty of humour and a dangerously dark edge underlying it all make this a five-star winner’ – Sunday Sport

‘An exquisite tale of female friendship combining thrills galore, dark humour, sparkling repartee, highly unpredictable twists at every turn of the meandering road and a glorious sense of the ridiculous’ – CrimeTime

‘You will have a hard time finding a more fun crime novel any time soon’ – NB Magazine

‘A dark, hard-hitting novel’ – The Herald

‘Boyle creates an atmosphere of almost claustrophobic intensity’ – CrimeReview

‘The real “Gift” here is his prose… dialogue that is second only to the master himself, Elmore Leonard. Helluva story. Helluva cast. Helluva writer’ – Brian Panowich, author of Bull Mountain

‘Deploying an inimitable tone that packs sardonic storytelling atop action and adventure, with a side of character development, Boyle’s voice works even when it feels like it shouldn’t. It’s just the right kind of too much – Kirkus

‘An excellent sequel with a superb plot, matched by its realistically shaped characters’ – Washington Post

‘Powered by brilliantly realized characters, a richly described and grittily realistic backdrop, and subtle yet powerful imagery, this is crime fiction at its best; immersive, intense, and darkly illuminating’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Boyle’s writing is raw, poetic, unflinching, nostalgic, and perverse. Urgency inhabits his pages and the characters live on weeks after you put the book down. Gravesend is a novel to read in a day, and then again, slowly’ – LA Review of Books

‘Boyle gives us an intimate portrait of a neighborhood in vivid, evocative prose, and explores how place and the past make us who we are’ – Melissa Ginsburg, author of Sunset City

‘A Jacobean revenge tangle in a Brooklyn where all the players have survived the same nuns. Even the most desperately lost of William Boyle’s characters retain a hungry heart’ – John Sayles, author of Yellow Earth

‘William Boyle delivers some choice laughs and a terrific trio of felons in A Friend is a Gift you Give Yourself ’ – New York Times

For Eamon and Connolly Jean, keep the hoping machine running.

Shoot the moonlight out

Baby, there ain’t no doubt

’Cause tonight we’re gonna

Shoot the moonlight out

– Garland Jeffreys,

‘Shoot the Moonlight Out’

Anything you don’t see

will come back to haunt you.

– Enid Dame,

‘Riding the D Train’

SOUTHERN BROOKLYN JULY 1996

Prologue

Bobby

Once a week this summer, Bobby Santovasco and his best pal Zeke head down by the Belt Parkway to throw things at the cars getting off at the Bay Parkway exit near Ceasar’s Bay shopping center.

Bobby’s just turned fourteen. Zeke is thirteen. They like stealing CDs from Sam Goody and cigarettes from Augie’s Deli and playing video games in Zeke’s basement. They both have a crush on Carissa Caruso from Stillwell Avenue. They’re both headed into eighth grade at St. Mary Mother of Jesus on Eighty-Fourth Street. Bobby was left back in third grade, so he’s older than everyone else in his class. Their teacher is going to be Mrs Santillo, who Bobby heard fart during the Pledge of Allegiance one day. Bobby lives in a small apartment on Eighty-Third Street, a block from St. Mary’s, with his father; his stepmother, Grace; and his sixteen-year-old stepsister, Lily. He and Lily don’t talk. Grace is just kind of there. His mother moved to California when he was six. He never heard from her again. Zeke lives in a big house on Twenty-Third Avenue. His real name is Flavio, but Bobby started calling him Zeke in fourth grade and it stuck. Zeke’s dad owns a pork store. He has four sisters and two dogs. One of his sisters, Giovanna, looks like the Virgin Mary mixed with Marisa Tomei. Bobby thinks about her at night.

They come down here because there’s always action. The cars funneling off the parkway, pausing at the traffic light. Ceasar’s Bay, with Toys ‘R’ Us and Kmart and other chain shops. The bazaar, with its stalls, closed down the year before. Shore Parkway Park. The tennis complex. Gravesend Bay itself, stretching from Coney Island Creek to the Narrows. The bike path. The Verrazano Bridge looming. Nellie Bly amusement park, where they used to go as kids, right nearby.

They started small, with little cups of ketchup and mustard they filled at the Wendy’s on the opposite corner.

The first day had been the best day, which is why it quickly became a ritual. That day, they had clomped a couple of cups against the wind-shield of an Olds simultaneously, the ketchup and mustard flinging itself across the glass. The driver had slammed on his brakes, abandoned his car in traffic, and chased them behind the tennis courts and onto the bike path by the bay. The guy caught them. Mustache. An L&B Spumoni Gardens T-shirt. The body of someone who played softball as an excuse to drink beer. He grabbed them by their shoulders and screamed at them for a solid two or three minutes, an eternity given the situation, spit flying from his mouth like bird shit. He said he was a cop and they were lucky he didn’t bring them down to the station. They nodded, stifling laughs. Eventually, they coughed up apologies and he let them go and told them to smarten up. They turned, ran, and yelled for him to go fuck himself, and all the guy could do was blow angry breaths through the bristles of his mustache and storm back to his stupid little condiment-splattered car.

After that, they tried water balloons, filling them beforehand and hauling them in a bucket, but that was too much work and the balloons didn’t last long. Some even broke in their hands as they released them.

It was Zeke’s idea to try tennis balls next. They could always find a dozen or so scattered in the grass on the other side of the fence by the courts. The nice thing about tennis balls was how fast and hard they could be thrown. Bobby had a better arm than Zeke, but they didn’t have to worry as much about falling short. The downside was the overall effect. Tennis balls just dinged against the cars and no one really thought twice about them. Could’ve been raining tennis balls for all anybody cared.

That was how they settled on rocks.

Before heading over to their spot now, they stop at Wendy’s for orange sodas. They stand outside and drink them, paper cups beaded with condensation. It’s a hot day. July-in-the-city hot. The heat’s rising up off the sidewalk. Bobby can smell himself. Sweat and the neighborhood. He’s wearing a Knicks tank top and his gym shorts, the high-tops he’d inherited from his cousin Jonny Boy. No socks. A Mets cap turned backward on his head. Zeke has no shirt on. Jams. His expensive new Air Jordans.

‘With a rock,’ Bobby says, ‘we could really bust a windshield.’

‘That’d be sweet,’ Zeke says.

‘We gotta be ready to bolt, though. This ain’t ketchup.’

‘Word.’

‘I tell you what I told Carissa?’

‘What?’

‘That I was gonna throw a rock up at her window one night. Break the glass, climb up the drainpipe, and come into her room.’

‘What’d she say?’

‘She said, “You try that, my dad’ll chop you to pieces in the garage.”’

‘Chop you up? Oh, shit. He chops you up, you’re out of the way and I got a clear path for Carissa.’

‘Dream your dreams. She’s mine.’

‘We’ll see,’ Zeke says.

‘Okay, you take Carissa. I’ll take Giovanna.’

‘Giovanna wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire. You’re shit on the sidewalk to her, kid. She’s seventeen. You should see the guy she’s dating now. Serge Rossetti. Muscles up the ass. He goes to Bishop Ford. Plays baseball. Pretty sure he’s on steroids.’

They suck down the rest of their sodas. The ice has mostly melted away, so Bobby’s last sip is watery. Zeke’s must be too – he spits it out. They drop their cups to the sidewalk. An old lady who has just come out of Wendy’s curses them.

They charge across Bay Parkway, dodging cars, and then walk past the tennis courts, hunting in the brown grass for good rocks. Bobby finds one. He’s only been to a lake once with Jonny Boy in Jersey, but it’s the kind of rock that’s good for skipping. Flat and sharp. Fits right in his palm. Kind of pinkish. Zeke collects a couple of smaller ones. Glorified pebbles. Then Bobby finds an almost perfect rock, shaped like a ball, smooth and heavy but not too heavy to throw. Zeke laughs. What a score. He finds a few others that’ll work, including a rock that’s not a rock at all but a broken hunk of brick.

Zeke throws first and misses. He was aiming for a church van, but the rock sailed over the roof, skittering up against the orange cone propped in front of the divider between the parkway and the off-ramp.

Bobby tries and wings the first rock he found against the passenger door of a rusty red Chevy Lumina. It lands with a thud. The driver slams on the brakes and leans on his horn. They can see him. A man with a beard, looking all around, trying to figure out what hit his car. They can see how sweaty he is from where they are. He doesn’t notice them. Finally, he takes off, making a left at the light onto Bay Parkway.

Bobby and Zeke laugh their asses off.

‘That dude was like, “What the fuck?”’ Zeke says, miming the driver’s reaction.

They throw a couple more each, hitting tires and hoods and trunks, eliciting no panicked responses from drivers, which remains their ultimate goal. If someone gets out and chases them again, they have their getaway route all set. Last time, when the guy with the mustache popped out after them, they took the long way around the fenced-in baseball field in Shore Parkway Park. It gave the guy time to catch them as they hit the bike path. Now they know where there’s a hole in the fence, and – since no one’s playing on the field – it’ll be easy to cut through and come out one of the dugouts. A shortcut that will make for a smooth escape up the bike path. Right around Seventeenth Avenue, Bobby knows, a pedestrian bridge crosses the Belt and goes to Bath Beach Park. From there, they can scurry home via the streets, lost in the maze of blocks, of cars and buses and people with shopping carts and boomboxes, kids on stoops, of trees and cracked sidewalks and telephone wires.

‘You know what’d be hilarious?’ Bobby says. ‘Get one in an open window. Hit a driver. Thousand points for that.’

‘First one who hits a driver gets to be king for a day.’

‘Fuck you mean?’

‘I mean I hit a driver, I get to tell you what to do for the day. “Bobby, steal me a tall boy from Augie’s.” Or: “Steal me three porno mags.”’

‘You’re on. When I win, what I’m gonna make you do is go into that new Chinese restaurant over by Bay Thirty-Fourth and eat an egg roll or something off somebody’s plate. Just walk up to their table, snag some food, and eat it right in front of them.’

‘You’re king for a day, all powerful, that’s what you’re gonna make me do?’

‘Hell yeah. That and then I’m gonna make you bring me a pillowcase full of Giovanna’s bras and underwear. I’m gonna sniff those shits until Mrs Santillo farts again.’

Zeke holds up a rock. ‘Next one’s coming right between your eyes.’

Bobby takes a defensive position, grinning wide. ‘What? I love Giovanna. Sue me. You know what I picture? When she pops a squat on the toilet, instead of normal everyday logs, I bet she squeezes out perfect, cold Italian ices. Chocolate, lemon, watermelon, whatever you want. Do me a favor. Look in the bowl one day. Bet I’m right.’

Zeke takes a playful swing at Bobby. ‘You wish. I been in the can after her. She lights it up, son. A three match operation. I’m like, “G, what’d you eat?” She’s pretty, but she makes a good stink.’

‘Not my Giovanna.’

‘You’re a dumb motherfucker. Ain’t a single gorgeous girl who don’t drop treacherous deuces.’

More wild laughter. They ready their next round of ammunition. Bobby has his almost perfect rock. Zeke has a good one too, not quite as round and smooth but it has some nice heft to it. Both rocks could probably do the work of a hardball or worse. Bobby’s thinking about some guy behind the wheel taking his perfect pitch right in the arm or chest and getting surprise-winded. Like a batter crowding the plate, clobbered by a fastball. Goofy look on the dummy’s face. The pain of a fool who couldn’t get out of the way. Bobby could’ve been a starting pitcher on his Little League team if he still played. He’d given it up in sixth grade. He didn’t like practice. Girls and after-school fights and scoring beer and cigarettes were way more important. Anyhow, the St. Mary’s team sucked donkey dicks. Stupid powder-blue uniforms. Like the goddamn Kansas City Royals. Who wants a uniform like the Royals? Bobby had enjoyed playing from second grade to fifth grade, had been a good second baseman and hitter, but he really wanted to pitch. The coach, Gene Grady, who gave out communion on Saturdays at church, had two sons, Jeff and Matt, who he let pitch all the time. They were okay. Bobby’s dream was to get on the mound, a little Vaseline on the brim of his cap, and really start mowing down batters with his good greasy junk. Fuck baseball, Bobby thinks now. Throwing rocks at cars is more fun.

A shambolic little cherry-red Toyota Corolla gets off at the exit. It’s going slow, like the engine’s struggling, coughing and burping along. Bobby notices it first and nudges Zeke. The windows on the car are open. The driver’s a woman. A girl really. Probably a high school senior or something. She’s smoking a cigarette and singing along to whatever’s on the radio, stealing glances at herself in the rearview mirror.

As the Corolla rattles toward the changing light at the corner, Bobby and Zeke work in perfect synchronization, taking aim at the open passenger window and throwing the rocks as hard as they can.

What happens next is a blur. One of their throws is perfect. The other sails wide. But the rock that goes into the car doesn’t hit the girl on the arm or chest. It smashes into the side of her head. Her body jolts, the cigarette knocked from her hand, and she loses control of the wheel as she barrels toward the yellow light.

Bobby and Zeke don’t hesitate. They drop the other rocks, turn around, and run toward the bike path, cutting through the baseball field.

They don’t look back. Bobby’s not worried that someone’s chasing them so much as he’s worried that something beyond terrible has happened.

It was a joke, that’s it.

For kicks.

They’re running at full speed up the path, weaving in and out of the few distracted pedestrians in their way, being passed on the left by asshole bikers once or twice. It’s hotter than ever. Sweat stings Bobby’s eyes. The bay smells pungent. Salt. Seaweed. Deep darkness.

When they get to the overpass, they cut across into Bath Beach Park and stop to catch their breath and hit up a water fountain.

‘Did you see what happened after it hit her?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, I just bolted immediately,’ Bobby says.

‘Me too. Anyone see us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fuck,’ Zeke says. ‘Was it the one I threw or the one you threw?’

Bobby puts his head in his hands. The girl’s maybe three or four years older than them, tops. Nobody they had it out for. Not someone who was cruel or unkind even. A stranger. Smoking. Singing in her car. A normal afternoon for her. Nothing special. Getting off at her exit and probably going home, wherever home was. Then they came along with their big fucking stupid game. That’s all it was. A game. He swears.

‘I don’t know,’ Bobby says to Zeke, unable to stop seeing the girl. ‘I don’t know anything.’

Jack

Jack Cornacchia grew up in this house on Bay Thirty-Eighth Street, and he knows he’ll die here one day. He’s sitting on the ramshackle front porch with a can of cold beer. It’s early afternoon. He’s off work today. He’s a customer field representative for Con Ed, goes around knocking on doors, led down to basements and cellars to read gas and electric meters. He never really got what the difference between a basement and a cellar is. Some people say one, some the other. He says basement mostly. He guesses there’s a distinction, but he doesn’t know or care to look it up. He could. He has a dictionary around. He likes not knowing. Either way, his job allows him to see the private lives of people, to see them in all their loneliness. It’s very personal.

His father was a mechanic. His mother worked at Woolworth’s before he was born and then stopped to raise him. He was their only child. They bought this house the year they were married for ten grand, a lot of money then. It’s a two-story house with a sloping roof, four bedrooms, a wide front porch, and a pine tree out front they brought back from their honeymoon upstate. Jack went to St. Mary Mother of Jesus on Eighty-Fourth Street for grade school. Next door to the school is the church, where he was baptized and confirmed and attended mass every Saturday night with his parents until he was sixteen and made up his mind that mass was no longer for him. He believed and still believes in God but in his own way. High school was Our Lady of the Narrows on Shore Road in Bay Ridge. All boys. He hated it. He didn’t go to college. For a while he bounced around from shit job to shit job. Considered taking the civil service test. Thought about maybe being a postal worker. Finally, his father scored him the job with Con Ed through a guy he knew from the garage, Connected Benny.

At twenty-one, Jack met Janey at a coffee shop on Avenue U. He’d dated a few girls. Nothing too serious. He’d broken his cherry unceremoniously at seventeen in the back of a borrowed car with Mary Concetta Stallone. He’d dated Dyana Petrillo for a few months – that was the most serious things had ever been up to that point. He learned the ropes in the sack with her. She was a good teacher. Gentle with him. Experienced. Of course, that experience wrecked him. He got jealous and called her a puttana, and it was over. He learned how not to be with girls from that. He learned to leave the past in the past. With Janey, things were different right away. He was cool and collected. It was love at first sight. That brown hair. Those soft brown eyes. She looked like a saint mixed with a movie star. She hadn’t had any serious boyfriends because her family was religious as hell, so there was not much of a past to excavate out of envy. For a Catholic boy, she was the dream. They got married six months after meeting, against the wishes of her parents. His folks were overjoyed. Jack and Janey moved in with them. Amelia was born the next year, in March 1978. They were so happy. Janey was a perfect mother. Mom and Dad became Nonna and Nonno. Amelia was their sweet girl. A decade passed. Things were better than he’d ever thought they could be.

Then the bottom fell out. Little by little at first. His mother tripped on the way home from shopping at one of the fruit stalls on Eighty-Sixth Street. Her trusty old cart slipped out of her grasp and she toppled hard to the sidewalk, busting her hip. He looks back and thinks of that as the inciting event, the moment when things started going sideways. While she was in the hospital getting better, his old man developed a bad hacking cough that quickly turned into something worse. When he finally went to the doctor, the diagnosis was pneumonia. They were both laid up for a while, incapacitated, but they got better. Then Janey got sick. Cancer. She battled for three years and lost. She was so frail at the end. Thank God his parents were there to help with Amelia, to give her some sense of normalcy. They took her to shows in the city, made birthdays and Christmases special. Janey’s parents had remained out of the picture, and they didn’t return – not even after Jack called to let them know how bad it was – to make amends with their only daughter. Jack knew Janey was a goner before she was gone. It was just a feeling he had. Things had turned rotten. Everything had gone too good for too long. It was bound to break down.

Janey died on September 13, 1992. Days didn’t get much worse than that. Amelia lost her happy glow. Her school suggested therapy. They clung to each other. They depended on his parents for everything. He and Amelia wouldn’t have made it out of that time alive if not for Nonna and Nonno, Mom and Dad to him, lifesavers, life-givers. The next two years were tough. A whir of sad days. Amelia started high school at Fontbonne Hall Academy in Bay Ridge, where Janey had wanted her to go. Jack worked his routes. His parents started going to Atlantic City one day a week for a break. They loved it. They were comped meals. They went and came back on the same day via a bus on Bay Parkway. They never stayed over, even though they probably could’ve been comped rooms too. The Golden Nugget was their joint. Mom liked slots. Dad preferred blackjack. On one of their return trips, his mother took a spill getting off the bus and broke her other hip. They rushed her to the hospital, and she died in surgery. His father died of heartache three months later. They were both buried at a cemetery on Long Island they’d never visited – his father had scored a good deal on graves there many years before. The cemetery wasn’t far without traffic, but it was rare not to hit traffic going to the Island and the hassle of getting there kept him and Amelia from frequent visits.

When his folks died, the world really started feeling like a cruel joke to Jack. That decade of good days had merely been a preamble to this decade of death and destruction. He and Amelia struggled on. They clung to each other even harder. The house was empty and sad. It took Jack months to deal with everything he needed to deal with. His father had put Jack’s name on the deed to the house, thank Christ, but he needed to update it to include Amelia. He knew he needed a will and a health-care proxy. He had everything his parents had left behind to go through – bank accounts, safe-deposit boxes, insurance policies, crates of stuff. He had to transfer all the bills to his name.

The house is run-down these days. Needs a new roof. The railing on the porch is rotting. The front steps need to be redone. Rogue squirrels have busted two windows in the attic. The oil tank in the basement is fifty years old, and Jack’s always worried it’s going to blow up. The linoleum in the kitchen is cracked and peeling from the edges. The bathroom sink makes loud clanging noises. The upstairs and downstairs showers have good water pressure, but the grout is full of mold and the drains are clogged. There’s a spot on the floor in the upstairs bathroom where water is somehow leaking through and bubbling the ceiling in the dining room below. The ceiling in the bedroom’s in rough shape too.

Amelia’s eighteen now. She just graduated from Fontbonne. It hadn’t been cheap. She’s going to Fordham in the fall. She wants to be a writer. She took a creative writing class her senior year and loved it. She’s been getting guidebooks, trying her hand at stories and even starting work on a novel. High school is tough under any circumstances – figuring out who she is, who she might want to be – but add tragedy to the mix and it was a million times more brutal. Amelia has had enough tragedy to last her a lifetime. Jack hopes more than anything that she can have a peaceful and happy existence from here on out. He’ll do everything he can to keep trouble from her door, and he hopes she’s smart enough to steer clear of trouble. She is. She’s a bright kid. Good head on her shoulders. He’s only forty, but he hopes he lives to see her marry someone nice and have a kid or couple of kids, write that novel, do all the things she dreams of doing. She keeps a map of the world on her wall, and she sticks pins into the places she wants to visit. Italy, Jamaica, Brazil, Hollywood. So many places she wants to see. He doesn’t want to tell her she can’t do it all, might not even do any of it. What’s the point? Let her dream.

Jack hasn’t been with anyone since Janey, hasn’t dragged any girlfriends or stepmoms into the picture, but he does have a secret life. Something he can’t tell his daughter about. Won’t ever tell her about. It’s given him some purpose – other than just being a dad – these past few years.

It started one day at the Wrong Number, the dive where he sometimes hangs out. He was drinking heavily right after Janey died. Starting early on his days off while Amelia was at school. His buddy Frankie Modica, who he’d gone to St. Mary’s and Our Lady of the Narrows with, asked him to hurt the priest who’d molested his son. His son was ten. The priest was at Most Precious Blood. To no one’s surprise, the diocese was protecting him. Word was that soon they’d move him to a parish in Western New York, Buffalo maybe, where no one knew of his crimes. His name was Father Pat. Frankie said he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, he didn’t have the chops, but he knew Jack was tough. He could give him some money, not much in the end, maybe a grand.

‘What are you asking me?’ Jack said.

‘To hurt him,’ Frankie said. ‘You don’t have to kill him. Just hurt him. I want to see the guy pay. Right now all he’s being is protected.’

Jack thought about it. He wasn’t violent by nature but he was definitely capable of violence when necessary. He’d been in bar fights where honor was on the line. He thought about a bad guy like this Father Pat getting away with what he’d done. He was sick to his stomach over the fact that someone like that kept right on living in the world when Janey didn’t get that chance, when she got ripped away. He’d learned that much was true in life. Bad people often lived easier and better than good people. They endured, while good people dropped like flies. He figured what the hell. He could pour his anger and sadness into it. He got the address where the priest was hiding.

Since time was a concern – they weren’t sure when Father Pat was being moved – he went there the next night with a baseball bat, wearing a ski mask, and beat the bad priest within an inch of his life. He was surprised how easy it was. He went to this cold place in his head where it didn’t even feel like he was doing what he was doing. He’d seen movies about detached hitmen and that’s what he felt like. All business. In and out. He split when it was over, left Father Pat bleeding and moaning on the floor. The bastard hadn’t even protested. He probably figured he had it coming to him.

Frankie said he was a saint. Jack wanted to refuse the money – he wanted to say he’d done it on principle – but he figured he could put it away for Amelia’s future. Start the college fund he’d always meant to start. Make sure he’d set her up in case something happened to him too. He put the cash in a safe-deposit box at his bank.

What he hadn’t expected was that word would spread. People started coming to him with their problems, telling him about somebody who’d wronged them, stolen from them, hurt somebody close to them. There’d been fifteen jobs. The fifth one was when he started bringing a gun he bought out of Slim Helen’s trunk on Avenue X. He keeps it wrapped in a cloth in the basement, tucked in a nook in the open ceiling over the oil burner, the bullets in a nearby cookie tin. On his seventh job he used the gun, killed a guy who’d raped a girl from the parish. He’d proceeded with the same cold detachment. It was a few months after his parents died, and he found it to be cathartic. The rapist didn’t even look afraid. He seemed thankful. Jack was taking poison out of the world. Now he has enough in the bank to help Amelia make a good life for herself. Somewhere down the road, he figures he’ll stop. What if Amelia gets married and has a kid and he has to hold that kid, be a grandpa, and know in his heart that he’s hurting and killing people on the side? Sure, they’re bad people, but that’s still a lot of blood on his hands. Plus, he’s getting worried that Amelia’s going to find out. There’s a network of secrets that’s been built and maintained, but it only goes so far. All it takes is one violation of trust, one person saying something to a cousin who can’t shut up. He hopes Amelia doesn’t find out, but he’ll deal with it if she does. He’ll lay out his case. He’ll explain that he did it because he wants a better world for her.

Amelia comes onto the porch with a can of Diet Coke. She lives on Diet Coke. She hardly eats anymore. Melba toast, half a grapefruit, maybe a scrambled egg a couple of times a week. The girl who loved pasta fagioli and spedini and semolina bread and sfinge is gone. She eats like a bird, sucks down her canned diet sodas. She has a streak of pink in her brown hair. That’s something they wouldn’t let her do at Fontbonne. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and jean shorts and her red Chucks. Eighteen. He’s wondering, as he always does when he looks at her now, how it got here so fast, her being an adult. He blinks and she’s a baby in his arms. That big heavenly smile. Those brown eyes that came right from her mother.

‘What’s up, kid?’ Jack says. He likes their banter. He likes that she likes to banter with him. A lot of kids, they don’t give their folks the time of day, but Amelia’s always got time to shoot the shit.

She sits on the rickety chair across from him, setting her can on her leg, trying to balance it. He can see the ring of condensation it leaves on the denim.

‘Not much,’ she says.

‘Lazy summer day,’ he says.

‘Yeppers.’

‘You working on your schedule for the fall?’

‘I’ll get to it.’

‘When’s that orientation?’

‘A couple of weeks, I think. I’ve gotta find the letter they sent.’

‘Let me give you a piece of advice, okay? As your old man and as somebody who speaks from personal experience.’

‘Here we go.’

‘I’m serious. Be organized. That’s it. That’s my advice. Be organized. Start a folder. Have a drawer where you keep important stuff. Use that file box of Nonno’s I gave you. Trust me. I learned the hard way how important it is.’

‘Groundbreaking advice, Pop.’

‘Okay, be a smartass. I’m trying to teach you what I’ve learned so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.’ He nudges her foot with his foot. ‘You were up late again last night, huh?’ He’d heard her pecking at the keys of his mother’s old Royal typewriter. Digging that up in the basement had been one of the best days. The glow in her eyes. His mother had taken care of it. Kept it under a cover. Had a hefty backup stash of ribbons. Had brought it to the typewriter shop on Stillwell Avenue for maintenance. She’d always liked writing letters on it, his mother. It was massive, heavy as hell. When they got it set up on the desk in Amelia’s room, she’d hugged him hard and then she’d run straight to Genovese for typewriter paper.

‘The work’s never done,’ she says.

‘How’s the novel coming? You gonna let me read it?’

‘Maybe when it’s finished.’

‘And you’re still not gonna tell me what it’s about?’

‘Nope.’

‘You know Ron Redden from the Wrong Number? He used to write. He says to me a couple of weeks ago he’s got a million stories from the bar. All these drunks across the decades. Guys puking on the bar, pissing on the floor. This one guy – they called him Phil the Mustache – shitting on the pinball machine. I guess he thought it was the toilet. Then, he says, there’s love affairs gone wrong. Fights. The time Sancho Stern stabbed Gene Carcaramo. The hit that happened there. The Brancaccios whacking Robbie Guttadoro. He says someday he’s gonna put all these stories in a book. I says, “Ron, who wants that?” You want bar stories, you go to the bar. I wanna read about a guy shitting on a pinball machine? Give me James Clavell, Larry McMurtry, Stephen King. I need a story. Not scraps.’

Amelia finishes her Diet Coke, rattling the can over her open mouth for the last few drops and then holding it up, sunlight glinting off the silver. ‘What would you do if I just crushed this can on my head right now?’ she asks.

‘I mean, I guess I’d be impressed,’ he says.

They laugh together. There’s nothing he likes more than hearing their laughter in harmony like this.

‘So, what’ve you got planned today?’ Jack asks.

‘Picking up Miranda. She’s got a doctor’s appointment in Bay Ridge, and then we’re gonna get coffee or something.’ Amelia got her own car about six months ago. It cost two grand – he’d gotten them a good deal from the guys at Flash Auto. Amelia had paid about half with money she’d saved up from her part-time gig as a file clerk at a dermatologist’s office in Dyker Heights. He covered the rest.

‘You’re a good friend.’

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Just sitting around, taking it easy. Maybe I’ll go to the Wrong Number for a drink later.’ But that’s not true. He has one of his side jobs lined up.

Amelia gets up, struts over, and gives him a kiss on the head. She takes her car keys out of her pocket. On her key chain, there’s a thing of pepper spray he bought for her and a crimson Golden Nugget key chain from Nonno. ‘See you later, Pop.’

‘Love you,’ he says.

‘You too.’ She takes her empty can and bounces down the front steps, dropping it in the garbage as she heads out the front gate to her car, parked up the block in front of Teddy and Sandra Dasaro’s house.

The job he has is one he’s on the fence about.

Mary Mucci, who Jack knows from West Fourth Street, got wind of the types of services he’s been providing and asked him to do something about Max Berry in Bay Ridge. Max has been running what’s turned out to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, where ‘investors’ deposit money in return for high interest rates. Max is holding Mary’s money hostage, and she’s essentially been bankrupted by the venture. Money she intended to pass down to her kids and grandkids. Same thing’s happening to a lot of other working-class folks across Southern Brooklyn. Max is preying on vulnerable people. In one way, he deserves what’s coming to him – stealing from those who have very little to steal. In another way, Jack isn’t sure he should go through with this. Max hasn’t killed or raped anyone or molested a kid. He deserves jail time but not necessarily vigilante justice. Mary didn’t specify what she wants him to do to Max, but Jack’s thinking just a warning shot across the bow will do. Let him know this is real. Let him know he’s ruining real lives. Show him the gun. Maybe jab him in the guts. A dead Max won’t help Mary. He’s a degenerate but maybe he just needs to be compelled to reconsider what he’s been doing.

Jack goes inside and boils some water in a pot on the stove for coffee. He’s got this way of making coffee that grosses Amelia out. He boils the water, adds a couple of tablespoons of grounds, some crushed eggshells that he keeps in a Ziploc bag in the fridge, and a pinch of salt. He stirs it all together and then strains it into his mug. It’s how his grandmother taught him to make coffee. She was a good lady. Tall for a grandmother. Strong hands. She died when he was seventeen, before Janey, before his life really got going. He thinks of her every time he makes coffee. He’s never really decided how he feels about death, what he thinks the dead are doing with their time. He’s always found it strange that people seem to predominantly believe that the dead are spending their time watching over the living. That notion always brings the image of a dead loved one perched in front of a bank of security TVs, watching live-feed footage of happenings on earth. Sure, check in now and again, he gets that, but he hopes being dead isn’t all about lusting after living. He isn’t comforted by thinking of Janey just constantly having to watch over him and Amelia. He’d rather think of her relaxing, no agony whatsoever, no worries, just peace as far as the eye can see, as loud as the ear can hear. He likes to think that she’s just totally overwhelmed by the feeling of love and happiness that she felt at their best moments: their wedding at the Riviera; Amelia’s birth at Victory Memorial; Amelia’s first steps in this very kitchen. He likes to think that she’s powered by that feeling in the afterlife.

It’s dead quiet in the house. He shuts off the gas and lets his muddy mixture slow from a boil. Once it’s cooled, he goes through the elaborate straining process over the sink. He tosses the shell-spotted grounds into the garbage and rinses the strainer.

He sits with his coffee at the table and watches the clock.

When he’s done, he rinses his cup and puts it upside down on a folded dish towel on the counter next to the sink. He grabs his car keys from a hook by the kitchen door and goes down to the basement for his gun. It’s a .38; that’s what Slim Helen told him anyhow. He doesn’t know anything about guns, doesn’t have any room in his brain for that kind of information. It works when he needs to use it. He stuffs it in his waistline and heads out of the house, locking up.

His car is out on the street too. The house has a shared driveway but the neighbors have taken to blocking it, and he thinks it’s a fight not worth fighting. Sometimes it’s hell to find a spot, but it’s easier than creating tension with the Yugoslavian family that moved in next door a few years back. He takes the gun out of his waistline and puts it in the glove compartment with his maps and retired air fresheners and receipts from Flash Auto.

Max Berry’s office is in Bay Ridge. To get there, Jack takes Bath Avenue to Bay Parkway, makes a left, and then hops on the Belt Parkway right before Shore Parkway and Ceasar’s Bay. It always bugs him that Ceasar is spelled that way, but it’s not named for Julius Caesar, it’s named for the fucking guy who started the bazaar in 1982, Ceasar Salama. Back then, it was a big flea market, but it’s pretty much just become a strip mall.

The Belt thrums with traffic. Jack turns on WINS for news and weather. He changes it when a piece of bad news sets his mind in the wrong direction and puts on WCBS-FM for oldies instead. He grew up loving Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, stuff like that, but he has a soft spot for some of the oldies, especially Dion and the Belmonts, Elvis Presley, and all the girl groups. The Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, they were something.

Things are stop-and-go all the way to the Verrazano. They open up after that, but he’s only on the parkway for another few seconds before getting off at the exit for Fourth Avenue. His history with Bay Ridge is long, and coming here – though it’s only a couple of neighborhoods over – always feels so far away. He went to high school at Our Lady of the Narrows on Shore Road. Amelia just graduated from Fontbonne Hall Academy, also on Shore Road. His father used to bring him to Hinsch’s for egg creams. He had a job for a summer cleaning out a carpet warehouse on Colonial Road. He was born at Victory Memorial Hospital and so were Janey and Amelia. His first drink was at O’Sullivan’s on Third Avenue. When he was in his late teens, he’d take long walks here from Gravesend, look into storefronts, dreaming up different lives for himself.

Max’s office is on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street. St. Anselm Church is only a couple of blocks down, and Jack remembers going there in the mid-seventies for the wedding of a high school friend, Gary Colkin, who was a hell of a three-point shooter. Gary married a girl called Ruby. Jack wonders whatever happened to them. So many people have drifted through his life and now they’re just floating faces in his mind. Gary used to do a killer Richard Nixon impression.

It’s hard to park on Eighty-Fourth Street, so Jack finds a spot near St. Anselm and walks back over to Max’s office. Just as he’s about to knock, he realizes that he left the gun in the glove compartment and goes back for it. He reaches around behind his back and tucks it into his waistline under his shirt on the sly, careful that no one is watching him. Last thing he needs is some priest spying on him from a secret window and calling the cops. He goes back to Max’s and knocks hard. A forceful knock meant to deliver a message: This is not good news.

Jack knows from Mary that Max also went to Our Lady of the Narrows, but he’s only in his mid-thirties, so he must’ve started right after Jack graduated. He’s never seen Max in person that he knows of, and he’d never heard of him until Mary. She showed him a newspaper clipping from some Republican fundraiser where Max was holding a plate full of pigs in a blanket while chatting up some white-haired Jack Kemp wannabe. The black-and-white image was fuzzed out, but Jack got his general vibe: slovenly conservative money guy. It amazes him that Max is able to operate so openly, running what’s clearly a Ponzi scheme and just getting away with it, that people keep it on the hush-hush because they really believe they’re going to get rich. Jack wonders who Max is paying off or if someone’s bankrolling the operation. The mob maybe. There has to be more to the story.

Max opens up. He’s tall and goofy and pale, wearing a yellow short-sleeved dress shirt with a pocket protector stuffed full of pens. The buttons on the shirt aren’t buttoned properly – somewhere he missed a hole. He has deep, dark, summer pit stains blooming under his arms. His shirt isn’t tucked into his knockoff Dockers pants. His shoes are flimsy, the laces undone. His glasses have cheap rectangle frames. He has a little red carton of whole milk in his hand, the kind kids get at school for lunch. He’s been drinking it. There’s a white ring on his upper lip. His hair is poofy, uncombed, dotted with dandruff. This does not look like a rich man, does not even look like a man who’s doing particularly well. If he’s stealing from people like Mary Mucci, he must be funneling the money out elsewhere. Either that or he’s sitting on it. Could just be about the game. That’s one form greed takes.

‘Can I help you?’ Max asks.

‘We need to talk,’ Jack says. ‘Let me in.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Mary Mucci sent me.’

‘Oh, come on, sir. I told Mary ninety-five times that I’ll have her money soon. The wheels are in motion. She thinks I don’t want to get her dough to her? What’s that do to my reputation? I have many clients. Everyone’s in the same boat right now. They think I’m a cash machine, but it’s a complicated system I’ve got going.’

‘Let’s talk inside.’

‘Right here’s okay with me.’ Max takes a swig of milk.

Jack muscles past Max into the office. It’s a real dive. Stacks and stacks of file folders on top of old filing cabinets trimmed with rust. A desk with a computer and phone that’s otherwise covered in bills, statements, and manuals. Instead of some fancy ergonomic office chair, there’s a folding chair, the kind they have in church basements. A wastepaper basket full of empty little milk cartons is right next to the desk. The carpet is thin, worn through to the wood below in several spots. Dust speckles the air, caught in the shafts of light coming through the broken blinds on the window. There’s no art on the walls. Just framed certificates. A boxy black safe, about the size of a small dorm fridge, sits in the corner on top of a sagging table. Towers of CDs line the walls. The office smells like a bachelor pad, vaguely moldy and rotten. It’s only one room in what’s ostensibly a much bigger space. As far as Jack can tell, Max owns the whole corner building. A battered door – a pin up calendar from the seventies hung crookedly at its center, around eye level – must lead to the next room, but it’s closed.

‘You own the whole building, huh?’ Jack says.

‘Yes.’ Max stays on the threshold of the front door, clutching his milk with nervous force, looking like he’s thinking seriously about skittering outside for help.

‘What’s in the rest of the place?’

‘Not that I need to give you an answer, but it’s storage. Mostly CDs. I run a CDs-through-the-mail business on the side. Like BMG. You want some CDs? I can hook you up.’

Jack looks around, examining some of the certificates on the wall. Max’s degree from St. John’s. An accounting license. A notary public certification.

‘What can I call you?’ Max asks, taking in Jack’s work boots, jeans, and his old Brooklyn Battlers softball shirt with blue sleeves that he wore for six seasons back in his mid-twenties when playing on hot concrete in a beer league was a fun thing to do on weekends. The shirt’s tight now. ‘You don’t dress for summer. How about Mr Blue Sleeves? That’s what I’ll call you, okay?’

‘Shut the door and come take a seat.’

‘I don’t play rough games, Mr Blue Sleeves. You give me a sec, I’ll call my friend Charlie French and get him over here. He likes rough games.’

Jack vaguely remembers the name Charlie French from the papers. A regular Bay Ridge shitbird. A nobody who’d built up some kind of air of importance around him. He’d inherited a bunch of dough from his wife; there was speculation he murdered her. Figures that Max is pals with him.

Max continues: ‘Charlie’s headed down to Florida in a few weeks. Business venture. But he’s still around right now, and he’d love to meet you, I’m sure.’

‘All that money you steal from single working moms and little old ladies, does it go to Charlie? Or you in bed with the Brancaccios?’ Jack motions around the office. ‘Because you obviously aren’t spending it here. Or on fine clothes.’

‘I’m an honest guy,’ Max says.

‘Shut the door. I just want to talk.’

Max huffs and finally closes the door. He storms over to his desk, dropping his milk container in the wastepaper basket, and sitting dramatically on the rinky-dink folding chair. He puts his elbows up on the edge of the desk, touching the dusty keyboard for his computer. His glasses fogged from all the exertion. ‘Okay, talk,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you five minutes.’

‘You’ll give me however long I want,’ Jack says.

Max clasps his hands together and sighs. He looks like an exhausted principal of a decaying middle school sitting there like that. ‘Fine.’

Jack reaches around for the gun. He pulls it and shows it to Max. ‘It’s not much, but it’ll get the job done.’

‘You’re threatening my life in my own office?’ Max says.

‘I’m telling you you’re gonna get Mary her money. I know you’ve probably fucked over hundreds of people, maybe thousands, but Mary’s my concern right now.’

‘That’s not the way this operation works.’

‘I know how Ponzi schemes work, and you’re gonna take the hit if you have to. Personally, I mean. You can take that money out of your own pocket. You can borrow it from your folks or some other relative. I don’t give a shit.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I guess I don’t. All that dough, where’s it go? It’s numbers on paper for you, but where’s the physical money?’

Max sighs again. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. ‘I’ve got people I’ve gotta give it to,’ he says.

‘So, you’re a front for something?’

‘I’m not a front. I started this as a legit thing. Look at me, I’m not making out. It just got out of control.’

Jack’s starting to understand. Max got in trouble – not unlike the trouble he’s in right now – and he asked the wrong people for help. Now he’s permanently in bed with them. That’s Jack’s guess anyway. He doesn’t need the whole story.

‘Look,’ Jack says, ‘you’re a guy – a smart guy – who’s done some dumb shit. Maybe it was out of greed. Maybe you honestly thought you could make it work. Whatever the case, you got in over your head, and it’s collapsing all around you. I know you’re not the lowest of the low because I’ve seen the lowest of the low. You don’t deserve to die like a dog, but that’s how you’re gonna wind up. I’m not saying me. I’m saying somebody. I’m sure there are plenty of somebodies out there fed up with you.’

Max is on the verge of tears. ‘Are you gonna hurt me? Please don’t hurt me, okay? I live with my parents. I’m all they’ve got. I’ve got to give my mom her medicine tonight. High blood pressure. I bring my old man a Twinkie one special night a week too. Tonight’s Twinkie Night. If I don’t bring it, what’s he gonna do?’

‘“Twinkie Night,” huh?’

‘Right.’ Max lets loose and starts bawling.

‘Stop crying,’ Jack says.

But Max keeps right on. He’s like an Italian grandmother at a funeral, the kind who throws herself on the casket, who revels in making a scene. Here he is, this weaselly, milk-drinking Irishman going for the goddamn Academy Award. He has snot hanging from his nose, his lips flecked with spit. ‘My work’s everything,’ Max says.

Jack walks toward him, turning the gun over in his hand. He’s not going to shoot the guy, but he’s got to at least give him a little something to let him know he’s serious. If he just lets him off the hook, what’s Max take away from this? Crying gets him everywhere, that’s what.

Max backs up in his chair, or he tries to anyway. It’s proving tough to move in reverse on the cheapo folding chair, its legs sunk in the carpet. ‘Come on, Mr Blue Sleeves,’ Max says.

Just as Max is about to say more, to plead for a reprieve, Jack clocks him in the face with the butt of the gun. He makes good contact, smashing him right in the nose. Max lets out a whine. His left hand goes to his face instinctively, like a kid in school sitting at his desk and tending to an unexpected bloody nose. There’s blood everywhere, dripping from his chin onto his yellow shirt and into his pocket protector, splattered across the bills and statements and manuals on his desk. Jack can also see that he’s busted Max’s glasses. He must’ve caught him on the bridge. One lens has popped out, and the other is cracked. The whining continues.

‘You’re gonna straighten things out with Mary, right?’ Jack says, backing away.

With his free hand, Max reaches for the handle of a desk drawer just to the right of him and thrusts it open.

At first, Jack figures he’s going for tissues, but then it occurs to him that Max might have a piece stashed there. Jack flips the gun around in his hand.

Max does come out holding a piece. It’s not much, but it’s enough. One of those little jobs. Kind of a purse gun. Max aims it at Jack, though he’s clearly having a hard time seeing through his broken glasses, his other hand covering half his face, the blood flowing. His hand is shaky, the gun panning from Jack to the window to the wall and back again. Jack wonders if Max has even held the thing before, let alone fired it. ‘You think you can just walk in here and threaten me?’ Max says, his tone gone from desperate to angry.

‘Take it easy,’ Jack says. He steps slowly toward Max, the gun out in front of him. ‘Put the gun down.’

‘You put yours down.’

Jack moves in quickly. With his free hand, he wrestles the little gun from Max. He steps away, looks at the piece, and checks to see if it’s loaded. It’s not. He tosses it on the desk. It lands with a light thunk like a plastic cowboy gun from a dollar store. ‘Now you’re really on my bad side here,’ Jack says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Max says. ‘I’m so stupid.’

‘Fix things for Mary,’ Jack says. He reaches around and tucks the gun under his shirt and then heads out of the office, leaving Max bleeding at his desk. He hears more elaborate moaning from inside as he turns the corner. He pictures Max wadding some of the bills up against his face. He looks across the street at a woman with a shopping cart collecting bottles from a garbage can. It feels especially bright out after being in that dingy office.

Back at his car, Jack opens the door and settles behind the wheel. The oldies station is playing Dion’s ‘(I Was) Born to Cry.’ He puts his gun back in the glove compartment and sits there listening. Turning the music up until it rattles the windows. He likes the Johnny Thunders cover of this too. Somewhere he has that record. Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin, Copy Cats. Probably up in the attic. He must’ve bought it at Zig Zag Records. He’s always gone there if there was some new Lou Reed or Johnny Thunders to get. That stopped when Janey got sick. Music seemed so much less important. He’s getting back to feeling some comfort from it now, able to sit here and listen.

When the song’s over and WCBS goes to commercial, he drives away up the block. A couple of lefts and he’s back on Fourth Avenue and soon enough he’s cruising on the Belt Parkway, headed home, windows down. He’s not sure what he’s going to do. Maybe go to the Wrong Number for a beer. Maybe go up to the attic and dig through some of his old records. He wonders if the turntable even works anymore – it’s buried under a big cloth in the basement. Probably needs a new needle at least. There might be a few on his old man’s workbench. For a brief spell in the seventies, he repaired turntables on the side. At some point tomorrow, Jack guesses, he’ll pay Mary Mucci a visit and tell her Max is going to make good.

Music’s back on now. Bill Withers, ‘Lean on Me.’ One of those songs that – no matter how many times he hears it – doesn’t lose any of its luster. If anything, it gets better and better. It means more to him now than it could have ever meant to him back when he first heard it.

Sailing along turns into light congestion and then that, suddenly, becomes dead-stop traffic. He regrets not taking the streets. He’s stuck now between the Fourteenth Avenue exit and the Bay Parkway exit – probably less than a mile, but it could take forever. He could get out of his car and walk home faster. Those are the goddamn breaks.

He lowers the radio and tries to see what’s going on up ahead. It’s not rush hour yet, so it must be an accident.

A sudden burst of sirens tells him he’s right. Probably some dope was doing ninety and flipped. A regular thing on the Belt. You get these cugines in their souped-up shitboxes, thinking they’re on a racetrack, and that’s what happens.

It takes a while, but he inches closer and closer to the Bay Parkway exit. He sees now that whatever’s happened has happened at the off-ramp. The cops are diverting traffic into one tight little lane, forcing cars to make a left on Bay Parkway. They’ve blocked off the right lane to try to create some kind of order. One cop is out in the street, controlling traffic, looking frazzled. The accident itself is obscured by a fire truck and ambulance, but it’s pretty clear that two cars crashed right under the traffic lights at the intersection of Bay Parkway and Shore Parkway. Probably whoever was getting off the exit tried to beat a yellow, blew through a red, and slammed into an oncoming car. Or something like that.

Jack blesses himself. A habit he picked up from his mother. Every time they drove past an accident, even if it was just a fender bender, she’d bless herself. ‘Let’s just pray everyone’s okay,’ she’d say.