SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH SARGE
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Chris Grabenstein
“Sarge?” cried the dame they called Trixie. “Hey, Sarge. That you? Yeah! Over here.”
Sarge ambled over. Reluctantly.
“What is it this time, Trixie?”
“It’s Moose and that bunch.”
Sarge let out a long sigh. “Moose Murphy?”
“Yeah, yeah. Murphy. Him and his trouble boys have been bothering that old guy, you know, the mug with the missing leg—Lucky they call him. Lucky Rabinowitz. You know Lucky, right?”
“Yeah, I know him. What’s Lucky doin’ out here? I told him last weekend, certain stretches of this park are too shady for an old-timer like him to be nosin’ around in.”
“Hey, leg or no leg, the guy has his pride. We used to run together, Lucky and me.”
Sarge wasn’t surprised. Trixie was the kind of dame who would run with just about anybody, even if they didn’t have enough limbs to really run anymore.
“Come on, Sarge. You know Lucky Rabinowitz still has his pride. He ain’t gonna tuck his tail and sulk home just on your say-so.”
“Then tell him, for his own good, to keep far away from Moose Murphy. Like somewhere in the next zip code.”
“I did, Sarge. But that ain’t how it works with Moose and that bunch. They sniff out you’re old or weak, they move into your territory, and boom, they grab everything that ain’t nailed down.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear it, Trixie. But I gotta go. Nice bumping into you. Enjoy your day.”
“Hey, hey, hey. You’re leavin’?”
“Yes, Trixie, I’m trying to.”
“What about Lucky?”
Sarge let out another, longer, sigh.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“Sure there is.”
“Look—tell your pal Lucky to call the cops.”
“Ah, come on, Sarge. You know the cops don’t care about you, me, Lucky, or none of us. Not like they used to, anyways. Not like they did when you was on the force.”
“That’s ancient history, Trix. I’m not a cop anymore.”
“Sure you are, Sarge. Once a cop, always a cop, am I right? That’s why you’re still out here every weekend patrolling your old beat.”
“I’m not patrolling anything, Trixie. It’s Sunday. I’m just trying to grab a little fresh air.”
“Cut the chin music, Sarge. Save that noise for someone who don’t know you no better.”
“I’m telling you straight up: I’m done. I’m out of all that.”
Trixie looked at Sarge hard.
“This is on account of what happened to your partner, ain’t it?”
“Trixie?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re friends.”
“I know.”
“You want to maybe stay that way?”
“Sure I do.”
“Then drop it.”
Trixie flicked her hair to the side. She always did that when she was annoyed.
“When are you gonna get it through that thick skull of yours that what happened to Joe weren’t none of your fault?”
“Oh, really? Try telling that to Mrs. Amodio. Or their three kids.”
In a flash, it all came back.
The night down in the subway. Sarge and his partner tailing two suspects. The thugs getting the drop on Joe, a good cop with the bad habit of walking where he maybe should’ve looked first. Shots were fired. Both officers went down.
Sarge still carried a lead souvenir in his left hip. He hadn’t lost a leg like Lucky. But he did lose the best partner any cop ever had.
“We were together a long time, me and Joe,” said Sarge, biting back the hurt the memories always stirred up.
“Then do this thing for him. Help a sad sack like Lucky Rabinowitz get back his stuff from Moose Murphy. Joe Amodio sure would.”
Sarge heaved one last sigh. “Where’d this incident go down?”
“Over this way. By the bench near the garbage can.”
Trixie scampered over to the spot. Sarge loped after her.
“Hiya, Sarge!” The big lug Lucky limped out of the shadows under a tree. “Thanks for taking my case.”
“What’d they steal?”
“The only thing my kid ever gave me!” whined Lucky. Then he started whimpering.
“Ease up on the waterworks,” barked Trixie. “Sarge don’t need no more emotional baggage. He’s already over his limit. Am I right, Sarge?”
Sarge ignored her. Studied the mud.
“Moose and that bunch sure left a lot of prints. A one-year-old could follow this trail.”
“That’s because they knew nobody had the guts to chase after them,” said Trixie.
Sarge looked to where the path made its curve around the oval-shaped lawn.
A pack of six rough mugs were tossing a ball back and forth under the shade of a towering oak tree.
“That’s my ball,” said Lucky. “The one my boy gave me. It’s got great sentimental value, you know?”
Sarge nodded. “Yeah.”
One of Joe Amodio’s kids had given Sarge a ball once, too.
He took off. Dashed up the pathway. Weaved his way through the Sunday strollers.
Moose Murphy saw him coming. Grinned.
“Well, hello, Sarge. Funny runnin’ into you out this way. I heard you quit the copper life.”
“You heard wrong.”
Sarge snarled. Just once.
Moose Murphy acted tough. Made like he wouldn’t mind having Sarge chase him around in circles.
Sarge was in no mood for circles.
So he bared his fangs and lunged forward.
Tasted fur.
Moose yelped and dropped Lucky’s ball. The thing was slimed with drool and a little chewed up but otherwise okay.
“Hey!” shouted one of the people holding a leash. “Keep away from my Moose!”
It was the Murphy dame wearing a fanny pack and a fancy Ivy League sweatshirt.
“Whose dog is this?” she shouted like she owned the park. “Whose dog is this?” She went to protect Moose.
Sarge smiled.
He knew whose dog he was: Officer Joe Amodio’s. Late of the NYPD K-9 Unit. Sarge Amodio was a dog who’d always track down the bad boys like Moose Murphy to protect the weaker mutts like Lucky Rabinowitz.
He picked up Lucky’s ball with his snout.
Trixie had been right.
Once a cop, always a cop.
Chris Grabenstein is the Anthony and Agatha Award–winning author of the John Ceepak/Jersey Shore mysteries for adults, the Haunted Mystery series for kids, and the Riley Mack comic capers, also for kids. He has also co-authored a pair of middle-grades books with James Patterson.
NAILS
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James Grady
Eleanor was like any long-retired schoolteacher who believes in punctuality, punctuation, propriety, and that the universal bar code on everything everywhere is the Mark of the Beast. Lord knows it must be so, or why else would she be marching over the sidewalk on a Tuesday morning past second-rate stores on her way to shoot two people? She wore sensible shoes, a blue pantsuit under her formal tan overcoat, and not a fleck of makeup or a dollop of dye in her gray hair.
Just because the day requires crime doesn’t mean everything gets thrown out the window.
Eleanor, of course, had been on time for the robbery.
7B was late—running late, she told Eleanor when they met by the elevator in the pine-ammonia-smelling hall outside their apartments.
“Could you help me?” lied Eleanor, who’d been standing at the elevator with feigned innocence for twenty-four ticking-clock tardy minutes. “My hands. Arthritis. I can’t push the call button.”
7B looked at the old lady she talked to half a dozen times a week—more, actually, but 7B seldom noticed this gray-haired woman who was so slight the wind off the cold river could bl
ow her away. 7B had her yoga mat plus gym bag slung over her left shoulder, and that hand clutched a metal coffee cup logoed by a save-starving-children charity of which Eleanor approved. The frayed shoulder strap on the attaché case cut into the right shoulder of the business suit 7B wore down to her properly panty-hosed knees. A cell phone filled her right fist.
7B put the cell phone in her suit’s side pocket, stretched across the old lady to push the elevator summons button—and didn’t feel Eleanor’s deft fingers slip the cell phone out of 7B’s pocket and into her own black purse.
“Thank you,” said Eleanor. “For helping with the elevator, I mean.”
“No problem,” said 7B.
Eleanor said: “We all take care of each other.”
The elevator arrived.
As 7B let the old lady enter first, she heard a motherly voice say: “Your coffee is getting cold.”
Lord please don’t let the cell phone ring!
The power of prayer got the cage to the lobby in blessed silence.
Eleanor watched her neighbor stride off to her doom in the coming End of Days and, before then, to the sorrows of this life someone should do something about, then went on her own dreaded way.
The alley alongside the grocery store where young men awaited temptation held only the thug called Knucks. Eleanor’s eyes leveled at the chrome cross dangling from his rhinestone-speckled neck chain.
Knucks stared at the twenty-dollar bill the old lady gave him and what she held.
“You want me to show you how to use that? Don’t you watch TV?”
“There is no substitute for direct instruction.”
“What’s keeping me from direct taking you off an’ taking that?”
“You are smarter than you think. You know a risk should equal its gain.”
Knucks blinked.
“Your cross is on upside down. Lord knows it is not for me to judge anyone’s faith, but the cross bar belongs at the top. Do you know why?”
Knucks shook his head.
The little old lady stuck her arms straight out from her sides.
Waited.
Fifth grade is forever. Knucks stuck his arms out like hers.
“Your arms are wide because the nails make you hold your own weight.”
Knucks showed her what she wanted to know: “Just point and shoot.”
Eleanor sat on that Brooklyn park bench until noon. Then, like most days, to the park fountain came the handsome lawyer who’d been squiring 7B for nineteen months and was the “he” in overheard elevator cell phone calls about “when was he finally going to ask.” Next came the black-haired receptionist for the nearby museum, who Eleanor first saw having an apparent business meeting in a hipster coffee shop with 7B’s intended—innocent until the receptionist slid the lawyer’s hand up her skirted thigh to the strap of her black garter belt, which Eleanor spied through tea’s steam and realized that she herself should have said yes more often to long-gone Hank, an epiphany she now luckily could do nothing about.
What she could do something about was God’s challenge. If she walked past the sin of betrayal, was she not condoning, even committing that sin? And as Hank’s direct instruction in divorce had taught her, what crime is worse than betrayal? Was committing one sin to battle another worse than doing nothing at all?
The nails make us hold our own weight.
Eleanor reached into her black purse as the lawyer and receptionist kissed.
Used 7B’s cell phone camera to point and shoot, shoot, shoot.
Strolled back to the front desk of their apartment building where she watched the doorman call 7B’s emergency numbers until a human answered and took the information about the anonymously found cell phone that Eleanor was certain 7B would check if not tonight then soon, so before the end of this world, she might find someone worth loving.
James Grady’s first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became the Robert Redford movie with only the loss of three days. Grady has published more than a dozen other novels and as many short stories, been an international investigative reporter, a screenwriter, an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee, and a recipient of the Grand Prix du Roman Noir (France) and the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy) for his fiction career.
LYE
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Derek Haas
You should know, first off, I’m a coward. I get squeamish, and if there’s a choice between fight or flight, well, it’s really no choice for me.
The con goes like this: Coombs and I explain we’re with the property board, and we need to survey the measurements of the house to make sure the homeowner isn’t paying too much in taxes. I tell the mark to hold a piece of string standing at the front door while I take the other end to various rooms inside the home and call out measurements to Coombs, who writes them down on his clipboard. What I’m really doing is cleaning out any drawers of silver, jewelry, or knickknacks, or whatever I can find that I can slip into my tool sack. I have free rein of the house because I know the homeowner is on the other end of that string. When I return, we tell the mark, “The city will talk to you soon,” and we’re in Coombs’s car and down the road before anyone knows what’s what.
I have no idea if there’s a “property board.” Neither does 99 percent of the housewives and hillbillies living in single-level homes around major cities in Texas. We’re not scamming rich people…too many alarms, too many safes, too much house, too many problems. Nope, we hit people who are scratching by but still own homes. You’d be surprised how many of them have jewelry worth pawning stuck in the back of their sock drawers.
On this particular day, the woman who opened the door was dressed as skimpily as a prostitute and said her name was Devin. I went through my spiel, and she lapped it up and took her end of the string, but I saw her making eyes at Coombs, and I was already thinking, “This is no good.”
Coombs has one of those dimples in his chin that gets women steamed. I’m not ugly by any stretch, but I have a forgettable face, so I have no problem blending into the wallpaper. Why I partnered with someone with a dimpled chin is beyond me.
We were locked up in county together, shot the shit for a couple of hours, and when we both were released, we ate some barbeque at Vitek’s, sort of laid out this grift, and here we were five months later.
The string was tight, and I called out, “Four ninety-five,” which didn’t mean anything, and rummaged through the kitchen but didn’t find squat. I walked on to the first bedroom, which had been converted into a pathetic office—sagging desk and five-year-old Mac sandwiched between filing cabinets—not expecting to find much of value. I opened the first drawer of the desk, nothing. My hand must’ve grazed the computer mouse because the monitor clicked on, and at first I didn’t look at it and, to tell you the truth, I wish I hadn’t. I saw the browser open, and the website displayed an order for a one-pound bag of lye, which struck me as odd. The only thing I know lye is used for is making soap or soft pretzels or bodies disappear.
I still felt the string tight in my hand and realized I hadn’t said anything for a while, so I called out, “Six twenty-one.” Usually Coombs calls back the number so I know we’re good, but if he parroted it back to me, I didn’t hear it. I should probably have moved on to the next room, but instead I moved the cursor up to the History tab and clicked it. Here were the search terms: “acid,” “dead body,” “disposing of a dead body,” “body decay,” and “lye.”
I blanched and gave a lookie-loo out the window to the backyard, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a mound of freshly plowed dirt. Scratch that. Two mounds, side by side, three feet apart, six feet long. Right then, the string went slack.
“Wilson!” I called out, which was the code name I used for Coombs, but he didn’t answer, the string limp in my hand. I felt my cheeks go hot the way they do when I’m nervous, and I called out again, “Wilson!” but I only heard a grunt and the sound of a body collapsing on the furniture coming from the front.
I swa
llowed hard and poked my head out in the hallway, which gave me a clear sight line to the front door, but all I saw was the other end of my string lying slack on the floor.
I tiptoed as quiet as a cat down the wooden slats of the hallway, hoping to hell one of those boards wasn’t loose, and maybe I could make it out the front door before Devin got me like she got Coombs.
My pulse was racing like a locomotive, and I could hear it in my ears as I moved toward the front door. I heard more grunting, and I told myself to keep moving, but I looked over into the living room, and on top of the couch Devin was on top of Coombs, pounding, pounding, and I realized she wasn’t stabbing him, she was riding him like a thoroughbred. He was having the time of his life. He spotted me over her shoulder and gave me the thumbs-up. I couldn’t process what I was seeing, and I think I gave him a slight nod, but it’s not too clear in my mind.
I left him to it and headed outside toward the car. As I stepped into the street, I saw a giant man pull up in a plumber’s truck and get out from behind the wheel, fisting a massive wrench. He nodded at me, neighborly-like, and headed toward Devin’s door.
I’d love to say I helped Coombs, but I’m a coward, Detective. You gotta believe me. I’m telling the truth.
Derek Haas is the author of The Silver Bear, Columbus, Dark Men, and The Right Hand. He also cowrote the screenplays with his partner Michael Brandt for 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, The Double, and the NBC show Chicago Fire, which premiered fall 2012. He is the creator of the website PopcornFiction.com, which promotes genre short fiction. He lives in Los Angeles. Follow Derek on Twitter @popcornhaas, or “friend” him on Facebook.
THE PLEDGE
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Parnell Hall
He didn’t want to do it. It went against every fiber of his being, taking another person’s life. He wouldn’t have even considered it.
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