Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  THE SHELTER PROVIDED LUNCH IN the form of cheap greasy pizza from the dollar a slice joint around the corner. They washed up and ate outside, where it was cooler, leaned against the brick.

  Christina held out her arm and ran a finger over a track mark. The silver pocks showed through the ink. “These are from a long time ago,” she said. “I’m a sponsor now.”

  “That’s good,” Sharon said. She tossed the spongy crust of her pizza toward a trio of pigeons. “See you inside.”

  AFTER WORK, SHARON WALKED AND fed Caesar, then took a blue train downtown to the Cubby. She drank Stoli and Seven; the fizz lingered on the tip of her tongue. A napkin around her drink absorbed the sweat, and the glass didn’t touch the bar until she’d finished it.

  She had lost her eldest brother to heroin when she was a little girl. She asked her mother: why would anyone give themselves a needle? Her mother had no answer, and in the fifty-two years since, Sharon hadn’t found one. We all dealt with pain in different ways, even animals.

  It always amused her, that adage about veterinarians being the best doctors, because the patient couldn’t tell them what hurt. If you couldn’t tell, maybe you had no business being a doctor. At least animals were honest about pain, and growled or snapped. People, they liked to bury it, in all sorts of ways.

  The clinic had been broken into several times over the years, for syringes and sedatives. But more often, half-used vials of ketamine went missing. Her previous tech, Lynndie, had put herself through vet school by tending bar; she told Sharon that ketamine was called Special K, and it was used both recreationally and as a date rape drug. There were bars where if you wanted to remember the rest of your night, you finished your drink without it ever leaving your hands.

  But it wasn’t Christina’s track marks that had bothered her. Like the tattoos, it was something you got used to seeing. There’d been something else just as familiar, around the wrists and forearms.

  A woman half her age with close-cropped hair and a beauty mark beneath her left eye bought Sharon’s next drink. They talked about the music and the weather and dogs, and Sharon forgot what it was she’d noticed until the next morning, when the young woman pulled a shirt over her tattooed shoulders, petted Caesar on the head, and let herself out of the apartment.

  Bruises beneath the inkwork, on the inside of the wrists. Right where you’d hold someone’s hands when you had them up against the wall, nose to nose. Thumbprint smudges between the radius and ulna, some yellowed and faded, others red-rimmed, fresh, and purple.

  She thought Christina was smarter. But over the years, she’d learned that if a horse wanted water, it found the corral on its own, and leading them to it often engendered more resentment than gratitude.

  She’d been kicked enough to know.

  THEY WERE BUSY ENOUGH THAT Sharon stopped noticing when new bruises joined the old, and she was thankful she’d minded her own business. For all she knew, the marks could be from anything. Maybe Christina took judo, or liked being held down as a kink.

  Christina’s sense of humor didn’t waver. Fridays, when the other techs on the shift went around the corner for a drink, she always bowed out, saying she had to pick up her son from his grandparents. And as her skills improved, she showed no inclination to abandon van duty for a cushier gig in the clinic.

  The show of loyalty softened Sharon’s view of her.

  The last snip on the clipboard was a bull mastiff female on Riverside Drive by the tennis courts. The owner was a little man who had half his hair pulled back in a little ponytail knot, leaving silver locks framing his face. Plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled, revealing nice, strong arms. The kind of man who looked like a sculptor or Buddhist priest, but usually turned out to be a financial planner or a hand model.

  “Jonquil’s in heat,” he said, rubbing her immense forehead. “Will that be a problem?” Jonquil was one hundred-and-ninety pounds of black-and-tan jowl and slobber, sitting spread-legged on the sidewalk, her pudenda swollen and red.

  “There’s a greater chance of bleeding,” Sharon said. “I usually recommend waiting until she’s out of her cycle.”

  “This guy at the park’s got a Doberman he can’t handle, he’s all over her.”

  Christina raked her nails over the dog’s back, and Jonquil butted her head into her, begging for more.

  “You should bring her to the clinic.”

  “I can’t really get away, is the problem. I’ve got clients all day, during your hours. And weekends, you’re booked for months. I called.”

  He squatted and kissed Jonquil on her wet coal nose. “I just don’t think Jonny girl wants puppies.”

  It took them both to lift Jonquil onto the table after the Telazol kicked in. Christina intubated her like a pro, and Sharon strapped her down and crossed her paws.

  “Jesus,” Christina said, as she shaved the belly. “She’s red as a baboon’s ass.”

  “Get her prepped,” Sharon said. Usually she appreciated the sense of humor, but the lack of urgency set her off.

  She made the cut with care, but blood welled immediately. Christina soaked it up with gauze and Sharon quickly inserted the spay hook, to fish out the first horn of the uterus. She extracted the grape-bunch of ovarian follicles, clamped it at both ends, and cut them at the bud.

  Blood formed like red beads of sweat, then pooled. The dog’s belly heaved beneath the surgical sheet. Christina inhaled sharply.

  “More iso,” Sharon said. “Quarter turn.”

  Christina adjusted the flow of gas and Jonquil’s breathing settled. Sharon sponged the blood and ligated the uterus with three quick loops of surgical thread. She kneaded the flesh, leaning in close to see, but no blood appeared.

  Sharon followed the pink worm of the uterus to the second horn, and squeezed it out. “You can see why we don’t go for hot dogs much,” she said.

  Christina let out a breath of relief, and shook her head with a little eye-roll. Her fingers clawed for a cigarette.

  Sharon repeated the cut, this time ready for the blood. She moved slow and smooth with practiced motions, cinched tight little stitches, and checked for bleeding several times before tucking everything back inside Jonquil’s belly.

  “Ease up on the iso,” she said, as she finished tying up the knots to close the abdomen. “Let’s get things cleaned up. Detube her.”

  “I’m too jittery,” Christina said, her face flushed.

  “She’ll be alright. She’s just got a big old heart.”

  Sharon flinched as Christina stepped in to give her a hug. Her hair smelled of strawberries and stale smoke.

  Sharon patted her shoulder. “Your first scare?”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed her nose then looked away, cleaning up the operating table.

  “I’ll bandage her up,” Sharon said. “Go have a puff.”

  “Thanks.”

  As Sharon bent to get the adhesive tape, she saw Christina squeeze toward the front of the van. Her hand went into the pocket of her scrubs, and came out empty.

  OUTSIDE, SHE GAVE JONQUIL’S OWNER the papers for postoperative care.

  “Doesn’t she have to wear a cone?”

  “No, just keep an eye on it. If it gets dark red, like her cookie, bring her in. And keep her out of the park for a few days, let her rest. She’ll still be in heat a day or two, it’ll take a while to get the hormones out of her system.”

  He handed them both a folded twenty, before walking sleepy Jonquil slowly up the stoop.

  In the van, Sharon waited for the doors to close, then turned off the ignition.

  “What—”

  “What’s in your pocket? That’s the only question,” Sharon said, clutching the keys in her palm.

  “My cigarettes, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t insult me now. Don’t.” The pleasant mask melted from her face, into the look she’d inherited from her mother.

  Christina reached in her pocket and removed a pair of Neuticles. The expensive ones, soft a
s a breast implant. The largest size, like the ones Sharon had put in Otto the mastiff.

  “What, you selling them?” Sharon said. “They cost a few hundred, wholesale. Am I gonna have to inventory the whole truck?”

  Christina’s lower lip trembled, and she mashed her palms into her eye sockets. She kicked the floorboards and rocked with silent sobs.

  SHARON DROVE THEM TO A shady spot in Riverside park. Christina gripped the cracked beige dashboard the whole way. After they parked, she hiked her scrubs. Leopard spot bruises between her ribs.

  “He likes to jam his thumb in there,” Christina said. “Don’t say it. I’d leave if I could. But he’ll get custody. His parents, they say it every time they can. ‘Oh we just love having little Alex over. Wouldn’t you like to live here all the time, instead of your tiny apartment?’ His name’s Alexie, bitch!”

  Sharon felt cold around the edges, like she’d barged into a house where the heat had been turned off. “If you need a lawyer, I know a few.”

  “It won’t matter.” Christina held out her arm, ran a finger over the track marks. “Kyle says they’ll use my record against me. I’m clean five years, I’m not even on fucking methadone.”

  “Then why are you stealing, if you don’t want a lawyer?”

  Christina lit a cigarette, and rolled down the window. The cherry ember bobbed as she laughed out an exhale.

  “Well, that’s where I ask a big favor.”

  BESIDES THE NEUTICLES, CHRISTINA HAD palmed a syringe and a fresh vial of Telazol. Needle, a scalpel blade, surgical glue, and thread.

  Sharon told her she was out of her mind.

  “Well then Alexie goes to Kyle’s parents, or protective services. My parents ain’t worth a damn, so don’t even ask. I can’t take this anymore.”

  “Does he hit . . .”

  “No, he just takes it out on me and the cat, for now. The last straw was when Alexie started talking. He uses the same condescending voice on him, when he gets mad. Next thing, he’ll stand there smoking in the door of his bedroom while he sleeps.” She looked out the window. “Looking at him like he’s less than shit.”

  There was more. On the drive back, she learned where the bruises came from. When she said no.

  She listened without comment, until Christina told her the plan. Then she laughed.

  “You need the gas to keep him under,” Sharon said. “He would’ve woken up with you down there, screaming and bleeding, then you’ll really lose your boy. Pretty sure there’d be jail time.”

  No, this was a van job. And she would need a partner. A smart one.

  SHARON TOOK THE SPARE SET of keys to the Neuter Scooter home Friday night. Kyle’s favorite bar was one of those new speakeasy types out in Bushwick, where the only thing bigger than the ice cubes was the check. It smelled of old wood and music blared from cheap speakers, muffling any attempt at conversation.

  Sharon wore a short dress that she sometimes took to Cubby’s, or a hunting ground uptown when the mood struck her. She kept the makeup light, like a neighborhood holdout enjoying herself, someone who refused to let the trust fund kids take over.

  It wasn’t a difficult role to play. Gentrification had begun its creep into Hamilton Heights. She enjoyed the restaurants, but not the accompanying shift in neighborhood tone forced by increases in rent. You could always take a train to try a new place, but home was home.

  Here the barflies were uniformly young, and mostly white. A couple had a stroller with their conked-out child, but most were singles out hunting. The kind of bar Lynndie had warned her about.

  Sharon played with her phone until a spot opened at the bar near Kyle and his group, and ordered a Vodka Seven. They didn’t have 7 Up, so she nursed a Moscow Mule instead.

  Kyle wore a checked shirt and a knit bow tie, a long but neat beard, and those stretched horn rims that everyone seemed to wear. He was tall but not built, and dominated conversation among his friends with sweeping gestures reminiscent of a stage magician.

  A young man cozied to the spot beside her and tried his game. Perhaps he felt it was his duty to talk to her, alone as they were in the crowd. He bought her a drink, and she bought him one, to let him know where they stood, and while he pouted, she used his body as a shield to spritz an entire vial of ketamine into Kyle’s Rock & Rye.

  She hugged her would-be friend goodbye and told him he was sweet, then cleared her bill with the bartender, as Kyle’s friends slowly drifted off in pairs. He gripped the mahogany for purchase. She turned, brushing him with her hip.

  “Oh hello there,” Kyle said, with a gleam of eye teeth. “How’d I miss you?”

  “I could be your grandmother,” she said. His great-grandmother, maybe. She been the first to break the streak of motherhood by sixteen on her mother’s side.

  “No way,” Kyle said. “Well, know what they say. Black don’t crack.”

  She feigned a smile and sipped her drink. She saw why Christina had once liked him. He put on a good show. But there was a layer of demanding beneath the ready smile, a hunger for attention, that Alexie’s sudden appearance must have offended. Her own father had it, but he’d been pleased to have a captive audience in his children. He may have pouted when they complained of hearing a story for the thousandth time, but he’d never become petulant. It was their mother who’d driven them away, one by one.

  She let Kyle talk, as the K and alcohol loosened his rivets. When she suggested he might like to go home, he assumed she meant hers and leaned in to whisper. As she pushed him away, she thumbed the empty vial of ketamine into his jeans pocket.

  She checked her phone. Christina would have Alexie in bed by now. She let Kyle snake an arm around her waist, and guided him out the front door onto the dimly lit, crooked sidewalks.

  Down the block, Christina would be waiting in the van.

  But Kyle would never make it there. The dose of ketamine was surely fatal, and that was the only way. Sharon had tried to explain, that dogs were one thing, and people were another.

  And besides, it wasn’t the balls that were the problem.

  It was the brain.

  BOWERY STATION, 3:15 A.M.

  BY WARREN MOORE

  I SAW A FOOD VENDOR at his cart near the corner of Bowery and Delancey. He didn’t look too busy—which made sense for a Thursday night, with almost an hour before the bars closed. The Ballroom on Christie had disgorged its concert-goers a couple of hours earlier, but thank God there was a little more time to drink like civilized people, and there had to be some of those somewhere—it was the Bowery, but even so. The vendor would be busy enough later, but right now it was alone enough and cold enough that the heat from his grill made him seem to shimmy under the amber streetlight glow. Straight ahead were the green-and-white subway globes and the stairs down. Just behind me was the streetcar shelter.

  The JZ entrance on the southeast corner—my corner—was bright, white fluorescent lamps set above tile walls with concrete stairs down. I walked down the stairs, carded my way through the turnstile and made my way down to the platform.

  A Queens-bound J train receded along the west side of the platform as I came down the stairs. The newsstand was long gone—a mosaic still said there should be one, but it had been gone since before I ever set foot there. But a copy of the day’s Daily News sat abandoned on one of the benches. I picked it up and, like a good citizen, dropped it into the trash. I breathed in deeply. It was the usual underground clammy, but it wasn’t warm enough yet to start smelling like a urinal. That would wait until July.

  I read somewhere that Bowery Station is one of the least-used stops in the system. I guess that made sense—for a long time, most folks didn’t want to go there, and the folks who were there may not have had much reason to get out. That’s starting to change, I guess; the rising tide of urban homesteaders and folks who can’t afford Williamsburg or Park Slope is starting to lap against this beachhead, too. But since it isn’t used too much, the station is pretty low on the maintenance list. You can�
��t even spot a CCTV camera to stand under on the platform.

  I saw the girl standing on the Brooklyn-bound side of the platform. You might not have noticed anything, but I saw the fists clenched at her sides and I saw her lips moving, and I knew what she was gearing up to do.

  The subways average about one jumper a month—one person who decides that if they can’t make it here, they won’t make it anywhere, and decides to call it a day under the wheels of a few tons of subway train. Most of the time it doesn’t make the papers—the editors don’t see much point in encouraging copycats—so you don’t hear about it except for really flashy cases, like the guy last year who pulled his three-year-old off the platform with him. But even without much publicity, we get about one a month, and this girl—she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—had decided it was her month.

  I heard the Brooklyn train before I saw the light—it sounds like a giant exhaust fan a good ten seconds before it shows up. I ran across the platform as she bent her knees to tumble onto the tracks, grabbed the collar of her fake leather trench coat and jerked her back as the cars roared by. I had let go by the time the car doors opened, but no one got off the train, and after a moment, the warning tones sounded, the doors closed, and the train rumbled away.

  She looked at me. She was blonde, with that leftover seventies middle-parted Marcia Brady hair that so many of them seem to like these days. Not much makeup, or it was applied well enough that I couldn’t tell. A little on the pretty side of average, I guess. She just glared at me for a moment and said, “What the fuck did you do that for? I’m never gonna have the guts to do that again.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have tried,” I said. “I mean, it seems kind of drastic.”

  “Of course it’s drastic,” she said. “That’s the point. If it wasn’t drastic, I wouldn’t be doing it. Not that I will now.”

  “Glad to hear it. Suicide’s wrong, you know.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Well, not much to me, I guess. But I kind of figure that you didn’t pick when you got here, so I’m not sure if you should pick when you leave. That’s God’s decision, and it’s not like there’s much chance to get right with God when you’re doing it, huh? When it’s your time, He’ll make sure it happens, I think.”