Gravesend

Praise for WILLIAM BOYLE and GRAVESEND:

“
Gravesend
is a taut exploration of the ways we hurt and save (or try to save) one another. With unforgettable characters, a fist for a plot and a deeply evocative setting, Boyle navigates alleys and streets with the best of them, Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos.”

—Tom Franklin, author of
Poachers
,
Hell at the Breech
,
Smonk
,
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
, and
The Tilted World

“
Gravesend
is a book that hits you in the guts the same way David Goodis or Charles Willeford’s books do. Boyle’s mining that dark edge of America where no one is safe, not even from themselves. A dark ride but a seriously great ride.”

—Willy Vlautin, author of
The Motel Life
,
Northline
,
Lean on Pete
, and
The Free

“
Gravesend
kicks ass! An irresistible combo of an insider’s tour of Brooklyn and true and authentic 21st Century Noir. Boyle is one to watch.”

—Ace Atkins, New York Times bestselling author of
The Broken Places
and
Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland

“William Boyle has written a terrific novel for the new millennium of Noir. A beautiful actress returns to her Brooklyn neighborhood where she finds the dark world she left has gotten worse. Peopled by ex-cons and ex-cops, teenage gangsters and Russian mobsters,
Gravesend
creates a claustrophobic intimacy as it moves swiftly to its shocking end. I finished the book grateful for release from its relentless grip, and admiring the guts it took to write such a brutal story.”

—Chris Offutt, author of
Kentucky Straight
,
Out of the Woods
, and
The Good Brother

“William Boyle’s
Gravesend
is a bruiser and a heartbreaker of a debut. With echoes of Lehane and Pelecanos but with a rhythm and poignancy all its own, it’s a gripping tale of family, revenge, the strains of the past and the losses that never leave us.”

—Megan Abbott, author of
Dare Me
,
The End of Everything
,
Queenpin
,
The Song is You
, and
Die A Little

“Boyle understands blood in all its meanings. He’s a dark poet who knows how to draw you close so he can slip the knife into your heart.
Gravesend
is deeply felt, brutal, tragic, personal and beautiful. You won’t forget it.”

—Jack Pendarvis, author of
The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure
,
Your Body is Changing
, and
Awesome

“
Gravesend
plops you down in the midst of a tragedy waiting to happen, and as the story rumbles toward its shattering conclusion, you’ll find yourself digging in your heels against the terrible inevitability of it all. William Boyle lays bare a seedy corner of Brooklyn and the tortured souls who inhabit it in his debut, and in so doing stakes out his own turf among up-and-coming two-fisted writers.”

—Richard Lange, author of
Dead Boys
,
This Wicked World
, and
Angel Baby

“There’s a natural, forthright style here that seems born of this writer’s sense of duty to his characters, these denizens of non-hipster Brooklyn living out the dooms they were born to, nurturing their vices, the hours of their lives plaited masterfully together, their lusts and regrets interlaced. The novel unspools without hurry but also without an extra line, giving neither the desire nor opportunity to look up from it. There’s an exhilaration that accompanies seeing a place and its folks this clearly and fairly, feeling at once that the writer is nowhere to be found and also working tirelessly to show you the right things. Boyle arrives in thorough possession of his seedy yet venerable world, this low-roofed urban hinterland. I can’t remember being more convinced by the people in a novel. Boyle’s characters, each in his or her own way, are accepting the likely future—with violence, with sex, with resignation, with rebellion, by being upbeat. You’ll be grateful, and it won’t take long, to be in this writer’s hands.”

—John Brandon, author of
Arkansas
,
Citrus County
, and
A Million Heavens

A Broken River Books original

Broken River Books

103 Beal Street

Norman, OK 73069

Copyright © 2013 by William Boyle

Cover art and design copyright © 2013 by Matthew Revert

www.matthewrevert.com

Interior design by J David Osborne

An excerpt from
Gravesend
first appeared in
Vol 1 Brooklyn.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-940885-03-2

Printed in the USA.

This book wouldn’t exist without the help, support, and encouragement of the following people: my wife, Katie Farrell Boyle, and our son, Eamon; my mother, Geraldine Chiappetta; J. David Osborne; Alex Shakespeare; and Jimmy Cajoleas.

For my grandparents, Joseph and Rosemary Giannini

When a man knows another man

Is looking for him

He doesn’t hide.

—Frank Stanford, “Everybody Who is Dead”

You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

—C. P. Cavafy, “The City”

One

It was the middle of September, and Conway had let McKenna take him out to a firing range in Bay Ridge to show him how to shoot. McKenna had been a cop for six years until he shot someone in the line of duty and they put him out with three-quarters pension.

“Can’t believe Ray Boy’s out,” Conway said. “Free. Just walking around.” He held up the gun and fired at the paper target, missing wide.

“Dude,” McKenna said, taking out his earplugs, “you really should put these on.” He offered a set of headphones.

“I’m gonna go what, deaf?” Conway did feel a light ringing in his ears, but it was like a far-off music.

McKenna said, “When you shoot, you gotta have confidence. You got no confidence now. The way you’re letting the gun pull you around, you’re gonna always miss outside.”

“Ain’t gonna miss I got the gun right in the guy’s gut,” Conway said.

“That’s a situation you’re probably not gonna find yourself in.”

The firing range was in a warehouse next to an abandoned textile company and right across from a Russian supper club. From the outside it looked like the kind of place where snuff movies got made. But gun nuts, cops and otherwise, knew about it and came in and fired down brown-lit rows at cardboard cutouts and paper targets. On some targets there were snaps of ballplayers, Mets gone bad, slumping Yanks. Conway had an old newspaper clipping of Ray Boy, and he’d tacked it onto his target. Thing was he hadn’t even hit it yet and it was big, a fold-out page from the
Daily News
. Ray Boy, all those years ago, freshly collared, on his way into the Sixty-Second Precinct. Wearing sunglasses, the fuck.

McKenna stood next to Conway now and showed him how to grip the gun. “You got fish hands, Con. Close up your fingers.”

Conway tightened up his hold and pulled the trigger again. Wide right. “Maybe it’s this type of gun.”

“You don’t know shit about guns. Trust me. Twenty-two’s good for you.”

“I need a sawed-off shotgun.”

“That’s for the movies. This is what I got you.”

Conway fired a few more times, hitting the outer rim of the target once but still missing the picture of Ray Boy, and McKenna seemed to be growing frustrated.

“Maybe I’ll just come with you,” McKenna said.

“I’m not taking you away from Marylou,” Conway said. “Things go wrong, I don’t want you near me.”

“And what about Pop? What happens to him?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Bunker is supposed to call you when?”

“This afternoon.”

Bunker was a private investigator out of Monticello who McKenna had hooked him up with via some retired cop who’d settled in Forestburgh. McKenna had used another connection, a State Trooper who knew a guy who knew a prison guard at Sing Sing, to find out that Ray Boy had settled somewhere in the general vicinity of Monticello after getting out. Where exactly, they couldn’t pin down, but Bunker claimed to be on it.

McKenna said, “You’re going too quick. I understand why. But you’re gonna do this, you should wait. Few days. Few months. A year. Don’t go in underprepared.”

“Every day he’s out I’ve waited too long,” Conway said. The truth was that he didn’t want to be prepared. He wanted to be primitive about it.

“You better keep shooting.” McKenna turned away.

Conway held the gun out and tried to see Ray Boy running away from him. It wouldn’t happen like that, Ray Boy backing down in his crosshairs, but it was what he needed to see if he was going to show McKenna he could place a shot. He fired again. Barely clipped the outer edge of the target. It was a start.

Bunker called at three. Conway was on the bus home to Gravesend, the gun wrapped in towels in a gym bag at his feet.

“This Ray Boy’s doing well,” Bunker said. “Know you’re not wanting to hear that.”

Conway moved in his seat. Tried to picture Ray Boy living the high life. “You mean, what? He’s got money? A girlfriend already?”

“He’s got this house in Hawk’s Nest. Been in his family for years. Does a shit ton of push-ups. Gets checks from his mother.”

“Hawk’s Nest?”

“About twenty minutes from Monticello.”

“You can take me there?” Conway said.

Bunker said, “Whenever you want. You come up here, I’ll meet you at the racetrack and show you the way.”

“How long’s the drive from the city?”

“Three hours, maybe. Little less.”

Conway flipped the phone shut and looked around at the other people on the bus. An old lady with shopping bags. A couple of Our Lady of the Narrows kids clutching bulky knapsacks in their laps and listening to iPods. This guy, Hyun—Conway knew of him but didn’t really know him—who ran numbers for Mr. Natale and was sweaty and nervous, holding onto the overhead strap with one hand and gripping a thin stack of papers with the other. And there was the peg-leg homeless lady who rode the B1 and the B64 all day, her wheelchair ornamented with shopping bags. None of them knew he had a gun. None of them knew he was going to get in his car, drive upstate, and kill Ray Boy Calabrese. Probably none of them knew Ray Boy. Or they’d forgotten his face from the papers. The kids weren’t even alive then. A lot got washed away in sixteen years. Conway thought of Duncan’s grave: all those paper poppies from his once-a-week visits. He’d knelt there and made a promise that none of the people on the bus knew about.

Walking back home, Conway watched pigeons on the sidewalk out in front of Johnny Tomasullo’s barber shop. He looked up at a pair of boots hanging from the telephone wires. People didn’t do that much anymore. He remembered throwing his school shoes up there after he was done with junior high. Then he leaned against a parking meter and thought about how he was going to deal with Pop. Kid gloves. Lies.

Pop was at the door to greet him when he came in the front gate. “You’ve been where?” Pop said.

“Bay Ridge with McKenna. At the gym.”

“I need you to pick up my prescription.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“Maybe later. We’ll see. Otherwise I’ll get Stephanie to run it over.”

“No, no, no. That’s too much trouble. I’ll go get it myself. To put Stephanie out, ridiculous.”

“Don’t walk up there with your leg, Pop. Stephanie doesn’t mind. She’s my friend. It’s four blocks. She doesn’t mind.”

“Ridiculous.”

Conway went inside and got his car keys off the hook in the kitchen and a roll of duct tape out of the tool closet. He put the duct tape in the gym bag. Pop followed close behind. “I’m busy, Pop,” Conway said.

“But you’ll go get it?” Pop said.

“Maybe.”

“I’ll go.”

Conway said, “Okay. I’ll go up and get it.”

But he had no intention of going. He left the house and went down the block and found his Civic parked by P.S. 101. He opened his phone and called Stephanie. Asked her to deliver the prescription to his old man. Told her just call first so she didn’t scare him. Ring the bell a few times, he said. Sometimes Pop couldn’t hear it. Stephanie was happy to do it, thrilled to get out from behind the counter. At least that was taken care of. And Pop would have company to distract him, even if only for a few minutes at the door. Stephanie was goofy, she had this frizzy hair like in cartoon strips and an accent nasty with the neighborhood, but she was kind, especially with old timers.

Driving away up Benson Avenue, headed for the Belt, Conway tried not to picture Pop in their sad living room with the dusty cross on the wall and the Sacred Heart Auto League calendars everywhere and the lampshade that was stressed to flimsy. But the picture came anyway: Pop in a ragged recliner, pillows everywhere, reaching out for the channel changer and trying to hear what they were saying on TV. Pop clawing his fingers into a go-to jar of Vicks VapoRub and massaging his neck, the Vicks blobbing up in his neck hair like a wispy chrysalis in a tree. Just waiting for Conway to get home with the scrip.

Now, beginning this very moment, Pop had nothing, had no one. Conway knew he wasn’t coming back. He was at the end of something. Maybe Aunt Nunzia would come around to check on Pop, but she had her own problems. A construction worker son who gambled away her social security. Squirrels in the wall. Her husband’s loans she was still paying off. Pop had squat. The house and his prescriptions. The windows he stared out. The kids around the corner he liked to call the police on. With Conway gone, he might try to stop living. Not off himself. Just give in quietly. Stop breathing with the TV on.

Plumb Beach wasn’t on the way, but Conway backtracked on the Belt. You could only get there by a short lane exit off the eastbound side after Knapp Street.

A parking lot was split in half on either side of the gated entrance. Conway pulled in and parked next to a small Dumpster. It was the same spot they’d found Duncan’s car parked. Conway kept a tally of his visits on the Dumpster. He used a rock or whatever sharp was around to scratch a line. He’d come at least two or three times a week for sixteen years. A whole long section was covered in his deep-etched lines. He leaned over and added one now with a snapped-off bicycle handle he found near his front tire.

He stood and went through his routine. He walked past a huddle of Rent-a-Throne port-a-potties where old Russians came to shit and then curved around the abandoned pavilion, squat and shadowy, stickered with regulations and peeling-off fish decals and a sign that said HORSESHOE CRAB HARVESTING IS NOT PERMITTED. A pair of children’s sneakers hung from the broken-down beach fence in front of him. Seagulls pecked the dirty sand. Empty Corona bottles and Newport packages and condom wrappers rimmed the seaweed-skirted shoreline. He went down to the water and looked out at the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge in one direction and Kingsborough Community College in the other. Fort Tilden and Jacob Riis were across the bay.

Ray Boy, who had tormented Duncan for being swishy since grade school, called Duncan one afternoon pretending to be a kid he met in the city, saying he wanted to meet out at Plumb Beach and hook up, and Duncan just goddamn went. He’d gotten his license a couple of months before, and he drove to Plumb Beach, parked next to the Dumpster with the lights off, and went down to the shoreline. The scene unspooled on repeat in Conway’s mind: Ray Boy and his crew, Teemo and Andy Tighe, charging Duncan from out of nowhere, pounding and kicking him, Duncan getting up, making a break, realizing he’d dropped his keys somewhere, running past his car, jumping over a guardrail and onto the Belt, dodging lights and cars, knowing that someone would stop to help.

Next Conway walked from the shoreline back to the guardrail beyond his car. He stood up on the rail, balancing himself with his arms out, watching the cars rip by on the Belt. The car that didn’t have the time to get out of Duncan’s way had been doing seventy.

The court called it a hate crime. They also called it manslaughter. Pressure came down from the LGBT Alliance, and Ray Boy, Teemo, and Andy Tighe got sent away for as long as the judge could get away with. Conway called it cold-blooded murder, and he knew that Ray Boy had been the ringleader. Conway was twenty-nine now, working at a goddamn Rite Aid on Eighty-Sixth Street, living with his old man who had never recovered from Duncan’s death and wondering what had happened to his mother who was long gone to alcohol. He wanted Ray Boy’s blood. The fucker deserved to wind up dead in a trunk, buried out in some shithole spot with no fanfare, no marker, just skin and bones rotting back into the earth. He tried not to imagine his brother dead on the Belt all those years ago, a picture that always came back to him. He got down from the guardrail and went to the car.

The drive up was quick, no traffic, and Conway kept the pedal to the floor. He’d only been outside the city a few times. Long Island for his brother’s grave. Jersey for a cousin’s confirmation. Baltimore for a shitty wedding. Mostly, Staten Island and the Bronx were the ends of the earth. He marveled at the world on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. The Palisades Parkway. Bear Mountain. A traffic circle where he followed signs to Central Valley. Trees everywhere. Leaves turning colors. Cars with their tops down. Then he got on 17. Factory outlets. Strip malls. Exits into towns with names that sounded like what you’d call your dog. Monroe. Chester.

Conway hooked up with Bunker at a Shell across from the Monticello Raceway. He pulled up behind Bunker’s Citation.

Bunker got out, lit a guinea stinker, and came over to Conway’s window. He looked more like a washed-up substitute teacher than a private eye. “Conway?” he said. “You want to get a coffee?”

“Not really,” Conway said.

“Ray Boy’s is about fifteen, twenty miles up the road. When we pass the place, it’s on a road called Parsonage, big white house on the left, I’ll put my blinker on one-two-three and then keep driving.”

“That’s fine.”

“If you get down to the train tracks and the river, you’ve gone too far. I’m not turning around there. I’m taking a different way back. But at the river, if you get down there by accident, you pull a U and go back up Parsonage.”

“How much I owe you?”

“Your buddy took care of it.”

Conway nodded and said nothing.