Hard Case Crime: The Max
Read Hard Case Crime: The Max Online
Authors: Jason Starr Ken Bruen
“Two of the crime fiction world’s brightest talents, Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, join forces for one of the year’s most darkly satisfying and electric
noir
novels... This is one of the top guilty pleasures of the year.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“This tense, witty, cold-blooded noir... reads seamlessly — and mercilessly... Funny [and] vividly fresh.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Adventurous crime-fiction fans who like their literary escapism totally unrestrained will find this brazenly violent and downright vulgar novel... as filthy as it is fun.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A full-tilt, rocking homage to noir novels of the 1950s... Hard Case’s latest release is smart, trashy fun.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Fasten your seat belts, and enjoy the bumpy ride of double- and triple-crosses, blackmail, and murder. If Quentin Tarantino is looking for another movie project, this novel with its mix of shocking violence and black comedy would be the perfect candidate. Highly recommended as a terrific summer read.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Two of the century’s best thriller writers have joined forces to bring a postmodern twist to the black heart of noir fiction. Grade: A.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“A really black comedy... I pretty much laughed my ass off.”
—Sarah Weinman
“Really good... very violent and very funny.”
—Jenny Davidson
“Crosses and double-crosses, miscalculations and blunders, and plenty of dead bodies... For those who like the bungling-criminal genre, this is good fun.”
—Booklist
“A fearsome and wondrous mix of vile characters [in] a caper novel worthy of Westlake or Leonard... exquisitely conceived and flawlessly written.”
—Book Reporter
“The prose reads like a dream. Fast paced and bursting with energy... Hard Case Crime have released some of the best new novels of the past few years. They’ve given us some amazing reprints of classic crime. But this book... has just upped the ante once more.”
—Crime Scene
When they brought Angela to the prison in Lesbos her first thought was, Jaysus, this place lives up to its name. The holding cell held eight other women. Most of them were in micro-minis, skimpy tube tops, a couple even in bikinis. Most were talking in Greek, and a couple of blondes were talking in some other language, maybe Swedish.
Angela went up to one of the blondes, asked, “So is this a prison or a nightclub?”
Thought she was making a joke, but the blonde said, “Both. There was a raid at Niko’s last night. Heroin or something. But we have nothing to do with it.”
She sounded a little too defensive. Angela glanced down, noticed the track marks on her skinny arms.
“So what did they charge you with?”
“We do not know. They told us nothing.”
“What about you?” the other blonde asked. “What did you do?”
“Oh, nothing,” Angela said. “I was just having a drink, minding my own business, and next thing I knew two cops were taking me away.”
The officers who’d arrested Angela hadn’t notified her of any charges. But, of course, Angela knew why she was being taken away. She didn’t know if they’d found some evidence that could hang her or if she was just a suspect by default. Not that it mattered. She’d heard enough stories over the years about the Greek justice system. It was your classic, old-world, eye-for-an-eye, guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality. She figured she’d never be formally charged with anything. She’d be handed over to Georgios’ relatives and quietly killed.
“Do any of the guards here speak English?” Angela asked.
“There was a young guy here last night maybe nineteen years old. He was hitting on all the women. He told one girl, if she give him blowjob she can get out.”
Angela thought,
Bingo...
SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
LUCKY AT CARDS
by Lawrence Block
ROBBIE’S WIFE
by Russell Hill
THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN
by Gil Brewer
THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN
by David Goodis
BLACKMAILER
by George Axelrod
SONGS OF INNOCENCE
by Richard Aleas
FRIGHT
by Cornell Woolrich
KILL NOW, PAY LATER
by Robert Terrall
SLIDE
by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
DEAD STREET
by Mickey Spillane
DEADLY BELOVED
by Max Allan Collins
A DIET OF TREACLE
by Lawrence Block
MONEY SHOT
by Christa Faust
ZERO COOL
by John Lange
SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB
by Robert Bloch
THE MURDERER VINE
by Shepard Rifkin
SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY
by Donald E. Westlake
NO HOUSE LIMIT
by Steve Fisher
BABY MOLL
by John Farris
by
Ken Bruen
and
Jason Starr
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-047)
First Hard Case Crime edition: September 2008
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London
SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2008 by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
Cover painting copyright © 2008 by Glen Orbik
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-371-7
E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-395-3
Cover design by Cooley Design Lab
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at
www.HardCaseCrime.com
For Jerry Rodriguez, Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin Madison Rules
One
“I had no worries about someone fucking me. I was no white bread white boy. If someone said something wrong, my challenge would be quick and if the apology was less than swift, I would attack forthwith.”
E
DWARD
B
UNKER
,
Education of a Felon: A Memoir
“Gonna have yer sweet white ass later.”
The greeting Max Fisher got from his towering black cellmate, Rufus.
Max thought, Whoa, hold the phones, there’s gotta be some mistake. Was he in the right place? Where was the... I.P. treatment? Where was Martha Fucking Stewart? Where were those bastards from Enron? How come there wasn’t a goddamn tennis court in sight? Yeah, Max knew Attica wasn’t Club Fed, but he didn’t expect
this
. He thought a big-time player like himself would get the, you know, special treatment but, Jesus, not this kind of special treatment. He thought he’d work on his backhand, get some stock tips, learn how to crochet, maybe start working out, lose some of the extra forty pounds he’d been lugging around. Maybe the guard took him to the wrong part of the prison. Didn’t prisons have neighborhoods just like cities? Max was supposed to be on the Upper East Side, but
by accident they’d brought him to the goddamn South Bronx.
Max clutched the bars, said to the guard, a young black guy, “Hey, come back here, yo.” Yeah, Max spoke hip-hop, one of his many talents. The guard didn’t stop and Max shouted, “Hey, asshole, I think there’s been a little fucking screw-up around here!” Yeah, let the fuck know who was boss, like the time he was dining at Le Cirque and the maitre d’ sat him at a table with a dirty tablecloth. Max let that motherfucker have it all right.
The guard, walking away, laughed, said, “Naw, I think there’s gonna be a
big
screw up, Fisher. Inside yo’ ass.”
His laughter echoed in the corridor until a gate slammed. That’s when it finally hit Max — he was fucked. Up till that point he’d been living the high life, in every sense of the word, blitzed from morning till night. He’d once been a highly successful businessman, then he’d had his nagging wife murdered by a psycho mick and things had gone south faster than you could shout
bust
. But rising if not from the ashes exactly, he’d re-invented himself as a dope dealer, and not only that, a goddamn
Scarface
. It didn’t last very long, though. He enlisted Kyle, a young hick from way down south, and to say the kid got, um, screwed is to put it very politely.
Throughout his more than colorful career, Max had been haunted, okay
plagued,
by an Irish-Greek woman named Angela, AKA heat on heels. She twice fucked up
his life and twice walked clean away. He blamed her for his current situation as he blamed her for all his fucking misfortunes. And yet, fuckit, he still got a hard-on when he thought about her. But, Jeez, a hard-on was one thing he did not wanna see right now, in this cage with Rufus.
Scared shitless, Max looked up to God, or at least toward the fucking ceiling, and asked, “Why me?” Yeah, he’d been found guilty of dealing and the judge had thrown the book at him, calling him a, what the fuck was the term? Oh, yeah, “a scourge of our society.” But Max didn’t think the judge had really, like,
meant
it. During the trial, etcetera, Max had been so out of it on dope, he’d thought he was some kind of rock star, waving to the crowds, and he expected to be found innocent. Yeah, they were some seriously good drugs. Finally out of the haze of the drugs, the booze gone from his system, Max realized he was actually
going to the freaking slammer
. He screamed at his lawyer, “Get me out of this, I don’t care what it costs!”
His lawyer had actually smiled, the bollix smiled! Yeah,
bollix
— Max’s speech was littered with Irish-isms from all the mad deranged micks he’d encountered the past couple of years.
The lawyer had said, “Maxie, you’re broke. You’ve got like zilch, nada.”
Max got the picture, but...
Maxie?
The fuck was with that?
Dios Mio
. See, he still had his flair for languages, even spoke spic after his time dealing dope to a crew of
Columbanos
.
His lawyer had said to him, “Keep your head down.”
He’d be keeping his head down all right, on Rufus, it seemed. He’d heard they ran a train through new fish and this was not a train you wanted to board, as it involved lots of guys and your ass.
The reality of the situation had sunk in when the verdict came down but, as he so often did, he’d managed to look at the bright side. Hey, what could you say, he was a positive thinker, an optimistic dude. Maybe this was a reflection of his spiritual training. Yeah, he was a Buddhist, knew how to get into himself, and knew how to not let the negativity of the physical world affect him. He’d asked himself, as he often did during times when his life went to shit, What would Gandhi do in a situation like this? He wouldn’t be panicking, that was for damn sure. He’d be getting off on it, acting like, Yeah, a harsh jail sentence, it was a bump in the road, they can beat me up but they can’t keep me down.