The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors

THE DARK END
OF THE STREET

New Stories of Sex and Crime
by Today's Top Authors

Edited by
Jonathan Santlofer
and S.J. Rozan

Illustrations by Jonathan Santlofer

New York     Berlin     London

To all the writers who jumped at the chance to cross the
Great Divide, and did it with brilliance, this book is
affectionately dedicated.

                                                   SJR & JS

CONTENTS

Introduction

S.J. ROZAN

S
EX, CRIME, AND
stories. They've all been with us from the start.

In the beginning was the Word. So says the Good Book, which goes on to tell us that as soon as God had the world pretty much in place, He created Adam and Eve, gave them a garden to live in, and laid down the law. Without missing a beat, they broke the law. And where did it get them, committing that first crime? What came of enjoying that apple?

What came of it was Knowledge: They realized they were naked.

And that naked was Evil.

They felt guilty and tried to cover up their crime by covering up their nakedness, God was not fooled and kicked them out of the Garden, and sex and crime have been skulking around hand in hand ever since. And writers have been chronicling them both.

When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea. Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime. Define each however you want, take any approach you like. What writer could resist? We were pretty sure the idea was hot, but we wanted more.

That dividing stream, it's a permeable boundary. It hosts much splashing and diving, some skinny-dipping, and a good deal of fording late at night. Writers rarely stick to their own “crime” or “literary” banks, and they don't check each other's visas when visiting. The unclimbable steep banks guarding those categories are inventions of reviewers and marketers. So we thought, let's bring them together. Let's get everyone horsing around in the pool at the center of the stream. We asked accomplished, high-octane writers from both shores, and it turned out we were right. Very few could resist the topic, or the chance to, for once, share the pool with each other.

The writers jumped on the idea, and they're at the top of their games. The stories they gave us range from creepily subtle to in-your-face, from darkly tragic to flat-out hilarious. The sex is here front and center, there barely whispered; the crime is sometimes obvious, other times imagined. What ties these stories together, besides the collection's theme, is their writers' clear joy: in the dual subject matters and in the nature of writing itself.

Stories, sex, and crime. Together, as always, and presented here for your pleasure.

Dragon's Breath

MADISON SMARTT BELL

A
JOURNALIST WAS
walking west when he happened to notice a young couple smoking cigarettes outside a bar. Nothing remarkable about it except that between them they framed a sign which declared
SMOKING BALCONY AVAILABLE,
3
RD FLOOR.
They both wore black leather, studded with chrome; their skinny shoulders hunched against the cold.

Was there a story, somehow, in that? The journalist sensed the faintest thread of irony, like a drop of blood unraveling through clear water. It was cold, bitter cold, the west wind blowing. He tightened the string of his sweatshirt hood, pulled the zip of his jacket tighter to his throat, walked on. Night had fallen; and denizens were hurrying in all directions homeward, their capped heads lowered to thrust into the cold. Neon signs all along the street drizzled pools of colored light on the damp pavement. Through these the pedestrians trailed dangling tendrils of their unknown narratives. The journalist felt his familiar urge to catch up one of them, reel it to him, follow it home. Learn it, know it. That was not all.

As blandly sanitized as this new avatar of the city seemed to him, to be there still awakened ancient cravings. Like the head of a hatchet, his life had briefly balanced on its thinnest edge. Soon it must topple, one way or another. The journalist circled the block, turning left, left, left, and paused at a deli to purchase a pack of Marlboro reds.

The couple had gone from the doorway when he returned, and the ground-floor bar was extremely crowded. A hostess gave him a thin smile from her stand; he gestured up the stairs with his numb fingers and she nodded. There was no one in the third-floor bar when he lumbered in, but presently a barmaid appeared and the journalist ordered a vodka on the rocks and waited, cradling the glass until his fingers thawed enough to catch the end of the fine gold ribbon that turned the corners of the box of cigarettes.

His cell phone wriggled against his ribs. He plucked it out, and with some fumbling found his way to a text message which let him know that the celebrity whose biography he had been supposed to ghostwrite had decided to go in another direction.

The journalist held the news at a little distance from him, surveying it with professional objectivity to see how it might harm him before he took it in. He had not expected to get any news until the next day and then he'd been confident the news would be good. Leaning forward, cupping the phone his palm below the level of the counter, he read a few labels on the bottles behind the bar: Absolut. Stolichnaya. Grey Goose. The bar stocked an exotic brand of rum he'd also noticed at the celebrity's studio, where no one offered him a taste. Instead they had sent out for coffee—whatever confection anyone wanted. The meeting had gone well, so it seemed to him, and he believed that he'd come only to confirm an understanding.

He lifted the dead phone to his face and said, “I didn't know there was another direction.” The barmaid looked at him with a faint curiosity. She was young, beautiful, maybe just young. A wave of belated comprehension broke over him so that he understood he must have been one of a number of ghosts auditioning and some other ghost had won the part.

The barmaid had turned from him, toward the mirror, where she studied the perfect red curve of her lip. The journalist picked up his glass, walked the length of the room, and let himself through a narrow glass door onto the advertised balcony. There were ashtrays chained to the posts of the canopy and several signs admonishing the customers not to let anything fall to the sidewalk below. The journalist smoked, tucking himself into a corner against the bitter wind, peering now and then through the glass to see that his shoulder bag and cell phone were still where he had left them at the bar. No one came in to threaten his possessions.

It had snowed earlier in the day, or the day before, and there was a crust of ice on the metal floor of the balcony. A buildup of snow on the underside of the fabric canopy now and then let a crystal drop. One tagged his scalp through his thinning hair, so he shrugged up his hood and moved aside. No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place, he thought. This recollection cheered him. In spite of it there was something voluptuous about smoking and drinking all at the same time. He had not smoked for a long while and he was a little dizzy when he stepped back into the warmth of the interior.

“Enjoy?” the barmaid said. The journalist nodded. His glasses had fogged, but she
was
beautiful. She looked at his empty glass and he nodded. She wore extravagantly high heels, like those the celebrity had worn. Perhaps he'd glanced at them, admired them once too often. Perhaps he'd overplayed his expertise. The thing of it was that he truly admired the celebrity, who was celebrated for better reasons than most. Well. He looked up and down the bar for a newspaper; there was none. Soon there would be none whatsoever, it was told.

Smiling, the barmaid handed him his drink. “You missed a call,” she said. A hubbub drifted up the stairs. The journalist wiped his glasses on his shirttail so he could see the phone's display when he picked it up. After some fumbling he found his way to the callback feature.

“Yo,” William said. “How's the city?”

“Safer than church,” said the journalist. “And duller than ditchwater.”

William laughed. “I mean like … really.”

Really. “Not like it was,” the journalist said.

“How's business?”

“Brilliant,” said the journalist. Don't bleed in the water.

“So,” William's voice grew faintly teasing. “You don't want to take a walk on the dark side.”

“The dark side is only the other side,” the journalist said. “We call it dark because it's the other. If we cross over to the dark side, when we look back it's the side we just left that looks dark.”

“All right, professor,” William said, and this time the journalist laughed with him. He had in fact been William's professor, once upon a distant time. Since then William had been through many changes, most recently managing a chic restaurant which had, not so long before, been sucked down in the widening whirlpool of economic disaster.

“So you wouldn't be interested.”

“I'm interested in everything,” the journalist said. “It's a matter of degree.”

“You remember Etheridge Elliot?”

The journalist patrolled a desert in his mind. “Hum me a few bars,” he said, and passed his glass up to the barmaid. It flashed on him before his drink was served.

“The Jamaican Jerk!” he said in a rush.

“You always used to harsh on him that way,” William said. “He's got a package.”

“A package,” the journalist said.

“Jesus, don't say it like that. We're on the phone.”

“Okay,” the journalist said slowly. “There's a story in here somewhere, but I don't know how I like it.”

“I'll call you back,” said William, and the journalist's phone went off.

The crush downstairs had squeezed three or four people up into the third-floor area and the barmaid was attending to them. Beautiful people, spending their substance. Bright contrails that they left behind … The journalist cast about for a newspaper again before he remembered there wouldn't be one. From either corner of the bar a flat-screen television flickered down at him. He wiped his glasses to read the crawl, then forced himself to look away. The phone was a warmish lump in his palm. He flipped it open, thinking he might call his agent to discuss other prospects but before he pressed send he inventoried what prospects he had and concluded it would be better not to discourage the agent by compelling her to discuss them. He handed the barmaid a credit card and waited, mildly conscious of his respiration, until the charge went through.

The phone rang as he hit the street—displaying a different number but still presenting William's voice, at roughly the same place in the conversation.

“I'm getting too old for this kind of—” The journalist interrupted himself as he flattened his body into a doorway, out of the biting wind. “Is it bigger than a bread box? Does it need airholes? Do I have to wipe it down for fingerprints? Do I need to taste it to be sure it's good?”

“Just bring it,” William said. “It's on Elliot if it's wrong, I guarantee you. We'll meet your train.”

Far Rockaway.
Far Rockaway!
the journalist had blurted into the phone, and William said,
So take a cab, you can afford it
, and the journalist killed the call, looked at his watch, leaned back in the doorway and watched the frosted feathers of his breath diffusing in the multicolored lights along the street.

At Forty-second Street he got the A train. The rush-hour scrum had already thinned enough that there was breathing room, and by the time the train had left Manhattan he had no trouble finding himself a seat. A wing of newsprint drifted across the floor, stirred by the scissoring legs of a descending passenger. The journalist leaned to catch it up, and glanced at the top headline:
TRY TO LIVE IN THIS TOWN ON
500
K.
Smirking in the shadow of his hood, he rolled the paper and slapped it on his knee.

Half drowsing as the train dragged from stop to stop through Brooklyn, he recalled the panhandler who'd accosted him that morning, when he'd set his satchel down for a moment on the sidewalk just outside Penn Station. The man had cadged a couple of dollars (the journalist gave up the money for luck), then described, apropos of nothing but with a peculiar shuddering relish, an event of fellatio he had once experienced. Was the story in exchange for the dollars? the journalist wondered—if so, he didn't think he wanted it. He took a couple of steps away, but the panhandler closed the distance softly, saying, “It's nicer to ask—I don't like to rob people.” Not until much later in the day had the journalist processed this statement as a threat; at the time he had not felt menaced in the least.

“You're a good man,” the panhandler said. “I see it in your eyes.” The journalist must have cocked an eyebrow above the aviator sunglasses he wore, for the panhandler then added, “I see your eyes around your glasses.”

The subway lurched around an underground bend and the journalist came half awake, for an instant unsure where he was—clinging to a rail of a truck or the strap of a bus rounding hairpins in the highlands of Rwanda, or maybe in the mountains of Jamaica where he had once gone to report on a two-hundred-year-old community of maroons. He opened his eyes completely: The vodka was draining out of his system, leaving behind it little claw marks of despair. He was riding an empty car, with only his reflection—leather jacket and face in shadow under the hood—accompanying him from the window across the way. The journalist checked his phone, his knife, his keys, the slack black bag on the seat beside him. He closed his eyes. Elliot would be expecting him, William had said, but most likely wouldn't call.

The Jamaican Jerk. He'd been a student at the same time as William, give or take, but Etheridge Elliot was unique in that little pond where he had floated to the surface, though south Florida and the whole Caribbean were choked with hustlers of his style. Elliot was a blithe and effortless liar, con to the marrow of his bones. He'd cut extraordinary swaths through the suburban white girls who populated that place, had smoked faculty and administration alike for an almost limitless series of free rides, but it was a rather small institution in the end and Elliot had worn through its possibilities before obtaining a degree.

Then put himself into the wind. The journalist was surprised, now, to find how clearly he remembered Elliot. In the years between he had used a good many such types as guides and drivers and informants, had become quite friendly with a couple, but trusted them only to his sorrow.

He came fully awake again as the train began to traverse Jamaica Bay. On the north shore, a jetliner lowered toward the tarmac; the journalist felt his belly tighten, then release when it safely touched down. A few years previous he'd been one of a pack rushing out to cover the plane that had flamed out and flown straight to the bottom of the dark water he was studying now. Or no, it was only the tail cone that had landed in the bay, while the rest of the plane slammed into shore to raze a dozen houses and kill all aboard: nine crew, 241 paying passengers, five lap children. The journalist remembered these statistics plainly. He had a convenient faculty for that sort of thing. Two hundred and fifty-five disparate tales hurled forward to the same rough jolt of an ending. He went on peering out the window into the water below the filament of track. There were glints reflected from chunks of ice floating in the chop raised by the wind. At the time of the Rockaway plane crash he'd been in the full-time employ of a journal now defunct.

It was not his reflection across from him after all, he realized, as the train rattled into the Sixty-seventh Street station, but another autonomous human being, yin to his yang, dressed in a similar scuffed leather jacket and black hoodie beneath, but with light-colored pants where the journalist's were dark, and blond Timberlands where the journalist wore a cheaper, knockoff brand of shoe. The other clung to him, tight as his shadow, as the journalist stepped onto the platform and moved toward the caged stairs that led down to the street. At the first landing an arm wrapped around his trunk from behind—reaching toward the front jacket pocket where the phone was (why not the wallet on the hip?). Half prepared for something like that, the journalist spun his shoulder into the other man, checking him into the wire of the cage.