Denver Noir

The Lake by Peter Heller

Sloan’s Lake

I live on a lake on the west side of Denver. Sloan’s. Three miles around with an island in the middle. I live in a small 1950s blond-brick ranch house whose walls are cracking because the water table is high and there is a stream running through my crawl space. But I wouldn’t trade it. I look out the window and I see grass, water, trees, mountains. The long escarpment of the Continental Divide. I’m really in the middle of a city but it doesn’t seem that way.

I am a novelist, with a lot of free time and not a ton of direction. I mean, I write. I drink coffee, and I spend a lot of my day outside. My debut thriller was a surprise best seller. I wrote it after I got fired from my job as editor of a national gym equipment trade magazine, where I’d been spending way too much time fantasizing about the ways I would kill the association’s communications director — a treadmill gone haywire was one of the most satisfying. Anyway, the book took off, but the three novels since have notched steadily diminishing sales. I am sensing that my publisher and I are about to part ways.

Kara is a pharmacist who works ten-hour shifts, so we try to see each other for coffee in the morning and at dinner.

I love where I live but here’s a confession: I have never really known what I was supposed to do in my life. Or whom I should listen to. Should I listen to myself? I always seemed to get in trouble that way. It seemed I could aim higher. God? How do you do it? I have tried praying, but I never get a clear message back. My wife? My friend Ted, who is a cop? Good compromises, but I noticed that when I listen to other people all the time, I begin to lose whatever sense of true north I still possess.

This not knowing is a little like tinnitus, a ringing in the ears that never ceases. I can still function and nobody knows I live with a constant drone, but... how clear and relaxed would life be without it? I discovered long ago that the best balm is to be outside and be physical. For a little while I forget.

What I do is: I carry my paddleboard across two hundred yards of grass and I launch where there is a gap in the willows and they have dug granite blocks into the bank and they make two high steps which are also great to sit on. I used to paddle in the evening. There are always a lot of birds — ducks and geese on the water, pelicans in summer, osprey hunting — but I got tired of the motorboats with wakeboarders kicking up waves and all the strollers on the bike path which follows the shore. Also there is a homeless couple under the pedestrian bridge at the lake’s outlet and sometimes they fight and yell. I have seen him strike her with a closed fist more than once, and seen her buckle and lie on the rocks sobbing. I called the cops twice. I saw an officer I recognized on the bike path later and he said she never talks, never testifies, always goes back to the man. Then I didn’t see her anymore.

I like it more quiet. So I started going in the morning. Motorheads tend to be partiers. They’re always blasting music as they tear by, and holding up plastic cups which I’d bet money are not filled with Hawaiian Punch, and so I imagine they are hungover a lot and they tend to sleep in. In the morning, except for the early dog walkers and joggers, I mostly have the lake to myself. Me, the muskrats carving their quiet wakes, the birds. I love it out there. As soon as I step on the paddleboard and am buoyant and free of the shore, all the normal, pedestrian laws of nature fall away and are replaced by a different rhythm, a different sense of gravity. And somehow I forget that I don’t know what I am supposed to do.

And I began to go earlier and earlier. Just at daybreak, when the sky is a crimson flush behind the Dickensian brick chimneys of the middle school; then I really am alone. There might be one or two runners. But if I go even earlier, in the dark, there is no one.

I walk across. Say it’s June. The dew on the grass wets my toes and I hear a night heron croaking on the shore and smell the sediment in the water. The water will be icy from the snowmelt in the tiny creek that flows under the pedestrian bridge at the west end, and as I get closer I can feel the chill. Most of the water in the lake, though, comes from a spring. That’s the legend. The legend is that this was farmland back in the 1800s and the farmer came out to dig a well and hit an artesian gusher and in a few days his cornfield was gone and he had a lake. Maybe it’s true. I like the idea. I like the idea that the lake bore herself into this world and that below the surface calm is a powerful animus of self-expression.

I push through the gap in the willow thicket and sit on the granite boulder. I let the short paddleboard rest on the ground beside me. The heron has ceased, but a redwing blackbird wheezes from a nest somewhere in the branches. No moon, good. Oh, there is one, a slender crescent hanging like a sinking boat over the jaws of the Divide, sallow and lost. Lights along the bike path on the other side of the lake, maybe a quarter mile across, but no movement. I can tell the water is very still and smooth because the ropes of light that extend across barely waver. The murmur of a duck, somewhere close. Are those shadows geese? Probably. They drift without sound. No pale shapes of the white pelicans that migrate here every summer to breed; they must be bedded down on the little island. I breathe. The lake breathes. It seems the wet silt and stone and algae at my feet, and the expanse of dark water, all exhale and I inhale them in. In this way we exchange breath. In this way I gain a little strength...

The only problem with going so early is that I miss Kara for our morning coffee. After a few days I got a note: I don’t know what’s gotten into you. All your spare time is on the damn lake! Miss you. XO. After a few more days she seemed angry when we met at night. She wouldn’t talk about it. I guess I was going out in the evenings too, and had missed a couple of dinners. She rolled away from me in bed when I tried to touch her.

Well, the lake is dependable. She always floats and rocks me, always has something new to say. If there is a wind before sunset and I paddle into it she sprays me happily as I hit each little whitecap. If there is a fog at dawn she embraces and covers me. Always.

Why is there fog? It was June, as I said. The nights were still cold but the water should have been colder. Makes no sense. But why would I ask? I love to get lost in it.

So that first morning of thick fog, I was alone at dawn, happily paddling blind. I felt disembodied in the mist as if I were paddling through outer space with no real up or down, and the fog parted a little before me, and on the glass of dark water there was a sudden suffusion, a glow, and then I clearly saw a man reclined, bearded, under... under a bridge. The picture pulsed once and was replaced by a figure, the same man, striking and striking a woman, until she buckled and fell. And then, like the shadow of a sudden cloud, the black water coalesced into kind of a cloak and blotted out the man.

I must not have been breathing then. I was shocked that a life might end with the toss of a cloak. That it should end. The image on the water looked exactly like the homeless man who slept under the bridge at the east end. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.

I am not a geologist. But I know that under a lot of this country lies a bedrock of limestone. That would explain a lot. Limestone tends to be full of water. Pockets, reservoirs, streams, rivers. It erodes easily and can be riddled with tunnels. And so the story of the farmer and his well makes sense. Also the Vanishing Point. What I call it. I noticed in my years living here — nine now — that in cold winters when the lake froze, there was almost always a spot clear of ice in front of my house. The size varied, but almost never got smaller than the area of a couple of tennis courts. Of course that’s where all the water birds congregated. The only open water for miles and it would be full of mergansers and shovelers, geese, canvasbacks, seagulls. My favorite are the green-winged teal. Who could have put all those colors together and made them sing? The burnished-cinnamon head with its swoop of emerald. Slate-gray sides with jaunty white shoulder stripe. Flash of jewel-green in the wing, yellow in the tail. Oh so elegant. Whenever I meet one I tell him that there has never been a thing more gorgeous and I swear he gets the gist.

The pair of bald eagles that winter here even have enough water to fish, and they plummet through the floating flocks and ignite an explosion of alarmed waterfowl. At first, I thought the opening in the ice was where the artesian spring welled up. But then, paddling my board on calm evenings when the sun dropped below the mountains and the lake glassed off, I noticed that twigs, lost fishing bobbers, errant soccer balls, tended to drift toward the spot and congregate like trash in the Pacific Gyre. If the spring flowed up here, I would think that flotsam would be gently pushed away. That’s when I decided that it was harder for ice to form because there was a subtle current drawing down — into some sort of limestone drain.

The lake was full of mysteries.

That morning after seeing the scene on the water, I dug the paddle in, pivoted the board, and paddled back toward the east end of the lake. I was in thick fog. But as I passed the hazard buoys that mark the rocks near the bridge, I was close enough to see the man sleeping. He lay curled on his side, with only the back of his head and thick mat of long hair outside his sleeping bag. He had been there for months. He had a little camp, a ten-tin kerosene stove, a rolling trash bin on wheels, a heap of clothing and tarps. I paddled in quietly, slowed, bumped a chunk of granite, hopped off, reached down for a rock the size of a softball, and bashed the back of the man’s head. He jerked, groaned, writhed, I swung again, harder, and he was still. Blood seeped onto the rocks.

Moving very fast, as if I’d done this a hundred times, I unbuckled a cam strap between two D rings on the front of my board and ran it through two rusted ten-pound barbell weights he had leaning against a cooler, and I tied them off. I set the weights on the back of the board, looped a clove hitch around the man’s neck, and dragged him into the water. I towed him out to the spot I figured had the Vanishing Point — I could tell where it was because there was a little island of floating trash — and I just shoved the weights off the end of the board with my paddle.

Down he went. I thought, What the hell, and paddled back to the bridge and used one of his old pots to wash down the rocks. Then I paddled home.

The next morning, I was out on the water even earlier, and wherever I paddled the lake trailed me with a faint wake of pulsing pink and blue. I am no hero. Definitely no hero. But I felt appreciated and... loved, I guess. I had done a good thing and gotten rid of a bad man.

Well. In the following days I watched for the body to resurface, because I hear they can do that, even with weight, but there was nothing. And so in the next months, as summer turned to fall — the autumn fog is the thickest, though darkness is the only cover I really need — I felt renewed, energized... purposeful. One cool morning in September I saw a man who came down at dawn some days to fish. He always brought his dog, a black Lab mix. I always waved at him but he never waved back. I got the sense he thought I was scaring his fish, how stupid. So that morning I was paddling easily by and I saw his dog grab a catfish out of the bucket and the man yelled and beat the poor thing without mercy. He used a stick. I will never forget the yelps of pain. And on the water, again, was this suffusion of light and moving shadows which flowed into the figure of a man striking a dog. It’s incredible to know what you are supposed to do. To know with certainty. To be told by this... this spirit of the lake. This angel, I guess.

It was early, it was foggy, so I landed up the shore, out of sight behind an outcrop of willows, and I beached the board on the rocks, picked one up, and snuck up behind the man and beaned him. Now I always carried rusted old barbell weights on the front of my board under my life vest. I got them at yard sales. I strapped them to his neck, as before, towed him out to the Vanishing Point, and sent him down.

And again, I felt completely at home with my world. How novel. I breathed in huge drafts of air that smelled like water, mineral and clean — and the air seemed to be the grateful, intimate outbreath of the lake. Inhale, exhale.

We weren’t often home at the same time, but when we were, Kara began to look at me with a wary expression, almost afraid, which stung. She started sleeping in the guest room. Angry, I guess, for my increasing absence. Sometimes I would catch her near me, nostrils flared, as if she were snagging a bad smell, and I realized it was me. She thought I was unappetizing, maybe disgusting. I tried to talk to her but I opened my mouth and had no words. I could feel myself wanting to weep. So I turned on my heels and went out the door... to you know where. Where I can fully breathe. Where I am always accepted with open arms.

One morning, Ted and I were having coffee on my porch and he said that there was a curious missing persons case in District One — which is here. He said they’d found a camp chair, a fishing rod, and a barking dog just across the lake, but no man. Curious. The man had a history of mental illness and so their best hunch was that he’d wandered off, maybe hitched a ride out of town.

“What happened to the dog?” I said.

“He got adopted by my corporal, Ricardo. A great dog. He loves fish, go figure.”

“Go figure.”

We watched mist curl on the water like smoke. “I don’t see the homeless guy under the bridge anymore,” I said. “The one who used to beat his partner.”

“Yeah, he left too. Probably moved down to the Platte. Good riddance.”

Good riddance.

“Got more coffee?” he said.

In October Kara left. She moved in with an old friend of mine.

I know we have been more and more distant lately, and that it was I, mostly, who stepped away. But damn it hurts. I can’t stop thinking about the two of them together. Imagining them in bed is bad — especially her straddling him, I don’t know why — but even more horrible is picturing them strolling down Tennyson with ice-cream cones, hand in hand, and the way she tilts her face up to his and looks so happy — it kills me. Sometimes it is so painful I don’t know how I will get through the next five minutes. I miss her terribly. The worn old song is surely true — you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. The What Ifs and If Onlys and Maybe Ifs circle so relentlessly in my head they have incised a groove I am afraid I shall never escape.

So I can’t sleep. Not a chance. So now I go out with the board at all times of night. Someone snipped the wire at the base of the streetlight on the bike path near my launch spot so if there is no moon it is very very dark. I wear black workout tights, a black nylon shirt, the board is navy blue so we are blended. Before I launch I sit on the granite block and breathe the scents which I know as intimately as any on earth. It calms me. I study the water. Body of water. Maybe there will be a faint spreading glow, a pulse almost like a heartbeat, and maybe in the flush there will be a moving image. I hope so. I pray so. I am listening hard, and I hear the scuffing cadence of footfall, a night runner who I’m guessing can’t sleep either.

Is the runner good or bad? I don’t know yet. Tonight one pulse of light will be enough.

No Gods by Amy Drayer

South Broadway

There are two bars in my neighborhood that aren’t terrible. Aren’t full of hipsters and liars, mostly lying to themselves but still not worth the goddamn words you’re wasting on them. I always walk to the bars, right up Broadway. If you can’t walk to the bar you shouldn’t go because you shouldn’t drive drunk. And if you’re at a bar and you’re not drunk, what the fuck are you doing? I mean, just what the fuck are you doing? I know what I’m doing and it’s not wasting my time in bars I haven’t been in before and driving around drunk. Jesus Christ.

Black Crown and BJ’s Carousel. One’s pretending to be new and going to die soon, and one’s old and dies next week. Even South Broadway is on the slate to get overrun by dog-loving craft beer drinkers, but you can still find pockets where you can get a good gay pour. But two bars, that’s where I go. Alternate nights. They’re both full of queens but they leave me alone. What the hell would they do with a drunk old lesbian?

In Denver there’s the Detour for lesbians, but I wouldn’t be caught dead there. Christ no. The only thing worse than all the queers in my bars are the dykes at the Detour. Washed-up assholes who think they’re tough, but what a bunch of pretenders. Used to be right on Colfax and ten years ago when I lived on Capitol Hill I’d drink there. I moved sometime around 9/11 and so did they. Now it’s to hell and gone all the way out on West Colfax. Shit. If I walked out there I’d be dead by morning.

Now as soon as I say this, of course, I get a call from Jackie. I’m sitting at home minding my own, but she’s all fired up about it being Friday night at the Detour because they’re going to have a draaag show. Not a drag show, but a draaag show, she says, because she’s excited. It’s kings, though, she says. Kings! What the fuck am I going to do with a woman dressed up like a man? Jesus Christ, now the baby dykes pretend to be men to get attention. I spend the best fifty years of my life trying to get it through our thick heads that men aren’t role models, and this is what it comes to.

But I never could do anything about Jackie. She’s a magpie and there’s always something sparkling somewhere. Used to be me, but Christ, that’s been a decade or more.

“Kings!” she proclaims. “Cheryl, you’ll love it. I know you will. They’re just so handsome. And they lip-sync, dance around, you know. The music is wonderful. Like drag queens—”

“What the fuck business do I have with any of it? And I assume the gestapo is still up our ass about smoking inside. Do these kings do their thing on the patio? No? Then fuck off.”

“I’ll give you a ride,” Jackie replies, because she doesn’t know how to listen. No one knows how to listen. “I don’t drink anymore, you know, but I’m just so excited for the show.”

“No. You don’t drink anymore, and you can’t stop telling me about it. Now you smoke that damn douche flute, and I can’t stand it. Why the hell do you want to suck strawberry weed out of a mini dildo? Jesus Christ, Jackie.”

“Well, you’re clearly drunk, but it’s no use arguing about it. Eat something and I’ll come by and pick you up in a couple hours. I want you to come, Cheryl. It’ll be fun.”

The Detour used to be fun. It used to be perfect. God, what a place. Full of women who knew what they were about and not even the bar was pretending to be something it wasn’t. It doesn’t take an expensive logo or a lot of light to drink whiskey, and a lesbian who’s drinking anything other than beer or whiskey should just piss off. Dark wood everywhere, neon too, of course. Casting a nice glow over things. You could see the pool tables and the bar and the door all at the same time. Drinks were cheap, food was cheap, you didn’t have to watch every goddamn word that came out of your mouth. New girls knew to sit down and shut up for a while and they didn’t get their panties in a bunch because you looked at them wrong.

They got gentrified out of the original spot, and now it’s West Colfax and drag kings and gray Formica tables and a drop ceiling in BFE. The neon feels like a communist hospital on a bad trip and the whole thing reminds me of drinking in the sales room of my greasy cousin Rick’s used-car lot in Greeley.

But I go on Friday because it’s Jackie. And then, who walks through the door of the Detour Friday night, but Lisa Ward. Can you believe I used to have a crush on that woman? God. I had the biggest crush on her. We’d lie around on the couches for hours at the Women to Women bookstore talking about how the world was going to be someday when we were — what? Liberated? What a crock of shit. We were kids. But she only ever had eyes for Sandy Rook, and they married, for Chrissake. Well, not really of course, that’s off-limits — thank Christ. Eleven years into the twenty-first-century AD with the walls coming down around us, but fuck if we let the gays marry. Yet those girls still put on the whole hetero show. Even fucking registered. Few years later, Sandy got cancer and died. And now Lisa’s with some other woman and it doesn’t take brains to see it’s not like it was, but lesbians are so damn codependent.

“Cheryl!” Lisa calls out. “Cheryl Russo. It’s been an age and a day at least. Wow, it’s good to see you. Let me buy you a drink. You here for the kings?”

Who the hell is this old broad? I ask myself. Lisa’s thick blond hair’s all silver and white now. She used to have the sharpest blue eyes like lasers, and I loved that. No bullshit in them. Now they’re watery and kind. Christ. Lisa Ward with old, kind eyes.

“I’m here because Jackie dragged me,” I reply. “And no thank you. I buy my own drinks. But if you want to talk, I’m outside.”

“You haven’t changed at all, Cheryl. Give me a minute. I’ll be out.” Lisa smiles at me. People are always smiling like they mean it. She’s got a mouthful of implants now, looks like. Wonder what happened. Her teeth were always good, and I suppose she knew it. White and straight as pickets and when she smiled it did get to you. But time’s a bastard.

Lisa sits down at my rickety table on the patio and launches right in, because would it have been too damn much to ask to just take each other in for a minute? It would, because people hate silence. Terrified of it, more than hate it, is more like.

She’s off to the races: “It’s so good to see you. So good. Do you remember, Cheryl...” I fade out when Lisa starts there — here we go down memory lane. The old queens do it too. “When we both worked in the movement? We thought we had the world by the tits, didn’t we? I’d just love to walk into Women to Women one more time.”

“Well.” I consider my Scotch and light a Lucky. “There were a hell of a lot more tits but it didn’t do a good goddamn. But I do miss it, Lisa-girl. All of us fired up like we were going to do something that mattered. I’ll give you a remember-when. Remember when equality was a four-letter word? We were talking about liberation! Never have to hear a minute of hand-wringing over ‘but what about the men.’ We cared about women back then. No one cares about women anymore.”

“I do.” Lisa looks back over her shoulder, through the propped-open patio door at the show about to start. Some baby dyke with an eyeliner mustache and glitter stars on her nips is roaming the crowd, warming it up and urging women to put dollars into sock-stuffed red Jockey briefs.

“Bullshit.” I slam my hand on the table and everything, everyone, jumps.

“Then here’s to bullshit.” Lisa holds up her glass and we’re toasting the goddamn Hindenburg.

We sit quietly for a minute. Finally. And in that moment we’re back in the bookstore together. Not just a bookstore, a women’s bookstore. I can feel what we felt then, the pull to freedom and each other. God, the struggle was glorious.

Lisa looks again to the shit show inside.

“You don’t have to stay out here.” I offer her a fucking way out. Just like always. “What is this, pity?”

“No, Cheryl. It’s an old friend wanting to catch up.”

“Then let’s catch up. You still with what’s-her-face?”

“Sandy? She passed eight years ago. Cancer—”

“No. Christ. I’m not dumb. That new one. The nice one.”

“Gloria? Yes.”

“You love her as much as Sandy?”

“We make each other happy.”

“That’s not what I asked.” I drill my finger into the table for emphasis. People are squirrelly as hell. “Do you love her as much as Sandy?”

Lisa considers me with those watery blue eyes. There’s flint way down, still. But no fire. “You know, Cheryl, you always had a way of seeing through the bullshit, the sexist propaganda. No one had the insight you did. But you always turned it on your own. I know you hated Sandy, but it didn’t make me love you.” She pauses and look out, someone’s got something profound to say. “I always wondered how you and Kathy ended up together. And more than that, why someone that good would stay with you. No one deserves to die that way, but at least she was free of you.”

“Well, I’m sure she and Sandy are fucking in the great beyond, so don’t feel too sorry for her.” Maybe I was wrong about that fire. Maybe I can forgive myself for wanting Lisa when lust didn’t feel like a waste of time.

“You really haven’t changed, have you?” she says.

I don’t take the bait this time and she wanders off. Christ. I told Jackie I didn’t want to come here, and can you see why, now? Goddamn that woman. Where is she? Probably clapping at some girl waving fake balls in her face. What happened to us? I mean, what the fuck happened to us?

That twit Taylor Swift is cranked all the way to twelve and it’s too goddamn much. I walk into the bar to call for a ride home. The airhead behind it only shrugs at me when the cab company says they’re booked two hours out. I have no goddamn idea how far it is from Sappho’s last stand here to my house, but even death is better than this circus. I turn toward the door and what do you know. Here comes Jackie out of the bathroom.

“Made room for more,” she jokes, and orders another Diet Coke. “I’ll buy your next one, Cheryl. Then we can go home.”

By the stage, the lesbians are losing their fucking minds over some asshole dressed up like a cop-stripper. One more time in case you missed that. A cop-stripper. A rapist and an opportunist. Like I said. Fifty years of my life and it’s come to this.

I want to talk about Faven. Jackie won’t listen to me talk about her. But now it’s gotten so I can’t not talk about her, even if it’s muttering to my goddamn self like an asshole while I’m walking down the street. People give me space when I talk to myself and that’s a real goddamn plus for the half an hour it takes to get to work. The library’s named after a woman, a real fireball. Sarah Decker got what she wanted out of this life and then some. Outlasted three husbands and I’m sure you can guess she really got going after she stopped giving the best of what she was to a man. We don’t think women ever did anything because no one bothers to tell us about it, but can you vote today even if your driver’s license has an F on it? You sure can, and you can thank her and the rest of the suffragists for it. Thank her for your national park and your local library too. The branch in Platt Park named after her does the woman some justice, at least. The place is wonderful, and I’ve never been unhappy a day of my life there. It’s not that assholes don’t use libraries, but at least they’ve picked up a damn book in their life. Now we lend out all kinds of crap that doesn’t belong in a library, but that’s progress. Shit, I’m up to my neck in progress.

The walk up Logan is nice. In spring, the eight blocks feel like you’re strolling through God’s vagina if the snow hasn’t snuffed out all the blossoms. I take my time on my way home in autumn and stop in Platt Park. Fall in the park, the grass is still green but smells dusty, it’s sunny and warm enough, and it feels like death’s always tomorrow but today’s just fine, thanks. I’ll sit on a picnic bench under the big rusty purple maple by the playground, all the kids screaming but it fits, and I’ll have a Lucky and think, it’s all going to die in a couple weeks, but now — now, where no one wants anything from me and I can pretend women aren’t getting beaten to shit in houses all across the city — now is good. Now is good.

Half an hour walk and I’m shelving books and talking to people who want to learn things. Best is when they bring their kids. We don’t have a big section like they do in some of the other branches, but I always manage to find the right something for the kids. Last year I fell in love, I mean absolutely in love, with this eight-year-old girl who came in with her mother all the time. Her dark-brown eyes were just light itself. She always wore pants with a dress over, her mom insisted she wear a dress but Faven knew what was up, I’m telling you. Eight and you could see in this girl’s eyes she’s going to light shit on fire and kick ass and take names and not swallow a second of the shit our culture feeds us.

“Excuse me, miss. Do you have any books about gardening?” This was Faven’s first question to me, and she asked it boldly. Not hiding in her mother’s skirts, not mumbling or vague. Brass set on her out of the gate!

“I do. Where are you planting this garden?”

“Eritrea. My big brother farms there and I want to do what he does.”

“I see. I think.” I cast her a friendly sidelong glance, just to test her out and see if she’d pay off down the line. She held that glance and I knew we were in business. “Just what are you planning to grow in your garden?”

She replies quick and smart as a whip: “Mama says Jemal grows wheat, so I want to grow wheat.”

“All right then, that clears it right up. Follow me.”

I’m not sure if her mother, Mariam’s her name I learned later, expected me to take the kid at face value. She’s a good woman is how I ended up figuring her after a while, but honest to God, I think the kid intimidated her, because she sure as shit intimidated me. If you’ve ever had a little girl intimidate you and not punished her for it, I wouldn’t mind knowing you.

Faven followed me that afternoon, and most afternoons that summer. Mariam worked out at the Purina plant, so it was either the library or at home with her father who slept days and worked nights. Faven seemed to greatly prefer the library, though she was always much quieter when she arrived than when she left. Books brought her out of her shell, opened her world. I remembered why I started working at a damn library in the first place. I actually didn’t mind the helpful shadow who gave me regular crop reports.

Over the summer when she wasn’t pestering me, Faven managed to grow a healthy swath of stalks. Mariam bent my ear about it for twenty minutes when the crop hit waist high. She said Faven would hide in the middle of the little patch for hours and read, even after it was dark — she’d go out after dinner, and get this, Mariam says, she even asked if she could sleep out there instead of in the house. Got downright mad about it one night, apparently. Started crying and pitching a bitch, which didn’t sound like the kid at all.

I asked her about sleeping outside right before she went back to school. She shrugged and said she just liked it out there. I asked her if it was getting a little cool. She said yes and then asked me to be quiet so she could read. I respected the hell out of that and fucked off. Kept my eye on her, though, and she did give me a little grin and wave before Mariam picked her up. That was the last we spoke of her little Children of the Corn act and I wish to hell it hadn’t been.

Like I said, I walk home through Platt Park in autumn. Sit under the falling leaves and have a Lucky. Sunny days the sharp, cool wind slips over your skin with a sweet little kiss. When it’s cloudy and smells like Greeley, the wind is ominous. It’s going to bring snow and cold, and dark. Some cloudy day in late October I’m doing my thing after work, thinking about what I’m going to put in the pan for dinner. Faven leaves the swing she’s been sitting on just kicking dirt, walks over, and sits opposite me on the bench.

“Hey, Faven. How you doing today?”

“Miss Cheryl, I have to apologize to you.” Faven doesn’t look at me, she’s looking at the ground and fidgeting with the hem of her dress over the top of blown-out knees in her jeans.

“What in the world for, sweetheart?”

“I promised to weave you a tree of life with the wheat I grew.”

“And you haven’t?”

“No.”

“Honey, that’s okay, but do you want to tell me why not?” Now don’t think I’m an asshole, I wasn’t asking to make it worse for her. Jesus — she seemed repentant enough. She still hadn’t even looked at me. But she came over to talk, and when a girl like that gives you her time, it means something.

“Well,” she replied, “I wanted to.” More hem-fraying.

“Did you get busy with school?”

“No. I wanted to make it for you, but then I didn’t want to anymore.”

“Have I done something wrong, Faven?” You ever disappoint a kid? Shit, for your sake I hope not.

“No, ma’am.”

“You just stopped wanting to make something for me, or make something at all?”

“I don’t really want to make stuff anymore. At all.” She pulled the string on the hem long enough to fly a kite. Didn’t seem at all worried that her mom might not be thrilled about it. Didn’t seem to care about much at all, as far as I could tell. The light had gone out. I’d seen that happen before to plenty of women, married women who stayed married because what was the alternative? Never thought I’d have to see it with a young girl, but who was I fucking kidding?

“Did someone else do something wrong?” I narrowed my eyes and stared hard at the top of her bent head. Four symmetrical poofs with twin blue balls on each of the ties held her sweet black hair tightly in place. Perfect for playground shenanigans, but bright colors were all wrong in the bite of the October wind as the clouds’ mean gray raced overhead.

“I started to weave your tree. But then my father said it looked nice. And he asked if I would make one for him when I finished yours, and it would be a special gift.”

“Ah.” I took a big old hit on that Lucky and tried to talk myself out of the truth. But you can’t talk yourself out of what men do to us. This girl sure as shit never would. “And so you didn’t want to even finish the one you started for me.”

Finally, I got a look. Christ, I wish I hadn’t. I wish she’d never looked up at me that way, with those dull, dark eyes. But she did. Faven looked right at me for the last time. She and Mariam don’t come to the library anymore. It’s been almost eight months since I made that call to Colorado Human Services and I still haven’t seen those dark bright eyes, except sometimes at night if I’m dumb enough to try to sleep sober. Suppose I ought to give up wanting to see that girl again, but I don’t know if I can. God, I’m sick of this world.

A hundred and one out and it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the last night of the world for BJ’s Carousel, all for this. “Get your BJ’s now or never!” Corky shouts from the end of the bar for the fifth fucking time in the past hour.

He’s shitfaced, but to be fair, so is everyone else. Ten sheets to the wind and the sun is just setting now on this great and glorious July night. Goddamn, I’ll miss the place when it closes. Just goes to show, you can miss a headache if you have one long enough.

Known him thirty years and never had a problem with Corky. He’s pocket-sized and harmless. Hell, to be honest, he’s a good guy. I thought for sure AIDS would get him in the eighties, but for all the screwing he was doing, the little bastard was far too busy raising money to die. Spared by the gay gods for all his offerings to the drag alter. Shit, his Sophia Petrillo alone was enough to guarantee immortality if God even exists. Which He does, I’m sure, that sadistic patriarch.

Men, including God, are terrified you’ll laugh at them. But bless those heathen queens, those boys sure aren’t. They use laughter like a vaccine and use mean like a surgical knife and it’s fucking good medicine for all of us. I laughed at Corky enough through the years to make up for a lot of the it’s-just-a-joke white boys we choke down every day.

“Cheryl!” Corky’s finally done staring at the boys. He gives a gay little wave and shouts over Martha Wash. Why are bars so fucking loud? Oh — right. So you can’t hear yourself think. He sashays over, takes my hand, and does a little twirl. “You heard the lady! Everybody dance now!” He’d worshipped Wash since the Sylvester days and lost his goddamn mind when she came to Denver Pridefest. Pale little bitch even worked his way backstage at Civic Center Park for a picture. Don’t know who he blew for that delight and I don’t want to.

“Corky, you asshole.” I wave my cigarette at him like a flyswatter. I’ll smoke if I damn well please. What are they going to do — shut down the place down? “You put on my song, we’ll dance.” Why the hell not? I’ll dance with a nice boy any day and BJ’s deserves a proper send-off.

“Why the hell not!” He sashays away. I don’t know what he’s going to have to do to the deejay, but again, I’d rather not know. Men have their own currency and shit am I glad to be fucking poor. Still, I’ll miss this place. I will. Bob’s owned it since day one, what, forty years ago? Through the good and the bad and the really bad, and he’s done a lot for us. I respect that. I went to John’s funeral with him in nineteen eighty-something when all the lovers were grieving. We all did, even Corky. It was Corky’s last funeral, he couldn’t take any more after that. AIDS was just hitting too many boys to keep up with, and I watched it kill even the ones who didn’t die from it. I guess freedom comes at a price.

Well, fuck. Corky did it. ABBA starts up and four G-and-Ts in, I can’t resist just one turn around the floor. The most action I’ve had in ten years at least. Jackie keeps promising to set me up, but God — I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of the butches she messes around with. If I want to screw a man, I’ll screw a man, thank you very much.

“You seeing anyone, Cheryl?” Corky looks up at me and winks. He knows I’m not, but he just loves to rub it in.

“Yeah, fucker — your mom.”

I laugh, he laughs, and there we are — two dancing queens twirling on the deck of the Titanic.

“You and Jackie still on the outs?” he asks.

“In and out since nineteen ninety. But it’s fine. Shit. She came around last night for dinner and had the gall to ask me if I’d made a will yet! I told her what she could do with my dead body. I don’t give two fucks about any of the rest of it. She says she’s done with me, but I don’t believe it.”

Jackie is too scared and too dumb to ever really leave me. And I don’t have to tell you how that feels. ABBA stops and so does the fun. I shove through sweaty men to get back to my stool and of course some tanned, twinky otter has slipped onto it.

“Clear out, pretty boy.” I reach over him to grab my drink and my Luckys and he smirks at me.

“Anything for you, beautiful.” That smirk. That one the white boys use like a billboard advertising their fucking God-given right to make you eat shit.

“You goddamn asshole.” I put my finger right in his face. “Just because your frat kicked you out for being a fag doesn’t give you the right to talk to me that way. This is my bar. You think I’m going to let you talk to me that way in my bar?”

“It’s nobody’s bar anymore, bitch.” He snickers and turns his shit-eating grin at his pretty friends to make sure they’re all in on the joke.

“Now, honey.” Corky flags the bartender and points at Goofus the pretty hairless boy wonder. “Let’s just all be quiet and drink. Everyone gets a round on me. Same with you, Cheryl. Nobody’s fighting tonight.”

“Shit.” I light a Lucky and sit on the warm stool. “Not enough gin in the world, Corky.”

“No, there isn’t. But we can pretend.” His tiny blue eyes twinkle as he gazes over my shoulder around the bar. The man’s been tossed into paddy wagons, watched half his friends die, fucked dozens of boys he doesn’t love, become old and invisible to the community he’s given everything to, and yet here he is, eyes twinkling. What an asshole.

“Just what did you tell Jackie she could do with your dead body, Cheryl?” he asks, and there’s that damn twinkle. What the fuck is so funny about death?

“Shove it up her ass. And just what’s your plan, Corky?”

“I don’t know what the good Lord’s got in store for my body, but I know what I’m doing with my soul. Tonight. This is it.”

“What?” I tilt my head.

He reaches into his shorts and holds up a small, clear bottle full of what could be vodka but certainly isn’t. “Best shit you’ll ever have. You want to come with me?”

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?” I set down my drink and take his out of his hand and set that down too. “Just what the fuck are you talking about?”

“This is it. Look around you, Cheryl.” He waves a fey hand at the sea of silver-haired men milling around in tight leather and jeans, half of them bare-chested with man-tits starting to sag. Among them are peppered dark and blond heads trolling for free drinks or trading sex for the drug du jour. “This is the ghost of Christmas future showing us the way it’s going to be, and honey, I’m not here for it. I have just loved this ride. Loved it even when I hated it. Loved it even when I got the clap from the love of my life. So tonight’s my wake, baby. Could be yours too!” He shakes his drink at me and finishes it, flags for another.

“You selfish, cowardly son of a bitch.”

He shrugs and pockets the vial. “Suit yourself. But I’m going out on a high.”

Well, that fixes it for the night. How the hell am I supposed to properly send off BJ’s when all I can think about is Corky’s dead body—

“Hey, you little twit.” I grab his arm before he can saunter off. “Where exactly are you going to carry out this ridiculous plan?”

“Center stage, baby, just like Ms. Wash. Civic Center Park. I’m leaving now and gracing every gay bar on Broadway with my presence on the way up. Last cocktail I’ll ever have at eleven, a little more of this and that,” he pats his pocket, “and I should be gone by the stroke of midnight. They say alcohol helps it along, so who knows. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?” He winks at me again.

“Stop winking, asshole, and just let me think. Good God.”

He doesn’t wink, but he does grin. “You believe in God, Cheryl? I do. Haven’t set foot in a Baptist church since nineteen seventy-five but Mama didn’t raise me to blaspheme. I can’t wait to meet my maker and party in heaven. Hell, I bet the drinks are free and the boys are clean!”

“You think your mama’s waiting for you up there, just sitting on a damn cloud knitting a scarf? You’re dumber than you look.”

“I don’t know about that. But don’t you want to see Kathy again?”

“Now don’t you dare bring her into this.” Like I hadn’t thought about Kathy the minute that man started talking about this nonsense. She’d been the only one I let stay with me, so she was the only woman who’d ever really left me, even if she didn’t have a choice about it. Missing Kathy made me want to believe in Sky Daddy big time. I slapped my face before things got out of hand.

“That’s just the thing though, isn’t it?” he continues. “I miss them all, girl. I miss them all. But I miss who I used to be most of all.”

Only a dumbass would argue with that. I thought about Kathy. Who she used to be, and the drunk khaki-coated Delta Tau Delta boy who ran her down, probably after he raped some girl. I thought about Jackie, whose husband beat her until she gave up men forever and stole part of her she’s never gotten back.

Most of all, sitting on that barstool, I thought about Faven, who never even got a fucking chance to be who she really was in the first place. How she laughed and ran through the stacks all summer and then stopped in the autumn. I thought about all the broken women of the world and who I had been before I’d opened my eyes and given myself a front-row seat to their pain.

“Corky, I take it back. You’re not a coward. You’re an asshole and you’re selfish, but you’re sure as shit not a coward.”

“Well, thank you, darlin’. It wasn’t my place to ask you to do it too. I’m ready to go, just not alone. Hold an old man’s hand one more time?”

He offers his limp wrist and what can I do. What can I do? I take it. Smash out my cig, finish my drink, and we sashay together through mourning revelers, out into the hot summer night just coming to life on Broadway.

Junk Feed by Mark Stevens

Glendale

Katy Cutler’s neatly trimmed right eyebrow arched like the top curve on a question mark.

“When I imagine private investigators, I picture them on long stakeouts, sitting in their cars eating greasy sandwiches out of paper bags. So perhaps you never—”

“That’s kind of a movie-type cliché.” Wayne Furlong swallowed hard. He hoped she didn’t press the question. “Trope, I guess. Never quite sure of the difference.”

“The point is, we can’t afford to let this linger,” said Cutler. “The only ones who want to book a room in the hotel are the podcasters and amateur snoopers who treat murder cases like a ghoulish hobby. The wannabe investigators. The pseudo journalists. The sickos. Business is bad enough. The pandemic, of course, whipped our ass.”

“And most restaurants.”

Cutler, the general manager for the hotel and its embedded restaurant, shook her head in a sad combination of disgust and dismay. It had been two years since the pandemic put the economy on ice and one year since the return to “normal” began, albeit at a lethargic pace. “We started off even worse. Right before 2020, we got clobbered by a bad review. Vicious. And then all the others piled on too. Like jackals on a dead antelope.”

“I’m more than willing to look into it, but—”

“But what?”

Cutler slumped against the leather of the high-backed booth inside Tang. The sensational murder had played out fourteen floors above, in the steel-and-glass obelisk hotel known as The Grange. Tang’s brutal critique had been delivered by restaurant blogger Timothy Powers. For two decades, Powers had served as a scourge to fine dining establishments across Metro Denver, with the occasional whack at swank pompous eateries in mountain villages too. Powers was a nom de food. When the newspaper industry shrank like a boiled chicken, Powers agreed to a buyout and took up work as a PI with his given name, Wayne Furlong. But Timothy Powers never stopped writing restaurant reviews. It was his gift to the universe. One well-protected anonymous blog page. One Instagram account with 45,000 followers. To Furlong/Powers, saving the masses from overpriced and artless cuisine was as important as helping wives nail cheating husbands or, every now and then, assisting in a murder case.

In fact, Furlong/Powers at that moment was sitting in the same booth where he had dined during one of three visits he made to confirm the fact that Tang was tasteless.

“But I’m not terribly optimistic about finding something, given all the scrutiny to date.” If Cutler had video surveillance of her austere dining room, as inviting as a Turkish prison, she could have spotted Furlong’s sizable frame on repeat visits and noticed that he had sent main courses back on the first two occasions and quietly shoved the contents of meal number three into a paper bag for further postmortem of the crisis-level mélange back in his modest home kitchen. Except Cutler would have to see through a few disguises to spot the repeat customer. Thick glasses. A change of clothes. A hat. Etcetera.

“Glendale police,” said Furlong. “They brought in Denver police too. And the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. And all the reporters who—”

“Reporters.” Cutler hissed it. She sat back up. “Leaches. Nosy fuckers.”

“Well, I—”

“You can’t really think a reporter can solve a crime like this, do you?”

“Not necessarily, but asking the right questions—”

“Oh, please,” said Cutler. “That’s like a mystery writer’s wet dream.”

At fifty-two, Katy Cutler was feisty. Furlong liked her edge. But, like the food at Tang, she was overly complex. Too many bracelets on one wrist, a tattoo of a fork on the other. Severely tweezed eyebrows. Chunky mascara. One thin gold necklace weighed down by a heart-shaped emerald stone that rested on her bony sternum and dared anyone to ponder the plunge in her neckline. When she had greeted him at first, the word stork popped into his head, given her height and angularity. She had a birdlike manner of shifting her head around, looking at him from different angles.

“Whether a reporter or a PI,” said Furlong, “it seems to me that all the questions have been asked. Asked and answered, as the lawyers say. Someone is lying. Goes without saying, even though I just did.”

Furlong caught a whiff of bleachy cleanser, not one of his favorite restaurant aromas. He glanced down at the white tablecloth and noticed a faint purple smear where a blueberry had once lost its life. Tang had just opened for lunch, yet an elderly couple in a booth across the way were turning to statues while waiting for a server to greet them. Not much had changed, despite the Powers savage review, which had been titled “Junk Feed: Tang Flat.”

“Podcasts too,” said Furlong. “One seven-part series already. I mean, going to the trouble of hiring actors.”

“And another producer came sniffing around last week.” Cutler shook her head, turned her mouth down in disgust, as if she had just had a bite of Tang’s indigestible matelote, with its chewy eel. “We politely told them to take their microphone and go, well, interview themselves. Though interview might have been a different verb.”

“Noted.” Furlong smiled. “It’s been seven or eight months of relative quiet in the media, especially once they got that first-year-anniversary story out of the way. Why now?”

“I want you to find the killer. That’s all.”

“What’s your theory?”

“The only one that makes sense.”

“The only one that makes sense,” said Furlong, “except for the superb alibi?”

“That one,” said Cutler. “Tyler Hyde. Golden boy. Ken Doll of the spreadsheets, I called him. Right? Nothing else makes sense, yet of course we are bound to look elsewhere. Right? If we want closure.”

“Bit of an elusive concept,” said Furlong. “Don’t you think?”

Cutler gave it some thought. “Not so sure. This is a whole different animal.”

This involved three facts that added juicy bits to the story. One, decapitation. Two, rugby. Three, that the murder happened in the enclave of Glendale — a hole the size of one M&M candy in the fat gooey donut of Denver. Glendale was home to 5,000 residents. Denver proper, 750,000. Metro Denver, an ever-burgeoning 2.8 million.

In the early 1950s, Glendale leaders had fought and won the right to prevent being annexed by the expanding state capital. As a result, over the ensuing decades, Glendale ran with a special flair. Two strip clubs. When pot was legalized, they stayed open until midnight. Apartments galore. A singles-ish vibe. And self-proclaimed RugbyTown USA, given the fact that in the early 2000s, the city built a stadium and athletic facility devoted to the niche sport.

The city, more recently, had hired Billy Duncan as a marketing guru. His specialty was sponsorships, particularly naming rights for the stadium and corporate branding for athletic gear and stadium advertising. Duncan was murdered on his ninth extended stay at the fourteen-story Grange Hotel. He was in the process of moving from San Francisco but appeared to be in no rush to do so. Duncan’s partying lifestyle seemed like a one-man campaign to keep the Glendale economy afloat. He was a frequent visitor at both strip clubs, had managed to bed several women from each of the two spots, spent piles of cash at restaurants all over the tiny burg, and developed a carousing lifestyle with a growing circle of male friends including a few rugby players who were also known for their partying ways, all of it well-documented on Instagram. Want to party? Find Billy Duncan. Bring money.

By day, however, he was a hard-nosed shark. He delivered professional and well-prepared reports in public and private meetings with the city. He did his job. City leadership was thrilled — and were equally entertained by his wild-side exploits.

Using software that searched for irregularities, Duncan found something fishy with city revenues. The stadium complex included an extensive event and conference center, with a variety of options for large and small occasions. It was also home to a sports center that drew hundreds of workout warriors every week to a gleaming gym and a smorgasbord of classes from Zumba to yoga to indoor cycling. Duncan, unsure of where the problem was located, or how high up the organizational chart, had quietly brought his evidence and suspicions to the district attorney for Arapahoe County, Glendale’s governmental mother ship. Party boy by night, straight-arrow businessman by day.

The problems seemed to point to the person in charge of city finance, a man named Tyler Hyde. Single. Blond. Trim. And the opposite of Billy Duncan — a quiet bureaucrat. The allegations of financial irregularities, however, depended on an algorithm that analyzed actual income versus projected revenues. There were no hard facts. Then, Duncan’s grisly demise. Yet on the night of the murder, Hyde was in a long meeting online and had the recording to prove it.

The upside of cracking the Billy Duncan case was obvious — helping solve a nasty murder and improving Wayne Furlong’s reputation as a PI. The downside would mean giving Tang another chance to foist mediocre food on the masses. Sure, a murderer might go free. But how to balance one bloody night with years and years of overpriced, crummy grub?

“Katy Cutler thinks what?”

The head of hotel security for the Grange Hotel was Ed Bostrom, retired Glendale cop. Furlong found him in his inner sanctum of security camera monitors and a console of beeping electronics in a sweaty room behind the registration desk. Crew cut. Square head. Girth like salad wasn’t a thing.

“Same case, same questions,” said Furlong.

“So you want a guided tour?”

“I gather one needs an escort, so, yes.”

Bostrom made a show out of studying the watch on his hairy wrist. “I guess I can spare eight minutes, and that includes riding the world’s slowest elevator.” He was right about that — the lethargic lift worked as if it were underpaid and underappreciated.

“This elevator?” said Furlong.

“Three shafts, three elevators,” said Bostrom. “But he likely waited to be on this one — closest to the security camera in the hall on the penthouse level. Fourteenth floor. One step out and he whacks the camera with a heavy club or something and it spins around enough to give us a good steady shot of the wallpaper.”

“And nothing useful from the brief second he steps out of the elevator.”

“A hoodie and a neck gaiter took care of that,” said Bostrom. “There’s a nose you can see for point-three seconds in the video and they tried some facial recognition software, but really? One nose?”

“Nobody got on or off with him?”

“If they did, they don’t remember. He can pull the gaiter up and the hoodie over at the last stop too, of course.”

“Wasn’t it unusual for Duncan to be in his hotel? At night?”

“No,” said Bostrom. “His night of carousing had not yet begun.”

“And man in hoodie is never seen again.”

“No.”

The Grange Hotel, a dark monolith on the east side of Colorado Boulevard, was built as a high-end joint. Rooms starting at $350. Suites starting at $850. Still, the space around the elevators was bland and generic.

Many of the newspaper stories had come with maps. And dotted lines. Elevator. Room. Stairs. Dumpster where head was found — three blocks away.

Furlong remained a step behind Bostrom. While Furlong had trimmed down from his top weight during the go-go foodie days at the newspaper, it was rare to feel outsized. Despite the plush hall carpeting, Bostrom plodded with a certain thunder.

“One bone saw?” said Furlong. “Not much to carry. Or hide.”

“And something for a garrote,” said Bostrom. “Coroner thinks garrote and then he cut right on that same line. Of course, the sawing eliminated evidence of the garrote. You know. Win-win, I suppose.”

“Serious hatred,” said Furlong.

Bostrom said nothing.

Unlocking the door to Duncan’s suite, room 1400, required two of Bostrom’s keys. The room was a sea of white. A wall of windows took in the panorama of the Colorado Front Range, all coated with a fresh blanket of white snow. At the forefront, Glendale looked like it had been dunked in crème anglaise.

“Jesus,” said Furlong.

“Twelve-fifty a night,” said Bostrom. “Cutler has talked about a remodel — turning this into three rooms or gutting it and putting in another restaurant.”

The horror...

“She wanted to call this one Tin. Tin and Tang.” Bostrom grimaced. “Get it?”

“Unfortunately.” Furlong took in the sunken living room, a kitchen worthy of a modest mansion, and doors that opened to three separate bedrooms. “New?”

“New everything.” Bostrom was making a circuit of the interior, as if to make sure nobody was hiding. “There was no passing the stains off as abstract designs.” He stopped at the sound of muffled voices outside the door. “Jesus H.”

Furlong shrugged a question.

Bostrom pulled the door open with a furious yank. In the hall, framed by the doorway, stood a small Asian woman wearing a giant set of black headphones. She held a thick fuzzy stick. The stick was pointed up at the mouth of a tallish slender man who, based on his pale pallor and nonfashion of chocolate corduroys and olive sweater, looked like he spent most of his time in a dark basement.

“Who the hell are you?” said Bostrom.

The Asian woman beamed. “You’re Ed Bostrom — hi,” she said. “Amy Ito with ‘Criming America.’”

Furlong winced at the irresponsible verbification.

“The podcast?” said Ito. She shifted the microphone around so it practically tickled Bostrom’s chin. “We tried to book an interview with you...”

Basement Boy looked wide-eyed, a bit terrified.

“Turn that fucking thing off,” said Bostrom.

“I was interviewing Tim McAvoy here about his theory that the murder of Billy Duncan was a conspiracy,” explained Ito. “That there had to be several people involved. Given, you know, all the things that had to go right to pull off such a messy murder, without someone seeing something. Up here.”

“Get the fuck out—”

“We have probability experts who have analyzed the likelihood of a single individual being able to execute all the steps needed, and this is an individual who says—”

“If you don’t head right back down to the elevators, I’m going to put my hands on both of you—”

“He said he saw one of them carrying a duffel bag and it appeared to be wet. Dripping.”

Furlong smiled to himself. All the true crime podcasts had trained a national army of amateur murder investigators. On the one hand, it was a wonder that any crime went unsolved. On the other, the mushrooming breed of pseudo news promoted the idea that with every story there could be a cover-up, an alternate version of reality, or a secret cabal behind the scenes. In this world of dueling microphones, where every opinion was given equal weight, claims were treated like facts. Rumors were crossbred with gossip. Innuendo mated with supposition and produced an illegitimate baby of flapdoodle that only needed a few believers to keep it well fed and nourished until it could stand on its own two feet. And never die.

“And you’re only coming forward now?” said Furlong to McAvoy.

“Well — I saw the article online about ‘Criming America’ recreating the whole investigation and—”

“And you thought you’d make some shit up to get famous.” Bostrom grabbed the top of Ito’s long gray sword of fake fourth estate. He squeezed the tip like a sponge. Ito’s mouth dropped open in shock. Bostrom put his other hand on the bottom of the shaft and yanked. The microphone cord came free from the recorder that was strapped to Ito’s chest like an explosive device.

“You will pay for any damages,” said Ito.

Bostrom bent the microphone with two fists. “And you’ll pay the fine for trespassing when I haul your nosy ass to court for coming up here where you fucking don’t belong.”

Outside, after escorting the still-complaining Ito to her Subaru, Bostrom lit a cigarette.

“She probably paid that shifty kid a few hundred bucks to make some shit up.”

“The case of the dripping duffel,” said Furlong, playing along.

One thing Furlong knew was to challenge every assumption, to come at it like a chef testing every ingredient, right down to the quality of the peppercorns. He treated himself to a roasted chicken banh mi at a hideaway joint on East Alameda. This was Furlong’s third visit — a month between stops to verify consistent quality over time — and the Timothy Powers side of his brain started to stir at the first bite of the delectable sandwich. But something was off. The tender chunks of meat were slathered with a garlic sauce that nicely complemented the crunchy crisp cucumber and fresh blast of cilantro. Yet the pickled carrots and daikon, what should be the soulful center of flavor for each bite, was humdrum. There was no kick. No sparkle.

Furlong checked his notes, glanced at the pass-through serving hatch into the kitchen, and realized that a serene older Vietnamese chef from his last visit was missing. In his place, a young, roly-poly white guy who was studying his phone between orders. Furlong made his way to the restroom, always another point of information for Powers’s reviews, and peeked in the kitchen.

“Where’s Mai Pham?” he said.

The kid looked up. “Made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” And laughed. On the counter stood a giant glass jar of pickled vegetables. The jar’s label screamed its mass-produced provenance.

Furlong drove his Mini Cooper to Enterprise — his shared office space in the uber-hip RiNo neighborhood near downtown. The middling banh mi and the impostor ingredients had planted a seed.

Enterprise gave him a veneer of official status. Furlong was treated like a father figure by the start-up whiz-bang tattooed gang that came and went at all hours of the day and night. For this bunch, it was working on your future IPOs by day and guzzling IPAs by night. Furlong’s age made him a quaint anachronism. His restaurant tips, however, were golden. He had suggestions for all taste buds and expense levels. He’d developed a few relationships with the tech-savvy youth, which had come in handy on more than one occasion.

“Gather is just like Zoom, right?” said Furlong.

“With a few differences — including the fact that the dashboard is a snap. Any grandma can figure it out. Zoom got complicated.”

Brie Chambers was part of a team that was developing an app that had something to do with bitcoin. Furlong’s head hurt just trying to understand the basic concept. Chambers had short blond hair streaked with bright tangerine. She had a generous sunbeam smile and a tall, athletic presence. Her graceful body was right at home in tight black jeans and a loose purple turtleneck. She sat next to Furlong on a bright-red couch in one of the many mini living rooms around Enterprise that were designed to encourage collaboration or relaxation or both. She sipped on steaming tea that smelled like already-smoked pipe tobacco and which she had explained was called Roy Boss, “but spelled r-o-o-i-b-o-s and is really good for bone health and digestion and comes from a South African bush.” Furlong wondered about the power of marketing and storytelling to entice perfectly beautiful young people to ingest such odd products. Like grapefruit beer. Or marshmallow popcorn. And all such trends seemed to happen from coast to coast. Regionalism was dead. It was very possible Timothy Powers was working up a rant. Furlong squelched it — for now.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“I’ve been asked to take another look at that case involving Billy Duncan—”

“What? Oh my god. Seriously? For real? My roommate is obsessed.”

“Really?”

“She likes all those true crime podcasts, murder docs. Those network shows where they drag out a murder case for an hour. And — right — Gather was a thing in the Billy Duncan deal. What was his name?”

“Tyler Hyde.”

“Yep,” said Chambers. “Tyler Hyde. Always thought it sounded like trying to hide, but there he was, right in plain sight.”

Furlong opened his vintage laptop. He pulled up the recording from Gather — seventeen men and women in a two-hour online meeting. He hit play.

“I remember I had just moved here from Bushwick and I thought, where the hell is Glendale, what the hell is Glendale?” said Chambers. “Also, where’s the glen and where’s the dale? Duncan’s body — well, most of it — was found the day after I got here, so it was sort of a welcome-to-Colorado thing you don’t easily forget.”

“Some greeting,” said Furlong.

“Creepy. So Tyler Hyde?”

“Was in this meeting when the murder happened,” said Furlong, pointing to him. There were three rows of boxes — six frames in the top row, five in the middle, and another row of six. Hyde, head and shoulders only, sat in the middle of the group of five in the middle row. Dead center. He wore a plain green pullover and round brown horn-rimmed glasses. “The meeting started thirty minutes before the camera got whacked by the man in the hoodie when he stepped off the elevator.”

“My roommate would probably say, Are you sure it was a man?”

“Agreed,” said Furlong. “But the cases involving dismemberment by women are rare.” He paused the recording.

“A proud talking point for your gender.”

“So proud,” said Furlong. “Anyway—”

“Tyler Hyde never left the meeting, right?”

“Right.”

“He lived close enough, if I remember, but it was like he had the perfect alibi.”

“Right.”

“Remind me why Tyler Hyde was even a suspect, then?”

“Billy Duncan had brought Hyde’s name to the DA. Duncan had spotted financial irregularities.”

“Embezzlement?” said Chambers.

“It’s unclear.”

“And?”

“And Duncan’s suspicions were never proven.”

“Because Duncan was killed,” said Chambers. “But Hyde could have been ticked off about the allegations.”

“Sure.”

Furlong hit play on the Gather recording again. A copy of the two-hour meeting had been sent to the DA’s office the day after the murder. By email. Anonymously. It was as if the email provided instant inoculation for Hyde: Don’t bother coming after me. Hyde was questioned by police. His entire demeanor was polite and cooperative, though he shunned any public statements. The recording of the snooze-a-thon meeting found its way onto YouTube for anyone to see.

“What was the meeting about again?”

“A nonprofit. Schools in Africa. He’s on the board.”

“Thief by day, do-gooder by night?” said Chambers.

“People are complicated,” said Furlong.

“You watched the whole meeting?”

“Me? Yes. Had to. He’s there for the duration. It was well-reported at the time.”

“Well-reported?” said Chambers. “What exactly does that mean?”

“These days? I’m not so sure. Is there any way, you know, from a technical perspective, to rig this?”

“What do you mean, rig?”

“I’m looking for the simplest answer,” said Furlong. “Maybe he’s not really there?”

“He’s participating,” said Chambers. “I can see him.”

“Yes, at the beginning he’s in charge of the fundraising committee and he makes a big report.”

“And it seems like real time?”

“I mean, he’s taking questions. Yes.”

“And then?”

“And then the meeting moves on to other business and he’s—” He’s what? Just sitting there? “Would it be possible to switch your Gather feed to a recorded video?”

Chambers thought about it. Shook her head like dawning realization. Said, “My roommate is gonna go nuts.”

For three days, Furlong followed Tyler Hyde back and forth to work. It was a mere four blocks from his eight-story apartment building to the city offices, but Hyde drove his tiny Kia to work because at lunch he ran swift, efficient errands and grabbed a cheap bite. To go. He was usually back in his office within forty-five minutes. If anything, Hyde appeared to be upstanding. Purposeful. He walked with his shoulders up. He held doors for women. He drove with care. He kept to himself.

On the fourth morning, as Furlong began to think Hyde might not give him anything to work with, the man emerged from his office at ten thirty a.m. and drove to a bank just over the Glendale border in Denver. Hyde hustled from his car, stepping around puddles in the melting snow. At the bank entrance, he sprayed a glance around like a lawn sprinkler on crack. He rested his gaze for a second longer than necessary on Furlong’s car. Furlong saw how Hyde’s face might have looked during the crime. Sheer darkness. Furlong shuddered.

However Hyde reacted when he returned to his car, it didn’t matter. Furlong could call the Arapahoe County DA and show them what he’d found. He could invite Katy Cutler to a restaurant — one with good food — and show her what he’d found. He could dial up Amy Ito and ask her if she’d like the truth — a dubious prospect — and show her what he’d found. He could drop Ed Bostrom an anonymous note and let him be the hero. But Furlong wanted this one. He wanted to watch Hyde sweat. Part of himself enjoyed watching false fronts fall. He shared that same trait with Timothy Powers.

Next, lunch at the second-fanciest hotel in Glendale. Hyde sat at the bar. He ordered a beer and a sandwich. Furlong watched from a table, letting a cup of coffee grow increasingly cold. On stakeout days, Furlong remained vigilant against liquids. Hyde ate quickly. He paid with cash from a wad of bills, and then walked across Cherry Creek Drive South, Cherry Creek North, and into Shotgun Willie’s. Furlong gave Hyde a ten-minute head start and paid the thirty-dollar cover. Daylight outside, midnight inside. Furlong took a seat at a table, ordered a ten-dollar bottle of Coors Light from a seriously bored waitress.

Tyler Hyde had a ringside seat at one of the two six-sided dancing stages, each with its own 99.9 percent naked woman. The club smelled like cotton candy and sweat. An invisible deejay cranked “You Shook Me All Night Long” as if the party was going full throttle. Furlong and Hyde were the only customers, but Hyde’s attention was devoted to the dancer at his stage. She wasn’t dancing. She squatted on her pink pearlized heels, and her arms were wrapped around her rubber-band knees. They were chatting. Hyde occasionally took bills from his wad and scattered them at the dancer’s feet like confetti. She laughed. She listened. She smiled. She took off Hyde’s glasses, cleaned them with the only tiny scrap of fabric she was wearing, and laughed some more. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. This wasn’t about flesh. Or lust.

After Hyde’s three-song conversation with the dancer, he stood up and left. Furlong waited two minutes, tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the stage for his dancer, and followed. Hyde walked back across Cherry Creek and returned to the office — a “lunch” of just under three hours. Furlong waited. At five thirty, full dark in late January, Hyde drove himself home.

Furlong went to the foyer holding an empty box wrapped in frilly red paper with a bouncy white bow — one of many such props in his trunk. When the first person arrived, a young woman, he said, “Surprise gift I’m supposed to leave at 802. Buzzer doesn’t appear to be working.” The woman punched in a code on a keypad. Studied him. Furlong shrugged. He followed her inside. He pressed the button on the elevator for the eighth floor and gave the woman the most reassuring smile in the world. The woman got off at the third floor. “Don’t get me in trouble,” she said.

The doors closed. Furlong opened his phone and pressed play on the voice recorder, put it in the outer pocket of his coat.

The third knock on Hyde’s door finally brought a “Who is it?”

“Someone you want to talk to.”

A long moment. “Answer the question.”

“I have a proposition.”

An even longer moment.

“I can call the cops.”

“That would make my job easy.”

The door opened. “Fuck,” said Hyde, standing in the opening just big enough for his face. “You didn’t sip your fuckin’ beer one time.”

Furlong barged his way in, let the heavy door slam behind him. He dropped his prop gift on a side table.

“What the fuck is that?” said Hyde.

“A ruse,” replied Furlong. “I think you’re familiar with the concept.”

“Who the hell are you?”

Hyde backpedaled down a long hall to a small living room. On the far side, a nook kitchen. A sliding glass door led to a two-seater balcony. Hyde’s drapes were open. A copy of the Economist lay facedown on an ottoman in front of a comfy brown leather chair. A cup of tea steamed on the side table. Something lemon, thank god, not rooibos.

“I’ve emailed the police.” It was a lie. Furlong suddenly realized that it probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea to bring an extra human along. In case Hyde panicked. “Copied your boss at City Hall. Top brass with the whole rugby team too. The newspaper too.”

“About?”

Up close, Tyler Hyde was a portrait in perfection. He was old-school handsome. Good cheekbones, a perfect coif of thick blond hair. Blue eyes. A solid physique. There was a model-level asymmetry to his face. He looked preppy and youthful.

“It was a slick little trick,” said Furlong.

“What?”

“There was a moment on the feed when your image froze. What? Three seconds? And when you come back it looked so normal.”

Hyde shook his head. “No.”

“You appear to be taking notes. For what? Ninety more minutes? You appear to be engaged. It was kind of a gamble on your part, because what if you got asked a bunch of questions, right? Or even one? But you didn’t. It was a big meeting.”

“No,” said Hyde. The word came out not like a denial of Furlong’s assertions but as recognition that it was over. “I was right here.”

Hyde moved to the kitchen, still backpedaling. Was there a bone saw hanging out with the knives? Something he might grab for a garrote?

“When your part is done, then comes that weird freeze thing and you come back on and it’s a video of yourself. Pretending. I recognize the set.” Furlong jerked a thumb at the brown leather chair. “That must have been hilarious to sit there and record. Ninety minutes of pretending? There you are. Sitting, listening, taking notes. Occasionally nodding your head.”

“No.” This time the word came out desperate.

“You probably had to record that at least a few days ahead of time. It couldn’t be a last-minute thing, right? You needed a long evening meeting the same night Billy Duncan was in town. You needed to be ready.”

“No,” said Hyde.

“You could keep the look simple — you in a chair, right? Kind of a plain backdrop?”

Hyde looked confused. “What?”

“On the recording, your drapes are open. Sure, you recorded at night to be careful. But there’s enough of a reflection from the apartment building across the way to see the lights in your glasses. It’s not much, but it’s there. In that first section? It’s not there. No reflection. And if you’re trying to tell me you used three seconds of your frozen image to open the drapes, well, that seems like a bit of coincidence and awfully hard to do in such little time.”

“No,” said Hyde.

“Was Billy Duncan right? About the money business? Some money was missing?”

“Nothing.” Hyde slumped down on a white chair at a small side table off the kitchen. He looked defeated.

Maybe this would be easy.

“No? Nothing?”

“His algorithm.” Hyde spat the word. “Was wrong. It wasn’t about that.” He shook his head. Stared through the table to the center of the earth. Steeled himself. “He thought I should be more social. He wanted to find me a girlfriend. He couldn’t fucking believe.” Air quotes. “That I didn’t have Facebook, didn’t have Twitter or Instagram. Wasn’t on Tinder. That I chose to live quietly, that I did my job and went home. I am not some fucking piece of data.”

“You killed him because—”

“He taunted me constantly at work. Whenever he was in town. I was like his fucking project. I reported it all to HR. It was harassment. I don’t think they took it seriously. But he asked me out to dinner, said he wanted to apologize. Claimed he’d back off but only if I agreed to let loose for one night, do whatever he thought might be fun.”

Hyde took a hard breath. He sat up straight. He gave Furlong that same glare from the bank door. That darkness. That flipped switch.

“He gets me in the strip club. We’ve had a couple of drinks. He’s been taking photos all night — meals, cocktails. He’s got an opinion about every single bite. Whatever. He’s posting every freaking thing along the way. Fabulous this and fantastic that. I’m trying to play along, figuring it will be over soon. At the club, more drinks. He buys me a private dance in the back. Small room with one big red chair. We both go back there and he gets the dancer—”

“The one today?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s taking pictures the whole time. Boobs in my face. He wants my tongue out. I’m being humiliated right and left. I want to crawl into a hole. I felt sick to my stomach.”

“And?”

“And the taunting didn’t stop. Now, he’s got photos. Now, he says he can post them online to prove I’m party hearty.” Air quotes. “His words.”

“And you go back to see the dancer—”

“Marlena. Yes, once a month. To tell her that wasn’t me that night. To tell her I’m a better person than—” Except Tyler Hyde spots the problem with trying to take the moral high ground about how he did or did not treat women when he’d put a garrote around Billy Duncan’s neck and cut off his head. He put a hand to his eyes. Covered them. “Humiliated,” he said. “Every bone in my body.”

“So you took care of business.”

Hyde stood. He nodded. He shrugged. He walked calmly to the sliding glass door. He gazed out. He tilted his head back. He opened the door and stepped onto the balcony.

Furlong felt the cool air rush in and wondered if Tyler Hyde could let one whole day pass without thinking about what he had done, without wondering if he would ever get caught.

Furlong reached for his phone to turn off the recorder and dial Glendale PD. He watched, helpless, as Tyler Hyde climbed over the railing and dropped out of sight into the dark, dark night.

“Sort of right there in plain sight,” said Katy Cutler. Same booth as the first meeting. She slid an envelope across the table.

“Sort of.”

“That’s what I call closure.”

“In a way,” said Furlong, thinking of the fresh terror for those who heard Hyde’s body slam into the cold hard ground. Who went to investigate. Who saw what eight floors of free fall will do to flesh. And bone.

“And now all the chittering, blathering types can move on down the road. Find another case to muck around with.”

“But maybe if there had been no endless stirring of the pot, you might not have called me.” Furlong had given it all some thought. “And Tyler Hyde would have lived to be an old man.”

“So you’re saying these leeches... did some good?”

A server arrived with a small plate.

Furlong studied the morsel. A red goo, flecked with shards of pink, sat atop one slice of cucumber. The substance reminded him much too much of what he’d found when Hyde splattered. Furlong’s appetite withered.

“Amuse-bouche,” said Cutler. “Avocado and chili sauce aioli with roasted black tiger shrimp.”

Out of politeness, taking one for the team, Furlong put the tidbit in his mouth. The shrimp were afterthoughts in the sea of garlic. The cucumber failed to crunch. The spice was lost.

“Interesting,” said Furlong. The remnants of sauce left a weird texture in his mouth. “Believe me when I say I’m no expert. Now I’m the amateur lobbing in unsolicited opinions. But something’s not quite right. I’d look at everything. Every element. You know, ingredient. You might think something is there — but really, it’s not.”

Northside Nocturne by Manuel Ramos

Northside

I didn’t give it a second thought when the young white man was shot outside Gaetano’s at Tejon and Thirty-eighth. Way I saw it, that wasn’t news. People been shot in the Northside for years, didn’t matter that the Chicano barrio was quickly turning into something else, something whiter, something with more money.

I figured the dead guy was new to the neighborhood, part of what Petey, my cousin who went to college, said was gentrification, and that he’d crossed the wrong homeboy. Most of the time I didn’t understand Petey and this was one of those times. All I knew was that the Northside was changing, and white people were buying up houses, tearing them down, and building two or three ugly boxes on lots where gente like my Aunt Julia had lived in one house for fifty years and more, and where she’d raised five children, four cats, and about a dozen parakeets.

Some of us natives stayed, we weren’t totally gone, but no denying it was different. For years, brown had outnumbered white on the Northside, but now raza was back to being a minority. I didn’t recognize the old hood, and I felt like a stranger in my hometown.

Change ain’t never easy, conflict and drama and that kind of bullshit, and even I’d tangled with a couple of the newcomers stepping out of one of the remodeled breweries after last call over on Thirty-second. The drunks were loud and rude and belligerent, and it looked like it was chingasos time until Petey stepped in, risking his pretty face, and calmed down me and the two bearded jerks.

The guy who crashed through Gaetano’s plate-glass window must’ve tried too hard to win the argument, and without Petey’s negotiation skills in play, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the situation spiraled out of control until someone said, Hell with it, and concluded that only a bullet through the throat could end the conversation.

Like I mentioned, I didn’t give it much thought. I’d learned long ago to mind my own fucking business. Not that I wanted to intrude. Not my style. Not anything I needed. I didn’t mingle with young white boys or old-school bangers with guns. But when a second young white guy was shot a week later, this time coming out of Chubby’s with a beef-and-bean special in his hand, I admit it gave me pause. It looked like someone had declared war on gentrification, and odds were that I knew that someone. I’d probably gone to Horace Mann Middle School with the dude, and if he hadn’t dropped out or checked into juvie or knocked up some shorty and was hiding out from her old man, we might’ve sat in the same row of desks in Mrs. Calabrese’s history class at North High.

The second shooting caught everyone’s attention. “The Denver Shooter” became the hot topic at family dinners or when we watched the Broncos games. Old friends I ran into had wild opinions and speculations about the killer, and radio talk show hosts spewed even wilder conspiracy theories meant to explain the shooter. I never brought up any of my own ideas. My thinking got as far as a crazy dude with a gun, which, in my experience, was all anyone really needed to know.

TV news reporters flocked to the area, where they waited to interview people coming out of bars and restaurants in what they called the Highlands and LoHi — what we called the Northside. I heard one of the reporters talk about rising tensions, community town halls, and city council debates, and then ask a smiling couple pushing a baby carriage if they felt safe walking the streets of their new hometown. They kind of giggled and shuffled their feet and then they said, “Of course” — what else could they say, right? No way they wanted their mama and papa back in Chicago or their friends in Boston to think they’d made a mistake moving to a million-dollar house in Denver. So, hell no, they weren’t afraid.

They were lying, obviously. Shit, there’d been plenty of nights in the past when I felt anything but safe on the Northside streets, and I was born here. Downright vulnerable, truth be told. Looking over my shoulder, checking out everyone cruising. And that was way before any so-called gentrification. On the other hand, I wasn’t all that uptight about what was going down. After all, I didn’t fit the victim profile, right? Know what I’m saying?

I asked Petey about the shootings one Saturday afternoon when we were stretched out at his house, drinking beer, snacking on Taco Bell nachos and conchas from Panadería Rosales.

“It’s crazy, no doubt,” he said. “Could develop into a mini race war if one of the hipsters returns fire, or just shoots the first Mexican he runs into, because he’s lost his cool, his mindfulness, like they say. Everyone thinks the shooter must be a Latino.”

“Always that way. That’s what I think, truth be told.”

Petey smiled in that way he had that made me nervous. “And you got no real reason for thinking that, right?”

I squirmed in my seat. Sometimes talking with Petey was complicated. I hadn’t learned how to outargue him, and he’d been in debate mode since the second grade. “I’m just saying that odds are that the shooter’s someone you and I probably know. That’s all.”

“Yeah, I get it,” he said. “Nothing changes. But what’s worse is that it’s stirred up the cops.” Petey talked between mouthfuls of beer and soggy tortilla chips. “That always means trouble for everyone but the troublemakers.”

“That can’t be good. There’s more patrols around here, for sure.”

Petey nodded. “Two skinny white boys get pegged and the blue army invades. Used to be that a Mexican kid was getting shot every other day and there wasn’t a cop anywhere within five miles of the Northside.”

“Yeah, like when the Inca Boys and the Northside Mafia were gunning for each other. Shit, I was in La Raza Park the night they lit it up with automatics and shotguns. I hid under a park bench like a punk. Not a cop in sight until the shooting stopped and Dogface had cashed out.”

“And Pony Boy ended up in a wheelchair.” Petey paused. Pony Boy had been his best friend when they were kids. He hadn’t seen him in years.

“Ah, the good old days,” I said, like a wiseass.

“Shit. You crazy, man.”

The third shooting went down in the Locavore market parking lot. Weird to say, but that guy was lucky. He lived. He was carrying a bag of organic groceries and Colorado wine to his Subaru when a bullet opened up a stream of blood from his hip and he dropped to the asphalt like a brick tossed off a roof. Wine and bread and apples and cheese scattered around the bleeding man. No one saw the shooter, but the rep for the cops told the ten o’clock news that the bullet must’ve come from a passing car. Strictly a guess, since no one saw nothing. Or maybe the cops knew something they weren’t revealing. As usual.

The Northside got a little tense after that.

Two days after the third shooting, Petey and I sat on the cracked steps of the porch of my mother’s house, enjoying the view of four demolished or almost-demolished homes that were surrounded by orange construction net fences and massive dumpsters overloaded with junk and probably asbestos. My mother had so far resisted the tidal wave of offers for the old house, and when I asked her why she didn’t take the money and move, she looked at me with her one good eye, shook her head, and simply said, “Where the hell we gonna go, mi’jo?” I didn’t have an answer. Still, the money sounded good to me.

I asked Petey what he thought about the drive-by theory. “That make sense to you?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But that means there’s at least two people involved.”

“The driver and the shooter.”

“Yeah. Which could happen. But these types of shooters usually act alone. They don’t trust other people, obviously. But it might be a pair of locos. There’s always exceptions to rules.”

“How can it be that no one’s seen anything? It’s like ghosts are taking pot shots at anyone foolish enough to go out on the street. Nobody sees nothing.”

“Damn good question,” Petey said, but he didn’t have a clue.

I didn’t see Petey for a few days. I had to take care of a bunch of stuff for my mom — pay bills, pick up prescriptions, clean up the storage shed — and Petey was kept busy at work. He had a good job with a printing company downtown, but occasionally he’d work late into the night because of a big order or a rush job. He was trying to save money. He’d decided he should finally marry Christina, so he was putting in as many hours as he could.

I was between gigs myself, and I couldn’t earn a little extra cash making deliveries for my Uncle Orly anymore, but that’s another story. He wouldn’t be back on the streets for at least three years, with good behavior.

When I handed Mom her high blood pressure pills, she just kind of sighed. She stuck the bottles on the shelf over the kitchen sink and sighed again.

“What’s wrong, Ma?” Something was bothering her, and I knew she would never simply tell me. I always had to dig it out of her.

“Oh, Eddie. Nothing. Nothing for you to worry about. No te preocupes. No es nada.”

Shit. Speaking Spanish was another bad sign. “Come on. Don’t be that way. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing new. Same as always. These damn drugs and the electricity, and now we’re gonna have to fix the car. And the house taxes. How are we paying the taxes? They’re twice as much as last year. It’s always something.”

“Money. You’re talking about money and how we don’t have much.”

“We never have.” She took in a deep breath, and then she tried to smile. “But we always seem to make it through, don’t we? It’ll be okay. Just feeling sorry for myself.”

Well, that made me feel like crap. “I’ll go talk to Jake and ask him to put me back on his crew. That was a good job, while it lasted. Outdoors, exercise. He’s getting busy again now that winter’s almost over. He told me to look him up when landscaping season came back. I can do that. Jake paid good, remember?”

She nodded. “And you almost killed yourself. Your asthma acted up, that’s what I remember. I had to take you to the clinic. That’s what I remember. We’re still paying on that bill. You can’t do that kind of work. You could’ve died. That’s what I remember.”

“It was just allergies, Ma. I’ll get something for that. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I got this.” Not really, but I had to step up.

She picked up a card from the counter.

“I’m going to call this guy who says he buys ugly houses. What do we want to stay here for anyways? I’ve been thinking. You’re right, the money is good. That one guy said he’d pay three hundred thousand for the house, as is. We could be out of here by the end of the month.”

That shocked me. She had to be very worried to consider selling. “You don’t want to do that. You should get another bid. And like you always say, where we gonna go? Whatever money you get will just go for another house, a more expensive house, with more bills and expenses.”

I realized I was contradicting everything I’d been telling my mother for more than a year, but I knew selling the house would break her heart. She got married in that house, took care of my dying father in that house. I had to get a job. It was as simple as that.

“And anyhow, it’s not a good time to sell,” I said.

“How can that be? Look around here. Everyone’s selling, moving out. Even Maggie’s gone.” I knew how much Mom missed Maggie, who’d sold her house last year after living across the street for decades.

“Petey told me the market took a hit because of the shootings. All the developers have reduced the prices they’re willing to pay for houses on the Northside. Petey said people should wait until the shooter gets caught, then the higher prices will come back.”

“Petey don’t know everything, mi’jo.”

I let it go. I had to give her time and space. I doubted she would follow through on her threat to sell. At least, not right away. She had a habit of getting down whenever the bills were due. That’s the American way. Riding high in April, shot down in May. Or so went the song.

When I hooked up with Petey again, and I told him what my mother said, he shook his head and tried to explain how selling was a bad idea. “The developers like to say that the Northside is a neighborhood in transition. Which means there’s still a few Mexicans left, like you and my tía. And in transition means smaller offers, especially when you add the shootings and killings. If your mother can wait, eventually she’ll get a lot more for the house.”

“She don’t want to wait. She got it in her head that three hundred Gs is like the magic solution to our money problems, and that’s all she’s seeing.”

“It will be twice that in another few months. I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter is a real estate agent trying to drive down prices so he can buy cheap and then sell high after the shootings stop.” He laughed to himself the way he always did when he told what he thought was a joke, but I often didn’t think he was funny. This was one of those times.

“This is serious, Petey.”

“Patience, man.”

“Not something my mother is famous for. And I gotta say, I’m getting tired of dealing with the same old shit every month. It’s been like this ever since Dad died. A move might do us some good. Or it might be a big mistake. Who the hell knows?”

My outlook had turned dark, and I felt tired and useless. Maybe it was the shootings, maybe it was dealing with my sorry-ass situation. I wasn’t much use to anyone, particularly my mother.

That’s when the signs began to show up. They were cheap-looking notices that were probably made on a home printer and then copied like a hundred times. I saw them all over the Northside on dumpsters, utility poles, fences, buildings. Each one said the same thing: WARNING — DANGER! White people are being shot in the Highlands! Protect yourself! If you see something, say something!

The signs didn’t specifically say, Watch out for Mexicans, they’re shooting white people, but they came close.

When I showed my mother one of the signs, she almost cried. She slumped in her chair and shook her head.

“I’m calling that agent. We’re moving, Eddie. The North-side is gone, and I don’t want to live here anymore.”

We talked for an hour about selling the house and moving, and the bills that seemed to get bigger each month, and how her medicines didn’t work as well as they used to, and about a dozen other things that worried her and made me more anxious and uptight. We talked about the problems, but we didn’t have any solutions.

I left the house that evening not sure what I should do. I wanted to help my mother. Real help required money, and I didn’t have any. I walked to the park to clear my head, but everywhere I went I saw those goddamn signs. I ripped one off the side of a liquor store, threw it away, and saw a dozen more plastered on the walls. I ripped off as many of those that I could reach, then I ran to the corner and tore up another half dozen that were taped to the bus bench and the traffic light pole.

All along Thirty-eighth, the signs mocked me. I stood on the corner and stared up and down the street. I thought there were hundreds of those things, maybe thousands, stuck on trees, buildings, whatever. I started to shake, and my throat felt dry, brittle.

“What the hell?” I whispered to myself.

I decided I needed a drink. I turned in the direction of the Black Bear Brewery, the closest bar I could think of. Not my usual place but I was in no condition to be choosy.

A lonely jazz riff from a sad guitar floated above the street.

I kept walking at a fast pace and tried to ignore the signs that surrounded me on the street. I thought about bills, medicines, taxes, car repair, my mother’s tear-stained face. I replayed what Petey said about change and selling houses. I tried to convince myself that I could work for Jake again, fuck the asthma. The more I thought about all the shit, the darker my mood tumbled.

I caressed the pistol I’d jammed into the pocket of my coat before I left the house. It was my father’s. I’d lifted it from the kitchen drawer where my mother kept it, loaded, “just in case,” she would say when I’d point out the danger of a loaded gun. I couldn’t explain why I took the gun. I just knew I had to have it with me. Maybe it had something to do with the shootings.

I walked past a small shop where a light glowed from the back. The light shined on someone sitting in front of a computer screen. The sign over the doorway said, Magnificent Properties, LLC — Donald Bunton, Licensed Realtor. Several photographs of homes and condos were taped to the plate-glass window. There was also one of the damn signs in the window, although it was twice as big as the signs stuck around the neighborhood, and in better shape. I guessed that it was the original.

I hurried to the alley and looked for the back of the agent’s shop. I didn’t have a clear-cut plan. I moved without thinking. I finally knew what I had to do, and that was enough. I pulled out the gun and walked in the semidarkness of the alley. I was about to look in the back window of the shop when I heard someone behind me. I twisted around and pointed the gun.

Petey jumped and put up his hands. “Whoa, buddy. It’s me, Petey. Take it easy, Eddie.”

“What the fuck? I could’ve shot your fucking head off. Jesus!”

“Your mother called me. She’s worried because you took the gun. I’ve been looking for you. I followed your trail of ripped-up signs, then I saw you turn into the alley. I was across the street. What the fuck are you doing?”

“Never mind about that. You better get out of here. I got business to take care of. Go on! Beat it!”

Petey slowly walked up to me, his hands still raised. “I’m not going anywhere, not until you give me that gun. You know that.”

Petey’s face was lit up from a streetlight, like he was the star of the show. I always thought that he looked like my mother, which wasn’t weird since his mother, Aunt Julia, was my mother’s sister. My aunt and my cousin were pretty, even beautiful. Petey and Christina were a good-looking couple. They’d have beautiful children. I saw that and more in Petey’s face, and I knew I had to give him the gun.

“Here, keep the damn thing. I doubt it even works.”

He took it from my shaking hands. “Let’s go home, Eddie,” he said, almost whispering. “We’ll figure something out. I can help. Your mom’s gonna wait to sell. She said to tell you, so you wouldn’t worry.”

“I—”

Headlights blinded me before I could finish. A car roared into the alley, and like a creature of habit, I backed away, my hands raised to the sky. The patrol car screeched to a stop only a few feet from Petey and me. Red, white, and blue lights flashed, and a pair of cops jumped out of the car.

“Drop to the ground! Show your hands, now!”

Petey turned to the cops. I knew what he was doing. He had to explain everything, ease the situation, calm everyone down.

“Don’t—” I started to say.

“Gun! He’s got a gun!”

The cops fired their weapons and I fell against a wall. Petey spun around once, twice, dropped to his knees, then to his back. Blood started to flow as soon as he collapsed. I crawled on my hands and knees to Petey but one of the cops jumped me and held me down and all I could see was the starless night sky and a thin sliver of yellow moon. The only sounds I heard were the guitar music and Petey’s hard, heavy breathing.

After that night, the night Petey died, the shootings stopped. The story on the Northside was that Petey had been the Denver Shooter. I knew that was wrong, but I never corrected anyone who told that story. Some things never change.