Manhattan Mayhem

EVERMORE by Justin Scott

Stark ran west on Eighty-Fourth Street.

Starry-eyed gentrifiers had renamed the shabby old block Edgar Allan Poe Street. He crossed Riverside Drive against the light, gave a bus the finger and a cabbie a look that made the man reach for the tire iron he kept under the German shepherd on the front seat. It was the winter of 1981; life was already harsh in New York, and just when it seemed the city couldn’t get more dangerous, Stark was on the lam.

He cut into Riverside Park, turned off the tarmac path, frightened a child, and climbed an enormous rock. It stood high as the fourth floor of the apartment buildings across the drive. He sat beside an old steel door someone had stolen from someplace and glared at the Hudson River.

On the lam came in two varieties. Holed up in a four-star Bahamas hotel with a suitcase full of dough was good lam. The job gone wrong, a woman gone south with your getaway stash, and witnesses reporting which way you’d gone was bad lam. Bad lam meant you had to pull another job, like right now. But spur-of-the-moment heists promised jail or the morgue. So did sitting on this rock until the cops caught up.

The old door slid aside, and a cadaverous long-haired man climbed out of the hole it had covered. He sat on the door, gazed at the river, sharpened a pencil with a penknife, and scribbled in an ancient leather-bound notebook.

“You going to be here long?” Stark asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, when are you going to haul ass outta here and leave me in privacy?”

Dark, mournful eyes drifted over Stark’s tough and battered face. They took stock of his clothing, the small rip in one knee, the solid lightweight assault boots, and the bulge under his sweat-stained gabardine jacket, which suggested either a firearm or an alarming pectoral. “I would imagine I’ll be here another seven or eight hours. And you, sir?”

Stark said nothing. He glared at the Hudson, instead, and wondered if he was losing his touch.

“Poe.”

“What?”

The cadaverous fellow extended a bony hand and said again, “Poe. The name’s Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. And you, sir?”

Stark jabbed the top of the first page of the guy’s notebook. “If your name’s Poe, why’d you write, ‘Ravings,’ a Short Story by E. P. Allan?”

“Allan’s a nom de plume.”

“Huh?”

“A pen name. I had to change my name to sell my stories.”

Stark nodded. He, too, had changed his name. This morning. Owing to the mismanaged bank job on the East Side. The connection pleased him, and an unusual sense of human fellowship warmed him like a restaurant exhaust fan blowing grease in a winter alley. He stuck his hand out. “Stark. Pleased to meet you.”

“Delighted,” said Poe, closing icy and surprisingly strong fingers around Stark’s.

“I’ve already admitted I’m a writer. May I ask how you make your living, Mr. Stark?”

“Banks and armored cars.”

“Do not expect me to be frightened by an armed robber. I’m accustomed to agents and publishers.”

“I could be a writer,” said Stark. “I could write a hell of a book about my work.”

“And what would you write for your second book?”

“I could write ten books. I’ve pulled jobs you couldn’t dream up. Some good, some bad. Human situations, mistakes, betrayals, revenge, scruples. All that stuff.”

Stark, who had put prison time to good use reading, was impressed to be meeting a writer. He began to tell Poe about jobs he’d pulled-leaving out names, dates, and venues. Poe listened, politely. Now and then he made a note in his book. Stark was wrapping up a redacted version of the morning’s disaster when Poe interjected, “Forgive me, sir, but I’ve got to finish this mystery before the Xerox place closes. They’ve got a special overnight rate, three copies for the price of two. One for my editor. One for me. And one for the girl who lives across the hall.”

Stark displayed some inside knowledge he had picked up somewhere. “What about your agent? Doesn’t he get a copy?”

Poe gave a small sad shrug, bent over his book, and resumed scribbling. Stark watched and when his pencil stopped moving figured it was okay to ask another question. “Why’d you have to change your name to sell your stories?”

Poe looked up, blinking. “What? What? Oh… I write different kinds of stuff. Poems. Novels. Short stories. I mean there’s no way I can write a love poem, a horror novel, and one of these Mystery Magazine pieces with the same name.”

“What does a name have to do with writing?”

Poe considered that a moment, and it seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Not writing. Selling. Marketing. You can’t confuse the readers.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The publishers say you can’t confuse the readers.”

Stark had spent enough time behind bars to understand the merciless logic of the power behind the rules. “I get it.”

Color rose to Poe’s cheeks. He closed his notebook on his pencil and said, “It’s more than that-here, I’ll show you.” He swung his legs over the edge of the hole in the rock and dropped into it. “Come on! I’ll show you.”

Stark peered over the edge. Poe was climbing down a rickety ladder.

“Come! I don’t have all day.”

The hole looked like the lowest form of on the lam where you huddled in the dark, curled in the fetal position. Still, you took your chances when you saw them; maybe it contained a tunnel that led under Riverside Drive into an apartment shared by Pan Am stewardesses.

Stark followed Poe down the ladder. The hole wasn’t as deep as it looked. He caught up at the bottom. Poe led him down a rock-sided alley and into a narrow street of low brick row houses. A carriage pulled by horses clattered past. The sunlight was dulled by coal smoke. “What is this?”

“Greenwich Village, last century-there! There we are.”

And there was Edgar Allan Poe, walking head down with a group of thin men who were listening to a plump, prosperous-looking business type with a thick gold watch chain draped across his belly.

The Poe standing at Stark’s elbow said, “The gaunt men are Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The youngster is Melville. That’s our literary agent doing the talking. Listen to what he says.”

“How did we get here?” asked Stark.

“Listen-”

“Can we get back?”

“Of course.”

Stark looked up and down the street and back at the stone alley and saw opportunity. His sharp cheekbones and granite jaw dissolved into a dreamy expression that had last crossed his face when his mother breast-fed him.

Poe smiled. “Would I be far off the mark?” he asked silkily, “to guess that you are speculating, what if you knocked that agent on the head and took his watch and chain back to Riverside Park in 1981?”

“I’m a heist man, not a mugger.”

“Forgive me. I meant no insult.”

“Any banks nearby?”

“Plenty downtown,” said Poe. “But when we return to 1981, good luck spending currency issued by the Savings Institute of Butchers’ and Drovers.”

Stark’s expression changed to that of a man grappling with the concept of attempting to pay a four-star hotel bill with a sack of gold coins.

Poe said, “Listen to the literary agent instruct the writers.”

“The publishing business is changing,” the agent was saying. He tugged his watch chain, checked the time, and shoved his thumbs in his vest pockets. “No more little books. No more medium-size books.”

Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville started snickering. They exchanged superior looks. Then all talked at once.

“Absurd!”

“A good book’s a good book.”

“Who cares if it’s big or little?”

“Long, short, you’re done when the story’s done.”

Stark nodded. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville seemed to have a point.

A gleaming lacquered coach drawn by a matched team of four black horses came down the street. The agent raised his arm in a languid wave, and the coach stopped. A liveried footman jumped down and held the door for him. “Change,” he called as he climbed inside. “Change or disappear.”

“We’ve heard enough,” said Poe. He led Stark back through the stone alley and up the ladder and out of the rock.

Stark squinted at the Hudson a while, digesting events. Tugboats and barges and heating-oil tankers headed to Albany were all signs of here and now. “Your buddies were right,” he said. “A good book’s a good book.”

“No,” said Poe. “Our agent was right. Look at Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Dead as doornails. Melville went sailing. Took him forty years to get Moby-Dick noticed. Nobody would touch Billy Budd with a barge pole until the poor man was a generation in his grave.”

Stark nodded. Put that way, Edgar Allan Poe had a point. “What about you?” he asked.

Poe hesitated a long moment before he answered. “I was terrified of disappearing.”

“So, you changed.”

“I wrote a big book-still a mystery at heart, but with thriller elements, and sort of multigenerational, almost a saga. My agent called it a saga and took me to lunch. Then he informed me he could not sell my big book under my little-books name.”

“What’s a little-books name?” Stark asked.

“I’d written some gothics. But gothics, like all genres, come and go, nice and steady for a while, not much money-four grand and a promise of lead book of the month sometime down the road-then your month finally comes along just in time for bodice rippers or sci-fi fantasies to knock gothics for a loop. Anyhow, my agent told me to use the pen name D’arcy de Chambord. The publisher who bought the mystery saga asked me to shift into big family sagas. D’arcy de Chambord cleaned up. Sold one to the movies, which paid for a house with a swimming pool in Connecticut.”

“Just there on weekends?” Stark, who liked empty houses, asked.

“A fellow comes by to feed the wolf hounds.”

“Well… if you’re making so much money writing sagas, what are you doing these E. P. Allan short stories for?”

“I’m a writer. I like short stories… My agent hates them. My book publishers hate them. So, I write them secretly as E. P. Allan.”

“Which means, you don’t have to pay your agent’s commission?” Stark, whose mind ran along such lines, remarked.

Poe took offense. “First of all, the commission on forty-nine dollars a story isn’t a hell of a lot of money. Second of all, as soon as I started making big bucks with the sagas, my agent raised his commission to fifteen percent.”

Stark nodded admiringly.

Poe said, “The short stories feature the same character. A detective named Block. I figure, when I publish about eighty of them, E. P. Allan will start to get a following. Maybe even an offer for a full-length paperback original. But at the moment, they’re just nice little classy stories that are fun to write.”

“And thanks to your family sagas, you can afford to write for fun,” said Stark.

“I wish that were so. Unfortunately, family sagas have gone out of style again. My agent couldn’t give away the last one. If I don’t come up with some new kind of big book, I’ll go broke.”

“You can always sell the Connecticut house.”

“Mortgaged to the hilt. I really need another big book deal.”

“I know the feeling,” said Stark. “I really need another big heist. You know that alley we took to Greenwich Village? Where else does it go?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Poe.

This time when they went down the rickety ladder, Stark reached up and pulled the door over the hole. “So we don’t get interrupted.”

Poe led him into the stone alley. “Where to?”

“There’s a branch of the Emigrant Savings Bank on Third Avenue I was casing before I went away for a few years. If we went back there in 1971, I know it cold. Two-man job. Everything planned, prepped, and rehearsed. In quick, out fast.”

Poe shook his head. “That’s only ten years ago. Witnesses, cops, guards will still be around to finger us.”

“Let me get a look at the job. If it’s still like I remember, we’ll be in quick, out fast, no one will see us.”

“What if it’s not like you remember?”

“Then we try a better one.”

“The problem is,” said Poe. “I can’t keep doing this all day. We’ve already gone back to Greenwich Village. If we go to Third Avenue in 1971 and it doesn’t work out, I’m done for at least twenty-four hours. Exhausted.”

“Okay. Let’s go so far back all the witnesses die of old age.”

“Ahead,” said Poe. “We go ahead.”

“Why?”

“They can’t come back for us.”

“Nice. Where? When?”

“Place I visited once.”

Stark followed Poe through the stone alley with a funny feeling that Poe had a plan. They emerged on the waterfront at the corner of Twelfth Avenue and Fifty-First Street facing Midtown skyscrapers ablaze in light, and their backs to the Manhattan Cruise Terminal piers. Disoriented, Stark looked up. Overhead, he saw only the night sky. “What happened to the West Side Highway?”

“They tore it down in ’89.”

Stark looked around. The shapes of the cars did not look familiar. “When is now?”

“Early two-thousands. Oh-five or oh-six. Before they changed the currency.”

“What are they doing to the currency?”

“Making it harder to counterfeit.”

Stark shrugged. Counterfeiting was indoor work. You might as well slave in a factory.

Poe said, “What we take here, now, we can still spend in ’81.”

Across the many lanes of car and truck traffic, a two-story stucco structure stretched a full block wide from Fifty-First Street to Fifty-Second. It managed to look vaguely Roman, an impression heightened by the stucco and a columned portico on its roof. It didn’t appear to have any windows, and Stark, who maintained a professional interest in buildings without windows, assumed it contained something valuable. Must have been a warehouse many years ago when the waterfront was still active, which meant a lot of big, open space inside. Might even connect to the tall loft building behind it. Which was also blank walled.

There was a single door on the street corner at the downtown end.

“What’s that?”

“That is where guys making fortunes on Wall Street spend it.”

Stark noted limos pulling up. Laughing men in suits reeled through the door. He said, “A strip club.”

“For the highest rollers. They call it a gentlemen’s club.”

“Cash,” said Stark.

“Mostly,” said Poe. “There’s some credit cards, but most use cash. Private from their wives.”

“How many girls?”

“At least a hundred, a busy night like tonight,” said Poe. “Plus hostesses, cocktail waitresses, and bar maids.”

“Did you case the joint, or were you just hanging out?” asked Stark.

“Research. I’m a writer.”

“Right,” said Stark, and ran the numbers aloud. “Five hundred customers spending five hundred a head. Quarter million in that one building. Minus a hundred grand stuffed in the girls’ drawers, we’re still looking at a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Drawers these days,” said Edgar Allan Poe, “don’t hold that much.”

“They’ll find someplace to put it.”

Poe looked troubled. “You wouldn’t rob the girls, would you?”

Stark returned a look that would freeze vodka. “Even if we wanted to, can you imagine parting cash from a hundred women who worked that hard to get it? No, we’re not here to rob the girls. We’re here to rob the club’s cash room.”

“They have heavy security,” said Poe.

“I would, too, in their position.”

“I should tell you that the mob owns a piece of the business.”

“The mob controls a strip club?” asked Stark. “I am shocked.”

“I’m just warning you.”

“Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“We need chauffeur uniforms,” said Stark, and he stalked across Twelfth Avenue.

Poe waited anxiously, wondering whether he had underestimated or overestimated the heist man. But surely Stark couldn’t just rob the club and leave him stranded? How would he get back to 1981? An hour passed. A second crept by, and Poe reflected gloomily that the crook had decided to stay in 2005 forever and rob the club on his own.

A long limousine stopped at the curb. Stark was at the wheel, wearing a chauffeur’s uniform that fit perfectly and licking blood from a knuckle. “Get in back.”

Poe slid into the passenger compartment, and Stark steered the limo into traffic. On the seat were a chauffeur’s jacket, pants, and visored cap. They fit perfectly.

“Got a gun?” Stark asked once Poe was dressed.

“No.”

“Good. Have you ever pulled a job like this before?”

“I’ve written it dozens of times.”

Stark glowered in the mirror.

“This is my first. In real life,” Poe said.

“Listen up. When we get in there, your job is to keep your eyes open and watch my back. You see trouble, tell me who to shoot.”

“Are we just barging in there?”

“No. We are entering on a mission to retrieve our criminal bosses, because the feds got the word they’re in the club. The feds are going to bust in in ten minutes. Our criminal bosses are armed. There will be gunfire and innocents will die, which means the cops will shut down the club for a very long time unless their loyal limo drivers get their bosses out quietly.”

“Security will ask what our bosses’ names are.”

“Our bosses use assumed names in strip clubs.”

“Security will ask why we don’t just text them.”

“What?”

“It’s the year 2005. They have cell phones that receive voice and text messages.”

Stark digested this information and said, “We can’t ‘text’ them because the feds are wiretapping their cell phones.”

“The feds can’t exactly wiretap cell phones. They have no wires.”

“They can call it whatever the hell they want to call it, but I can guarantee you the feds are still tapping the phones. In your day, they would have netted homing pigeons.”

Poe said, “The club has security cameras covering the whole place. They’ll probably make us go to their office and look for our bosses on their video screens.”

“Now you get it,” said Stark.

Stark had driven down Twelfth Avenue while Poe put on his chauffeur uniform, and he talked the writer through the job. Now he turned the limo around at Fourteenth Street and headed back up toward Fifty-First. Two blocks from the strip club, he pulled to the curb and switched on the hazard blinkers.

“What?” asked Poe.

“Cops.”

Patrol cars with flashing lights had converged on the corner of Fifty-First. A phalanx of men in blue charged in the door.

“Now what?” asked Poe.

“We wait ’til they leave.”

“What are they doing in there?”

“Whatever they want to.”

“Security won’t believe our story if the cops have already been there.”

“They’ll believe it more,” said Stark.

An ambulance pulled up. Men and women rolled a gurney across the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, it’s a shootout,” said Poe. “We better-”

“Just relax.” Stark thought that Poe was getting dangerously nervous for a man who was supposed to be watching his back. Yet another reason not to pull a job without rehearsing. He kept his eyes on the scene two blocks ahead and tried to distract the writer before he got too frantic to be of any use at all. “What kind of book will you write next?”

“Mysteries are coming back big time,” said Poe. “Best sellers, even. So, my agent thinks we can find a publisher willing to shell out big for the right book. He’s trying to talk me into writing one. I have an awful feeling I’m going to have to.”

“You don’t like mysteries?”

“I like them. But I know I’ll never win an Edgar.”

“What’s an Edgar?”

“MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award.”

“MWA?”

“Mystery Writers of America. They organized to promote mysteries and protect writers. They’ve got a clever motto: Crime does not pay-enough.”

“Bull,” said Stark. “Crime pays top dollar. But you gotta put the work into it. Plan. Prep. Rehearse. If you don’t, you’re a two-bit stick-up artist broke and in the slammer-wait a minute. Did you say they named the award after you?”

“Writers think I invented the mystery genre.”

“Hell of an honor.”

“I suppose.”

“Suppose? They don’t call it a Herman or a Ralph or a-what was Hawthorne’s name.”

“Nathaniel.”

“They don’t call it a Nat. They call it an Edgar. How much dough is the prize?”

“No dough. Big honor, and you get a little statue of me. But I’ll never win one.”

“Why not?” said Stark, who tended to feel optimistic halfway into a heist.

“Too perverse.”

“But genres come and go. You said so yourself. Sagas, gothics, bodice rippers. Perverse will come back, too.”

“I meant I’m personally perverse. I always write whatever I feel like writing. I never build on one thing. Which the winners tend to. The comedy guys do comedy, the hardboiled guys hardboiled, and they keep doing it over and over and over until someone notices. I’m all over the place-detective, science fiction, horror. Perverse.”

“Sounds more like feckless,” said Stark.

The ambulance crew and the cops trooped out of the club wheeling a gurney on which lay a bulbous shape covered with a sheet. A nurse was holding an oxygen mask to his face. Cocaine, thought Stark. Some things never change. Cute girls, martinis, coke, mortgage trader, no gym. “Okay, here we go. You up to this, Edgar?”

“I think so,” said Poe. “Can you give me any advice?”

“In quick, out fast.”

Stark parked the long black Lincoln precisely halfway up the block between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second. They walked the half block to the door of the strip club and skirted the line the bouncers had established behind a red velvet rope. The sharp-eyed doorman cracked a joke at their expense. “Yo, limo drivers! You forgot your limo.”

“Around the corner,” Stark said quietly, then he leaned in close so only the doorman could hear. “Our bosses are in there. The feds are coming for them. We’re supposed to get them out.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s their names?”

“Mine’s name is Smith.”

The doorman rounded on Poe. “What about yours?”

“Smith.”

The doorman cast a dubious look on his reservations book. “I got eighteen Smiths tonight.”

“We only want our two,” said Stark.

“Text ’em you’re here.”

Stark said, “Text them? On what? You think they carry cells?”

The doorman gave a small nod and several bouncers, big men, larger than the doorman even, gathered around. The doorman said, “Your problem ain’t our problem.”

“It’s about to be,” said Stark. “Just ’cause they don’t carry cells, don’t mean they don’t carry.”

“What?”

“I’ll paint a picture for you. In red. That’s going to be the color of your club when the shooting stops.”

“Nobody shoots at feds. Let the lawyers handle it and stop blocking my door.”

Stark took off his visored cap and said calmly, “Guys whose asses lawyers can’t save shoot at feds.”

The doorman spoke urgently into a shoulder mike, listened in his earpiece, spoke some more, and listened some more. Then he said to Stark, “I’m turning you over to the inside guys. Tell them your story. Do exactly what they tell you if don’t want your face broken. That goes for you too,” he said to Poe.

“We’ll be in quick and out fast,” Poe promised.

It looked like it might go just as well indoors, a huge room crowded with guys with their suit jackets draped over the back of their chairs and shapely naked women wearing high heels. They had arrived just in time for the March of the Ladies, where every woman in the joint formed a dancing line that snaked slowly about the room, accompanied by thundering music and flashing lights.

The head inside bouncer said, “I can’t let you go wandering around gawking at the customers. You’ll throw everybody off their game.”

“Is there someplace where we could look for them without bothering people?”

The bouncer snapped his fingers. “Right. Right. Good idea. Come on. We’ll scan the place. You can watch on the security monitors.”

“Let’s go,” said Stark. “The feds will be here any minute.”

“Got to clear it with the boss.” He spoke into his shoulder mike and listened to his earpiece. Stark remained expressionless. He was pleasantly surprised when the boss bought it.

Led, flanked, and followed by bouncers, Stark and Poe were hustled along the edge of the main room, up a back stairway to the second floor and down a hall toward an ordinary-looking door that swung open as they approached. Stark was thinking that security was pretty light up here. The head bouncer ushered them into an office that had a wall of video monitors. In one corner stood an enormous funnel.

The music from below shook the floor. Women wearing not much more than they were downstairs were wandering around, drinking and joking with a fit guy in a suit whom Stark pegged for the mobster who owned the strip club.

“Make it quick. Find your guys and we’ll send ’em out the back.”

Stark and Poe paced along the wall of monitors, pretending to hunt for their limo passengers. Stark stopped suddenly, signaled Poe, and pointed at a monitor. “Look at this, Ed. These our guys?”

“They all look the same,” said Poe.

“See the funnel?” Stark growled quietly.

“What’s it for?”

“That funnel is why winging it is for stick-up artists. That’s why they let us in here. That’s why girls are wandering in and out. Stuff you pour into the funnels goes straight down a pipe to the cellar.”

“Do you mean the room in the cellar is a vault?”

“You got it, Sherlock. So they don’t have to unlock the cellar room every time someone brings up a deposit, which they do regularly so there’s not a lot of cash on the floor to attract guys like you and me.”

“What do we do?” asked Poe.

“Stall until the next load of cash comes up here, and then grab it before they pour it.”

“But that will be only a tiny fraction of what’s in the vault.”

Stark stared. “You want a fraction or nothing?”

“Hey!” yelled the mobster. “Where are your guys?”

“Still looking, sir.”

“Look faster.”

The office door, which had been opening regularly, opened again, admitting two mostly naked women-a brunette who carried a canvas bank sack toward the funnel-and a beautiful bright-eyed blonde who walked straight up to Poe.

“Edgar?”

Poe, already paler than a bed sheet, turned white as snow.

The beautiful bright-eyed blonde looked confused. “Edgar? What are you doing in that uniform? You’re not a limo driver.”

“We were at a costume party,” Poe stammered, adding in a whisper through clenched teeth, “I didn’t realize you were working tonight.”

The owner crossed the office in a bound. “Costume party? What the hell are you talking about? Annie, you know this guy?”

“Sure,” said the beautiful bright-eyed blonde. “He’s one of my regulars.” She flashed Poe a dazzling smile. “My most generous regular. He’s promised to buy me a beach house right on the ocean. Listen, hon, when you’re done whatever you’re doing up here, I’ll be waiting for you in the Champagne Room.”

To Stark-who now understood why Poe’s Connecticut home was mortgaged to the hilt-the strip club owner said, “What are you pulling?”

“A Smith & Wesson,” said Stark, moving very close to the boss while shielding the short-barreled.38 from foolish attempts to grab it. “Edgar, grab that sack before she dumps it.”

Poe hurled himself toward the brunette as she threw the sack into the funnel. He caught it, and they ran out the door.

The head bouncer blocked the hall. He laughed. “I’ve been shot by a lot bigger guns that didn’t stop me.”

“It’s not only a gun,” said Stark. Before he had finished the sentence, the revolver and the bouncer’s head had collided. Stark grabbed Poe and jumped him over the bouncer’s body. He said, “Hang on to that sack,” and dragged Poe to the stairs.

“Not up,” cried Poe. “Down. Downstairs.”

“We’re going up.”

Somewhere behind them, someone fired a gun.

Women started screaming. More guns popped. Men yelled in terror.

Stark dragged Poe up the stairs, outdoors into a columned portico, out between two columns, and across the flat roof to the low parapet that rimmed the edge. The limo was parked where he had left it, thirty feet below.

“How do we get down?”

“Rope,” said Stark, uncoiling a heavy rope that was tied around a roof vent. He tossed it. The end fell within five feet of the sidewalk. “Where did that rope come from?”

“Plan. Prep. Rehearse.” Stark swung his legs over the parapet, grabbed the rope, lowered himself hand under hand to the sidewalk. “Throw me the money.”

Poe threw the money and slid down the rope. By the time he was darting across the sidewalk, blowing on his burned palms, Stark had the limo unlocked and the engine started. Poe jumped in beside him.

“Put on your seat belt,” said Stark, and he floored it, screeching into the late-night traffic, up Twelfth Avenue, and onto the Henry Hudson Highway, checking his mirrors repeatedly.

“All clear. Take us back to 1981.”

“I can’t from here.”

“Why not?”

“We have to go back from the same spot we entered.”

“Fifty-First and Twelfth Avenue?”

“Right across from the club.”

“I wish you’d told me that earlier.”

Stark checked his mirrors, for the tenth time, and turned off at the Seventy-Ninth Street. He circled under the highway, up the ramp, floored the big car back downtown. “We’ll have about three seconds at Fifty-First for you to get us the hell out of there.”

Poe’s answer was an unreassuring, “I’ll do my best.”

Stark hit the brakes. “Now!”

They piled out the doors. Stark’s estimate had been overly optimistic.

In one second, a club bouncer howled, “They’re back!”

In two seconds, numerous large men were running across Twelfth Avenue full tilt at Stark and Poe, yanking pistols from coats and trousers.

In three seconds, several stopped running to take careful aim.

Stark raised the hand not holding the money sack, with a hopeless feeling it wouldn’t change their minds. He heard Poe say, “Step back.”

They were in the stone alley and, just as suddenly, at the foot of the rickety ladder.

Up on the rock, a cool fresh breeze was blowing off the river and the sun was sinking low. A siren, faintly audible at first, grew loud. Poe gazed at the river. “That’s not an ambulance, Mr. Stark.”

“I didn’t think it was.” He started to stand up.

Poe said, “There’s a jeep patrol in the park. I wouldn’t run for it unless I were very young and athletic.”

“I thought you said they couldn’t follow us back.”

“Those aren’t bouncers, they’re cops. And they didn’t follow us from 2005. They followed you from this morning on the East Side.”

Stark’s face assumed the flat hard lines of a man unamused as he scrutinized the rock for fields of fire. Three or four police cars converged on the Eighty-Fourth Street entrance, and Jeep with riflemen roared up the bank from the promenade.

“Okay, get us out of here. Back, forward, I don’t care. Just away. Now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Poe. “I shot my wad getting us back from 2005. Being shot at didn’t make it easier, you know. I can’t budge us until I’ve drunk some wine and slept a full a day and night.”

“In that case, Mr. Poe, I need a hostage.”

“I am no longer famous enough to be a hostage. Too many pen names. They’ll shoot me and blame you. No, we need a more creative solution.”

“Any bright ideas?’ Stark asked. He felt himself running on empty.

“One,” said Poe. “I’ve used it before, but hopefully they don’t read. Give me your gun.”

“Fat chance.”

“Lay it down, over there. I’ll tell them you dropped it when you ran. Quickly, they’re out of the cars. Do it, man! One gun won’t make a difference.”

Poe was right about that. The cops were hauling shotguns from their trunks.

“Give me your gun and take the dough down in the hole. I’ll cover until they’re gone.”

Shaking his head dubiously, Stark slid the gun across the rock and slithered into the hole. The ladder chose that moment to break and he fell hard, but not far enough to do any damage. Overhead, the sky went black as Poe shoved the door over the hole.

“In pace requiescat!”

“What?”

Poe’s answer, if indeed he had answered, was drowned out by clanging and banging. It sounded like he was covering the door with heavy stones. Stark heard the cops scrambling up the steep rock, calling to each other, shouting at Poe.

“He went that-a-way!” Poe cried. “Look! He dropped his gun.”

Stark heard grunts, curses, the thump of rubber-soled shoes. Sirens. Then silence.

He waited a long time.

“Can I come out, now?”

Silence.

“Hey! Poe!”

Again silence.

“For crissake, Poe!”

He couldn’t reach the door. He wrapped his garrison belt around the broken ladder rail and climbed the rungs gingerly. The repair held until he pushed up. The weight of the rock was too much; the ladder twisted and he fell again. He landed flat on his back and in that position pushed the unbroken ladder rail against the door like a pole. The rocks were really heavy. Stark pushed up with all his might. Nothing. He took a deep breath and concentrated his considerable strength by imagining he was using the ladder to impale Edgar Allan Poe.

Slowly the door lifted. He could hear the rocks sliding off, a noise like fingernails on a blackboard. Suddenly the door felt light and it flew away and the sky poured in. Stark patched the ladder again, picked up the suitcase, and very carefully climbed out. The sun had set behind a Jersey condominium and the Hudson River was mauve and fading fast. The cops were gone. So was Poe.

Stark smiled. Not a bad deal. It was a mystery why Poe had split, but now all the money was his. The only thing he had lost was his gun, and he could afford to buy another.

About a year later, Stark was pretending to read magazines in a newsstand across the street from a lightly guarded Connecticut National Bank, when he spotted the name E. P. Allan embossed in shiny foil on a fat paperback mystery novel. His old friend Poe, who had saved his ass in Riverside Park and helped bankroll a memorable winter at a Bahamas resort.

The book, In Quick, Out Fast, was touted as the first in E. P. Allan’s new series of “astonishingly realistic” mystery thrillers featuring a brilliant armed robber who hit banks and armored cars. This first volume, of a projected ten, had already sold to the movies. A bunch of best-selling writers had given it glowing blurbs, but the one that speared Stark’s eye was lifted from a Kirkus prepublication review:

“More, much more, than an action-packed, crackerjack, unbelievably realistic yarn about a bank robbery on New York City’s East Side that goes bad. It’s as if you were there, shoulder to shoulder with a quick-thinking, fast-acting hero you will want to read about again and again and again. Read it and cheer. Read it and wonder how E. P. Allan could know such things. Read it and weep.”

JUSTIN SCOTT (aka Paul Garrison, aka J. S. Blazer, aka Alexander Cole) was nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel and best short story. He writes the Ben Abbott detective mysteries set in small-town Connecticut. He cowrites the early-twentieth-century Isaac Bell detective adventure series with Clive Cussler; The Assassin, their latest Isaac Bell novel, debuted in March 2015. His novel The Shipkiller is honored in the International Thriller Writers anthology Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. His main pen name is Paul Garrison, under which he writes modern sea stories and, for the Robert Ludlum banner, The Janson Command and The Janson Option.