Queens Noir

Alice fantastic by Maggie Estep

Aqueduct Racetrack

I’d been trying to get rid of the big oaf for seventeen weeks but he just kept coming around. He’d ring the bell and I’d look out the window and see him standing on the stoop looking like a kicked puppy. What I needed with another kicked puppy I couldn’t tell you, since I’d taken in a little white mutt with tan spots that my cousin Jeremy had found knocked up and wandering a trailer park in Kentucky. Cousin Jeremy couldn’t keep the dog so he called me up and somehow got me to take the animal in. After making the vet give her an abortion and a rabies shot, Jeremy found the dog a ride up from Kentucky with some freak friend of his who routinely drives between Kentucky and Queens transporting cheap cigarettes. The freak friend pulled his van up outside my house one night just before midnight and the dog came out of the van reeking of cigarettes and blinking up at me, completely confused and kicked- looking. Not that I think the freak friend of Cousin Jeremy’s actually kicked her. But the point is, I already had a kicked puppy. What did I need with a guy looking like one?

I didn’t need him. But he’d ring the bell and I’d let him in, and, even if I was wearing my dead father’s filthy bathrobe and I hadn’t showered in five days, he’d tell me, You look fantastic, Alice. I knew he actually meant it, that he saw something fantastic in my limp brown hair and puffy face and the zits I’d started getting suddenly at age thirty-six. It was embarrassing. The zits, the fact that I was letting this big oaf come over to nuzzle at my unbathed flesh, the little dog who’d sit at the edge of the bed watching as me and Clayton, the big oaf, went at it.

My life was a shambles. So I vowed to end it with Clayton. I vowed it on a Tuesday at 7 a.m. after waking up with an unusual sense of clarity. I opened my eyes to find thin winter sunlight sifting in the windows of the house my dead father left me. Candy, the trailer trash dog, was sitting at the edge of the bed, politely waiting for me to wake up because that’s the thing with strays, they’re so grateful to have been taken in that they defer to your schedule and needs. So, Candy was at the edge of the bed and sun was coming in the windows of my dead father’s place on 47th Road in the borough of Queens in New York City. And I felt clear-headed. Who knows why. I just did. And I felt I needed to get my act together. Shower more frequently. Stop smoking so much. Get back to yoga and kickboxing. Stop burning through my modest profits as a modest gambler. Revitalize myself. And the first order of business was to get rid of the big oaf, Clayton. Who ever heard of a guy named Clayton who isn’t ninety-seven years old, anyway?

I got into the shower and scrubbed myself raw, then shampooed my disgusting oily head. I took clean clothes out of the closet instead of foraging through the huge pile in the hamper the way I’d been doing for weeks. I put on black jeans and a fuzzy green sweater. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My semi-dry hair looked okay and my facial puffiness had gone down. Even my zits weren’t so visible. I looked vaguely alive.

I took my coat off the hook, put Candy’s leash on, and headed out for a walk along the East River, near the condo high-rises that look over into Manhattan. My dead father loved Long Island City. He moved here in the 1980s, when it was almost entirely industrial, to shack up with some drunken harlot, right after my mom kicked him out. Long after the harlot had dumped my father — all women dumped him all the time — he’d stayed on in the neighborhood, eventually buying a tiny two-story wood frame house that he left to me, his lone child, when the cancer got him last year at age fifty-nine. I like the neighborhood fine. It’s quiet and there are places to buy tacos.

“Looking good, mami,” said some Spanish guy as Candy and I walked past the gas station.

I never understand that mami thing. It sounds like they’re saying mommy. I know they mean hot mama and, in their minds, it’s a compliment, but it still strikes me as repulsive.

I ignored the guy.

As Candy sniffed and pissed and tried to eat garbage off the pavement, I smoked a few Marlboros and stared across at midtown Manhattan. It looked graceful from this distance.

The air was so cold it almost seemed clean and I started thinking on how I would rid myself of Clayton. I’d tried so many times. Had gotten him to agree not to call me anymore. But then, not two days would go by and he’d ring the bell. And I’d let him in. He’d look at me with those huge stupid brown eyes and tell me how great I looked. Alice, you’re fantastic, he’d told me so many times I started thinking of myself as Alice Fantastic, only there really wouldn’t be anything fantastic about me until I got rid of Clayton. When he would finally shut up about my fantasticness, I’d start in on the This isn’t going to work for me anymore, Clayton refrain I had been trotting out for seventeen weeks. Then he’d look wounded and his arms would hang so long at his sides that I’d have to touch him, and once I touched him, we’d make a beeline for the bed, and the sex was pretty good, the way it can be with someone you are physically attracted to in spite of or because of a lack of anything at all in common. And the sex being good would make me entertain the idea of instating him on some sort of permanent basis, and I guess that was my mistake. He’d see that little idea in my eye and latch onto it and have feelings, and his feelings would make him a prodigious lover, and I’d become so strung out on sex chemicals I would dopily say Sure when he’d ask to spend the night, and then again dopily say Sure the next morning when he’d ask if he could call me later.

But enough is enough. I don’t want Clayton convincing himself we’re going to be an everlasting item growing old together.

Right now Clayton lives in a parking lot. In his van. This I discovered when, that first night, after I picked him up in the taco place and strolled with him near the water, enjoying his simplicity and his long, loping gait, I brought him home and sucked his cock in the entrance hall and asked him to fuck me from behind in the kitchen, and then led him to the bedroom where we lay quiet for a little while until he was hard again, at which point I put on a pair of tights and asked him to rip out the crotch and fuck me through the hole. After all that, just when I was thinking up a polite way of asking him to leave, he propped himself up on his elbow and told me how much he liked me. “I really like you. I mean, I really like you,” looking at me with those eyes big as moons, and even though I just wanted to read a book and go to sleep, I didn’t have the heart to kick him out.

All that night, he babbled at me, telling me his woes, how his mother has Alzheimer’s and his father is in prison for forgery and his wife left him for a plumber and he’s been fired from his job at a cabinet-making shop and is living in his van in a parking lot and showering at the Y.

“I’ve got to get out of Queens soon,” he said.

“And go where?”

“Florida. I don’t like the cold much. Gets in my bones.”

“Yeah. Florida,” I said. I’d been there. To Gulfstream Park, Calder Race Course, and Tampa Bay Downs. I didn’t tell him that though. I just said, Yeah, Florida, like I wasn’t opposed to Florida, though why I would let him think I have any fondness for Florida, this leading him to possibly speculate that I’d want to go live there with him, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to be kind to him.

“Just a trailer is fine. I like trailers,” Clayton said.

“Right,” I said. And then I feigned sleep.

That was seventeen weeks ago. And I still haven’t gotten rid of him.

Candy and I walked for the better part of an hour and then headed home, passing back by the gas station where the moron felt the need to repeat, Looking good, mommy, and I actually stopped walking and stared at him and tried to think of words to explain exactly how repulsive it is to be called mommy and how it makes me picture him fucking his own mother, who is doubtless a matronly Dominican woman with endless folds of ancient flesh, but I couldn’t find the words and the guy was starting to grin, possibly thinking I was actually turned on by him, so I kept walking.

Once back inside my place, I gave Candy the leftovers from my previous night’s dinner and sat down at the kitchen table with my computer, my Daily Racing Form, and my notebooks. I got to work on the next day’s entries at Aqueduct. No matter how much I planned to change my life in the coming weeks, I still had to work. It wasn’t much of a card, even for a Wednesday in February, so I figured I wouldn’t be pushing a lot of money through the windows. But I would watch. I would take notes. I would listen. I would enjoy my work. I always do.

Several hours passed and I felt stirrings of hunger and glanced inside my fridge. Some lifeless lettuce, a few ounces of orange juice, and one egg. I considered boiling the egg, as there are days when there’s nothing I love more than a hard-boiled egg, but I decided this wasn’t one of those days. I would have to go to the taco place for take-out. I attached Candy’s leash to her collar and threw my coat on and was heading to the door when the phone rang. I picked it up.

“Hi, Alice,” came Clayton’s low voice.

I groaned.

“What’s the matter? You in pain?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean? What hurts? I’ll be right there.”

“No, no, Clayton, don’t. My pain is that you won’t take No for an answer.”

“No about what?”

“No about our continuing on like this.”

There was dead silence.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In the parking lot.”

“Clayton,” I said, “I know you think you’re a nice guy, but there’s nothing nice about coming around when I’ve repeatedly asked you not to. It’s borderline stalking.”

More silence.

“I need my peace and quiet.”

After several moments: “You don’t like the way I touch you anymore?”

“There’s more to life than touching.”

“Uh,” said Clayton. “I wouldn’t know since you won’t ever let me do anything with you other than come over and fuck you.”

Clayton had never said fuck before. Clayton had been raised in some sort of religious household. He wasn’t religious himself, but he was reserved about cursing.

“My life is nothing. Clayton, I go to the racetrack. I make my bets and take my notes. I talk to some of the other horse-players. I go home and cook dinner or I go to the taco place. I walk my dog. That’s it. There’s nothing to my life, Clayton, nothing to see.”

“So let me come with you.”

“Come with me where?”

“To the racetrack.”

“I’m asking you to never call me again and get out of my life. Why would I want to take you to the racetrack?”

“Just let me see a little piece of your life. I deserve it. Think of it as alimony.”

I couldn’t see why I should do anything for him. But I agreed anyway. At least it got him off the phone.

I took the dog out to the taco place. Came home and ate my dinner, giving half to the dog.

I’d told Clayton to meet me the next morning at 11:00 and we’d take the subway. He offered to drive but I didn’t trust that monstrous van of his not to break down en route. He rang the bell and I came downstairs to find him looking full of hope. Like seeing each other in daylight hours meant marriage and babies were imminent. Not that he’d asked for anything like that but he was that kind of guy, the kind of guy I seem to attract all too often, the want-to-snuggle-up-and-breed kind of guy. There are allegedly millions of women out there looking for these guys so I’m not sure why they all come knocking on my door. I guess they like a challenge. That’s why they’re men.

“Hi, Alice,” he beamed, “you look fantastic.”

“Thanks,” I said. I had pulled myself together, was wearing a tight black knee-length skirt and a soft black sweater that showed some shoulder — if I ever took my coat off, which I wasn’t planning to do as I figured any glimpsing of my flesh might give Clayton ideas.

“I’m just doing this ’cause you asked,” I said as we started walking to the G train, “but you have to realize this is my job and you can’t interfere or ask a lot of questions.” I was staring straight ahead so I didn’t have to see any indications of hurt in his eyes, because this was one of his ruses, the hurt look, the kicked puppy look, and I was damn well sick of it.

“Right,” said Clayton.

We went down into the station and waited forever, as one invariably does for the G train, and all the while Clayton stared at me so hard I was pretty sure he would turn me to stone.

Eventually, the train came and got us to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop in Brooklyn where we switched to the far more efficient A train. I felt relief at being on my way to Aqueduct. Not many people truly love Aqueduct, but I do. Belmont is gorgeous and spacious and Saratoga is grand if you can stand the crowds, but I love Aqueduct. Aqueduct is down-on-their-luck trainers slumping in the benches, degenerates, droolcases, and drunks swapping tips, and a few seasoned pro gamblers quietly going about their business. My kind of place.

Thirty minutes later, the train sighed into the stop at Aqueduct and we got off, us and a bunch of hunched middle-aged white men, a few slightly younger Rasta guys, and one well-dressed suit-type guy who was an owner or wanted to pretend to be one.

“Oh, it’s nice,” Clayton lied as we emerged from the little tunnel under the train tracks.

The structure looks like the set for a 1970s zombie movie, with its faded grim colors and the airplanes headed for JFK flying so low you’re sure they’re going to land on a horse.

“We’ll go up to the restaurant, have some omelettes,” I told him once we were inside the clubhouse. “The coffee sucks but the omelettes are fine.”

“Okay,” said Clayton.

We rode the escalator to the top, and at the big glass doors to the Equestris Restaurant, Manny, the maître d’, greeted me and gave us a table with a great view of the finish line.

Then Clayton started in with the questions. He’d never been a big question guy, wasn’t a very verbal guy period, but suddenly he wanted to know the history of Aqueduct and my history with Aqueduct and what else I’d ever done for a living and what my family thought of my being a professional gambler, etc., etc.

“I told you, I have to work. No twenty questions. Here’s a Racing Form,” I said, handing him the extra copy I’d printed out. “Now study that and let me think.”

The poor guy stared at the Form but obviously had no idea how to read it. Sometimes I forget that people don’t know these things. Seems like I always knew, what with coming here when I was a kid when Cousin Jeremy still lived in Queens and baby-sat me on days when my father was off on a construction job. I’d been betting since the age of nine and had been reasonably crafty about money-management and risk-taking since day one. I had turned a profit that first time when Jeremy had placed bets for me, and though I’d had plenty of painful losing days since, for the most part I scraped by. I’d briefly had a job as a substitute teacher after graduating from Hunter College, but I hated it. So I gambled and supplemented my modest profits with income from the garden apartment in my house. Not many people last more than a few years gambling for a living but, for whatever reason, I have. Mostly because I can’t stand the thought of doing anything else.

I was just about to take pity on Clayton and show him how to read the Form when Big Fred appeared and sat down at one of the extra chairs at our table.

“You see this piece of shit Pletcher’s running in the fifth race?” Fred wanted to know. Big Fred, who weighs 110 pounds tops, isn’t one for pleasantries. He had no interest in being introduced to Clayton, probably hadn’t even noticed I was with someone; he just wanted confirmation that the Todd Pletcher — trained colt in the fifth race was a piece of shit in spite of having cost 2.4 million at the Keeneland yearling sale and having won all three races he’d run in.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding gravely. “He’ll be 1–9.”

“He’s a flea,” said Fred.

“Yeah. Well. I wouldn’t throw him out on a Pick 6 ticket.”

“I’m throwing him out.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He hasn’t faced shit and he’s never gone two turns. And there’s that nice little horse of Nick’s that’s a closer.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’m using Nick’s horse. Singling him.”

“I wouldn’t throw out the Pletcher horse.”

“Fuck him,” said Fred, getting up and storming off to the other end of the place, where I saw him take a seat with some guys from the Daily Racing Form.

“Friend of yours?” asked Clayton.

I nodded. “Big Fred. He’s a good guy.”

“He is?”

“Sure.”

I could tell Clayton wanted to go somewhere with that one. Wanted to ask why I thought some strange little guy who just sat down and started cursing out horses was a good guy. Another reason Clayton had to be gotten rid of.

One of the waiters came and took our omelette order. Since I’d mapped out most of my bets, I took ten minutes and gave Clayton a cursory introduction to reading horses’ past performances. I was leaning in close, my finger tracing one of the horse’s running lines, when Clayton kissed my ear.

“I love you, Alice,” he said.

“Jesus, Clayton,” I said. “What the fuck?”

Clayton looked like a kicked puppy.

“I brought you here because I thought it’d be a nice way to spend our last day together but, fuck me, why do you have to get ridiculous?”

“I don’t want it to end. You’re all I’ve got.”

“You don’t have me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Clayton, there’s no future. No mas,” I said.

“No who?”

“No mas,” I repeated. “No more. Spanish.”

“Are you Spanish?”

“No, Clayton, I’m not Spanish. Shit, will you let me fucking work?”

“Everything okay over here?”

I looked up and saw Vito looming over the table. Vito is a stocky, hairy man who is some kind of low-level mafioso or mafioso-wannabe who owns a few cheap horses and fancies himself a gifted horseplayer.

“Everything’s fine,” I said, scowling at Vito. Much as Clayton was pissing me off, it wasn’t any of Vito’s business. But that’s the thing with these Vito-type guys at the track: What with my being a presentable woman under the age of eighty, a real rarity at Aqueduct, these guys get all protective of me. It might have been vaguely heartwarming if Vito wasn’t so smarmy.

Vito furrowed his monobrow. He was sweating profusely even though it was cool inside the restaurant.

“I’m Vito,” he said, aggressively extending his hand to Clayton, “and you are...?”

“Clayton,” said my soon-to-be-ex paramour, tentatively shaking Vito’s oily paw.

“We all look out for Alice around here,” Vito said.

Go fuck yourself, Vito, I thought, but didn’t say. There might be a time when I needed him for something.

“Oh,” said Clayton, confused, “that’s good. I look out for her too.”

Vito narrowed his already small eyes, looked from me to Clayton and back, then turned on his heels.

“See ya, Vito,” I said as the tubby man headed out of the restaurant, presumably going down to the paddock-viewing area to volubly express his opinions about the contestants in the first race.

A few races passed. I made a nice little score on a mare shipping in from Philadelphia Park. She was trained by some obscure woman trainer, ridden by some obscure apprentice jockey, and had only ever raced at Philadelphia Park, so, in spite of a nice batch of past performances, she was being ignored on the tote board and went off at 14-1. I had $200 on her to win and wheeled her on top of all the logical horses in an exacta. I made out nicely and that put me slightly at ease and reduced some of the Clayton-induced aggravation that had gotten so severe I hadn’t been able to eat my omelette and had started fantasizing about asking Vito to take Clayton out. Not Take Him Out take him out, I didn’t want the guy dead or anything, just put a scare into him. But that would have entailed asking a favor of Vito and I had no interest in establishing that kind of dynamic with that kind of guy.

The fifth race came and I watched with interest to see how the colt Big Fred liked fared. The Todd Pletcher — trained horse Fred hated, who did in fact go off at 1–9, broke alertly from the six hole and tucked nicely just off the pace that was being set by a longshot with early speed. Gang of Seven, the horse Big Fred liked, was at the back of the pack, biding his time. With a quarter of a mile to go, Gang of Seven started making his move four wide, picking off his opponents until he was within spitting distance of the Pletcher horse. Gang of Seven and the Pletcher trainee dueled to the wire and both appeared to get their noses there at the same time.

“Too close to call,” said the track announcer. A few minutes later, the photo was posted and the Pletcher horse had beat Big Fred’s by a whisker.

“I’m a fucking idiot!” I heard Fred cry out from four tables away. I saw him get up and storm out of the restaurant, probably heading to the back patio to chain-smoke and make phone calls to twenty of his closest horseplaying friends, announcing his own idiocy.

“Guy’s got a problem,” Clayton said.

“No he doesn’t,” I replied, aggravated. While it was true that Big Fred had a little trouble with anger management, he was, at heart, a very decent human being.

I got up and walked away, leaving Clayton to stare after me with those dinner plate — sized eyes.

I went down to the paddock, hoping that Clayton wouldn’t follow me. I saw Vito there staring out the big viewing window, his huge belly pressing against the glass. As I went to find a spot as far away as possible from Vito, I craned my neck just to check that Clayton hadn’t followed me. He had. I saw him lumbering around near the betting windows, looking left and right. He’d find me at any minute.

So I did something a little crazy.

“Vito,” I said, coming up behind him.

“Huh?” He turned around.

“Favor?” I asked.

His tiny black eyes glittered. “Anything, baby,” he purred.

I already regretted what I was doing. “Can you scare that guy I was sitting with? Just make him a little nervous? Make him go home?”

Vito’s tiny eyes got bigger, like someone had just dangled a bleeding hunk of filet mignon in front of him.

“You serious?” He stood closer to me.

I had a moment’s hesitation. Then thought of Clayton’s love pronouncements. “Yeah.”

“Sure. Where is he?”

I glanced back and didn’t see Clayton. “Somewhere around here, let’s look.”

Vito lumbered at my side. We searched all around the betting windows of the ground floor, but no Clayton. Then I glanced outside and spotted him standing near an empty bench, hunched and cold and lost-looking under the dove-gray sky.

“There,” I said.

“You got it, baby,” said Vito. Without another word, he marched outside. I saw him accost Clayton. I saw Clayton tilt his head left and right like a confused dog would. I thought of Candy. Later this afternoon, I’d go home to her and just maybe, thanks to Vito, I wouldn’t have to worry about the big oaf turning up with his big eyes and his inane declarations. Me and Candy could have some peace and quiet.

Now Clayton and Vito had come back inside and were walking together. They passed not far from where I was standing. Where was Vito taking him? I figured he’d just say a few choice words and that would be that. But they seemed to be going somewhere.

I followed them at a slight distance. I didn’t really care if Clayton saw me at this point. They went down the escalator and out the front door. Vito was only wearing a thin button-down shirt but he didn’t seem to register the bite of the February air. Clayton pulled his coat up around his ears.

They headed over to the subway platform. I saw Clayton pull out his MetroCard and go through the turnstile. Then he handed his card back to Vito, who went through after him.

What the fuck?

I stopped walking and stayed where I was in the middle of the ramp leading to the turnstiles. The two men were about a hundred yards in front of me but they had their backs to me. There wasn’t anyone else on the platform.

They started raising their voices. I couldn’t hear what was being said. There was wind and a big airplane with its belly low against the sky. Then the sound of an oncoming train and a blur of movement. A body falling down onto the tracks just as the train came. I braced myself for some sort of screeching of brakes. There wasn’t any. The train charged into the station. The doors opened then closed. No one got on or off. The train pulled away. There was just one guy left standing on the platform. He was staring down at the tracks.

My fingers were numb.

I slowly walked up the platform. Found my MetroCard in my coat. Slid it in and went through the turnstile. I walked to the edge and looked down at the tracks. There was an arm separated from the rest of the body. Blood pouring out of the shoulder. The head twisted at an angle you never saw in life. I wasn’t sure how the train conductor had failed to notice. The MTA has been very proud of its new One-Person Train Operation system that requires just one human to run the entire train. Maybe that’s not enough to keep an eye out for falling bodies.

I felt nauseous. I started to black out and then he steadied me, putting his hands at the small of my back.

“He was talking about you,” said Clayton, staring down at Vito’s big mangled body. “Said you were going to blow him in exchange for him getting rid of me. He was just trying to upset me but it was disrespectful to you. I wanted to scare him but he fell onto the tracks.” Clayton spoke so calmly. “He was talking shit about you, Alice,” he added, raising his voice a little.

“Well,” I said, “that wasn’t very nice of him, was it?”

Clayton smiled.

He really wasn’t a bad-looking guy.

Under the throgs neck bridge by Dents Hamill

Bayside

Times change, she thought. People don’t.

Nikki reread the last of three diaries written by a dead woman named Eileen Lavin, took a deep breath, and spied Dr. George Sheridan through the Zhumell Spotting Scope mounted on a tripod in front of her sixteenth-floor window in her Bayside condo. He was leaving his luxury shore-front home over in Douglaston.

It was 8:55 a.m. on a sunny Mother’s Day in Queens. Dr. Sheridan was dressed in his blue and white Abercrombie & Fitch tracksuit and Nikki’s zoom lens was so powerful that even clear across the half-mile of Little Neck Bay she could see the double-G imprinted on his $375 dark-blue Gucci sneakers. She knew from watching him since New Year’s that he wore a different tracksuit and rotated his designer sneakers every day.

“Mmmm-hmmm,” Nikki whispered, knotting her yellow cotton tank top at her sternum and tying the laces on her New Balance sneakers, sweat socks bunched at the tops. Her white spandex shorts could not have been any tighter, accentuating her twenty-five-year-old ass that she’d slaved to sculpt into bubble perfection on the butt buster, StairMaster, and at the aerobics dance classes in the gym in the Bayview condo complex where she’d rented an apartment for six months.

Two things she’d noticed about all the women Dr. Sheridan chased — all were in their twenties and all had bubble butts.

Several minutes later, Nikki peered through the telescope again. The sun twinkled on the blue eye of Little Neck Bay as Sheridan boarded his forty-two-foot Silverton bearing the name The Dog’s Life at his private dock behind his modernized Queen Anne — style house on a cul-de-sac off Shore Road. He climbed to the fly deck, fired up the twin engines, and aimed straight at Bayside Marina a half-mile across the water. Nikki knew Dr. Sheridan would moor The Dog’s Life there before moving down the marina walkway to the jogging path. He would run south to the end of the asphalt path at Northern Boulevard, then make a U-turn and jog three miles north to Fort Totten, where he’d turn and head back to the marina to complete his daily six-mile route along one of the most idyllic stretches of waterfront in New York City.

“He’s mine,” Nikki whispered, before hurrying out of the apartment and down the sixteen flights of stairs to work up a good sweat before jogging out into the Bayside streets, passing the old colonials, the Queen Annes, the Tudors, and the gruesome McMansions and boxy two-family condo units that looked to her like they had been designed by shoemakers.

She huffed east on Thirty-Fifth Avenue and over to the secret little emerald called Crocheron Park. Nikki ran past a fraternity of dog walkers who let their pets chase taunting squirrels through the underused meadows. She legged past the fields where a father in a Mets jacket towered fly balls to his son who wore a Yankees hat. She nodded to three chunky women joggers who gasped counter-clockwise on the one-mile inside roadway and watched a tennis volley between two seventy-something men wearing white designer shorts with indoor winter tans. They stopped the volley to ogle Nikki. Since Viagra, seventy is the new seventeen, she thought. She slowed to a walk as she approached the southern-most of the two gazebos stationed on the steep leafy hill overlooking the jogging/bicycle road parallel to the humming Cross Island Parkway. Through the budding trees she would momentarily clock Dr. Sheridan making the southbound leg of his run.

It was 9:17 a.m. now. She knew his moves better than he did. Glistening with sweat, her red headband securing her long dark hair, she gulped some Poland Spring water, then poured out all but an inch from a twenty-ounce bottle. Through the verdant trees she saw him, running hard, like someone fleeing from his own footprints.

Nikki bounded down the long stone steps from the park to the Cross Island overpass. She leaped from step to step in a graceful ballet, her body taking blurry flight between footfalls. She cut over the six lanes of the Cross Island, busy with Mother’s Day travelers, about half of them on their way to visit Mom now living in some old person’s orphanage, with a name like Shady Acres, after having been abandoned by the very ingrates she had brought into the world. Nikki gazed right and here came Dr. Sheridan hoofing toward her just as she bounced down the final ramp onto the jogging path, her breasts heaving, sweat lashing off her face in a spray of tiny sunlit diamonds.

They exchanged glances. Dr. Sheridan smiled. Nikki didn’t. A lifetime of running had kept his forty-five-year-old body as trim as Nikki imagined it had been when he was twenty. She pivoted, sprung, and ran ahead of him, ham muscles bunching in the damp white Spandex like sins waiting to be committed. Her thigh muscles rippled as she passed fishermen in rubber suits standing hip deep in the tame bay where swans and geese and mallards and ducks looped around the sailboats. A spotted hawk circled and a pair of fat black crows exploded from the wild reeds into the high trees of Crocheron.

A lone whooping crane stood on one leg on a sand spit, bleating like a traffic cop. Nikki watched a pair of young lovers, a pretty Asian girl and a skinny white boy with mousse-spiked hair, sharing the two earplugs of an iPod and strolling hand-in-hand as if never wanting this song, this walk, this morning to end. The girl gave her companion a gentle bump of her left hip in the first movement of their ephemeral dance of spring. Love him till it hurts, Nikki thought. She knew Dr. Sheridan was behind her undressing her with his eyes.

Up ahead she saw the sun gilding across the long steel bones of the Throgs Neck Bridge. A cabin cruiser grumped beneath it. Nausea rose in Nikki like a dirty tide. She contained it with her sense of mission. She was gonna make a bad thing right.

Nikki knew Dr. Sheridan would shower and change in the luxury salon of his boat before hopping in his two-door silver BMW Z4, with the MEOW1 vanity plate that he kept in one of his two rented parking spots by the marina — the second spot was for babes who spent the night on his boat. Then he’d drive the five minutes to work at his Menagerie Animal Clinic across the street from the Bay Terrace Shopping Mall. There, even on Mother’s Day, he would give comfort to the daily parade of heartsick pet owners, most of them women — divorcées, young and single, widows, unhappily married and happy to cheat — who came whenever Fido or Fluffy so much as sneezed, just to hear the soothing timbre of Dr. Sheridan’s deep voice. Observing him over four months, from winter until spring, Nikki had deduced that Dr. Sheridan didn’t mix business with pleasure. He mixed pleasure with more pleasure, she thought. Never with friends or clients. Only with strangers.

With his handsome and gray-only-at-the-temples good looks, a multimillion-dollar bay-front home, his own luxury boat, a Beemer and a Benz in his driveway, a lucrative veterinarian clinic, and membership in the local community board, Dr. George Sheridan possessed one of the most sought after naked left ring fingers in eastern Queens.

Fat chance, girls, she thought. For on Thursday night, Ladies’ Nite, when Cosmopolitans were free for babes in most of the crowded bars along Bell Boulevard, Dr. Sheridan could usually be found at the three-deep mahogany bar in the ambient bordello lighting of Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse, dressed in an Armani or Hugo Boss, with open-necked shirt, Botticelli loafers, no socks, sipping Grey Goose and tonic through a swizzle straw.

When he met the right hot chick, never older than the French formula of half-his-age-plus-seven, he’d buy her drinks. After two rounds he’d ask if she was hungry and then treat her to the famous crab cakes, shrimp the size of mandolins, and the porterhouse steak that he insisted was as good if not better than the ones served at Peter Luger’s over in Brooklyn. “Meal whores,” Nikki had overheard Dr. Sheridan call his prey to other middle-aged men on the prowl on Ladies’ Nites.

Dr. Sheridan always paid with cash when he left and usually had one of the Cosmo’d babes plopping her bubble butt in the leather bucket passenger seat of his Beemer on his way home to Douglaston. But Nikki knew — as did he — that those consenting adults in high heels were as much on the make as Dr. Sheridan. He wanted to get in their pants; the ladies wanted to get on his left ring finger. It was a game, though he was the one who stacked the deck.

In the mornings after, through her all-revealing telescope, Nikki had seen many of those young women stagger out of Sheridan’s house, or the salon of his boat, still dazed and woozy. He’d drive them back to the cars they had left on Bell Boulevard the night before.

Of late, however, with spring prickling the air, Dr. Sheridan was fond of taking his lady friends for a nightcap at the elegant, brilliantly lighted Caffè on the Green overlooking the Throgs Neck Bridge, a high-end restaurant that was once home to Rudolph Valentino and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. And then for a moonlight cruise on his $300,000 luxury Silverton, replete with living room, salon, wide-screen satellite TV, quadraphonic sound system, full-service kitchen, elegant dining room, master bedroom with queen-size bed, and smaller guest bedroom. Nikki would watch him drop anchor under the Throgs Neck Bridge, where he and his young dates would spend the night rocking in the tide.

Nikki knew his routine. A month ago, she had positioned herself alone at the bar of Uncle Jack’s so that Dr. Sheridan would spot her wearing her skin-tightest jeans, high spaghetti-strap heels, and matching tight red leather waist jacket. He offered to buy her a drink and she asked for a bottle of Heineken, no glass. As she drank the beer, she watched him sip his Grey Goose in careful measures through the swizzle-stick straw.

“Real guys don’t suck straws,” she said, pulling it from his mouth.

He laughed. She clinked her bottle against his glass and he drank from the lip.

“Real guys offer to buy beautiful women like you dinner,” he said.

“Maybe some other time. I just stopped off for a cold one before work.”

“Where do you work?”

“Queens.”

“Queens? Queens what? Queens Hospital? Queens College? Queens Supreme?”

She slugged more beer. “Nah.”

He laughed. “Okay, doing what?”

“My job.”

She wanted him to remember her. Nothing makes a rich man remember you like a little bit of mystery and declining a dinner invitation, she thought. Go to dinner, fuck his brains out, and tell him your life story... and you are as memorable as yesterday’s Dow index. Turn him down, keep your pants on, tell him nothing, and he’ll never forget you.

He wrote his cell number and his private e-mail address on the back of his embossed business card and handed it to her. She opened her pocketbook and stuffed the card into her wallet, then discreetly slipped the swizzle stick in a clear plastic bag. She finished the beer, said thanks, and left for work.

The job consisted of sitting in her dark-blue Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows, parked up the block on Bell Boulevard. Three hours later, after bar hopping along the same street, Dr. Sheridan left a place called The First Edition accompanied by a gorgeous wobbly blonde with a bubble butt and pants so tight they looked like they hurt. Nikki figured her fake ID said she had turned twenty-one the day before.

Nikki followed Dr. Sheridan’s BMW to the Bayside Marina, where he and his date boarded The Dog’s Life. Later, Nikki watched them through her telescope from her condo window as he pulled the boat under the Throgs Neck Bridge. After one glass of bubbly, the young woman got up from a deck chair and staggered sideways. Dr. Sheridan helped her into his salon and closed the door.

Hours later, Nikki watched him come up on deck wearing only boxer shorts, gabbing on a cell phone. The second time he came up he was completely naked, spraying Windex and wiping off the railings and deck furniture. Nikki turned away, but then felt compelled to look back with the zoom lens because something seemed odd. A close inspection through the telescope revealed that Dr. Sheridan was a man completely devoid of body hair. Shaved from neck to ankles, like a toy poodle in summer. Nikki could think of nothing less sexy than a completely hairless naked man doing housework. Retch-ro-sexual, she thought, suppressing a wave of nausea.

The girl never reemerged. Not until morning when Dr. Sheridan had to help her off the boat on her wobbly platform shoes. Through the telescope the woman appeared to be dazed, confused. He stroked her hair, shook his head, kissed her, and patted her cheek, as if reassuring her that nothing sexual had happened. Then he tapped his watch and helped her into his Beemer, and drove her back toward Bell Boulevard where she would have left her car the night before. Some hangovers you never recover from, Nikki thought.

Now, on this sun-filled Mother’s Day, Nikki jogged just ahead of Dr. Sheridan along the wooden planks of the Bayside Marina, knowing he was watching her. She slowed to a sweaty, panting walk. Asian and Latino fishermen crowded the end of the marina, casting their lines into the dark waters. A bride and groom stood posing for pictures that would keep them forever young, even when married life got old before they did. Nikki nodded to a grizzled dock hand running the boat-rental concession and entered the snack shop at the end of the pier, opened the soft drink refrigerator door, grabbed an ice-cold bottle of Poland Spring, and approached the cashier. She patted her hips as if just realizing she didn’t have her jogging pouch with her.

“Damn it,” she said. “Forgot my money.” She turned to return the bottle, counting: One Mississippi, two Mississ — “Let me buy it for you,” she heard Dr. Sheridan say in that soothing, deep voice that sounded like a priest giving absolution.

She looked up. “Nah, thanks anyway.” She opened the refrigerator door.

“C’mon, don’t you remember me?”

“Sorry?”

“Uncle Jack’s? Several months ago. You said I looked gay sipping a straw.”

She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “I didn’t say you looked gay. I said that real guys don’t suck straws.”

“Dr. Sheridan... um, George. I’m a veterinarian. I offered to buy you dinner.”

He paid for her water and bought some for himself.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the water, doc.” She turned for the exit.

“You said you’d have dinner with me some other time.”

“I’m positive I said maybe.”

“Touché. Is maybe still an option?”

She smirked. “Look, I don’t date married guys and you look like the married ty—”

He held up his bare left hand. “Never.”

She cracked open the water bottle, took a long gulp, her neck muscles and veins bulging, her face and pronounced clavicle bones gleaming with a patina of fresh sweat. She rolled the cold plastic bottle on the back of her neck. “Italian?”

“Caffè on the Green?”

“Promise not to suck straw?”

He laughed and nodded. “Promise.”

She swigged more water. “When?”

“Tonight? Eight? I’ll pick you up. Where do you—”

“See you then.”

“Hey,” he called out, “I don’t even know your name...”

But she was already on the hoof, buns bunching, hair flapping in the wind off Little Neck Bay. Got him, she thought.

Over dinner at a window table in the spacious Caffè on the Green, decorated with polished Italian marble, Oriental carpeting, lustrous mahogany, looking out on the glittering Throgs Neck Bridge, Dr. Sheridan asked Nikki dozens of questions. “Why won’t you tell me your last name?”

“I only give my last name to people who pay me. Friends call me Nikki.”

“Like Madonna? Or Cher? You a singer? Or fugitive or something?”

“Something.”

“Family?”

Nikki told him that she had no siblings. That her mother had died when she was young. That her father had never really been in her life. That she had fended mostly for herself since moving to New York after college.

“What school?”

“You never heard of it.”

When he asked what she did for a living, she said, “IT.”

“Aha, the IT Girl. Information technology for whom?”

“Freelance,” she said, eating an arugula salad. “I work for online database companies that locate people.”

“Like old sweethearts and schoolmates?”

“Yeah, and for estate lawyers looking for beneficiaries, private investigators looking for abducted kids and dead-beat parents, orphans who want to find their birth parents, bail bondsmen searching for bail jumpers, people who need criminal background checks on potential spouses or prospective employees.”

“Cool. How’d you get into that line of work?”

“Doing my family tree.”

“Fascinating.”

“Can be.”

“How do people find you?” he asked.

“I find them. I choose my own hours. But I’m gonna launch a website soon.”

“Awesome! Need any investors?”

“Nope.”

The more he probed, and the more evasive she got, the more intrigued he became. Everyone loves an enigma, she thought.

“So what brought you to Bayside?”

“Enough about me,” she replied, then asked about his family.

He poked at his branzini filet with lemon, garlic, and capers. “I’m an only child,” he said. “Lost both my parents when I was seventeen. Drowned in a boating accident.” He pointed out the window at the bay, where the lights of the 1800-footlong bridge reflected in the night waters. “Right there, under the Throgs Neck.”

“Sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Some things hurt forever.”

He nodded.

After she declined coffee and dessert, he invited her for a nightcap at his house, where she could see his menagerie of exotic animals.

“Nah.”

He seemed surprised. He asked if she’d like to join him for a midnight cruise through New York Harbor.

“Nah.”

“Cold Heinekens on board. Or Roederer Cristal champagne.”

“Cristal’s tempting but I never put myself in a hump-or-jump situation on first dates.”

He laughed. “Then how about on a second date?”

“Maybe.”

“How will I know?”

“I still have your card.”

Dr. Sheridan paid the bill in cash, like a man who didn’t want to leave a trail. Like a body-shaved man who wipes away fingerprints with Windex.

They left Caffè on the Green and walked across the sprawling lawn toward the parking lot, passing the duck pond that reflected the moon shining through the hundred-year-old willows. An ornate marble fountain burbled, and a thousand tiny white lights dotted the shrubbery like immortal fireflies. A frail breeze sighed off Little Neck Bay and Nikki imagined Rudy Valentino putting the make on some hot flapper here long before the Throgs Neck was even imagined.

Dr. Sheridan offered to drive Nikki home, but she declined. In the well-lit parking lot she thanked him for dinner and said, “Goodnight, doc,” then shook his hand. His palm was damp. He leaned in to kiss her and she backed away, sliding her hand from his, and before the valet could retrieve Dr. Sheridan’s Mercedes 450, she clacked her high heels off into the night, looping home through the dark drowsy side streets of eastern Queens.

Nikki watched Dr. Sheridan through the telescope for the next two weeks. She watched him jog along the Cross Island Parkway each day, ogling the female joggers, chatting them up, handing them business cards. He took a young woman on a boat ride just before sunset one evening. When he dropped her off at a small weed-shrouded fishing dock halfway between the Bayside Marina and Fort Totten after dark, Nikki saw her stumble up the jogging path to her car in one of Dr. Sheridan’s two parking spots. She collapsed into the driver’s seat and appeared to fall fast asleep.

An hour later, Nikki jogged up to the car, stopped, knocked on the window, and asked if everything was okay. “S’all right,” the glassy-eyed girl slurred. She asked the time while stifling a yawn. Nikki told her it was almost 10 p.m. The girl was astonished. She sat up, shook her head like a wet hound, and started her car. “My fuckin’ husband’ll kill me,” she said. Nikki asked if anything bad had happened to her on the boat. The girl blinked several times and said, “Boat?”

“Were you sexually compromised, hon?”

“Fuckin’ lesbo freak,” the girl shot back, powering up the window and squealing off onto the Cross Island.

At night during this period, Nikki sat in her Jeep Cherokee staking out Dr. Sheridan as he cruised the local bar scene on a mobbed Bell Boulevard. There were a dozen bars in this four-block strip that brought young people from all over Queens and Nassau County by car or the Long Island Rail Road. She watched Dr. Sheridan, big fish in a small, well-stocked pond, sample Uncle Jack’s, Bourbon Street, Sullivan’s, KC’s Saloon, Dempsey’s, Donovan’s, Monahan’s, Fitzgerald’s, No No’s, and The First Edition. On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Dr. Sheridan left with different young women each night. He spent the night aboard The Dog’s Life with each one, anchored under the Throgs Neck Bridge. No one’s that lucky, she thought.

On a Friday morning in the second week of June, Nikki received the results from Dr. Sheridan’s swizzle straw from the DNA lab. All that she’d suspected was now scientific fact. The DNA on the drinking straw confirmed everything that the woman named Eileen Lavin had contended long ago to her family, friends, church, and the authorities — and in her diaries.

Dressed in her jogging gear, Nikki sat down in front of her telescope with Eileen Lavin’s diaries and went over everything again. Lavin had told police that she went aboard a boat with a guy named George Sheridan who said he had some golden Labrador retriever puppies from which she might choose a mascot for the orphan kids she was working with as a novice in the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Eileen had finished three years at St. John’s University, lived in a convent in the Bronx for eighteen months, and had taken all the temporary vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. She had met George Sheridan when he attended a St. John’s swim team meet against rival Wagner College. That night, beautiful Eileen Lavin, who was on a full athletic scholarship, led the Johnnies to a major victory over the Seahawks. A series of photographs in the St. John’s Torch student newspaper showed young Lavin in a team bathing suit. She was gonna be a nun, thought Nikki. But she had a bubble butt.

George Sheridan was a St. John’s senior majoring in veterinary medicine. Eileen Lavin was studying social work, working toward her BA. She was also preparing for her final vows of sisterhood. Sheridan ate lunch with her at school several times. He cheered at her meets. Then one afternoon after school, Sheridan invited her aboard his boat. He said he would gladly take some of the poor inner-city orphan kids she was working with out for a day of fishing and sightseeing. He also told her about some pedigree puppies he had at home and said that he’d like to donate one to the orphanage. Late that afternoon, Eileen went out on the boat with Sheridan. Her diary said that he was a perfect gentleman at first and took her for a cruise around New York Harbor. On the way back to his home in Douglaston, he dropped anchor under the Throgs Neck Bridge. As the sun went down over Queens, he asked Eileen to pray with him for his parents who’d drowned in those very waters. Then he served popcorn and gave her a glass of lemonade before they were to head back to his home in Douglaston and select a puppy. The last thing she remembered were the lights of the Throgs Neck playing on the night waters of Little Neck Bay.

Then, according to her diary, total blackout. When she awoke in the predawn, she was sitting on a bus stop bench down the road from her Novitiate House. She was groggy and very sore between her legs.

Years later, after an exhaustive Internet search, Nikki had found the old police report and Eileen Lavin’s Family Court records. She had tracked down Eileen’s father, a broken old man who still lived in Bayside. She told him who she was, and he had let her read his daughter’s diaries. Eileen’s mother had since died, never really recovering from the scandal, shame, and sorrow her daughter had brought upon the family with the out-of-wedlock pregnancy, expulsion from the convent, withdrawal from St. John’s, and then her suicide.

The diary entry recounting Nikki’s boat trip with George Sheridan said that she had bled most of the next day. She didn’t want to believe that she had been drugged and raped by the kindly schoolmate. She had no memory of any such monstrous thing happening and she had woken up fully clothed. She was not beaten or bruised. She had no memory of seeing any puppies. She called Sheridan, but he didn’t return her calls. She had no proof that she had ever been with him, in his car, his house, or on his boat. Never mind his bed.

Afraid she would be punished, or asked to leave the Novitiate, she kept her dark fears of having been raped to herself. She did not go to a hospital or to the police right away. Instead, she prayed. She did a Novena and the Stations of the Cross. She lit votive candles. She worked with orphan children who had more problems that she could ever know. She went to confession in Manhattan where no one would recognize her. She kept a diary for her and God’s eyes only.

The diaries revealed that after the night on Sheridan’s boat, Eileen missed a menstrual cycle. Then a second. After three and a half months without a period, she confided in her Mother Superior that she feared she was pregnant. That she’d been raped. The stern, skeptical, no-nonsense head sister who’d seen many a young novice surrender over the years to the weakness of the flesh before taking final vows asked why Eileen hadn’t told anyone till then. Eileen said she’d been afraid.

“You were afraid of going to hell,” Mother Superior said.

“I wasn’t sure I was raped. Or even pregnant. Until now.”

“The alternative being that you are the second coming of the Blessed Virgin?”

“I was afraid! Afraid of you. Afraid of the shame to my parents. Afraid of God.”

“And so now, three months later, you blame a young man, a good Catholic boy from St. John’s studying to be a veterinarian? You aren’t even sure he ever laid a hand on you. You have no memory of any such thing. No evidence. Yet you accuse him and bring shame on him, upon a great Catholic university, to make up for your own weakness? Your own mortal sin?”

“You have it all wrong. I was a virgin when I stepped on his boat!”

“You’ve violated your vows,” Mother Superior said. “You’ve committed the sin of fornication. You are bringing a child out of wedlock into the world. Stop pointing fingers at others. Go home and point the finger at the dirty girl in the mirror.”

When she was four months pregnant, Eileen Lavin was told she could not take her vows of sisterhood. She had not kept her temporary vow of chastity. She’d sinned, covered up that sin, compounded the sin by lying about the original sin, and now she was carrying a bastard child. “There is no room for untruthful, unwed mothers in the sisterhood,” Mother Superior said.

The diaries revealed that when Eileen finally contacted the police, they asked why she’d waited four months to report a rape. They asked why she hadn’t gone to a hospital. Why she hadn’t contacted police right away. They asked why any woman would give birth to a rapist’s baby. She explained that she was a devout Catholic, and could never abort any baby. The skeptical detectives from the 111th Precinct made a cursory call on Sheridan. He denied ever having Eileen Lavin aboard his boat or in his house. He invited them to dust for fingerprints. He said the woman was delusional. That her nickname was Sister Psycho.

The cops believed Sheridan. They apologized for bothering him. “We cannot indict a man on the word of a defrocked nun with no memory of the alleged crime,” said the Queens District Attorney’s office who investigated the case in 1982. “There’s no proof the baby is Sheridan’s. A blood test could only eliminate him, not identify him.” There was no definitive DNA test in 1982.

Eileen’s devout, old-world, immigrant Irish Catholic parents ostracized her. They had been shamed by a whispering campaign in their Bayside parish where they had previously bragged about their pious daughter going into the convent. Eileen had become just another unwed, knocked-up college slut. Gossip swirled. Neighbors snickered. Friends didn’t return her calls. Because of the pregnancy, she lost her swimming scholarship. She was forced to drop out of her last year of St. John’s and had the baby shortly after she turned twenty. Her mother refused to have anything to do with the child. Or Eileen. After the baptism, Eileen reluctantly gave the baby up for adoption.

Then, the diaries showed, Eileen went into a period of deep and prolonged depression. She reapplied for the Novitiate a year later, but Mother Superior said she was psychologically, morally, and spiritually unfit for the sisterhood. She had no family to turn to. Her religious dreams were shattered. She tried in vain to retrieve her baby from the adoption agency. The Queens Family Court refused to restore custody of her child because she was too emotionally and financially unstable. In thorough despair, Eileen ventured out onto the Throgs Neck Bridge one summer night and jumped 120 feet into the inky waters where she had lost her virginity on George Sheridan’s boat.

On a Friday morning in the second week of June, a quarter-century later, Nikki spied Dr. George Sheridan through her telescope as he left his house in Douglaston for his morning run. She timed it so that she ran into him twenty-two minutes later while descending from the Crocheron overpass of the Cross Island. He undressed her with his eyes so blatantly that she feared he’d leave a stain. Then he sidled up and ran alongside her toward the Bayside Marina.

“What are you doing on Sunday night, doc?” she asked.

“I’m free.”

“Thought I might take you up on that moonlight cruise.”

“Fabulous. Want to eat somewhere first?”

“I’ll pack dinner.”

“I’ll pour you champagne. Where do I pick you up?”

She told him she’d be waiting at 8 p.m. sharp at the little fishing dock alongside the Cross Island between Bayside Marina and Fort Totten.

“Date,” he said.

She promptly jogged up the ramp of the next overpass and he headed on toward the Throgs Neck Bridge.

On Sunday night, Dr. Sheridan showed Nikki how to start, stop, and steer The Dog’s Life as they cruised back to Little Neck Bay from their tour of New York Harbor. Nikki wore black Spandex clam-diggers, a black halter top, a black Mets jacket, and a black Mets cap, which she tilted up when they sailed under the chilly shadow of the Throgs Neck. Sheridan cut the engines and suggested they go down on deck to “eat, drink, and be silly.”

“Okay,” Nikki said.

He dropped anchor under the bridge as Nikki opened the picnic basket and served chicken and broccoli tossed in a cold penne with olive oil and thinly sliced red bell peppers, seeded Italian bread, and a tomato and basil salad. He walked into the salon and she watched as he poured a flute of champagne from an already opened bottle of Roederer Cristal chilling in a silver ice bucket. He made himself a Grey Goose and tonic. They headed back out of the salon and he handed her the champagne as The Dog’s Life lolled on the night tide.

“You aren’t having champagne?”

“Real guys drink Grey Goose,” he said. “From the glass.”

She smiled and they sat down and started to eat. She watched champagne bubbles rise in the flute glass, each one like a long buried corpse popping to the surface.

“You like it out here?” he asked.

“Nah.”

“Why?”

She stood and carried her glass to the railing. She leaned over it and swept her free left hand across the Throgs Neck as she carefully poured her champagne into the bay with her right hand, out of Dr. Sheridan’s view.

“Too beautiful a place to die,” she said, her back to him, lifting her empty glass and pretending to guzzle her champagne. She turned to him and forced a belch into her fist.

He said, “Die?”

“You told me your parents drowned here under the Throgs Neck.”

He ate a bite of pasta, took a sip of his Grey Goose, and leaned back in his deck chair. “You have a very good memory.”

“Yeah.” She waved the empty champagne flute as she took a sideways step across the deck. She knew it took most date-rape drugs about fifteen minutes to kick in. She excused herself and tottered into the luxurious salon that was bigger than some Manhattan apartments. She spent about ten minutes in the bathroom, then staggered out, tripping over the step at the threshold to the deck.

“You okay?” he asked.

She grabbed her head and lurched across the deck. He looped his right arm around her waist.

“Easy,” he said.

“Feel funny.”

“Maybe you should come inside and lie down.”

“Tryin’ to ’memba... something I gotta tell ya...”

He led her inside, slammed the salon door closed, and shoved Nikki onto her back on his couch. He pulled off his shirt in a single flourish. “Now the fucking fun starts, mama.”

Nikki lay motionless on the couch, hands in her jacket pockets. “Whajoo give me?”

“Ketamine,” he said, unbuckling his pants. “Horse tranquilizer. When it wears off you’ll remember nothing. But tonight you’re mine, for any fucking thing I please.” He stripped to his boxer shorts, turned his back to hang up his pants. Then he kneeled before Nikki and slid his two index fingers under the waistband of her Spandex pants. “Now, let’s see what you have here for the ass master.”

Nikki pulled her right hand out of her jacket pocket and rammed a .25 caliber Colt automatic to his left temple. “What I have here is the end of your miserable life, motherfucker,” she said.

Sheridan froze, still kneeling in front of Nikki. “Please... It’s a joke.”

“Real side splitter,” she said. “Let’s see if you remember the same old joke you pulled on a girl named Eileen Lavin.”

His face collapsed into a spasm of tics, coming apart in pieces like a mosaic held together by a lifetime of lies. “Who?”

“Maybe a little champagne will improve your memory.”

Nikki stood up, pointing the gun, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and poured.

“Drink,” she commanded. He looked at the bubbling flute, his eyes skittery. He licked his dry lips. “Drink the fucking champagne, Dr. Sheridan.”

“No, please—”

She shoved the pistol into his left ear again and yanked back the metal slide. “Then I will blow your sick fucking brains across your boat and leave you for the gulls.”

He drank the entire glassful.

She poured another. “Drink, motherfucker.”

He downed it.

She said, “Eileen Lavin was going to be a nun.”

“Her? She was a nut. Everyone called her Sister Psycho.”

“You took her on your father’s boat. Out here where you take all the young girls, because this is the spot where your parents died all right. But they didn’t drown. No, this is the spot where your father discovered your mother screwing his best friend on his boat. The place where he killed them, in a jealous rage. And then shot himself. When you were seventeen. I found all this with a few keyboard strokes. Jilted Hubby Kills Wife, Lover, Self. Nice. And so what was it, doc? When you wanted to get even with Mom, you took poor Eileen Lavin out here to the same spot? On the same boat? Here, under the Throgs Neck Bridge, you drugged and raped her. Over and over and over again. All night.”

“No girl gets on a boat with a man unless she wants to go with the flow.”

“Like your mother? Your father found out she was going with the flow on his boat while he was busting his ass at work to pay for it. He heard talk, slipped out here in a dingy, snuck aboard, and made her pay. And you’re still making her pay, aren’t you, you sick fuck? Every time you take another young girl out on your boat, you’re getting even with Mom. Am I right? But you got careless with Eileen Lavin. You didn’t use protection. Or maybe the rubber broke because she was a virgin. Something went wrong. And you knocked her up. But it was 1982. Before DNA testing was refined. She couldn’t prove it was you.”

“You’re as nuts as Sister Psycho,” he said, yawning.

“She was a fucking virgin! You took her out here, you drugged her, you raped her, you knocked her up. She had to give the baby up for adoption. Then she tried to get her baby back. Everyone abandoned her. You destroyed her life. You destroyed her soul. You destroyed her mind. Until she went up on that bridge and jumped. And died right about here, right where we’re anchored.”

“You can’t blame that on me. And why the hell do you care? What’s it to you?”

“That baby she put in the orphanage? That baby was adopted by a good family, a nice elderly Greek family in Astoria. They called her Nicola. They died when the kid was twelve. Then that baby was bounced around the foster system like a meal ticket. Treated like, well, a bastard. Scroungy orphan. Second-class citizen. She was beaten, abused, neglected. The only time anyone paid any attention to her was when she grew a pair of tits. Then she couldn’t get the filthy bastards off her! Then she became a party favor.”

“Fuck... you... talking ’bout?” His voice was becoming disjointed.

“I’m talking about your own daughter, asshole! The one you made when you raped Eileen Lavin. The rape-baby that caused her to jump off that bridge.” She pulled the diaries out of her jacket pockets and read wrenching portions of Eileen’s words to Dr. George Sheridan.

“She... wush... fucking nuts!” he said, his voice slurry and his jaw slack. “Jush... like... joooo.” His eyes were bloodshot and glazed, like stained glass. He stood and staggered sideways, a straw man, his body devoid of muscle control. Nikki pulled a pair of driving gloves from a jacket pocket, wiggled them on, and led him back onto the rear deck of The Dog’s Life, rocking in the bay under the Throgs Neck.

“You started using the horse drug as a veterinary student. You used it on Eileen Lavin. You literally fucked her out of a life.” Nikki paused and looked up at the bridge, crowded with cars under the crescent moon. “You also fucked me out of a mother. And you gave me a fucking monster for a father. When I was old enough, I went into computers just so I could trace my biological parents. I found out who my real mother was from the old baptismal records. My first adoptive mother told me the name of the church where I was baptized. I was the only girl baptized there the year I was born without a father’s name on the certificate. Once I had my mother’s name, Eileen Lavin’s father — my grandfather, that piece of sanctimonious dogshit — gave me her diaries. From them I found marvelous you. Times change. People don’t. Your hardwiring is the same. Crisscrossed, short-circuited. You’re fucking e-vil, doc. Twenty-five years later, you’re still taking girls my mother’s age out on your boat. Drugging them. Date raping them. Only now you’re more careful. You use a rubber. You shave your body. You pay for meals in cash. You wipe away all fingerprints. You leave no trace of anything. But you are still getting even with your mother, aren’t you? Before you tried to rape me, you even called me mama!”

“I never... hurt anybody,” he said. “I just fucked ’em, thass all.”

Nikki shoved him into a deck chair, pressed the button for the mechanical winch, and the anchor rose. She climbed to the fly deck and started the twin engines. When she was done here, she would simply steer the boat to the small fishing dock, hop off, and let the tide take The Dog’s Life back out into the dark bay. But first Nikki descended to the deck and packed up the picnic basket which she’d take with her, then washed the flute glass, filled the champagne bottle with water, and threw them into the bay. She used the Windex to wipe her fingerprints from everything she’d touched on board. She’d get rid of her sneakers before she got home, in case they left footprints.

Nikki led Dr. Sheridan, who was barely able to walk, to the edge of the aft deck. She opened the entry gate and looked him in his bleary eyes. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.

His head flopped like a bobble doll’s. “Shuuunday.”

“It’s the third Shuuunday of Juuuuune, assbag,” she said, mocking him. “That’s the day my mother, Eileen Lavin, jumped from this bridge twenty-five years ago.”

“Fuckin’ nutjob.” His voice sounded like it was coming out of a deep well.

She opened the gate. “Fuck you.”

“How... can joo do thish... to me?”

“Easy,” Nikki Lavin Sheridan replied, shrugging. “I have your blood in my veins.”

“Please...”

“Happy Father’s Day, Dad,” she said, and pushed him into the black water. She watched him flail and kick. The ketamine was paralyzing him. He tried to scream but his mouth filled with water, and Nikki watched Dr. George Sheridan slip into the same grave that had swallowed her mother under the Throgs Neck Bridge.

Golden venture by Jill Eisenstadt

The Rockaways

He’s waiting for her to die, Rose knows. She’s no dummy. It’s June and her son, Paulie, is once again thinking about inheriting her house on Rockaway Beach.

“You’re getting up there,” is this year’s phraseology, as if turning eighty-five begins her ascent. Up and up, she’ll levitate a little higher each birthday, while Paul, Maureen, and the kids line up on the sand waving bye bye. Paulie’s latest brainstorm is to just move in now — this weekend. “We’ll take care of you,” he insists, somehow oblivious to the way this sounds.

“Maureen’s a doctor, after all. You’ll get to play with your grandkids. All the time!”

“Oh, they’d sure love the free baby-sitting...” Rose is telling her new Chinese friend, Li. “But at fourteen and ten? Those kids think I’m boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do! I’m no dummy!”

This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she’s collapsed in a stained dining room chair, cradling her arthritic elbow. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first ever crimes (give or take a little parking on her late husband Vincent’s handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with pride. If Vin, may he rest in peace, could see Li lying here in his favorite shirt — the ivory one with black piping and breast pocket snaps — he’d surely be impressed. Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to spend each Sunday morning riding around Belle Harbor on their mopeds. “The Good Guys” they called themselves, and went looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to this Robin Hood level: A good deed and a crime too!

“It was mostly his excuse to get out of church,” Rose adds and crosses herself; a reflex.

“Yesu Jidu!” Li suddenly claps from his spot beneath the dining room table, an awkward choice of seating conversation-wise but okay; maybe it’s cultural.

“Yesu Jidu?... Parla Inglese?” Maybe he’s dreaming with his eyes open. So weak and emaciated, it’s like taking care of a child again. Like Vin in the end. But this fellow can’t be much older than thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal frame and wet-looking hair even now that it’s dried. In one hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With the other, he points a shaky finger at the iron crucifix from Calabria hung over Rose’s marble sideboard.

“Yesu Jidu,” he repeats. “Me!”

At last, Rose gets it. “You’re Jesus Christ! Well, no wonder we’re hitting it off!”

And not an hour ago, he was on his knees, in his undies, puking up the Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.

For some reason, this cracks her up all over again.

When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was ringing too. Rose fumbled for her bifocals. Three a.m.

“Are all the doors locked?” Paulie panted. “Turn on the TV! There’s a boatload of illegal chinks out—!”

“Who taught you to talk like that?”

“I’m comin’ over.”

“Who said?”

“Don’t you get it? They’re washin’ up by — what?”

“What?”

“I heard something.”

“Helicopters?”

“Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!”

It was easier to just push aside the window curtain. Yes, the giant metal insects were out there hovering. But that was not so unusual here on the shore where they’re often called in for drownings, drug traffickers, and big-wig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound dead whale that just washed up in Arverne Friday, the sky had been pocked with press copters all week. But this new swarm buzzed the other end of the beach, up near Riis Park, and seemed to be composed of police and Coast Guard choppers.

“Get Dad’s gun; I’ll feel better.”

“Paulie...”

“Get it, Ma, or they’ll be stormin’ our fuckin’ house.”

“Who taught you that language?” Our house.

“If you don’t get it, I’m comin’.”

So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She’d never get back to sleep now anyhow. Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Paul’s old red surf-shop sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammer toe or two.

The gun, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent’s Bootery on 116th Street was hidden, appropriately, in one of Vin’s old cowboy boots. It was painful, physically and every which way, for Rose to crouch in the closet and extract it. Yet she lingered, running her hand along the familiar broken-in black leather and fancy white boot stitching, letting herself miss the husband she mostly despised. The revolver sagged heavily in her big front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. Vincent’s Bootery was now a cell phone store.

The backdoor sticks. To open it, you have to lean with your whole weight, wham, shoulder-first. Each time Rose does this, she imagines falling onto the brick patio where she’ll lay in crumpled agony until 8:30 a.m. when, obligated, Paulie comes to check she’s not drinking, and forevermore forces her to wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of emergencies.

“I know you would have come and rescued me,” Rose says, as she shuffles toward Li with a breakfast tray. “If I were out there wailing in pain, I know you would.”

Li just bows (or has a cramp). He reaches clumsily for the tray and a bowl skids off, smashing. Together, the two wrestle the food down to the scratched-up dining room tile. Can he hear all her joints popping? she wonders. His smooth black eyes both avoid and study her as if she’s a phantom or royalty, the Queen of Queens maybe.

“The Queen of Queens and Yesu Jidu will commence to dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca.”

It’s a far swim from the meals she used to make, for her daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday like this, she’d be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side, dessert, espresso, and mints. She prayed for a daughter to help her. When that didn’t work, she prayed for an air conditioner. Finally, “I just prayed they’d leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am. Until Paulie gets his way. Or the whale saves me.”

“A bacterial time bomb,” the papers are calling the washed-up finback. If the city doesn’t get rid of her before the next high tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. Rockaway’s summer of ’93 would be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare! A blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near her house if the beach is closed. Rose will live happily ever after for one more summer. Rose and Li—

Sadly, no one’s ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway besides the delivery boy for Wok and Roll. People would definitely notice. Li’s dark hair and busy eyebrows are actually a lot like young Vin’s were, but there are those nearly lidless eyes to give Li away, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall cereal.

“If Paulie hadn’t had my gas turned off, I’d make you my famous cutlets and escarole,” Rose apologizes. “Or some soup — I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like this, I’d serve an antipasti and a pasta, two meats—

Eyes closed, Li begins quickly eating the cereal, with his hands, from the box, no milk. He’s got a way of chewing with his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has seen a whole lot of people eating.

“I’d go easy on that Fiberall,” she warns.

He streaked across her lawn just as she made it out the backdoor, without falling. There goes the neighbor’s huge black lab, Blacky, off its leash again, she’d assumed. And though she’d noticed his bark sounded odd, like a croup, she was too distracted, thinking how the wretch had gone to pee in his favorite spot against her shower house. No point reasoning with the owners, people so deeply unoriginal that they’d name a black dog Blacky. Didn’t they also want her property? Eager to buy and tear down the place Paulie was born in to build something they called a solarium. Owning things others covet might make some feel powerful, but it just filled Rose with fear.

In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on, but its usual soothing rhythm was jangled by searchlights roaming the dark, chaotic waves. She could hear sirens. Screams? The helicopter din made it hard to make out. Then that lumpy policeman appeared, bouncing around the side of the house.

“What!” Rose snapped, clutching her sweatshirt closed. She’d been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire on the beach. Had she really fallen, this officer would have been the one to find her. Quite by accident, while coveting the ivy climbing up her façade, the decorative inlaid tile, flowering shrubbery, large picture windows, his flashlight would have suddenly illuminated what was left of her, Rose Camille Maria Impoliteri. A shriveled, bloodied human carcass. An ugly, used-up thing requiring removal. A nuisance.

“We were ringin’ but you were out here, I guess,” the policeman said, and only then remembered to flash a badge. “O’Donnell.”

Behind him, a second, trimmer uniform materialized. This one trailing a nightstick along the beach wall and whacking now and then at Rose’s ornamental grasses. He looked so much like an old classmate of Paulie’s. Kevin? Kieran? But then they all did. Those fair-haired Rockaway lifeguards and rangers, cops, firefighters, Coast Guard; they could all pass for larger versions of the St. Francis High School bullies who tagged her son “Guido” and “Greaseball Wop,” “Guinnie Rat” and “Zipperhead.”

“Stop!” her frail voice failed to yell. “Why’s he doin’ that?”

“Just checkin’ around.” O’Donnell smiled, still bouncing, in place now. “You see anything unusual?

“Yeah. Over there, your partner beatin’ on my plants.”

“Any Chinese, I mean. Boat ran aground on a sandbar off a Breezy,” he explained. “The Golden Venture. Full of Chinese illegals. They’re drownin’ and runnin’ so we’re s’posed to check around.” With a couple more bounces for punctuation.

“I know about that,” Rose said. “You need to use the men’s room?”

A genuine offer but O’Donnell ignored it. “Anyone else wit ya here? Husband? Kids? Some kinda companion?”

Rose snapped. “What makes ya think that? I can take care a myself! I am—”

Which is when Blacky started up barking again, barking from inside the house next door, the same old bark she was used to. So Blacky wasn’t actually out there, Rose got around to understanding. So it hadn’t even been a dog that ran past her just—

“Wait,” she called uselessly. By the time her mind had gotten here, the two officers had set off to search the garage. “Wait. You can’t do that.”

Her elbow throbbed and flamed from opening the door, but still she followed.

“You can’t do that! Wait!” Kicking off her flip-flops to try and move faster. “No, I think you’re not allowed to do that. Without a warrant.” Was this true? She hadn’t the faintest idea. All she knew for sure was, “This is my house!”

The backdoor sticks, the tile is scratched; the basement floods every time someone cries, Vin used to joke. But according to the brokers who periodically call, the brick rectangle is now worth two million easy. Ten thousand was what Rose’s daddy paid for it brand new, back in the ’40s.

“Germans came ashore then, did you know that? German spies in Rockaway!”

Now total strangers regularly stroll up and make offers on the house over the beach wall.

“But I’m gonna fool them all, Li,” Rose all of a sudden decides. “I’m gonna leave the place to you.”

The Good Guys didn’t help anyone that much. Other than a lady who let them load up her car with groceries in the Waldbaum’s parking lot, the Good Guys never really helped anyone at all. Vin said they tried but no one was interested. Even the lady with the groceries, Vin said, probably she just felt sorry for them. So the Good Guys took to drinking instead. Then they’d drag race their mopeds up and down Beach Channel Drive. Vin would stagger into Sunday dinner to alternately love up and criticize Rose. My favorite flower. You call this turd a meatball? My soft, fragrant Rose. Lazy bitch can’t go to Bensonhurst for some decent bread!

“It was that and more, and I took it until the day he says, Rose, he says, do me a favor. Don’t serve this grease when my cousins come from Calabria. In front of our Jewish friends, he says this in front of the Friedmans. He calls my sauce grease.”

Li can’t possibly understand the story, yet he tilts his head at its tone of hurt and even stops eating while she speaks. If Paulie and his atheist wife ever showed her half the deference, she might have invited them to live here already. If.

“That night, I burned the table leaves,” Rose continues. “This table here. I dragged those two heavy planks one by one across the floor — see here these long scratches? — that’s from draggin’ them, and mind you, by myself, since Paulie’s too busy upstairs with Vin watchin’ detectives chase each other or professional wrestlin’... But I know you would have helped me, Li.” At that, he tries to give Rose the wad of bills from his Ziploc bag and she pretends not to notice.

Once she finally got to the garage, all the chairs and cushions she’d paid the grandkids to stack at the end of the summer had been tossed across the dirty floor, and still the officers were going at it, knocking over beach umbrellas, tossing paint cans. What would they do if they actually found a person? Her father had come over just like this, on a boat from Sicily. And Vin had arrived in an Armani suit on a plane. But the ways they’d been harassed would be nothing compared to what they’d do to a poor Asian soul stuffed on a freighter, for months it had to be, now half-drowned and frozen from kicking for his life in the frosty June chop. Just thinking about it made her sure she heard the croup again, that someone was there.

“Someone’s here,” Kevin or Kieran said, but he meant Rose. “Hey. Hi. Ma’am. Ya really shouldn’t be out.”

“At my age?”

“At this hour. With that cough.” One of his green eyes was lazy, drifting. Rose thought to cough again to cover for the stranger. She wondered if the wok she’d long ago ruined had wound up here in the garage. She’d cleaned it wrong and it had rusted or—

“Let me take you back inside,” Kevin or Kieran insisted, grasping her elbow. Ow. “Mrs.—”

“Don’t you even remember me?” The way it came out sounded like begging. “Paulie’s mom?” Of course, it had been years since she was even that in any meaningful way. She touched the bulge in her sweatshirt. It had been years since she’d been in her own garage, let alone had a car, driven a car, ridden a bike, fired a gun. The beachy gas smell pulled her back to all those sticky cousins of Vin’s, of endlessly boiling pots, gritty towels, crumbs, bones, and water rings that slowly led her down to the sand dragging those two heavy planks that signified: Company. Two leaves, two meats, the vegetable side—

Kevin or Kieran claimed to not have grown up around here. But too bad, he’d kill for a house like this, on the beach. At the door, he gave her a card. In case she saw anything unusual. Then O’Donnell was beckoning him away, to the neighbor’s, setting Blacky off all over again.

“Fires on the beach are illegal; you should know that,” said the policemen when they arrived, that first time. “We could give you a ticket. Burnin’ some good wood there too, looks like oak. We could haul your crazy ass in.” When they’d finally gone, it took Rose a long time to bury the rest of the charred leaves beneath the sand. And still, a dog had it partially dug up by daylight. Vin saw it and said, “So?” If Rose wanted a buffet, well, he’d just invite more company. Then he drag raced his moped into a Green Line bus.

The kids on the beach used to always say they were digging a hole all the way to China. And once, for a few months somewhere in the ’70s, she’d fashioned a hair ornament out of chopsticks like she’d seen on that actress, what’s her name, in that film, whatsitcalled?

“Other than that, I gotta admit, when it comes to things Oriental, I’m one big dummy.”

Li starts to nod but an involuntary shiver overtakes him. His eyes close. He slumps against the table’s pedestal. Rose imagines his mother teaching him to swim. A river it must have been, not a curly, raging ocean. A nice, manageable river.

At first, he looked like some kind of sea monster soaked through and wrapped in the moldy shower curtain. You could see his chest go in and out, but close up that rusty, tentative sound it made scared her. Every now and then he’d erupt with the cough. The shower house itself was a dank lair, reeking of vomit and adorned with wet leaves, cobwebs, and the butts of cigarettes she’d long suspected her teenage grandson of smoking.

“I can help you,” Rose said. “My daughter-in-law is a doctor.”

The stranger bowed, moaning himself up onto his hands and knees, but then he heaved up saltwater and collapsed again.

“You come into my house,” she insisted. “I have a nice house.”

“Ma! Ma! You okay? Did ya trip? What are you doin’ down here under the table? The traffic, ohmygod. That Golden Adven — Why don’t you have the TV on?”

“I’m sleeping?” Rose opens her sticky eyes to see a short, wide man with a graying goatee wheeling several bulging Samsonites. “What are those for?” She pushes up on to her forearms, blinking.

“Thought I’d start the process. Since I was comin’ anyways.” Paulie crosses his furry arms.

According to the window it’s now morning. Low tide. Soon enough he’s eying the empty bottle of Sambuca near her foot and swearing.

“You know you’re not allowed—”

“I thought she was decaying. I thought they were closing the beach!”

“You’re still talking about a damn whale? MA! A dozen or two people drowned right out there last night—”

Her confusion clears, leaving panic. “Where is he? What did you — Oh!” Li’s beside her, his chest moving up and down, kind of. “Call Maureen!”

But Paulie’s too busy hating her to notice. “They got some cement trucks to bury the big ugly fish, all right? The beach is safe. NOW CALM THE FUCK — Oh god, not again!”

Now he’s spotted his father’s shirt — the ivory cowboy number.

“You keep tellin’ me you don’t need takin’ care of, so how come every time you get blicked, you gotta carry this shit around?” Grabbing for the sleeve, he — “Aah!” — discovers there’s an arm inside it, and there’s a man under the dining room table attached to the arm.

Rose can’t help but giggle. She was waiting for that. “You should see your face, Paulie!”

“What the hell—”

And it just keeps getting funnier. “SHHHH,” Rose has to gasp between laugh spurts. “This is Li. He’s not well.”

“Have you gone fuckin’ nuts? Where did you — why—”

“I was hoping Maureen—”

“What? You can’t ask her to do that.”

“Why not?” With effort, Rose pulls Li’s dented too-still skull onto her lap. “He’s a Christian.”

“You mean criminal!” Paul yells, patting his khakis. “And she’s a vet.”

“Then call a priest.”

“I’m callin’ the cops is who I’m callin’!” Paul starts rifling through his suitcases. “If you’d please shut your trap.” Sounding exactly like Vin.

“When you find your weapon, let me know,” Rose says, reaching into her sweatshirt pocket to cock the gun. “Then you can just kill me and get my house.”

“What? Where’s my phone. I just had—”

The kick of the gun knocks Rose down where Paulie is also heading with a sashay — low twist combination that leaves him slumped right over his bulbous luggage. The movements seem so foreign that she actually finds herself wondering, Did he just get a bad haircut or something? Then she remembers to thrust the gun into Li’s dead-cold hands, their life about drained from them. Fingerprints, right? Rose didn’t endure years of Columbo for nothing.

She is waiting for Li to die before crossing herself, a reflex, and calling the number on the detective’s card. Not Kevin or Kieran but Andrew — her new friend. He’ll be the one to do her the favor. Andrew Volishskya. Not from around here.

Buckner's error by Joseph Guglielmelli

Shea Stadium

I followed him to the platform for the 7 train at Grand Central, a place so far down below the street that I expected to meet devils with pitchforks on their way up from Hell. The tail was easy. After a couple of days on the job, I saw that he always wore the same kind of clothes, like a uniform or that crazy detective on cable. White Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, beige khaki pants, and brown loafers. But today he added a cap — navy-blue with an antique capital B on the front and little red socks at the back. A brand new Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

I noticed more people in the city wearing Boston caps after the team had won the World Series. Always brand new, never faded from the sun or stained with sweat. It was like they were previously ashamed to walk the city’s streets broadcasting their loyalty or were afraid that crazy Yankees fans would chant “1918” at them when they went for a quart of milk or to pick up their dry cleaning. I say, your team is your team no matter what and no matter what anyone says. I wore a Mets cap that wasn’t new when they won the Series in 1986, and carried a copy of today’s Post in my back pocket. The two of us waited, on this warm June night, for the 7 train to take us to Shea Stadium where the Mets and Red Sox would play the first of three interleague games.

He stood quietly on the platform, leaning against the elevator with his hands in his pockets. He stared off into space with no paper or book to read. The stale, sticky air did not seem to bother him. Next to him, a fat guy in a crappy suit with his polyester tie at half-mast, tired and heading home to Queens, mopped his face with a rumpled handkerchief. Three Korean women who could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old stood silent and still, holding shopping bags filled with vegetables and other groceries. I disregarded them. Further down the platform, college kids wearing black awayjerseys with the name and number of their favorite Mets players on the back were obviously going to the game. The kids were playful and laughing but I knew they wouldn’t get in my way when the train pulled in. I didn’t expect the subway car to be sardine-can crowded until we got to the Queens stations.

A blast of cooler air signaled the arrival of a 7 express, which meant fewer stops and fewer chances for screw-ups. When the train stopped, we stood in front of the last car. He didn’t move to rush the doors like so many subway riders do. He followed the tinny, distorted message over the car’s loudspeakers and let the passengers off the train before getting on. I maneuvered my way into the car so that I was standing in front of him and holding the same pole in the middle of the car. A little guy wearing blue mechanic’s overalls and reading El Diario had grabbed a piece of the pole to my left. A teenaged black girl on my right was lost in the music playing from her iPod, swaying in time to the song. I was lucky that it was ’70s Philly soul leaking from her headphones, not some rap shit.

I knew that I had to make my play before Queensboro Plaza, the first stop on the ride to Shea with connections to other subway lines. The express rattled through the first two underground stations, making so much noise that I couldn’t even talk to myself, forget about talking to anybody else. When the train left the Hunters Point station and emerged into the evening sunlight five or six stories above the Queens streets, the clatter lessened to a normal din.

He was humming along with a Delfonics song from the girl’s iPod and staring out of the windows at abandoned buildings covered from rooftop to ground floor in graffiti that appeared to be carefully designed and painted, rather than the work of random punks with spray cans. He held onto the pole with both hands. He seemed not to be in the subway car but in a private place with a look of contentment on his face. It was the same expression that my second ex-wife had when she did yoga in the morning.

I startled him when I told him that he was a brave man. I saw in his eyes that he was confused and did not know whether to ignore me, to ask me what I wanted, or, like any true New Yorker, to tell me to fuck off. I continued to make eye contact and said, “You’re a brave man to be wearing a Red Sox cap to Shea.”

He relaxed and smiled, never questioning how I knew where he was going. “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s not like going to Yankee Stadium when the Sox play. The crowds there can get rowdy. Besides, we Red Sox fans have a lot in common with you Mets fans,” he said, taking one hand off the pole long enough to point to the cap on my head. “We both hate the Yankees.”

I smiled back at him. “Good point, good point. But I don’t know, man. We snatched Pedro from under your nose. And if Manny stands at home plate admiring a home run ball to show off for all his Washington Heights homeboys, it could get ugly.”

Still smiling, he shook his head but was fading back to his own personal place with his own thoughts, not the thoughts of some joker on the subway. He turned away from me to look at the midtown Manhattan skyline that now dominated the view from the left side of the train after it had pulled away from the Courthouse Square stop. I needed to keep this conversation going.

“I’m sitting up in nosebleed country. I’m gonna need one of those guides that mountain climbers use to find my seat. But what do you expect when you decide to go at the last minute? Where are you sitting?”

He still didn’t know what to make of me but was polite. “My friend’s family has season tickets. Field level behind first base.” I knew all about the friend. I was standing in front of him because of the friend.

“Nice. I’ve sat around there a couple of times. I’ve been going to Mets games since my dad first took me when I was six. Most of the guys I know follow the teams that their dads followed. It is like an inheritance, to my mind. He was a big Brooklyn Dodgers fan. I mean, a huge fan. My mother says that when O’Malley took his team to California, my father said words that he never said before or would ever say again in all the years they were married. So growing up in a National League house it was only natural that we would follow the Mets. But if the Dodgers were in the World Series or in the playoffs, my dad, until the day he died, would root for the other team. Even if it meant rooting for the Yankees.” I whispered the last part as if I were sharing a shameful family secret.

I had hooked him just in time. The subway car was beginning to get crowded as more people going to Shea got on at Queensboro Plaza. He could have easily moved away from me to grab one of the metal railings in front of the benches of filled seats. Despite the crush of Mets fans and homebound workers boarding the car, we were still standing together like two buddies having a night out at the ballpark.

“So, your dad take you to Fenway during the glory days of Yaz?”

He flinched at the question. I thought I’d overplayed my hand and lost him. I hoped that the look on his face was just the result of a sudden burst of sunshine hitting his eyes. “No. My father never took me to a ballgame. I don’t think I ever saw a baseball game when I was growing up. My college roommate freshman year dragged me to Fenway with some of his friends because he thought I studied too much. It was love at first sight, the minute I stepped into the ballpark. After the first pitch I knew that I belonged right there. I never liked the taste of beer but must have had five that day. I loved the cheering and yelling of the crowd. I loved the hustle and grace of the players on the field. When we left and the Sox had beat Baltimore 5 to 4, I was hoarse and my hands were sore from clapping. I went to dozens of games before I graduated. I read the Globe and Herald sports pages religiously and any baseball history or biography voraciously. All these years I’ve been true to the Boston Red Sox. I never get to see the team live enough, working here. Now I have one of those cable packages that allows me to see almost every game, but it’s not the same as being in Fenway.”

I gave him a name and told him that I worked on Wall Street selling mutual funds to retail brokers. I knew enough details about this kind of job that I could BS my way through a conversation if he wanted to talk about work. I know a little about a lot of things so that I can talk to almost anybody about anything, a talent I find useful in my line of work. It would have given us something else in common, though I was certain we wouldn’t be talking shop for the rest of the ride. Only baseball.

“I’m Jack Buckner,” he said, mentioning he worked for an elite, privately held Wall Street firm that only handled oldmoney clients whose net worth was a minimum eight figures. He did not mention that it was his friend’s family firm.

“Any relation to Bill? A cousin maybe, returning to the scene of the crime after so many years? Bill Buckner... letting the world championship roll between his legs during the legendary Game 6 of the ’86 World Series.”

“Billy. Buck. Did. Not. Lose. The. World. Series.” Jack emphasized each word. I’m certain that he would have poked me in the chest on the beat of each syllable if the train had not roared past a local station with enough speed to cause him to keep both hands on the pole.

I have seen criminal defense attorneys sum up before juries in high-stakes trials with flair and with eloquence. Imagine Darrow in his heyday. Think Cutler and Gotti. Remember Cochran arguing on behalf of that piece of crap? None of them showed the passion that Jack did defending Bill Buckner. Hell, years later, all I remembered was the tenth inning. Jack could practically tell you the entire game pitch by pitch.

“First of all, McNamara should never have taken Clemens out in the seventh with a one-run lead,” he began. “He claimed Clemens asked to be taken out because he had a blister on his finger. This man will be the AL Cy Young winner and the league’s MVP. You keep him in unless he needs immediate surgery on his pitching arm in the dugout. Besides, Clemens said that he never asked to be taken out, but only after McNamara was fired. In my opinion, Clemens was very honorable because he didn’t undermine McNamara’s authority in the clubhouse by contradicting him. When I look at how he has pitched since leaving Boston, the awards and the rings, I cannot believe that he quit. However, I confess that I have a soft spot for the Rocket. The Sox quit on him. He did not quit on Boston.”

He went on about some Italian relief pitcher named Calvin letting the tying run score in the eighth. Never met too many guys from Mulberry Street named Calvin. But then again, I thought Rudolph was a name for only Nazis and reindeers before Giuliani came along.

Jack was analyzing and dissecting the plays in the tenth inning when the 7 passed Fisk Avenue. So intent on making his points, he didn’t see the joke of talking about the 1986 Series above a street that shared the name of the great Sox catcher. “Bob Stanley had already tied the game on a wild pitch, so the damage was done before Wilson ever hit the ball toward Billy. At that point, Buckner should never have been in the game. Because his ankles were bad, McNamara had taken him out of every other post-season game in the late innings and put in Dave Stapleton for defense. What was he thinking? It was not as if Billy’s bat would be missed. He went 0-for-5 in Game 6. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that even if Billy makes that play, Wilson beats him to the bag. Billy was too beat up and Wilson was too fast... And, of course,” Jack added as we were about to leave the Woodside stop, “there was still Game 7. You can’t blame Billy Buck for what happened in Game 7. They would have been the champions if they’d won that game.” He paused for a breath and checked his watch when the conductor announced that the train was being held in the station.

While Jack had been commandeering facts and stats to make his point, I noticed that each platform for the local stops along this stretch of the 7 line had stained-glass windows. I could not make out the designs as the train raced by, but I was sure that they were not pictures of the Stations of the Cross. We even passed a giant red neon cross on top of a Korean church of some Protestant denomination. With each word out of Jack’s mouth, I kept thinking about that movie with Susan Sarandon and how she belonged to the Church of Baseball. Jack was certainly a member of that congregation.

When the train finally left the station, Jack said, “Buckner was the butt of a lot of jokes afterwards. But my sympathies were later with Donnie Moore.”

The name rang a bell but I couldn’t place it.

“He was the other goat of 1986. He was the relief pitcher for the Angels, who were one strike away from winning the American League pennant when Moore gave up a home run to Dave Henderson that tied the game. The Angels lost that game in the eleventh inning. They lost the next two games and the pennant. At the time I was, of course, very happy that Boston was going to the World Series. However, Moore was never the same pitcher due to physical ailments. He was hounded out of Anaheim by boorish fans and a mean-spirited front office in the middle of the 1988 season. About a year later, he shoots his wife in front of his own children and kills himself with a bullet to the head.”

With a sigh, Jack continued, “Anyway, I couldn’t believe that when Moore’s suicide became public, a reporter called Buckner to ask whether he considered killing himself after the 1986 Series. Billy said, ‘Of course not. It’s only a game.’ I can never decide whether that’s a cheery or depressing thought.”

“Depends on the day, my friend,” I said. He went quiet as the train pulled into Junction Boulevard and 103rd Street.

I tried to keep the conversation casual for the rest of the ride, just bar talk between strangers, but I could tell that Jack’s thoughts were drifting away again. He agreed with a curt “yes” that the Zambrano-for-Kazmir trade was the biggest heist since Lufthansa. I asked him who he was going to the game with, when the windows of the subway suddenly darkened. Trees densely filled with leaves surrounded the car, blocking the sunlight. It was as if, for a minute or two, the subway had left the trestles above Roosevelt Avenue and plunged into a forest. Just as suddenly, the train emerged from the tree cover and Shea, all blue, gray, and orange, appeared in front of a slowly setting sun, a stunning joyful sight. I never got an answer to the question, only a curious stare.

Even before the subway came to a full stop at the Willets Point station, the chants of “Let’s Go Mets!” could be heard. When the doors opened, everyone in the car poured out onto the elevated platform and made their way to one of the metal stairways, freshly painted a puke-green color. I was right behind Jack as we left the car. As distant and formal as when I first addressed him, he turned and said, “Nice speaking with you. Enjoy the game.” He headed off toward the stairs and began to blend into the crowd, anxious to meet his friend.

I yelled at him over the head of a father holding the hand of his young son: “Jack, wait up! Let me give you my card and I definitely want to get yours.”

He reluctantly stopped, letting people pass him to get to the staircase. We stood by a large green garbage can so we would be out of the way. He pulled a thin gold case out of his pocket to take out a crème-colored business card. I fumbled with a frayed leather case that dropped between my feet. I squatted down to pick it up, watching Jack stare at the diminishing crowd on the platform and impatiently tapping the business card against his thigh. I also removed the ice pick that was taped to the inside of my right calf and concealed it under my sleeve. The platform was now empty except for the stragglers at the top of the staircases. A quick glance across the tracks at the Manhattan-bound platform found only a teenaged couple too busy making out to notice a pair of middle-aged guys exchanging business cards.

Jack again said goodbye and turned to walk away. But he stopped beside one of the black wooden benches on the platform when he saw that the name of his boss, the name of his friend’s father, was printed on the business card I had given him.

I could imagine the confused look on his face as the handle of the ice pick slipped down into my hand. I focused on my target. There is a small indentation at the base of the skull, just below the Velcro strap of a baseball cap and aligned, in this case, with a cartoon pair of red socks. A blade thrust into this depression will sever the spinal cord from the brain. Your muscles go limp so you cannot run away. You cannot breathe so you cannot cry for help. You go into shock as your blood pressure drops to nothing. You become unconscious with barely another thought. Death is almost immediate if an expert wields the ice pick. I am an expert.

I caught him as he began to fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I placed him on the black bench, arranging the body so that the Mets fans exiting the next trains would think that he was just waiting to board. I took his wallet, card case, and BlackBerry so that the cops would have the always popular and distracting motive of robbery to think about. I put the Post from my back pocket in his lap so that Jack appeared to be reading the sports page with Pedro on the cover. I left the ice pick there with no prints and no trail back to me. I was halfway down the stairs before the next train pulled in.

When I came up on the Manhattan side of the platform, the young couple were still at it hot and heavy and wouldn’t have noticed me if I had shot Jack with a.45. Standing in the evening breeze, I could see the body on the bench. The latest trainload of fans was hurrying down the puke-green stairs to get to the game. No one was giving him a second look. The starting lineups were about to be announced.

Jack’s mistake was thinking with the head between his legs, not the one on his shoulders. People with assets worth in excess of eight figures don’t care who or what you fuck so long as you are discreet. When the details of your sex life appear on the disapproving lips of some dried-up matron whose name is in the Social Register, or in a blind item in a sordid tabloid gossip page, those people might take their assets to another investment boutique. But that’s just money. There is always more money to be made somewhere.

It becomes trouble when whispers and innuendos reach the ears of your boss. It becomes real trouble when, after a little snooping and a little window peeping, he learns you are screwing his college freshman son. It becomes big trouble when you tell your boss that you are the only thing that keeps his firm from being a comical relic on The Street and that, if he continues to interfere in your personal life, you will take his business and his son. Blood and money are very personal. That’s when, through a middleman or a cutout or a guy who knows a guy, I get a call.

But who knows? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake to fall for the kid. If they had baseball in common, that would have been plenty for Jack. His error was not how he used his mouth with the kid, but opening his mouth to the father. It was the blow-up, not the blowjobs. My mother often said: Be careful because a big mouth will always get you in trouble.

A Manhattan-bound local pulled in and I got on. Below me, a young man waited outside of Shea Stadium with two tickets for tonight’s game that wouldn’t be used. Probably wearing a brand new Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

Jenny put a Guinness in front of me while NY1 played on the plasma screen over the wooden bar at my local Woodside pub. I could see some reporter standing with Shea in the background, but with the sound low and the jukebox blaring Bono, I couldn’t hear anything. Because it was the top of the hour, I figured he was not reporting on the outcome of the game.

“Can you believe it?” Jenny said. “They had this story on before. Some poor guy is going to a ballgame and gets stabbed to death. You can’t ride the subway anymore without some wacko trying to kill you with a knife. First that kid from Texas gets stabbed in the chest. And I get the creeps just thinking about that poor guy and the handsaw. I’m taking buses everywhere from now on.”

“More importantly, love, did the Mets win?”

She slapped my hand playfully. “You’re bad.” She walked to the other end of the bar where a couple was signaling for a refill.

Yes, tonight I think I am.

Baggage claim by Patricia King

JFK Airport

Read. Just keep reading. She had to try to lose herself in the story. Let it block out the shaking and shuttering. She gripped the book with sweating hands. She rubbed her knee. There was no way in this cramped space to ease the throbbing.

The man in the seat next to her was sleeping. He had changed places with a Hasid who had refused to sit next to a woman. When this new guy first sat down, he had scared her. He looked like an Arab. His pockmarked skin gave him a sinister appearance, and she had tried not to think of him in such a prejudiced way. He had a nice smile. But hijackers could smile.

“Are you going home or do you live in the UK?” She had worked up her courage to question him while she waited behind him in line for the loo. She kept saying “loo” now, after a week with the people in the London office.

“Home,” he had said. That smile again. It did look kind of threatening. “I’m from the Bronx, and I can’t wait to get back.”

The accent was unmistakable. Bronx, for sure. He was probably Puerto Rican. “Me too. Riverdale.” She tried to smile back at him. The last word came out sounding apologetic. People from the real Bronx hated Riverdale; she was sure of that. It shamed her to have suspected him. He seemed so benign now. He could be a victim, not a terrorist.

The plane touched down with a jolt that woke him.

She wiped her palms on the rough fabric of the seat. Rivulets of rain ran over the window glass.

“Welcome to JFK,” an intimate and humorous voice began over the loudspeaker. “If I hadn’t just spent nearly eight hours cavorting with all of you on this plane, I would think we were still in London, given this gloomy weather.”

Friday. The traffic would be awful. And she had her car in long-term parking. The Triboro Bridge would be backed up. And the rain would make it worse.

She got her black rolly down from the overhead bin and waited in the aisle to get off the plane.

“Thank you for flying Virgin Atlantic,” they said by way of goodbye.

The walk to Passport Control went on forever. The specter of having to drive over the bridge haunted her. Suppose she got stuck in traffic in the middle of the bridge with her heart beating out of control. She would have to get off. She would have to. This started back in October of 2001, returning from Washington on a Sunday night — at dusk on a misty evening, driving along, sipping the latte she had picked up at the rest stop. The bottoms of her feet had gotten sweaty when suddenly there was the Delaware Memorial Bridge — the double span sticking up above some light fog. It would have looked pretty, if it hadn’t frozen her heart. She couldn’t drive up there.

She had moved behind a blue Volkswagen Passat in the middle lane and hung onto the steering wheel for dear life. She had stayed behind that car and couldn’t look left or right until they got through the toll on the other side. Heart still pounding, she had pulled over at the first opportunity. It was almost an hour before she could get back on the road.

A few months later, she had gotten lost trying to get back to Manhattan from Newark without driving on the Pulaski Skyway. Worse and worse. Two weeks ago, she had driven down through New Jersey and gone through the Lincoln Tunnel and back up to the Bronx, just to avoid the George Washington Bridge. So ashamed, she hadn’t even told her sister. But when she finally mentioned it to Roger, who was hardly a close friend, he immediately asked, “Did this start after 9/11?” The idea had shocked her.

“Go to line twenty-seven.” The short, sharp-faced African-American woman at Passport Control jabbed a finger in the direction of a booth.

The officer’s face was round and kind, but he looked at her with hard, searching eyes. She handed him her passport. He scanned it and watched the screen, then handed it back with a perfunctory, “Welcome home.”

The baggage was slow. The rain, she guessed. The Hasidic guy stood near her, waiting. The rainy weather made her knee worse. She tried to keep her weight off it.

On 9/11 she had been down in Soho, getting physical therapy. She hadn’t gone to the office that morning. A lot of people weren’t at work for odd reasons. They were late. They called in sick. She had heard a lot of stories like this. A woman who went to pick up her new eyeglasses and never got up there. A guy from Jersey whose little girl had cried and said, “Daddy, don’t go.” The father had stopped so long comforting his kid, he missed his train. The kid had saved her father.

Her knee had saved her. By rights she should have been on the ninety-seventh floor.

After her therapy appointment, while icing her knee, she felt the gym go quiet. They were all staring at the burning skyscraper on the TV, asking each other, “Which building?” “What kind of plane?”

Her office would be flooded with light. On such a sunny day, the intensity of the light always made her giddy. Working up there made you feel important, even if all you did was put numbers into spreadsheets all day. Gerry and Margaret, sitting at their desks, would be silhouetted against the windows on a day like this. Like ghosts. Only black. Only they couldn’t be sitting. Not with this going on in the other tower.

She stood, gazing at the burning building, completely silent, feeling guilty that she was thinking about how much it would hurt her knee to be walking down all those stairs with them. The second plane hit. “Terrorists,” was all she said. She went and put on her clothes.

She had a portable radio in her gym bag. Only one station was broadcasting. One tense male voice.

On her way out, she glanced over at the knot of people gathered in front of the big TV near the treadmills and Stair-Masters. Radio to her ear, she left without looking at the screen.

Out on Broadway, the air was acrid with smoke and stung her throat. People streamed up the sidewalks. Ambulances and firetrucks careened south toward the towers. An EMT vehicle with the words Valley Stream Rescue Squad on its side went screaming by. How the hell could they have gotten here so fast?

A crowd gathered around her. “What are they saying?” A short guy in a snug gray suit pointed to the radio. She held it out to him. The battery was weak and the street so noisy that he had to put his finger in his opposite ear to hear it. Two big African-American women with tears streaming down their faces stopped and asked for news. She just shrugged and gestured to the guy holding her radio.

One of them was sobbing uncontrollably. “They are jumping out of the top floors.”

They couldn’t be. No one would do that. Gerry wouldn’t do that. Harry Ardini wouldn’t do that. She looked at the other woman, who just nodded and pulled her friend away, up Broadway.

She pictured the wide expanse of her office. The fichus tree next to her chair burning. The light from it shining in the frame on her desk. Her sister’s picture smiling through the bright red reflected flames.

The guy handed the radio back to her. She put it to her ear and started walking north with the herd.

The voice on the radio was suddenly hysterical. “We’re losing it! We’re losing it! OMIGOD!”

She turned and looked down Broadway. Her building was collapsing. Boom! Boom! Boom! Like one of those structures in a demolition movie. A huge cloud of thick gray dust rushed toward them up the street. She turned again and ran. Past the church with the pealing bells. The sexton had thought to do that. As if he were in some medieval village that had the plague.

She had walked all the way to Riverdale that day. Over the Henry Hudson Bridge. Her knee never recovered, had not stopped hurting since. She never returned to physical therapy. Just the thought of physical therapy brought back that picture in the papers the next day. The guy falling though the air. Head down. The familiar building behind him. She had looked and looked at that picture. Sometimes she was sure it was Harry. Other days, it didn’t look like his hair.

The buzzer on the luggage carousel sounded and the metal belt started to move. Bags moved down the slope onto the belt in front of her. The Hasidic guy peered at a huge black one, frowned, and then let it pass. It came around again. Blood dripped from a small opening where the zippers met at the top. Bright and shining, it pooled onto the metal of the conveyor. She breathed in to scream as it went by. She held her breath. People would call her a hysteric. Seeing blood all the time, knowing that if she had jumped that day her body would have liquefied. That’s what they said. That a body hitting the ground from such a height just liquefies. The bottoms of her feet were sweating. Just like driving over a bridge.

Her bag came tumbling down the slope. She saw the green ribbons on the zipper. Not red. Not blood. She grabbed her bag, turned in her card at Customs, and dragged it to the nearest restroom. She couldn’t drive over the bridge. She just couldn’t.

In the handicapped stall, she sat on the toilet and laid the big bag down. Inside was her toiletries kit, with all that stuff you can’t carry with you on a plane anymore.

She unzipped it and pulled out a pink disposable razor. She wedged it under the toilet paper dispenser and pressed hard. It bent but would not break. She put her foot against it too and finally it popped with a loud metallic crack.

“Are you okay in there?” a voice from another stall called.

“Fine,” she said.

She retrieved the razor blade from the floor and held it carefully between her thumb and forefinger. This is better, she thought. She could stop the pictures in her head of Harry liquefying on the sidewalk. She could finally do what she was supposed to have done. She cut along the blue veins on her wrists. She held out her arms and let the blood drip on the green ribbons, running them red, like the blood in baggage claim.

Arrivederci, Aldo by Kim Sykes

Long Island City

I love my job. How many people can say that?

I could be working security in a department store over in Manhattan, where they make you follow old ladies with large purses and mothers with baby strollers. Or in an office tower doing Homeland Security detail, looking at photo IDs all day and pretending I care whether you belong in a building full of uninteresting lawyers and accountants, most of whom come to work hoping I’d find a reason to stop them from going in. Or guarding a bank where you’re so bored that you consider robbing it yourself or kicking one of those lousy machines that charge two dollars to do what a bank is supposed to do for free.

My friends tell me I got it pretty good because I work security at Silvercup Studios where they shoot television shows, movies, and commercials. Not to mention the fact that it’s not far from my walkup in Long Island City. My neighbors treat me like I’m a celebrity. Which is pretty funny since my mother worked at Silvercup in the ’50s baking bread and nobody ever treated her like she was somebody, except me and my father.

Yeah, okay, I see lots of good-looking men and pretty girls, famous singers and movie stars. No big deal. They’re just like you and me. Especially without the makeup and the fancy clothes. They all come in with uncombed hair, comfortable shoes, and sunglasses. Some of them got egos to match the size of the cars they drive up in. They arrive with their assistants and their entourages carrying everything from little dogs to adopted babies. Some of them pride themselves as just folks and come in on the subway. The one thing they all got in common is that I make them sign in. It’s my job. They might be celebrities, but I treat them all the same.

There are exceptions, like the directors and the producers. They don’t bother to sign in. Every day they walk past my security desk and one of their “people” will whisper to me who they are. You’d think they were royalty or something. I check their names off a special list the office gives me. The boss says that they pay the bills and we should make them happy no matter what. I guess when you’re in charge of making multimillion-dollar movies, it’s the little things that matter, like not having to write down your own name.

Then there’s everybody in between, the ones who are not movie stars — the supporting and background actors, backup singers, and the hoochie girls in the music videos. When they come in, all eager and excited, they usually put their names in the wrong places and walk through the wrong doors. Especially the first-timers. They don’t pay much attention to anything except the hopes and dreams in their heads.

Last, but not least, there’s the crew. Most of these guys I know by sight. They come in when it’s still dark outside and that’s usually when they leave too. They walk past me half asleep. It’s hard work getting up before dawn every day, unloading, setting up and breaking down and loading up again — not to mention looking after all those people. So sometimes I try to make their days a little easier. If I’ve never seen them before, they sign in. If I know them, I let them go through, but you didn’t hear that from me. You see, we got thirteen studios and they’re in a constant state of shooting something. So sometimes I have to bend the rules.

The phone at my security desk rings and I almost fall backwards in my chair. It’s probably the boss’s office telling me about an unexpected delivery or adding a name to the list. You see, they got it under control up there. The next day’s schedule and sign-in sheets are usually done at midnight and placed on my desk for the following morning. We run a tight ship around here, so when the phone rings it’s pretty important. I answer it on the second ring.

“Yes, sir?” I straighten up in my seat. It’s the boss himself.

“Listen, Josephine, we got an intruder walking around the premises.”

I can hardly believe my ears. The news makes me stand up and grab hold of my nightstick, my only weapon.

“I’m sorry, sir,” comes tumbling out of my mouth. I feel as if I’ve let him down. Being the only woman in security here at Silvercup, I know I have to work harder than everybody else.

“He’s walking in on sets, Jo. He’s ruined a shot in Studio 7, for Christ’s sake. See who the hell this guy is, will you? Probably some damn background actor looking to be discovered.”

It happens occasionally that extra players, bored with waiting around, go exploring the place in hopes of finding the next job. Sooner or later a production assistant spots them and sends the poor thing back to where he or she belongs. The fact is, Silvercup is the last place you’ll be discovered. By the time actors get here, they’re just numbers in a producer’s budget. If you’re not in the budget, you’re not in the shot. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but I can count them on one hand.

“Anybody say what he looks like?” I ask my boss.

“White, around thirty. Wearing clogs.”

“Clogs?”

“That’s what they tell me. Just take care of it, Jo.”

“Yes, sir.”

There are thirteen studios here at Silvercup, and at least two sign-in sheets for each one. We’re talking hundreds of people. It’s barely 10 o’clock and the place is packed. This is not going to be easy. On one of the sheets, a couple of wise-asses signed in as Mick Jagger and Flavor Flav. They came in early. I can tell by the names before and after them. That means these comedians are with the crew. I take a moment to remember who came by my desk just before dawn. There was nobody I didn’t know. And I would have remembered a guy wearing clogs.

The new guard, Kenneth, is checking out the Daily News and eating his second meal of the morning. His plate is piled high. He is reading his horoscope and is oblivious to my panic. I watch him dunk a powdered donut into milky coffee and drip the muddy mess on his blue vest. I hand him a paper napkin and look past him at the tiny security screens mounted on the wall. Like I said, there are thirteen studios here, with at least three times that many bathrooms, not to mention dressing rooms, storage rooms, production offices. These little screens are useless to me. You’d think we’d have better video equipment here, but we don’t.

Still, nobody-but-nobody gets past me. I pride myself on that. I’m famous, if you will, for keeping the place tight and secure. Okay, I’m not going to make it seem like I’m guarding the U.S. Mint, but we get a lot of people trying to come in here, like rag reporters or crazed fans or desperate actors. They don’t have weapons but they have things that are far more lethal to us like pens, cameras, and unrealistic expectations. It’s my job to protect Silvercup and everybody inside from all that. My job and reputation are at stake, and I’m not going to let some clog-wearing twerp or donut-eating knucklehead ruin it.

Just my luck, my other two colleagues are at lunch. That leaves me and the munching machine, who since he got here has been visiting the different sets and mooching free meals. I watch him fold the News and start the Post. He reminds me of myself when I started on the job years ago. After the rush of the morning, it slows down to a crawl. Keeping yourself awake is a chore. Thanks to plenty of coffee, newspapers and magazines, and hopefully some good conversation, you can remain alert most of your shift.

Then there’s the food. Each production has it’s own catered breakfast, lunch, and if they’re here long enough, dinner. My first six months I gained twenty pounds and it’s been with me ever since. One day it’s fresh lobsters from a restaurant chain shooting commercials, then it’s a week of birthday cakes from a television show. Here, at any given time, someone somewhere is eating something. Makes you wonder where the term “starving actor” came from.

I’m not too confident in this boy’s abilities, especially after I see him bite into his breakfast burrito and squirt half of it on his lap. But he’s the only guy I got on the desk right now, since the other two have gone off on a break. So I tell him to keep an eye out for a white guy wearing clogs and to call me on the walkie if he sees anything suspicious. He doesn’t bother to ask me what’s going on or about the clogs even, and I don’t bother to fill him in. I give him two weeks, if that.

I take today’s schedule with me. I have to be careful not to excite or disturb the productions going on. Today we’ve got four commercials, two cop shows, three sitcoms, one movie, and two music videos shooting, not to mention the Home Shopping Network, which has it’s permanent home here. That means hundreds of actors and crew roaming the place. I decide to go up and work my way down. I don’t bother with the top floor where the boss’s office is. I figure a guy in clogs is not interested in that. A guy in clogs wants attention. He wants to be discovered. And that means I got to go where the directors and the actors are. I take the freight elevator to the second floor.

When the doors open, I see a herd of suits, some eating bagels, others reading or having intense conversations. It’s like I just walked in on a business conference at some firm on Wall Street, only the men are wearing makeup and the women have rollers in their hair. I move past them to Frank, a production assistant I know pretty well. He’s worked here at Silvercup almost as long as I have.

“Yo, Frank, all your people accounted for?” I ask him.

Frank silently counts the actors.

“Yeah. Why?”

“We got somebody walking around the place. He screwed up a shot in 7.”

“Moron.”

“Yeah. You see anyone who doesn’t belong, call me.”

“You got it, Jo.

“Oh, and he’s wearing clogs.”

Frank raises an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask,” I tell him.

I walk to the other side of the building. Past storage rooms that have complicated lock systems installed. You have to have a combination or a special key. On some of them you need both. I try the doors anyway. Better to be sure.

My schedule says they’re setting up a music video in the next studio. Whether they want to or not, they usually start shooting later in the day. Pop and rap singers don’t like to get up in the morning. They can afford not to. The crew was there, however, installing stripper poles for a rap video.

“What’s shaking, Jo?” says Dimples, a pot-bellied Irishman carrying heavy cables. I cross the studio floor toward him.

“You won’t believe it,” I say as I approach. “I’ve got some guy walking around the place messing up shots.”

His cheeks flushed, betraying his nickname. “Was he wearing clogs?”

I nearly choke on the chocolate-covered peanuts I just snatched from the Kraft table. “Yeah, you seen him?”

“About ten minutes ago. He walked in here asking for Tony Soprano. I thought he was joking.” Dimples takes off one of his thick gloves and scratches his bulbous nose. “He had an accent. Italian, or maybe Spanish. It’s hard to tell. Tiny guy, though. No bigger than my leg. Kept stuffing bagels into his pants, like he was saving them for later. He creeped me, so I chased him out of here.”

“Which way did he go?” I ask, licking chocolate from my fingers.

“I followed him out to the hall and watched him take the stairs down. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Thanks.”

I run toward the exit and take the steps two at a time. I figure if I move quickly enough, I can catch up with him. Besides, how fast can a guy in clogs go? But when I get to the bottom landing, I have to sit down. They say, if you don’t use it you lose it. And after all these years, I have definitely lost it. When I was younger, if somebody had said to me I would be tired after running down a flight of stairs, I would have kicked his ass. Now the very thought of lifting my foot to carry out my threat exhausts me. Not counting vacations and holidays, I have mostly spent my time sitting behind the security desk watching others come and go. The last time I chased anyone was awhile back when a mother-daughter team tried to get an autographed picture of Sarah Jessica Parker. They would have succeeded if they hadn’t been as out of shape as I was.

I look down at my ankles. They’re swollen. It makes me think of my mother, who would come home from work, worn out, same swollen feet as mine, in the days when this place supplied bread for schools in Queens and the Bronx and parts of Manhattan. Now, instead of filling their stomachs with dough, we fill their heads with it.

The mayor keeps telling us that New York City has grown safer now that violent crimes are at the lowest rates they’ve been in a decade. That’s true everywhere except on television and in the movies. It’s as if Hollywood didn’t get the memo. Production companies spit out cop show after cop show, movies full of mobsters and gang-bangers who kill and rape, rob and shoot one another — in the name of entertainment. It’s not Silvercup’s fault. We don’t write the scripts. We just provide the space to film them in.

I push myself up from the steps and enter the first floor. First thing, down the hall, I see two guys about to come to blows. Any moment the fists are going to fly. I stand quietly off to the side and watch. I know that when the time comes for one of them to throw the first punch, they’ll calm down and probably laugh or pat each other on the back. This time they do both.

“Hey, Jo, what’s up?” Edward, the one with the perfect teeth, calls me over. I shake his manicured hand. He plays a serial killer on one of the cop shows. He’s on for the whole season. Nice guy, great family man, good kids.

“Same ole, same ole,” I answer. “You seen a guy running around here in clogs?”

The actors laugh, thinking I am about to tell a joke.

“I’m not kidding.” I say this with my best poker face.

Ed drops his grin. “No, just us up here running lines before our scene. Why?”

“Nothing serious. Sorry I interrupted you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the new guy chirps. He has a shaved head, which from a distance made him look thuggish, but now that I’m closer to him, I can see that he’s a kid barely out of school. Must be his first big part. This morning when he signed in he was a little anxious around the eyes; polite though. Probably right out of college and here he is playing a street thug, the kind his mother and father sent him to university so as not to become. If this script is like all the others, his character’s going to be shot or killed and sent off to prison by the afternoon. That’s show business.

I stick my hands in my pockets. It’s cold in here, I want to get back to my desk where I keep a space heater tucked down below. The boss has the thermostat in the low sixties, even in winter. He says it keeps everybody on their toes.

The next studio is dark except for the set, which looks like a doctor’s office. They’re rehearsing a scene for a pharmaceutical commercial. A very nervous actor in a doctor’s coat is having trouble with his lines. When he gets to the part about the side effects, he starts to laugh. But no one else thinks it’s funny. Time is money and everyone is frustrated, including the director, who makes the actor even more uncomfortable by sighing loudly and storming off between takes.

After my eyes have adjusted to the dark, I glance around the room. The crew, producers, and other actors are standing around, quietly waiting for the next take, hoping this day will come to an end so they can all go home. Everyone except what I will later describe to the press as a deranged imp — no more than five feet tall. He’s standing off to the side, eating a bagel that he has just pulled out of his tights.

He has on a billowy white shirt that looks like it’s from one of those Shakespearean movies — it’s hanging over his wiry shoulders and flared out past his nonexistent hips. On his small feet are a pair of genuine wooden clogs.

We make eye contact and he quickly figures out why I’m here. The actor and the director head back to the set. I search around for a couple of guys who I can recruit to help me. When I turn back, the little guy is standing right next to me.

“Have you seen Tony Soprano?” he whispers in an Italian accent. His eyes are bright, even in the dark, and his breath smells of cheese.

“Quiet on the set!” The alarm bell rings, signaling that the camera’s about to roll. I grab his skinny arm but he twists around and frees himself from my grip.

“Action!” The director cues the actor, who begins his lines.

“I’m a doctor, so people are surprised when I tell them that I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.”

No one is watching me or the imp as he makes his way behind several clients from the pharmaceutical industry who are engrossed in the actor’s performance. Imagine spending a good part of your career having meetings and conference calls about irritable bowels. I squeeze past them and follow my quarry who is creeping closer to the set.

“If you suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, do like I did. Call your doctor. Side effects include stomachache, fever, bloody stool, and on rare occasions, death.”

This time the actor does not laugh, but the imp does, as he dashes right in front of the camera.

“Cut!” What the...?” The director is about to have a nervous breakdown.

I know better than to follow the imp in front of the camera. I figure there will be enough people waiting to kill him for messing up this shot. Someone switches on the overhead lights just in time to see him open the door and scurry out.

The first year The Sopranos shot here were my hardest as a security guard. We had the press, fans, everybody coming by asking to speak to the fictional mob boss, Tony Soprano. We even had real gangsters come around. It wasn’t easy turning these kinds of fans away. We had to hire two extra security guards to handle the crush. But now the show is winding down. The actors are bored. The reporters have moved on. Things were getting back to normal until this clog-footed fruitcake came along.

I go out into the hall but there is no sign of him. I call Kenneth on the walkie but he doesn’t answer. He’s probably in the john, making room for another meal. Did I say he’d last two weeks? Make that one.

As I struggle to put my walkie back in its cradle, the imp exits a john and sprints into the stairwell. By this time I’m joined by the actor/doctor, the director, and several guys from the crew.

We follow him up one flight. My heart is thumping. He better hope I catch him before the director does. I can see the tabloid headline: IMP MAIMED AT SILVERCUP. We chase him down the narrow hall toward the Wall Street herd waiting to go on set. Because he’s limber and small, the imp cuts through the crowd barely touching anybody.

“Stop him!” I yell out.

A few of the actors look at me like I’m a 300-pound woman who just walked into a gym. Let’s face it. In a place where there are actors and little guys in clogs, I’m the odd one. Thankfully, a banker type catches on and grabs the imp from behind, lifting him off the ground. An actress who looks like an H&R Block agent screams. Everyone panics.

Coffee and bagels splatter and fly into the air. This is the imp’s second big mistake. You don’t mess up a director’s shot and you don’t spill coffee on an actor’s wardrobe before he goes on. I start to feel sorry for the little guy, until he reaches back and grabs his captor by his private parts and gives them a yank.

“Aaaah, Christ!” groans the actor, who lets go. The imp lands on his feet and darts toward the east end of the building.

Now this is where it gets interesting. I couldn’t make this up if I wanted to. It’s the kind of stuff that Hollywood pays big bucks for. I got to remember to put that in the screenplay I’m writing. Did I mention that I’m writing a screenplay?

The light outside of the Home Shopping Network set is flashing red. This means only one thing: No one can enter. They’re shooting. I’ve seen movie stars stop in their tracks when they see it. Directors, producers, even the boss. But the imp ignores it and, once again, goes in without hesitation.

I move to stop the others from following him, but then I realize I don’t have to. The consequences of entering a set when the red light is flashing differs from set to set. It can be anything from a stern talking-to, to getting punched out by a Teamster, to having the cops called in to haul you away. Home Shopping has a full-time bodyguard and ex-cop named Zack, who carries a .38. Whatever happens, it’s going to be the last set the imp crashes.

I wonder how long it will take for Zack to spot him. As soon as I finish the thought, the doors burst open and Zack emerges with the imp tightly pinned under his arm and a meaty hand clamped over his mouth. None of us say anything.

Ready for revenge, we all silently followed Zack down the hall to the bathroom. It’s like watching David and Goliath. Man, the little guy is strong. His arms bulge like small cantaloupes and his legs are like iron rods. Every time Zack tries to go through the door, the imp’s arms and legs stop him. This goes on for a while until the imp bites down on Zack’s hand. The ex-cop screams like a eunuch and drops him to the ground.

We don’t waste time. We all dive on top of him, arms and legs grabbing and pulling at other arms and legs. I swear I have him until I find myself pinned to the ground by a sweaty stockbroker. A Teamster has to be stopped from strangling the director. By the time we realize what’s going on, the imp has wiggled out from under us.

“Ciao!” he calls over to us before entering the stairwell a couple of feet away.

I watch Zack and the others follow him up. The next floor is administrative and is rigged with an alarm. His only option is the rooftop, and from there he’ll be trapped. So I save myself the climb and take the freight elevator to the roof.

A couple of years ago, the boss had a series of solar panels and plants installed to help generate electricity for the building. I thought it was a crock myself, but apparently it works. At least it’s gotten the boss off our backs about portable heaters and keeping the doors open for too long, and in August I can take home all the tomatoes I can eat.

On three sides of the building, Silvercup Studios is encircled by two exit ramps to the Queensboro Bridge and the elevated subway tracks of the 7 train. Four flights down is the street. Unless the imp can do like Spiderman and climb brick, he’s mine.

Row after row of raised square planting beds lie next to solar panels angled to the east. Large generators, the size of trucks, stand off to the west side harvesting the energy. Above me is the towering S of the famous SILVERCUP sign that lights up the entrance to Queens from the bridge at night. The sign stretches from one end of the building to the other, above the elevated tracks of the subway.

I walk to the west to get a better view of the roof and spot the imp standing under the P, waving at me like I’m his long-lost sister.

I don’t like coming up here when it’s not warm, especially on days like today when there’s nothing but gray clouds and a damp wind that cuts through my thin uniform right to my bones. I can’t wait to get my frozen hands on this little creep. But before I start after him, Zack and the others come bursting out of the rooftop door like the Canadian Mounties, only without the horses.

We spread out and begin walking slowly toward him, just like in the movies, but the closer we get, the further he backs away, until finally he reaches the far edge of the building. Listen, I don’t want the imp to jump. His death is the last thing I need on my conscience, so I motion for everyone else to hold back while I try and talk to him, even though the traffic from the bridge and the trucks unloading below make that impossible.

I wish I could tell you that I get him to move from the edge or that he drops that stupid grin and runs sobbing into my arms, but things like that only happen on television. Real life is much more complicated. Instead, he rubs his hands along his thighs and then, with an operatic flourish, he calls out to us, “Arrivederci!” Then he turns around and jumps.

I must’ve looked like the wide-mouth bass in the window of the fish store on Queens Plaza South. At least that’s what I felt like: a cold dead fish. I ran with the others to the edge, expecting to see Italian sauce splattered all over the pavement below. Just one story down, however, there’s the imp, rubbing his hands on his thighs again and grabbing hold of a rope hanging from the 25A exit ramp of the Queensboro Bridge.

I forgot that this end of the building has an extension to it: a freight garage that’s only three stories high, connected to the main Silvercup building. It looks like he got into the building by lowering himself from the exit ramp to the garage and then climbed up the emergency fire ladder to the main building. When I tell the boss about this, he’s going to lose it.

I decide not to follow him, especially since he’s scurrying up that rope faster than an Olympic gymnast. Besides, now that this jerk’s off the premises, he’s no longer my problem. If this were a television show, it would be a good time to cut to commercial. I could use a donut and a hot cup of coffee, only my curiosity is getting the better of me.

We all stand there and watch as he scurries up the rope jammed between the crack of the concrete barrier and onto the exit ramp to 25A. He loses one of his clogs but it doesn’t faze him. Like a tight-rope walker, he steps along the ledge, against traffic, to exit 25, which runs parallel to 25A, but then veers off and under the elevated subway tracks of the 7 train. Once he’s on exit 25, he crosses the lane and hops up on the ledge again and reaches for another rope. This one is tied to the iron gridwork that holds up the track, and instead of going up, he goes down. We lose sight of him behind the Silvercup parking lot, so we all rush to the west end of the roof just in time to see him running, with one clog, up Queens Plaza South toward the subway entrance a block away.

The End.

Or so I think.

A week later, I’m sitting with Kenneth at the desk (yes, he’s still here and he’s five pounds heavier) and we’re reading the News. A headline screams, ALIEN ACTOR NABBED BY HOMELAND SECURITY, and there’s a picture of the imp, smiling for his close-up.

His name is Aldo Phillippe and he’s a street performer from Naples who overstayed his visa. He came to the United States to do three things: meet Tony Soprano, get discovered for the movies, find a wife.

According to the paper, Aldo decided that a good way to get publicity was to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, crawl through the window of her crown, and sit on her head. You probably think they caught him because they have better security over at the Liberty, but it wasn’t that. According to the article, they had to close the visitors’ center and chase him around for over an hour. The only way they caught him was by cornering him at the tip of the island, and evidently Aldo can’t swim. If he’s lucky, they won’t send him to Guantánamo Bay.

I keep Aldo’s clog on my desk filled with pens for people to use when they sign in. No one notices it except when the director and actors who were with me that day come back to work. Everybody else is too busy making entertainment.