The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Contributors’ Notes

Karen E. Bender is the author of the novel Like Normal People. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and other magazines. They have been reprinted in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies and read on the Selected Shorts program on NPR. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is working on a collection of stories.

“Theft” began because I wanted to write something from the point of view of a swindler. Ginger was a great character to let out the id. It was fun trying to figure out how she would use people and try to figure out her own theories on how the world worked.

I chose a cruise ship because once I weirdly ended up on a cruise to Alaska, and the setting had to be used — the general sense of desperation and sequins and the constant eating opportunities, particularly the chocolate buffet, which was one of the most poignant and piggish experiences I have ever witnessed. A friend told me that he had heard of instances in which lonely people went on cruise ships to die and be found. That was incredibly powerful to me and somehow seemed to fit into Ginger’s perspective — that was the container that would hold the story. So I put that in, too, which made the story darker and sometimes hard to write, but so goes the puzzling escapade of writing fiction.

C. J. Box is the author of six novels, the most recent being In Plain Sight. He is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 Award (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award, and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Open Season (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book and three of the novels have been Book Sense 76 picks. Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and is currently writing a stand-alone thriller called Blue Heaven.

When the editors of “Meeting Across the River” — an anthology based on the Bruce Springsteen song — approached me about submitting a story, my first thought was: I don’t do urban. Then I read the lyrics with their vague, mysterious references to planning a crime, the girl Cherry, a $2,000 score. While contemplating how to put my stamp on a story with those elements, my family vacationed in Yellowstone. As we left the park, we witnessed an unexpected and somewhat jarring scenario — dark, leather-clad, menacing Eastern Europeans loitering on the corners and sidewalks of little Gardiner, Montana. They were wildly out of place, like a pawnshop in a cow pasture. Turned out they’d come to the United States for jobs in Yellowstone but couldn’t get them. They had that look about them like they’d do just about anything for $2,000. At the time, my daughters were listening to Eminem. Suddenly, everything fit. Voila: “Pirates of Yellowstone.”

James Lee Burke was born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received an A.B. and M.A. in English literature.

Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

My best and oldest friend passed away three years ago, and I wrote “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” and two other stories in memory of him. The real “Nick Hauser” was a remarkable man and a great friend to have. Even though we were born in the Great Depression, the era in which we grew up was one that I do not think will come aborning again. The quiet tree-shaded street on which we lived was next to a horse pasture and a grove of live oaks that were perhaps two hundred years old. “Nick” and I had a shoeshine business, yard-service, and were masters at harvesting blackberries on property that was not ours and selling them in bell jars, door-to-door, for two-bits ajar. But our great loves were baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests.

It was a grand time to be a kid. Minor league baseball players were celebrities and the Canadian men who set up street-corner yo-yo competitions all over town seemed possessed of magic. Even the gangsters with whom “Nick” and I associated the word criminal had a Hollywood aura about them. I think the innocence of the boys in the story is a reflection of the mindset of the times. On V-J Day we knew with absolute conviction that our nation was on the right side of things and that the evil that had threatened our tiny microcosm on that dead-end street had been purged from the earth forever. Perhaps one could say that our national perspective was one of illusion, but I believe otherwise. I believe my generation will be the last one to remember what is called traditional America. We believed in ourselves. We were a united people. Each day was like waking to music and sunshine and the smell of flowers. Anyway, I’m proud of this story and the others I wrote about “Nick” and me. I hope you enjoy it.

Jeffery Deaver is a former journalist, folksinger, and attorney. The creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thrillers, he’s the author of twenty-two novels, has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He’s been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. His book The Bone Collectors was made into a feature release from Universal pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His most recent books are The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, and Twisted: Collected Stories. And, yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As The World Turns.

“Born Bad” is typical of my short stories. They don’t come from real-life experiences and are meant to be pure entertainment; I simply sit down and came up with a scenario that I think will make a fun story. Like my novels, the short stories are carefully plotted and move along quickly to an unexpected ending. The difference, though, is that in a novel I strive to create an emotional roller coaster for my readers. Accordingly, I have to keep in mind the connection that readers have with the book’s characters and never disillusion them. In short stories, that’s not the case, since it’s hard to form more than a marginal connection with the characters over the course of twenty pages or so; the payoff of a story is a gut-wrenching surprise. To stay with the amusement park metaphor: if novels are roller coasters, then short stories are like the parachute drop ride — when the parachute doesn’t open.

Jane Haddam is the pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, whose first language was not Greek and whose parents were both born in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels and, under her own name, of a short series about romance writer Patience Campbell McKenna as well as two psychological thrillers. She was married for thirteen years to the three-time Edgar Award-winner William L. DeAndrea, who died in 1996. She lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

I don’t think I would have written a story about a cat if the cat had been any other cat but Edelweiss. I’m not a cat-detective sort of person — all the cutesy half-humanness of detecting pets tends to make me climb the walls. So when Ed Gorman first asked me to do a story for a volume of cat-related mysteries, I was torn between my first reaction (“oh, for goodness sake”) and the desire to have a chance to do a short story at all. I don’t get asked to do them often, and I love the form. In the end, I opted for a story that wasn’t anything like cutesy and that couldn’t be mistaken for cozy in a million years. In the process, I gave Edelweiss — who was adopted after having been neglected and abused, and who had the most thoroughgoing case of shyness ever visited on a mammal — the sort of nonchalant self-confidence all cats are supposed to possess by birthright. She’s a good cat, Edelweiss, even if you’ll never get to meet her. If you visit, she’ll hide under the couch or behind the recycling bin until she can be sure you’re safely gone.

William Harrison is the author of eight novels — five set in Africa — as well as three volumes of short stories, essays, and travel pieces. He taught at the University of Arkansas for a number of years and still lives in Fayetteville.

I usually begin with a character when a story comes to me, but sometimes a place — or even a single image — starts the process. I was driving down toward Dripping Springs, Texas, out of Austin when I saw this forlorn little real estate company in a squat building out there among the scrub oak and mesquite trees. My wife had once worked as a real estate agent and told me how women agents always traveled in pairs when dealing with male clients — especially in isolated rural situations — and my imagination just turned over. “Texas Heat” was the result.

Alan Heathcock has published stories in a number of journals. His story “Peacekeeper,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, won the 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. He is a native of Chicago and teaches at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

Some friends of mine live in a lovely small town in Minnesota. I visited the town not long after a horrible crime — not unlike the crime in “Peacekeeper” — had been discovered. The town had palpably changed; everything felt different, somehow tarnished. I remember wondering if anything could be done to restore the town’s peace and decided nothing short of having the crime erased from the town’s collective memory would suffice. That, in turn, got me thinking on the nature of peace itself and how disrupted peace will always show itself, will be felt, will be ingested like fouled air, even if not seen by the community; peace, or the lack of peace, is a force of nature, is the very air we breathe. Around the same time I was working on a story about the Great Midwestern Flood of 1993, and it made sense that the two stories reside in the same Active space. I owe a structural debt to the Christopher Nolan film Following for the disjointed manner in which Nolan unfurled his story, juxtaposing related but out-of-sequence scenes to enable a consistent tension — building multiple lines to a proper crescendo, was, for me, a key to unlocking this particular story’s potency.

Emory Holmes II is a Los Angeles-based novelist, playwright, poet, children’s storywriter, and journalist. His news stories on American crime, schools, and the arts have appeared on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Magazine, Essence, CODE, the R&B Report, Written By magazine, and other publications.

When my crime-writer buddy Gary Phillips called in the summer of 2004 and asked if I would contribute a story to The Cocaine Chronicles — an anthology of new writing he and novelist Jervey Tervalon were putting together addressing the effects of cocaine on American society — I jumped at the chance. I was eager to pen a twenty-first-century blues. I unearthed a motley gallery of killers I’d banked in an archive of traffickers and thugs, collected during my thirty years as a reporter and writer. Some of the characters and settings in “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” got plucked from the novel I am writing about a meth epidemic (and murder) in 1980s Honolulu. I had done a page one story on this epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle back in August 1989 and, a few weeks after that, Vanity Fair sent me back to Hawaii to do the story for them. Working on assignment for Vanity Fair is a writer’s dream come true, and the experience was all that and more for me, but my Hawaii narrative never got published in Vanity Fair. It was, however, during this time that I first uncovered the remarkable crimes and characters that have become “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella.”

I changed the settings from inner-city Honolulu to the outskirts of Los Angeles. My cycle of events takes place within the span of a few heartbeats, in a police interrogation room, a few miles from the urban hick town of La Caja, California (a fictional hometown I intend to revisit). To celebrate the invention of La Caja, I birthed an ambitious killer, Cut Pemberton, whose presence is a mere specter in this story. Nevertheless, he is my narratives’ inscrutable engine. He is a quicksilver force and, I may as well add, a predator and a scoundrel and a merciless miscreant too who, for the moment, exists primarily as a mordent spook in the opulent, backtracking imagination of his gargantuan road-dog, his thoroughly guilty, yet somehow blissfully blameless — and hungry and thirsty and wronged! wronged! — pale-ass pussy of a sidekick, the roundly chastened and proportioned Fat Tommy O’Rourke.

“A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is an inquiry into the mind of this man, Tommy O’Rourke. My story, frankly, suspects Moises is complicit in a monstrous crime. While negotiating the streams of Tommy’s thoughts, I tried to make note of the reeling fluidity and momentum of subjective time as it whipped Tommy round and around in its rapids on that interminable day and night, while around him the grave machinery of fate ticked on. I looked for fun as well as art in this sad stuff. At a decisive point in Tommy’s interrogation, DEA Special Agent Roland Braddock nails him with a slur, “Pale-ass pussy.” Here’s how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), critiqued the Moises Rockafellas of his day: “An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its image after it was done. Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became the essence for him. A chalk streak stops a hen; the stroke that he himself struck stopped his poor reason: madness after the deed I call this.”

My story is about exactly this: the madness after the deed. There’s nothing funny about murder. True that. But, I won’t get mad if readers think of this narrative as a comedy, even a slapstick comedy, and laugh out loud. That said, at the bottom of all this funny business, “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is a blues; a pale-ass, lowdown blues.

Wendy Hornsby is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories, Nine Sons, that includes her Edgar Award-winning short story of the same tide. She lives in Southern California, where she is chair of her college history department. Currently she is finishing the sixth Maggie MacGowen mystery

One early summer evening, just before sunset, I sat on our front deck gazing out across Malibu Canyon, glass of good red wine in hand, thinking about a story for Murder in Vegas, the anthology edited by Michael Connelly. In front of me, a pair of magnificent red-tail hawks rose up out of the depths of the canyon, found thermals to ride, like kites, so they could shop the chaparral below for their dinner. Beautiful. I’m not a big fan of Vegas and whatever goes on there, but I do love the Red Rock Canyon area that rises from the desert floor just a few miles past the artifice and faux gilt of the Strip. Like the rugged canyons of the Santa Monica mountains where we live, that can be a very treacherous area for the unprepared. The elements of “Dust Up” began to emerge out of that place where stories lurk. By the time the last of the sun was gone, and with some help from my well-used copy of Sibley’s Guide to Birds, the story was formed: bad guys, an excellent body drop, endangered wildlife, and Pansy Reynard, a character I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know. “Dust Up” was fun to write. I think Pansy Reynard and I may have some further adventures to explore.

Andrew Klavan is the author of True Crime, which was filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, which was filmed starring Michael Douglas. He has just completed Damnation Street, the sequel to the Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop novels Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other places.

When I first finished “Her Lord and Master,” my agent at the time told me not to try to publish it. He said its graphically sexual and politically incorrect subject matter would hurt my career. After a couple of venues turned the story down, I brought it to my friend Otto Penzler. I trust Otto, and I figured if he told me to ditch the thing, I would. Instead, he called me and said, “I’ll get this into print if I have to build an entire anthology around it.” It took him four years but he was, as always, as good as his word. The story first came out in Otto’s anthology Dangerous Women. Then it got nominated for an Edgar Award. Now it’s been included here. The moral of the story: when in doubt, call Otto.

Elmore Leonard is one of the most honored and beloved writers in America, a regular on the best-seller lists for two decades, and the winner of the Grand Master Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement. Among the motion pictures made from his books are Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, The Tall T, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and Stick.

Elmore Leonard has said that if he didn’t have a good time writing novels and short stories he wouldn’t have kept doing it for fifty-five years. According to Leonard, his ultimate pleasure is developing characters, giving them attitudes, and getting them to talk in scenes that he makes up as he goes along, without much of an idea how the book or story will end.

He was already working on his novel The Hot Kid when Otto Penzler called and asked if he had time to write a story for Otto’s forthcoming anthology of suspense stories Dangerous Women. Elmore said, “You bet” and pulled Louly Brown out of the novel he was writing, but doesn’t remember why he changed her name to Louly Ring. He also introduced Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, who later appeared in a fourteen-part serial called Comfort to the Enemy that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and will be featured again in the book Elmore is currently writing.

“My characters,” Elmore said, “are always on call, never knowing where they might have to show up again.”

Laura Lippman has won virtually all the major U.S. mystery-writing awards for her Tess Monaghan novels. She also has published two critically acclaimed stand-alones, Every Secret Thing and To the Power of Three. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Murderers Row, Tart Noir, Murder and All that Jazz, Dangerous Women, and Baltimore Noir, which she also edited. A former newspaper reporter, she lives in Baltimore.

Much to my disgust, I have a bit of a “nice girl” rep in the mystery world and short stories have given me a chance to shake that up. I was particularly flattered when Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon asked if I would write a story for The Cocaine Chronicles. “What do you know about cocaine?” asked my parents, already mildly discombobulated by the recent revelation that I once wrote erotica. “More than I know about golf!” I said, referencing another story. But I also had a secret agenda. The cocaine trade in cities such as Baltimore would be much less lucrative if suburbanites weren’t part of the customer base. I wanted to show an African-American drug dealer helpless in the face of true evil — two white girls on a diet.

Ed McBain, whose novels of the 87th Precinct, Matthew Hope, and other characters sold nearly 100 million copies worldwide, died on July 6, 2005. He had been battling throat cancer for three years. While he did not quite invent the police procedural novel, he refined it and popularized it, becoming a household name and winner of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Under his own name, Evan Hunter, he wrote such memorable novels as The Blackboard Jungle and Strangers When We Meet, both of which also were successful films. Among his screenplays was the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Birds. Improvisation was his last short story.

Mike MacLean is a faculty member of Harrison Middleton University and the author of numerous published stories. Born and raised in Arizona, he lives in Tempe with his wife, Bobbie, and their three dogs. Along with his love of writing, Mike has a passion for the martial arts and holds a black belt in Ja-Shin-Do.

Mike’s short fiction can be found in the pages of Thug Lit, Thrilling Detective, Demolition Magazine, and Plots with Guns. His first novel, The Silent, is currently under consideration by major publishing houses.

There is a mundane suspense that comes with getting a package. “McHenry’s Gift” was an attempt to take that everyday experience and infuse it with tension. While many of my stories are quick and brutal, writing this one presented a different kind of challenge. I wanted to dangle the threat in front of the reader without resorting to overt scenes of violence. I wanted to make the reader sweat it out.

Walter Mosley is the author of twenty-four critically acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Some of his characters have become iconic: from the reluctant detective Easy Rawlins to the ex-con philosopher Socrates Fortlow. His books encompass a wide range of genres: from his popular mysteries to literary fiction, nonfiction, young adult fiction, and science fiction. He has won numerous awards including the Anisfield Wolf Award; a Grammy Award for his linear notes accompanying Richard Pryor... And It’s Deep Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992); an O’Henry Award in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story); the Sundance Institute Risktaker Award; and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.

I am so happy to have this story recognized in the crime fiction field. I was deeply satisfied with the world that Leonid McGill represents. I wanted to start writing about New York and about the toll working with crime has on both sides of the law. This story is the beginning of a long and convoluted literary relationship.

Joyce Carol Oates, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978, is the author most recently of the novel Black Girl/White Girl (Ecco/HarperCollins) and the noir story collection The Female of the Species (Otto Penzler Books, Harcourt). She is the 2003 recipient of the Common Wealth Award for Achievement in Literature and the 2005 Prix Femina for her novel The Falls. She lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.

Like most of my fiction, “So Help Me God” was evoked by some mysterious conjunction of place, time, and character. The setting is upstate New York in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where young men like Luke Pittman, prone to violence, yet “attractive” as charismatic personalities, may be as likely to go into local law enforcement as into a life of sporadic crime. The attraction of such men to women, including even young women from “good” families, is part of the subject here, like the gradual awakening, in such a marriage, that the wife may have to emulate her violence-prone husband in order to save her own life. We’ve all had experiences with mysterious, unidentified telephone calls, especially women; the story’s opening was suggested by an episode of some years ago in my life, which remained unexplained.

Sue Pike is the editor of Locked Up, an anthology of short mystery stories marking the 175th anniversary of the construction of the Rideau Canal, a navigable system of lakes and rivers joining Lake Ontario to Canada’s capital in Ottawa. The canal was built as a defense against American invasion but now welcomes hundreds of boaters from the country each year.

Sue has stories in all six of the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies and is editor of Fit to Die, Bone Dance, and When Boomers Go Bad. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Storyteller and Cold Blood V, as well as Murder in Vegas. She won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1997.

I wrote this sitting on the dock at our cottage on Lake Opinicon in Eastern Ontario, feeling about as far away from Las Vegas as it’s possible to be. I had a recalcitrant temporary crown at the time and began to wonder if DNA might lurk in its porous plastic. My dentist wouldn’t commit on the subject but I notice he’s been a little wary of me ever since.

Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship.

I was surprised to learn that “Smile” was selected for this anthology because I didn’t conceive it as a mystery story. My father, who is from the region depicted in “Smile,” describes it as a horror story. I think of it more as a love story because it depicts my romance with the Cajun language. Who knows? Maybe it’s all three. I’ve been thinking about the “mystery” designation, though. The thing that isn’t said, the thing that’s strategically withheld, is usually the thing that makes a reader want to turn the page. In a way, a lot of successful fiction could be referred to as mystery. Writing for me, like life, is also a mysterious process. I don’t know how it’s going to end and it’s only through the blind act of doing it that meaning occurs.

R. T. Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and edits Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review. His stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and his new collection, Uke Rivers Delivers, published by LSU Press in 2006. He is also the author of several collections of poetry, including The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood. Smith is currently working on a novel about Sheriff Blaine Sherburne.

When I read in The Rockbridge Advocate the reprint of a newspaper account of a crime outside Lexington at the beginning of the twentieth century, I began wondering about the gaps in the record and the feel of a suppressed subtext rippling through the testimony. Because jigsawing accounts, especially in criminal matters, often bring Rashomon to my mind, I decided to write a story that was distinctly Appalachian but that addressed questions of both motive and memory similar to those that interested Kurosawa. One of the Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories that the film works from is titled, in Kojima’s translation, “In a Grove.” I joined the first three letters to get the victim’s name and began looking at the evidence, as I imagined it, from disparate perspectives, in different voices. At one time or another in the process, every one of these unreliable narrators seemed to have some credibility and to arouse at least a little sympathy. Sherburne’s name, by the way, is borrowed from the Lynching Bee section of Huck Finn’s narrative.

Jeff Somers writes all of his stories on cocktail napkins while sitting groggily at local saloons, using felt-tip pens that produce blurry, indecipherable scrawls. He dreams of a society that does not consider pants required public attire, and swears someday he will wake up some time before noon, remain sober for the better part of the day, and compose a persuasive tract on the subject that will change society forever. He began publishing The Inner Swine, a personal zine, in 1995 and now has at least eleven loyal readers who actually pay him for each issue, assuming promissory notes and occasional alcoholic beverages count as subscription fees. His first novel, Lifers, was reviewed favorably by the New York Times Book Review in 2001. His second novel, The Electric Church, is forthcoming from Warner Aspect in 2007. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the ratio of bars to bookstores is roughly 344 to 1.

Like many of my stories, Ringing the Changes grew from the title. I can’t recall where I first heard it, but it evoked the opening scene of the story for me, the boring conversation endured for its cloaking purposes, the sly, steady grift that requires more patience and work than an honest job. From there, all it took was a bottle of bourbon and a few late nights, and Poppy was born, exhausted and unhappy. Every story requires a bottle of bourbon, so every story is slowly killing me. I think it is worth it.

Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn, a collection of short stories. For five years in a row, Wolven’s stories have been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories. In 2006, Wolven’s stories will also appear in two other anthologies: Murder at the Racetrack, edited by Otto Penzler, and Fuck Noir, edited by Jennifer Jordan.

“Vigilance” is influenced by the hard, beautiful geography of Idaho and Montana and Washington, where the story takes place. The great Western cowboy artist and writer Charles M. Russell titled one of his paintings When Guns Speak, Death Settles Disputes, and that is certainly true here. Jack Cooley sums it up when he talks about the snakes, and in the end my nameless narrator gets to live another day as a ghost dog. It’s always night, in this story.

It’s a serious honor to have my story appear here. Very special appreciation goes out to M, the great team at WSBW. Big thanks out to Crimespree magazine. Anthony Neil Smith and Charlie Stella and Victor Gischler — three aces in the writer’s deck. For the art, inspiration, and support, Skylight Books and K, and nobody ever beats DMC Des Allemands and best brother Will.