First Thrills

got back to the villa a little later than usual; I might even have been humming something from Man of La Mancha.

Opened the door and saw a woman in the corner, the late evening shadows washing over her; I asked, “Bonita?”

No.

Brona, with a sawn off in her lap.

I dropped the bags.

She asked, “What day were you born on?”

I said, “Wednesday.”

She laughed; said, “Complete the rhyme…”

Jesus, what was it?

I acted like I was thinking seriously about that, but mainly I was thinking, how I’d get to the Walther PPK, in the press beside her.

Then she threw the said gun on the floor beside my wilted paella feast, smiled, said, “Here’s a hint, Tuesday’s child is full of Grace… so…”

Now she leveled the sawn off, cocked the hammer; said, “You get one guess.”

***

KEN BRUEN was a finalist for the Edgar, Barry, and Macavity Awards, and the Private Eye Writers of America presented him with the Shamus Award for the Best Novel of 2003 for The Guards, the book that introduced Jack Taylor. He lives in Galway, Ireland. To learn more about Ken and his novels go to www.kenbruen.com

Eddy May by Theo Gangi

Eddy tells me we can make money together. Eddy is the best police impersonator there is. He hangs out in police bars. He goes into police stations and talks to cops in perfect jargon. He goes down to court and gets search warrants and arrest forms and types them up. Eddy’s fed himself since the seventies by sending little kids into bathrooms to solicit pedophiles. Then he’d go in like a cop and shake them down.

I’m hanging out on Christopher Street with Eddy. He’s by the phone booth in plainclothes, a sport jacket and black shoes. Eddy told me that’s how you dress like a detective. So now I’m also wearing a sport jacket and plain black shoes.

I’m going to Brooklyn today and I’m pissed about it. I haven’t crossed that water since I moved to Washington Heights and my father cursed me as a traitor.

It’s early on a Tuesday afternoon. The lower west side teems with productivity; Starbucks supports a line out onto the sidewalk. People steadily file down into the subway. Busses yawn, stretch, and lumber up and down avenues. Eddy whistles an old song, “If I were a Bell,” the way Miles Davis played it. It’s a show tune, pretending to be jazz genius, about a man, pretending to be a bell. Eddy catches a glimpse of something through the dark window of the bar on the corner. He gets up close to it. I am still by the phone booth, being a detective. He curses, and starts pacing, fixated on the bar window. I go over to him. He curses again, rolling his eyes and smacking himself on his pocket keys.

“Problem?”

He wipes the sweat from his old, wrinkled brow.

“The fuckin’ unit. Gave up three fuckin’ homers in a row.”

The Big Unit. The Yankees’ biggest disappointment this year. Eddy and I are Yankees fans. We’re both from Brooklyn, home of the former Ebbet’s Field, where Brooklyn’s own Dodgers once played, now a large project. You ask me it’s just as good, replaces bums with more bums. Most native Brooklynites are Mets fans, as if obeying some law of transfer from one non-Yankee New York team to another. The Brooklyn bitterness toward the frequent champions is deep. Eddy chose the Yankees because some aspect of his life deserved to be aligned with a winner. My preference came at greater cost. To my father it was evidence of a great betrayal.

Many of my teenage years were spent explaining why Mickey Mantle was better than Snider, Pee Wee, Robinson, and Campanella combined. “They’re bums, Pop,” I would tell him. “It’s common knowledge.” His hurt was palpable. I told him it’s only baseball, but he didn’t believe me. “Bums? That what you think of me?”

The dark bar at daytime reminds me of my father. Three or four drunks sit at the bar stools, faces tilted to the blue wash of the TV screens above. Could be any time of day; it will always be the same time inside. Pop was like that; no matter the pitch, it was always a strike.

On the three mounted sets, Randy Johnson paces with his hands on his hips, spitting as though the homer was anybody’s fault but his. The Big Unit irritates the hell out of me and Eddy. After he blows a game, I find myself making up my own Post and Daily News headlines. Big Disaster. Flop of Fame.

“Cocksucker ain’t worth half what we gave for ’em,” says Eddy.

“Got that right.”

I’m a New York Times reader. Eddy reads The Daily News and The New York Post. But when the Big Unit loses, I buy The News, too, so I can fully absorb the crass, ruthless abuse my team deserves. Then I talk to Eddy about this year’s two-hundred-million- dollar joke.

“No word though?” I ask.

“He’ll be here.”

Eddy is right about that. He thinks so, but I know for sure. I step back and the TV disappears in darkness, the glass opaque now, with my reflection on its surface. I like to dress a bit better, clean shaven, cuff links now and then, how my wife likes me. She’s Puerto Rican, likes a little shine, some cologne. But Eddy told me how to dress like a detective, so I’m dressed like a detective.

“Ho shit!” Barks Eddy, attention back on the TV on the other side of the glass. I go up beside him and look through: a replay of a White Sox player who I never heard of knocking an unhittable pitch, up by his eyes, clean out of the ballpark. The big unit, with his giant, gangly frame and trailer- park dismay, stands on top of the wheat shade mound of dirt in utter incredulity.

“Four!” says Eddy. “Four goddamn dingers in one inning? That pitch wasn’t even a strike. It wasn’t even close, damn near over his head! How’d he hit that? Fucking impossible. Four homers.”

I shake my head.

“I can see the headlines. Four! four-get it!”

“Four-gone conclusion,” says Eddy. “Just four-fit already.”

I see the kid as Eddy goes on about how the Unit keeps throwing his flat, useless slider. The kid has bleached blonde hair and light eyes, with a don’t-give-a-fuck apathy way beyond typical adolescence. His attitude puts him going on thirty, a couple of jail bids already behind him. In reality, the kid is maybe fifteen, though not even he knows for sure. Got more miles on him than a ’89 VW.

“Yeah, he was unhittable in the National League, but so fuckin’ what? My friend, you and I could have fifteen wins and an ERA under three with those pansy-ass hitters.”

My father and Eddy were cast from the same boilerplate, even though Eddy is a European mutt and Pop was one-hundred-percent Sicilian. It must be the Brooklyn in them, the streets that taught them both how to hustle and talk, doing funny things with the letter H, adding it to the end of some words and striking it from the beginning of others. Fuck outta ’ere. Even their stooped countenance is the same: short necks, slumped shoulders, heavy faces pulled to the sidewalk as if losing money at dice.

Eddy’s cast-iron eyes look just past me as he speaks, just how a real cop might. Though a real cop would