Fiction

Rise of the Triad - Penny Miller Book Four (Ebook) $9.99

The Zombies Are Coming… Again. Small town Sheriff Penny Miller and her outlaw friend Scratch managed to survive a nuclear blast in Nevada and a brutal attack on their peaceful lodge in Colorado. They head for Los Angeles, looking for a fresh start. It seems the citizens of Southern California remain blissfully ignorant of the coming war. They believe zombies are simply an urban legend. As usual, there’s no rest for the wicked. When they find themselves in a suspiciously run Malibu rehab facility, Miller can't relax. She knows the gore is about to hit the fan. It seems that Miller can sense when zombies are near. And they’re almost always near. When all hell breaks loose around them, Miller and Scratch must survive deadly experiments, resist an ongoing government conspiracy, and battle another horde of ravenous zombies. And that’s just for starters.

At the End of the World - Penny Miller Book Three (Ebook)

Steven W. Booth

At the End of the World - Penny Miller Book Three (Ebook) $9.99

The Zombies are Spreading... Small town Sheriff Penny Miller and her friends Scratch, Terrill Lee, and Sheppard escaped from Nevada moments before a devastating nuclear explosion intended to eradicate the zombie plague. The Government’s plan didn’t work, and the undead are spreading fast. When Miller and her men find an abandoned hunting lodge in a remote village in Colorado, they’re hoping to steer clear of zombies, redneck survivalists, and panicked locals, and to simply ride out the winter. Penny Miller just wants some peace and quiet, a glass of wine in front of the fireplace, and maybe some quality time with Scratch over the holidays. Unfortunately, that isn’t Santa coming down the chimney—and this will not be a Merry Christmas. “Zombie thrillers loaded with sex and smarts.” —Jonathan Maberry, NYT Best Selling Author of Extinction Machine “Defines laugh-out-loud funny.” —Bookish Brunette “From the opening line, I loved it. For a zombie fan like me, presses all the right buttons.” —Stoker winner Joe McKinney, Author of Dead City and Flesh Eaters “The dialogue and narrative crackle, and the expressions that come out of Penny's mouth are hilarious. Great combination of action, gore, horror and humor.” —Dana Fredsti, Author of Plague Nation Paperback, 205 pages ISBN: 978-0615785-27-1

The Wrath of God - Penny Miller Book Two (Ebook)

Steven W. Booth

The Wrath of God - Penny Miller Book Two (Ebook) $9.99

Nevada: America’s number one tourist destination… if you’re DEAD! After surviving the first days of the zombie apocalypse, Sheriff Penny Miller and her friends relax in what’s left of Las Vegas. The Army asks Miller and her party to return to Crystal Place, the Top Secret base that was the birthplace of the zombies. Even though the mission is to recover data that may lead to a cure for the virus—and Miller herself—she’s pretty sure it’s a bad idea. The Army assures her that a crack team of mercenaries will be there to protect them every step of the way. When Miller sees weird religious graffiti scrawled in blood on the concrete walls, she’s sure their chances of survival have just dropped to damn near zero. Again. Sometimes it sucks being right! “Zombies generated by a government scientist searching for super-soldiers meet up with a good-looking, foul-mouthed female Sheriff…and she’s packin’. Four stars.” —SF Signal “Defines Laugh Out Loud funny. Often inappropriate, rude and utterly epic sarcasm from a completely rock your face off chick! Read this now! You won’t be sorry!” —Bookish Brunette “It’s zombies. A mad scientist. An ass-kicking female sheriff out to save the world. A fun ride. One of the better novels of the undead. Recommended.” —Horror World “Zombie thrillers loaded with sex and smarts.” —Jonathan Maberry “A fun fully loaded brain entrails explosion of a high octane charged zombie story.” —More2Read(dot)com

The Hungry - Penny Miller Book One (Ebook)

Steven W. Booth

The Hungry - Penny Miller Book One (Ebook) $9.99

The zombies are here. An accidental outbreak of a mutated virus unleashes hundreds of the undead on the sleepy town of Flat Rock, Nevada. Now, Sheriff Penny Miller must use her wits, grit, and damn near all of her ammunition to endure the arrival of zombies. Sheriff Miller quickly finds herself leading a vicious biker named Scratch, her ex-husband Terrill Lee, and a unit of incompetent National Guardsmen to safety. At their heels is Colonel Sanchez, the wicked Army commander who is pursuing Miller to gain the special powers the virus has given her. With a gang of murderous bikers on their tail and surrounded by slobbering hordes, Sheriff Miller must do what she does best: Aim for the brain! “THE HUNGRY is a zombie thriller loaded with sex and smarts. A real nail-biter that brings a new weapon to bear in apocalyptic fiction: Hope. Highly recommended.” —Jonathan Maberry, NYT Times bestselling author of Dust & Decay and Dead of Night “If you’re craving an apocalyptic horror novel that’s not just wall-to-wall action but balls-to-the-wall intense, Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon have cooked up a real treat for you. I would say The Hungry will leave you totally satisfied, but that’s not true: Readers will be howling for more more more MORE just like the hordes of insatiable zombies rampaging through this book.” —Steve Hockensmith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls “You don't know what gut-churning page-flipping horror really is until you read this one. The Hungry combines the storytelling power of the big commercial thriller with many new twists on standard zombie fiction. A real winner.” —Ed Gorman, author of The Dark Fantastic and Cage of Night

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c2">CHAPTER ONE</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Specialist 4 Dwayne Morton woke with a snort and looked around him. The small office he sat in was no different than when he had drifted off. His clipboard still lay at his elbow, the security log attached to it awaiting his next entry. His last simply noted the departure of the civilian cleaning crew at 4:00 AM, or 0400 hours military time. He was relieved that the duty sergeant had not discovered him during his inadvertent nap. Glancing up at the large clock hung on the wall, Dwayne saw that it was now 0517 hours. There remained almost three hours in his shift, a fact that did little to lift his spirits.</div> <div class="indent">“Army sucks,” he whispered with feeling. This was not supposed to have been his assignment—he had just completed a week’s tour of midnight to eight shifts, and by rights, should have been rotated to the much coveted day duty. But, as usual, the army, or more accurately, his first sergeant, had screwed everything up for him when Danny Boyle came down with appendicitis.</div> <div class="indent"><i>It wasn’t his fault that Danny’s appendix burst</i>, he thought, and there were plenty of other MPs to choose from in their company. It was just that Dwayne was having a little trouble with the company runs lately, was falling behind during PT sessions. Top was a fitness fanatic—the old fart had to be forty, and he still ran five miles a day—who does that?</div> <div class="indent">Glancing down at his waistline, Dwayne had to acknowledge that he had readjusted his duty belt twice since arriving in-country six months before—the damn beer and pastry diet here in Deutschland was kicking his ass and he had been no lightweight to begin with.</div> <div class="indent">Standing, he stretched and yawned widely, then snatched up his flashlight. Standard Operating Procedure on site security stated that foot patrols of the parking lot and office complex should occur hourly, though not at regular intervals, in order to avoid establishing a predictable pattern. Sleeping on duty was punishable by Article 15 regulations and could result in loss of pay or demotion.</div> <div class="indent">Slapping on the iconic white helmet liner with MP printed in black on the front, Dwayne threw open the door and staggered out into the parking lot. His last check had been almost an hour and a half before. He expected the duty sergeant to be rounding the corner any moment, as he always checked the sentries at least twice a night and Dwayne had not seen him since shortly after coming on duty.</div> <div class="indent">Noticing that one of the sodium lamps that lit the parking lot had burned out, Dwayne made a mental note to log the observation and complete a work order to have the bulb replaced. Satisfied with the lot, Dwayne turned to his left and began to walk toward the three story office building that overlooked it. Then he saw the car, a Volkswagen Jetta, parked in front of the entrance, and his steps faltered in surprise. The lot had been empty earlier, he was sure of it.</div> <div class="indent">Was it possible that one of the German cleaning crew had forgotten something in the building and come back for it? Had they driven past him as he slept? <i>But it could have happened while he was making his last rounds</i>, he thought, <i>desperate for a preferable alternative</i>.</div> <div class="indent">This was one of the faults in the procedure—he couldn’t be in two places at once. Each time he was inside checking the offices he was away from the lot. Of course, he was supposed to check the lot each time he returned, but he had exited the building from the rear after his last inspection and come back to his office from the other side and hadn’t bothered. For Christ’s sake he wasn’t supposed to be on nights anyway!</div> <div class="indent">Switching on the flashlight, he shined it at the windows, the beam revealing an interior empty of occupants. That was a relief, at least. He gave each of the vehicle’s four doors a tug, finding each locked in its turn, preventing him from getting inside and finding the registration. If he could only discover the owner and give them a call, maybe he could get the damned car out of there before it was discovered by his supervisor. He kicked a tire with his spit-shined jump boots. “Goddamnit,” he muttered.</div> <div class="indent">Walking to the rear of the VW, he played the light across the registration plate. It was German alright. Wedging the flashlight between his elbow and his body, he pulled out pen and pad with his free hand to jot the number down.</div> <div class="indent">Headlamp beams swept across the small lot, accompanied by the familiar grind of a jeep’s engine. When they came to rest on Dwayne, the vehicle raced across the asphalt, skidding to a halt just feet from the MP, and transfixing him in their illumination.</div> <div class="indent">“Whose fucking vehicle is that, specialist?” Duty sergeant Calvin Auster demanded, leaping from the jeep. He was hardly older than Dwayne, no more than twenty-eight, but every inch the lifer, his uniform immaculate, his leather polished and gleaming. Having enlisted to escape the Brooklyn ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant, it was his firm intent to never return there. Black and lean, he glared at the chubby specialist as if he had placed the car there himself in order to thwart the sergeant.</div> <div class="indent">“I just found it, sarge,” Dwayne began, hastily coming up with a plausible chain of events. “It was here when I came out of the office building.”</div> <div class="indent">“And when was that?”</div> <div class="indent">“Just now—I finished making my rounds in there and found it here with no one around. I was writing down the registration number to call it in,” he lied, holding out his notepad as proof of his honorable intentions.</div> <div class="indent">Sergeant Auster looked unimpressed. Glancing at his watch, he snapped, “In less than an hour personnel will begin to arrive here, specialist, and in less than an hour I want this fuckin’ piece of civilian shit towed out of here and impounded. Is that clear?”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, “Yes, sergeant.”</div> <div class="indent">“I will not have some goddamn colonel climbing up my ass today because you let some German loser ditch his car in our lot, do you hear me, Specialist Morton?”</div> <div class="indent">“Loud and clear, sarge,” Dwayne responded.</div> <div class="indent">The irate sergeant turned on his heels and began to climb back into his jeep. As he fired up the engine once more, he stared at the VW for a moment, then said, “Have dispatch run that vehicle thoroughly before you remove it, specialist. HQ’s been warning everybody to be extra cautious since that German officer got whacked in Hamburg a few weeks ago.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, though it was not entirely clear to him what he was expected to do—tow the car, or not?</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant began to reverse at the same high rate of speed he had arrived, then slammed on the brakes once more. He studied the VW in silence as if something was troubling him. “Get on the radio and request a bomb-sniffing K-9, Morton,” Auster said quietly. “Tell them I said so. You stay here and keep everybody out of the parking lot until it’s been swept.”</div> <div class="indent">“Not let anybody get to their offices, sarge?” Dwayne asked. He could already picture the ass-reaming every officer that showed up was going to give him. “Not even officers?”</div> <div class="indent">“You heard me correctly, specialist,” the sergeant snapped, then added in a softer tone, “I’ll be back as soon as I finish up doing spot checks—twenty minutes, or so. I’ll be back long before the brass arrives in any case, so don’t worry, I’ll handle the heat.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne was both relieved and grateful.</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant sped off in the direction of the Staff Duty NCO’s office.</div> <div class="indent">With a sigh, Dwayne removed his portable radio from its belt holder and called in the request to dispatch, placing heavy emphasis that the order came from Sergeant Auster. After only a very few minutes he was told that the K-9 officer and his dog would be enroute shortly, and that he was to hold the fort in the meantime.</div> <div class="indent">“Wilco,” he replied, fishing a package of cigarettes from his cargo pocket and firing up a smoke. He could see that his hands were shaking a little. Taking a deep draw to settle his nerves, he plopped his wide rump onto the trunk lid of the Jetta. He was not surprised to hear the springs groan a little at his formidable burden, but the loud click that followed was puzzling.</div> <div class="indent">Rising and turning, Dwayne was only in time to witness the fireball erupting from the car and engulfing him like a blowtorch, the explosion blowing out every window of the office building. Like a flaming comet, he traveled some fifty yards to land smoking and smoldering outside the same door he had stepped through only minutes before, his leather boots the only bit of clothing left intact, his body charred black, his face burned away. He had only two and a half hours left in his shift.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">#</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

David Dean

The German Informant $14.95

It’s 1984 in West Germany when U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent Conrad Vogel gets a routine assignment—a background check on a low-level enlisted soldier. Expecting little to come of it, he soon uncovers the GI’s relationship with a German barmaid—a barmaid who knows much more than she should and people that she shouldn’t, and what appeared to be routine suddenly becomes anything but. With the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact nations still a potent threat to the Free World, and terrorist bombings and assassinations in full swing against military personnel, Conrad sets out to unravel a web of espionage, betrayal, and murder.

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Steven W. Booth

Continuity $19.95

Carlos San Sebastián wants nothing more from life than spending time in the company of beautiful women, gambling, seeking adventure, and generally enjoying himself. However, he is also the heir to the patriarchy of his family of time-travellers, a fate he would do nearly anything to avoid. When Carlos is summoned to the family residence in the middle of the deal of his lifetime, he can see his opportunity to thwart fate slipping away.What Carlos finds at the residence is worse than any responsibility he ever contemplated. His father is inexplicably murdered out of continuity, six years before Carlos is born. It is up to Carlos to prevent the murder and protect the family.Carlos is no detective and hardly skilled as a time traveller, but with less than 24 hours to thwart the murder, he must seek the help of the one person his father demanded not be involved: his estranged sister, Monique.As the clock ticks on, Carlos and Monique must unravel the secrets of their family and time travel itself. Continuity takes the reader on an exploration of the laws of time travel and through the psychology of a family capable of anything.

Steven W. Booth

Rise of the Triad - Penny Miller Book Four $19.99

The Zombies Are Coming… Again. Small town Sheriff Penny Miller and her outlaw friend Scratch managed to survive a nuclear blast in Nevada and a brutal attack on their peaceful lodge in Colorado. They head for Los Angeles, looking for a fresh start. It seems the citizens of Southern California remain blissfully ignorant of the coming war. They believe zombies are simply an urban legend. As usual, there’s no rest for the wicked. When they find themselves in a suspiciously run Malibu rehab facility, Miller can't relax. She knows the gore is about to hit the fan. It seems that Miller can sense when zombies are near. And they’re almost always near. When all hell breaks loose around them, Miller and Scratch must survive deadly experiments, resist an ongoing government conspiracy, and battle another horde of ravenous zombies. And that’s just for starters.

All Hell Breaks Loose - Penny Miller Book Five

Steven W. Booth

All Hell Breaks Loose - Penny Miller Book Five $19.99

Sheriff Penny Miller of Flat Rock, Nevada, has always done her duty. On the first night of the zombie apocalypse, she swore an oath to protect her friends from the ravenous hordes. However, now that the virus is rapidly spreading to the rest of the country it has become clear that Miller and her friends, Scratch, Sheppard, and Rat, are winning battles but losing the war. And that’s just not good enough for Penny. Too many people have already died. Determined to stop the maniacs who have been funding the research that created the undead, and with the key to stopping the virus in hand, Miller and crew embark on a long and dangerous journey north. Their route cuts through the very heart of zombie occupied territory, but this time they are out to end the apocalypse once and for all. Unfortunately, the elite committee of government officials who control the Super Soldier program knows exactly where Miller and her friends are headed, and they are determined to capture or kill them at any cost. Sheriff Miller doesn’t stand a chance. Of course, lousy odds never stopped her before. She gives the order to move out. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. Paperback, 274 pages ISBN: 978-0615978-71-0

The Rule of Three - Penny Miller Book Six

Steven W. Booth

The Rule of Three - Penny Miller Book Six $24.99

The zombies must be stopped… Sheriff Penny Miller has come too far and lost too many friends to quit now. She and her companions have made it safely to Mountain Home, Idaho, the operation center of the three-person Enhanced Bioweapons Select Committee that controls the nation’s response to the zombie outbreak. Miller knows they are still funding the research that started the zombie apocalypse. And Miller didn’t come to the home of the zombies to attend a church social. When Sheriff Miller stumbles across a homegrown militia whose leader shares her hatred of the Select Committee, she sees the opportunity she’s been waiting for. Together with Major McDivitt and his team, Sheriff Miller sets out to destroy the three committee members who have the most to gain from the spread of the zombie virus. One last mission should finish the job. …Unless they know she’s coming.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} s {text-decoration: line-through;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c2">Prologue</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">Jolo, Sulu Archipelago</div> <div class="indent">The Philippines</div> <div class="indent">The Battle of Bud Bagsak</div> <div class="indent">July 15, 1913</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc">Day Four</h2> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>It was like being wide awake and being caught in the middle of a nightmare.</div> <div class="indent">How many hours had it been?</div> <div class="indent">He wished he knew. It was as if time itself had stopped.</div> <div class="indent">The sweat poured out of Jim Bishop so copiously that it felt like a steady stream of water being poured over his face. His eyes burned and he had to keep blinking to try and clear his vision, but it was no use. The cloying moisture clung to his eyelids. His lips tasted the constant saltiness. It was their third trip up the mountain that day, and once again, their advance stalled as the crater came alive once more. One moment it was all green bushes, thick shrubbery, and clusters of trees and temporal placidity, and the next instant it gave way to a surging wave of brown men dressed in red loincloths and accompanying red headbands, their veins bulging out in bas-relief along limbs bound tight by constricting ligatures and vines. The Moros, or the <i>pulajans</i> as the Filipino Scouts called them, seemed to rise up from behind every bush, every tree, virtually from the dark earth itself. The surge of humanity descended from the lip of the crater, brandishing their razor-sharp <i>talibongs</i>. The rhythmic chant, “<i>Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac</i>,” sounded in unison like an advancing drumbeat.</div> <div class="indent">Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac—Tagalog for Cut-cut, cut-cut, cut-cut.</div> <div class="indent">And that’s what they did.</div> <div class="indent">Jim stopped and raised the muzzle of his Winchester 1897 shotgun, racking the slide back and then forward to chamber a round.</div> <div class="indent">The man next to him, a young lieutenant who’d just arrived in the country two weeks ago, turned and darted to his right toward the cover of a cluster of trees perhaps ten yards away. From the corner of his eye Jim saw the young officer’s foot snare the elongated vine trigger.</div> <div class="indent">“Sir,” Jim yelled, taking his eye off the enemy for a split second. “Don’t move!”</div> <div class="indent">But his warning was a millisecond too late.</div> <div class="indent">The vine trigger snapped and released a twisted branch in a horizontal arc, sending a row of sharpened spikes into the lieutenant’s body with a sickening thump.</div> <div class="indent">The officer cried out, but the sound was reduced to a pathetic gurgle as he went limp, bouncing off the branch and flopping down onto his back. A trio of gaping holes, already filling with blood, was stitched across the front of his brown uniform shirt. His legs convulsed, like he was still on his feet, still trying to move away, but with each movement more blood and slithering intestines seeped out of his wounds.</div> <div class="indent">Jim ran to the man, but could tell he was dying.</div> <div class="indent">He wanted to offer some comfort, some assurance that it would be all right, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie. A few seconds later, he saw that it didn’t matter anyway. Vacuous eyes, still wide open from the shock, stared directly upward, unflinching under the unbearably bright sun as it shone down.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Dead</i>, Jim thought.</div> <div class="indent">There was no time for sentiment or mendacious words</div> <div class="indent">The ominous mantra continued unabated: “Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac . . .”</div> <div class="indent">The Moros were almost upon them. The sons of bitches were savages, fighting with bows and arrows and spears and traps. They had some guns, but not a lot, and those huge talibong knifes could chop you apart with one solid swing. They gave no quarter, nor did they expect any. Worst yet, they kept the families with them like human shields—old men, women, children. It was sickening.</div> <div class="indent">Shots rang out to Jim’s left.</div> <div class="indent">From his kneeling position by the dead lieutenant, he raised the shotgun, aimed at the nearest advancing <i>pulajan</i>, and pulled the trigger. The double-aught buck load ripped into the Moro’s side, tearing a large swath of skin and a hunk of meat away. The Moro stumbled for two steps as his mouth twisted into a scowl, the talibong still raised above his head.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Damn, these Moros are tough</i>, Jim thought as he worked the slide and chambered another round. The oblong blade caught a glint of sunlight for a moment before descending in an oblique arc.</div> <div class="indent">The shotgun discharged again and this time the pulagam went down, enveloped in a crimson mist.</div> <div class="indent">Jim felt the flecks of blood and body tissue dapple his face as the world suddenly went silent for several seconds.</div> <div class="indent">Another one came at him.</div> <div class="indent">A shotgun boomed off to his left.</div> <div class="indent">Larry Rush was next to Jim now, the trail of smoke trickling upward from his shotgun muzzle as the advancing Moro’s head exploded like a muskmelon struck by an axe handle. The man did an awkward, headless pirouette as he went down. Rush chambered another round and moved next to Jim.</div> <div class="indent">“The lieutenant dead?” Rush asked. He was shouting, but his voice still sounded far away.</div> <div class="indent">Far away . . .</div> <div class="indent">If only they could all be far away.</div> <div class="indent">Jim grunted a response as he sighted in on another rushing Moro and fired.</div> <div class="indent">Three more advanced from the left. Rush swiveled and blasted one, but the second one did a stutter-step, leaned back, and hurled a long bamboo spear. It sailed toward them. The next instant Rush dropped his weapon and grabbed his thigh as the pointed tip of the spear tore through the inner part of his pant leg. He toppled over, his eyes rolling back into his head.</div> <div class="indent">Jim turned and fired. The rounds took down the assailant, but two more were closing in on them. He fired once more. One of the oncoming Moros took the hit in the side, but kept advancing, taking three slack steps before collapsing. Jim racked the slide back and then forward, chambering what he knew was his last remaining round, and fired again. The blast hit the closest man. He jerked forward, then curled into a fetal position as he fell to the ground.</div> <div class="indent"><i>No more ammo</i>, Jim thought, gripping the Winchester’s hot barrel and stock. Despite the overheated metal searing his skin, he managed to bring the rifle up just in time to block the descent of another Moro’s two-foot-long talibong. The solid blade chunked into the wooden slide, splintering it. Jim twisted the rifle free and simultaneously rammed the base of the stock into the Filipino’s face. The man’s jaw jerked out of alignment and he paused just long enough for Jim to kick him in the groin as hard as he could. The Moro grimaced but drew back the large knife, ready to take another deadly swing.</div> <div class="indent">A split-second burst of fire and smoke whipped between them, and the Moro’s head snapped to the side as a shot rang out. Rush had managed to pull out his long-barreled Colt .45 revolver and fire it. Jim dropped the Winchester and drew his own revolver. Cocking back the hammer, he fired at the next group of advancing Moros. A burst of red blossomed on one man’s upper torso, just under his clavicle, but that didn’t stop him. A diagonal constricting loop of twine bisected the man’s chest, limiting the bleeding and enabling him to keep moving. Jim adjusted his aim, lining up the rear, M-shaped sight on the revolver with the single bar of the tip of the barrel.</div> <div class="indent">“Keep them damn sights flat across the top,” his drill sergeant had yelled at him in basic training.</div> <div class="indent">He squeezed the trigger. His next round pierced his adversary’s right eye.</div> <div class="indent">He fired four more times with undetermined results. The short, sweaty bodies kept coming, like a brown tidal wave capped with red. Jim turned to reach for Rush’s gun but saw his was empty, too.</div> <div class="indent"><i>The lieutenant</i>, Jim thought. He sidestepped to the right and knelt beside the fallen officer. His fingers scrambled to undo the dead man’s flap holster before feeling a textured grip. He pulled the weapon out and saw it was one of those new 1911 semiautomatic pistols, something only a few of the officers had. They were supposedly sitting in crates in New York Harbor or someplace, their distribution to the troops in the Philippines delayed by yet another layer of bureaucratic inefficiency. It was rumored that a few, a very few, of the officers had managed to sneak a special shipment in, and that was apparently true. The magazine purportedly held seven rounds, but Jim had never fired one.</div> <div class="indent"><i>No time like the present to learn</i>, he thought as he brought the pistol up, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.</div> <div class="indent">Nothing.</div> <div class="indent">In desperation he cocked back the hammer and tried again.</div> <div class="indent">The next trio of Moros was almost on top of them.</div> <div class="indent">The hammer clacked down and still the weapon didn’t fire.</div> <div class="indent">Was it a dud?</div> <div class="indent"><i>No</i>, he thought. <i>It’s just like a shotgun.</i> <i>There’s no round in the chamber.</i></div> <div class="indent">Gripping the row of vertical lines on the rear of the slide, he racked it back, felt it catch, and then whip forward.</div> <div class="indent">The Moro was raising his talibong over Rush’s supine body when this time the Colt’s round pierced the area just under the pulagam’s left armpit. The Moro fell like a marionette whose strings had been abruptly severed. Jim adjusted his aim and fired two more rounds, putting one into each of the advancing would-be killers. He dropped to one knee and frantically searched the dead lieutenant’s pouch for more magazines.</div> <div class="indent">Suddenly the sound of distant thunder rumbled accompanied by a screaming sound. Another set of rumbles along with more whistles and a burst of explosions echoed further up the ridge, by the mouth of the crater.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Artillery</i>, Jim thought. <i>Blackjack’s got the 40th zeroed in on them</i>.</div> <div class="indent">He felt a surge of hope as the area along the lip of the crater, where he knew the last Moro stronghold was, erupted in more roiling clouds of dust.</div> <div class="indent">The Moro advance suddenly halted, their heads rotating back toward the spiraling dust clouds farther up the hill, their eyes widening in horror.</div> <div class="indent">Jim knew their families, the women, the children, the elderly, were all up there in this last cotta. They had nowhere left to run. Orders were to wipe them all out.</div> <div class="indent">A company of Filipino Scouts, their brown uniforms drenched with sweat, streamed forward from the right flank and the left, their rifles barking fire, their bayonets fixed. They’d taken the brunt of the Moros’ attacks before and now they’d regrouped. From the look on their faces, no quarter would be given.</div> <div class="indent">Nor none expected.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Thank God</i>, he thought. <i>Maybe this nightmare is going to be over with now.</i></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent"><i>Historical Note</i></div> <div>The final siege then started at seventeen-hundred-oh-five hours. Three hours later it was over.</div> <div class="indent">Or was it?</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Michael A. Black

Where Legends Lie $17.95

1913. Veteran Jim Bishop takes a job with a motion picture company that is filming a movie based on a famous western gunfight. As the filming proceeds, Jim begins to wonder what really happened in Contention City, Arizona, those thirty-three years ago. 1880. In the actual Contention City, Sheriff Lon Dayton is contacted by the notorious Dutch Bascom regarding the territorial governor’s proclamation of amnesty for Bascom and his gang. Dayton has no choice but to walk the tightrope balancing the alleged intentions of the outlaws against the promises of the unscrupulous politicians and railroad men who claim to be in favor of the outlaw’s surrender. But are they really?

David Dean

The Wisdom of Serpents $15.50

Collected within these pages you will find twelve masterful tales of ill-conceived notions and faulty assumptions from prolific Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contributor David Dean. A retired man with a mole-infested lawn decides a ferret is the obvious and nature-provided answer; an American prisoner in Mexico is offered a work-release program in which survival, not freedom, is the prize; and a travel agent discovers the consequences of blind love in Belize. These and other stories comprise the suspenseful tales that you will find within this collection. But remember—the wisdom of serpents is poison. The Wisdom of Serpents and Other Stories of Tragic Misunderstandings is the second volume in the collected short fiction of David Dean, following Tomorrow’s Dead and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense. Review of "The Mole" by Anne Van Doorn of the Netherlands: BEST SHORT STORY OF THE WEEKSince 2016, I read a short story a day. My favorite read this week is “The Mole” by David Dean, published in his short-story collection The Wisdom of Serpents and Other Stories of Tragic Misunderstandings. Moles are making a mess of Stivac's garden and that annoys the elderly man enormously. A few days ago, his foot sank into a mole run, causing him to fall. To end this predicament, Stivac buys a ferret. He hopes the little carnivore will hunt down the moles. But the ferret is not interested in moles. The next day, Stivac finds the ferret dead, and the neighbor's cat is resting contentedly near him. Three days later, the neighbor's cat is found dead—poisoned. Over the years, David Dean has written stories about tragic misunderstandings and what they can lead to. "The Mole" is a fine example of what a writer can do with this appealing premise. In fact, all the characters have their own misconceptions, leading to a dramatic, tragic finale. A well thought out plot, masterfully executed.

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David Dean

The Purple Robe $12.95

Rumors rising out of the Yucatan jungle report healings and miracles attributed to a holy relic. Father Pablo Diego Corellas discovers that even his own parishioners are making secret pilgrimages to the decrepit plantation where it is held. There, Doña Josefa, a mysterious woman who is either mystic or mad, possesses an artifact that she claims is a fragment of the robe worn by Christ at his trial. Guarded by armed Mayan farmers, she holds sway over an ever-growing number of pilgrims desperate for the healing power of the Purple Robe. Much against his own wishes, young Father Pablo is dispatched to the interior to investigate, while a police captain and a vacationing American couple make plans of their own for the robe. But when the relic is stolen, they soon discover that miracles have unforeseen consequences, and that no one is beyond their reach.

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Steven W. Booth

The Orchard $19.95

Charlotte Wilson is an investigative journalist reporting on a global pandemic that seems to have no identifiable cause. When she is contacted by the COO of a multinational biotech company claiming he has the answer to what’s making people sick, Charlotte and her producer Nick start dreaming of Pulitzers and national syndication. But as she begins to uncover the truth, Charlotte discovers she is at the center of a conspiracy that is 12 years in the making, one that touches every part of her professional and personal life. Millions of lives depend on her breaking the news, but the story is so big, will anyone believe it? Charlotte may not live long enough to find out. Steven Booth’s The Orchard is many things – an intriguing mystery, an intense suspense tale, a terrifyingly plausible bio-thriller – but overall it’s just plain great. Pick it up at your own risk. You’ll be in its grip from the first page to the last…and thinking about it long after you put it down. —Steve Hockensmith, author the Holmes on the Range mysteries and The White Magic Five and Dime

Dave Case

Out of Cabrini $19.99

Stacey Macbeth knows the streets of Chicago better than anyone, but his beat is like no other—Cabrini Green, one of the most infamous housing projects in America. As a tactical officer, Macbeth works to keep peace in a place ruled by gang violence and a constant undercurrent of fear. But when a major drug shipment disappears, the delicate balance of power shatters. Determined to recover their missing stash, a ruthless gang begins a trail of violence that threatens to spill beyond the neighborhood, endangering the entire city.Caught in a high-stakes race against time, Macbeth and his team must navigate the treacherous web of Cabrini’s factions to stop the gang before it’s too late. In a world where every decision can mean life or death, Macbeth’s resolve is tested as the streets he’s sworn to protect erupt in chaos.Drawing on firsthand experience from his years as a Chicago police officer, Dave Case paints a vivid, unflinching portrait of life on the front lines. Gritty, intense, and deeply authentic, Out of Cabrini captures the human drama and explosive action of a city in crisis. With lives hanging in the balance, the story builds to a gripping, unforgettable climax.

Steven W. Booth

All The Devils (Ebook) $9.99

Carrie Young’s life is one hot mess. The posh political aide is having an affair with her boss, a Congressman who is taking bribes from a major corporation. When a hit man kills the Congressman and sets Carrie up to die in an apparent murder/suicide, she is rescued by Spider Walsh, a soft-spoken janitor. The two strangers go on the run, pursued by an elite network of professional assassins, skilled men and women who do dirty work for the rich and powerful. With both the police and the ruthless group of mercenaries on their trail, Carrie and Spider venture deep into LA’s gang territory, where she must trust her mysterious protector and his friends to keep her alive. Their enemies will stop at nothing to keep Carrie from revealing vital secrets to the authorities. As they begin to fight back, Carrie learns that Spider is not just a janitor after all. In fact, he is a very dangerous man, with a few dark secrets of his own. “All the Devils is a wild and fast-paced thriller pitting brave and quick-witted heroes against a frightening array of vivid adversaries.” —Thomas Perry, author of Big Fish and The Informant

Steven W. Booth

The Orchard (Ebook) $9.99

Charlotte Wilson is an investigative journalist reporting on a global pandemic that seems to have no identifiable cause. When she is contacted by the COO of a multinational biotech company claiming he has the answer to what’s making people sick, Charlotte and her producer Nick start dreaming of Pulitzers and national syndication. But as she begins to uncover the truth, Charlotte discovers she is at the center of a conspiracy that is 12 years in the making, one that touches every part of her professional and personal life. Millions of lives depend on her breaking the news, but the story is so big, will anyone believe it? Charlotte may not live long enough to find out. Steven Booth’s The Orchard is many things – an intriguing mystery, an intense suspense tale, a terrifyingly plausible bio-thriller – but overall it’s just plain great. Pick it up at your own risk. You’ll be in its grip from the first page to the last…and thinking about it long after you put it down. —Steve Hockensmith, author the Holmes on the Range mysteries and The White Magic Five and Dime

The Rule of Three - Penny Miller Book Six (Ebook)

Steven W. Booth

The Rule of Three - Penny Miller Book Six (Ebook) $9.99

The zombies must be stopped… Sheriff Penny Miller has come too far and lost too many friends to quit now. She and her companions have made it safely to Mountain Home, Idaho, the operation center of the three-person Enhanced Bioweapons Select Committee that controls the nation’s response to the zombie outbreak. Miller knows they are still funding the research that started the zombie apocalypse. And Miller didn’t come to the home of the zombies to attend a church social. When Sheriff Miller stumbles across a homegrown militia whose leader shares her hatred of the Select Committee, she sees the opportunity she’s been waiting for. Together with Major McDivitt and his team, Sheriff Miller sets out to destroy the three committee members who have the most to gain from the spread of the zombie virus. One last mission should finish the job. …Unless they know she’s coming.

All Hell Breaks Loose - Penny Miller Book Five (Ebook)

Steven W. Booth

All Hell Breaks Loose - Penny Miller Book Five (Ebook) $9.99

Sheriff Penny Miller of Flat Rock, Nevada, has always done her duty. On the first night of the zombie apocalypse, she swore an oath to protect her friends from the ravenous hordes. However, now that the virus is rapidly spreading to the rest of the country it has become clear that Miller and her friends, Scratch, Sheppard, and Rat, are winning battles but losing the war. And that’s just not good enough for Penny. Too many people have already died. Determined to stop the maniacs who have been funding the research that created the undead, and with the key to stopping the virus in hand, Miller and crew embark on a long and dangerous journey north. Their route cuts through the very heart of zombie occupied territory, but this time they are out to end the apocalypse once and for all. Unfortunately, the elite committee of government officials who control the Super Soldier program knows exactly where Miller and her friends are headed, and they are determined to capture or kill them at any cost. Sheriff Miller doesn’t stand a chance. Of course, lousy odds never stopped her before. She gives the order to move out. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. Paperback, 274 pages ISBN: 978-0615978-71-0

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c4">LAST CALL</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc"><i>December 1943</i></h2> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Private First Class John Rondello closed the door behind him and turned to face the barroom. As he stamped snow from his shoes, he allowed his eyes to scan the smoky dimness before him. The place was small for a soldiers’ bar, barely forty feet across with the actual bar running down the side to Rondello’s right. To his left, scattered indifferently, were eight small, round tables, and he was relieved to see that only two were occupied. The room’s flooring consisted of worn, wooden planks under a sprinkling of pale yellow sawdust, the bare grey walls scarred with sporadic spottings of water damage. An oddly pleasant odor of beer, whiskey and cigarettes wafted in the warm air. A scrawny Douglas fir stood in a corner, its needles already drying, growing brittle against red and green Christmas lights.</div> <div class="indent">Ten G.I.s stood at the bar, scattered and clumped in small groups along its length, a few looking up from their drinks or conversations as Rondello entered. Two hookers sat at the far end, one sipping without pleasure at a flat looking beer, the other engaged in tee-hee chit-chat with a red-faced soldier of about nineteen.</div> <div class="indent">More than an hour to kill in this dive, thought Rondello.</div> <div class="indent">Moving toward one of the empty tables at the rear, he slipped the overseas cap from his head, unbuttoned his green uniform overcoat and tucked the folded cap into his belt. He could feel the appraising eyes of the beer sipping hooker as he crossed the room. Rondello imagined she liked what she saw. He kept his eyes purposely from her and sat at a table with his back to the bar facing a small, snow encrusted window which looked out to the Wrightstown Bus Depot directly across Main Street. He glanced at his Timex. Ten forty. The bus to New York City was due in from Philadelphia after midnight. He sighed and gazed into his watery reflection in the darkened window glass.</div> <div class="indent">At twenty-three, Rondello was the oldest man in his platoon. His sergeant was only twenty-two, although in many ways he seemed much older. The rest of the guys were eighteen and nineteen with a sprinkling of twenty-year-olds. Rondello had been drafted late, and he knew exactly who to thank for that. Or blame.</div> <div class="indent">Good old Willie Cosentino, Rondello thought. Willie the Widow Maker. There hadn’t been much Willie couldn’t get done even before the war, but once the conflict produced depression-busting paychecks for everyone and a thriving black market, Willie had grown godlike within the old Brooklyn neighborhood known as Red Hook.</div> <div class="indent">It was Willie who had arranged Rondello’s gig at the Alimony Prison, a popular Manhattan night club. Sure, he deserved the spot, but hell, there were lots of guys deserving of that job; it was Willie himself who spoke to the owner, an ex-prize fighter and bootlegger who had founded the Alimony Prison as a speakeasy many years earlier and then taken it legit once prohibition was repealed. When Willie spoke, people tended to listen. Willie the Widow Maker had grown up on President Street, just off Fourth Avenue, with another kid everyone called “Allie Boy.” The grapevine wise guys never tired of relating how it had been Willie who suggested a more fitting nickname for a tough kid like Alphonse Capone: “Scarface.”</div> <div class="indent">“‘Allie Boy’ sounds like one of them new peanut butters they’re selling,” Willie reportedly told Capone.</div> <div class="indent">Now Rondello smiled at the legend. He had never particularly liked Willie, but had always been pragmatic; if a guy wanted to amount to anything on Red Hook’s mean streets, working for Willie was the best way to do it. And if a guy dreamed of being a big-time singer like Sinatra, he needed someone to grease the wheels a little. Hell, thought Rondello, his Alimony Prison performance was reviewed by <i>The</i> <i>Times</i> just last year, <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>, for Pete’s sake. “Promising young crooner,” they said. “Dark, sensual good looks,” the guy had written. Johnny Rondello was a big hit.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello had been living on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan at the time, just a few blocks from the Alimony Prison’s Greenwich Village location. He was booked there for a long-term engagement. And then came the telephone call from Brooklyn.</div> <div class="indent">“Hey, Johnny, how ya doing?” Willie had said. “You with any a’ that high class Manhattan tail at the moment?”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello laughed. “No, Willie, not right at the moment. What’s up?”</div> <div class="indent">“I need you to go take care of sumthin’,” Willie said casually. “Nothin’ heavy, just the usual.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello had stiffened. He’d been hoping these little instances of “taking care” of something were finally behind him. How long, he wondered, would he be in Willie’s unrelenting debt?</div> <div class="indent">“What’s that?” he asked, forcing a mirroring casualness into his tone.</div> <div class="indent">“Matty the Milkman. He’s inta me for almost two c’s, and he’s been duckin’ me. Time he gets a little message.”</div> <div class="indent">“What kinda message?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s chuckle came through the line. “Relax, kid, I know you’re lightweight. Just go and see ‘im, that’s all. Smack ‘im around a little. Warn him next time it won’t be <i>you</i> comin’.”</div> <div class="indent">“Sure, Willie. I can put a little scare into him. He still live over on Dean Street?”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah. He leaves for work at two-thirty in the morning. That’d be the best time to catch him. Give ‘im the whole day drivin’ around in that milk wagon a’ his to think about the position he’s in.”</div> <div class="indent">“Consider it done, Willie. Anything else ya need?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, kid, I got some bad news. My guy at the draft board called. Seems he’s lost his nerve; he thinks the FBI is hidin’ under his friggin’ bed. Says he can’t keep misplacin’ your draft call up notice. He read about ya in the newspaper, the whata-ya-call-it…”</div> <div class="indent">“<i>The Times</i>?” Rondello suggested.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, yeah, <i>The</i> <i>Times</i>. He says pretty soon somebody’s gonna start wonderin’ why a gettin’ famous guy like you ain’t humpin’ around shootin’ at foreigners like the other losers. So we gotta get you fixed.”</div> <div class="indent">“Fixed?”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, fixed. By some doctor up on the Grand Concourse, up in the Bronx.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook his head and frowned. “Willie, what do you mean, ‘fixed’? I ain’t a Cocker Spaniel, for Pete’s sake.”</div> <div class="indent">For a moment there was silence on the line. Then Willie laughed. “Oh, I get it. No, Johnny, relax. It’s your ear, just your ear.”</div> <div class="indent">“You wanna cut my ear off?”</div> <div class="indent">“No, but now that you mention it, I did cut a guy’s ear off once. With one of my old man’s barber razors.”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie,” Rondello said, his stomach knotting a bit, “What’s this about <i>my</i> ear?”</div> <div class="indent">“The doc owes Jimmy Buttons, a friend of mine. Jimmy says no problem, he’ll just squeeze him a little and he’ll help us out on this.”</div> <div class="indent">“On what, Willie? What are we doing here?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, you go see this doctor, he’s a’ ear doctor, and he pokes a hole through your eardrum. Then you go for your draft interview. You tell them at the board, you say, ‘Hey, it’s about time you guys called me. I been waitin’. Where are those Nazis, I’m gonna kill them all.’ Then they say, ‘What a nice boy this one is. Set up his physical.’ You go for the physical, they find the punctured eardrum and bingo! Four-friggin’-eff. It’s back to the Alimony Prison and all them Manhattan Protestant broads you been bangin’, thanks to your buddy, Willie.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello didn’t like the sound of this. “And what am I? Deaf then? A deaf singer? I have to know tone, I have to know pitch, I have to—”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh, pipe down,” Willie said. “Listen, kid, you ain’t gonna be deaf. Is Sinatra deaf? Can he tone and pitch and whatever the hell? He got the same condition, he’s four-eff just like you gonna be.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello felt himself relax. “Sinatra? Sinatra’s got a punctured eardrum?”</div> <div class="indent">“Damn right. Probably got it the same way you gonna get yours.”</div> <div class="indent">And so Willie would make the arrangements. Rondello would be 4-F and skip this war. Sorry, folks, too busy. Maybe next time.</div> <div class="indent">“One more thing,” Willie said, “you been a little out of touch with the neighborhood lately. You should get to Brooklyn more often. The guys are startin’ to mumble about it.” Rondello thought about “the guys”—the dreamless, imagination-less pool shooters and card players, boozers and bums and skirt chasers, chain-smoking Luckies and greasing back their hair.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, sure, Willie, as soon as I get some time. Maybe next week sometime if I can—”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s voice cracked like a pistol shot through the phone. “No,” he said. “No, kid, not maybe. And not next week. You get here in a day or two, and you do the right thing, act like ya supposed to act, like a man. Don’t get fancy on me, Johnny, don’t play with me.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello paled. “Yeah, sure, Willie, tomorrow’s good. Tomorrow night’s good, after the late show, tell the guys. I’ll see ‘em down at the hangout, okay? Then after that, I’ll walk over to Dean Street and see Matty the Milkman.”</div> <div class="indent">Willie sounded placated. “Okay.” He paused. “One more thing. I guess you should hear this from me.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello frowned into the phone. “What?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s voice softened. “Your friend. Your friend Bobby. He ain’t coming home, kid. I’m sorry. I just heard about it this morning.” Rondello could feel his head begin to swim. Bobby Arena, his childhood best friend from the neighborhood. Bobby, like Rondello himself, had been a little different, a little smarter, maybe, than the other kids. In their special friendship, Bobby had once confided his deepest, darkest secret: Bobby liked poetry. He liked to read it. He even liked to write it.</div> <div class="indent">Bobby had flushed red when he told Rondello. “You think maybe I’m like some kind of sissy, Johnny?” he had whispered, his eyes welling with tears.</div> <div class="indent">“Bobby’s… <i>dead</i>?” Rondello asked.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, kid. I’m sorry. But he should never have gone and joined up. He got all pissed off after Pearl Harbor, remember? He took it real personal—like those Japs had bombed the Brooklyn Bridge.”</div> <div class="indent">“How? Where?”</div> <div class="indent">“How-where what?”</div> <div class="indent">“How’d he die? Where’d he die? What happened?”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh. I think he got shot. A place called Tarawa, some island somewheres. Too bad, the kid was okay. And I gotta give ‘im this much. He was tough. Hard as nails.”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, a tough guy,” Rondello said dully.</div> <div class="indent">“‘Arena the Cleaner,’ the terror of Guadalcanal. Every Jap mother’s nightmare. Whata ya gonna do? Nobody gets outta here alive. I’ll see ya, kid.” Willie hung up.</div> <div class="indent">Two nights later Rondello found himself standing in the second floor walk-up foyer of a battered Dean Street tenement. He dropped his cigarette butt, crushed it out against the black-and-white tiled floor, and he waited.</div> <div class="indent">Matty the Milkman was forty-two years old. He lived alone in a three-room apartment. Each morning, he woke at one-thirty a.m. and fixed a breakfast of farina, jellied toast, and black coffee. He then donned his white uniform and walked two blocks to the BMT subway on Fourth Avenue. He rode to the sprawling dairy in Long Island City where he would load his milk truck with thick, heavy bottles of cold milk, cream, orange juice, and cardboard boxes of butter. By mid-morning his day’s work was done, freeing him to return to the neighborhood and purchase a racing form. By seven p.m. Matty would retire for six hours of sleep before repeating the same daily routine.</div> <div class="indent">As Rondello waited, he found himself pondering the pointlessness of such an existence. It was why, he supposed, Matty took his scant earnings and wagered them on horses and baseball or anything offered by the local bookie, an associate of Willie the Widow Maker. Anything, Rondello supposed, to provide some excitement would be preferable to doing nothing. A sad choice made by a sad, lonely man.</div> <div class="indent">At precisely two-thirty, Rondello saw the apartment door swing open. The foyer where he stood was ten-by-ten-foot square, a steep staircase to the left. An anemic twenty-five-watt bulb was affixed to a far wall, Rondello positioned away from it in shadow. He watched as Matty locked his door and turned toward the stairs.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello stepped forward. He wore a dark trench coat and a black Fedora pulled low on his brow. His hands were jammed into the coat pockets, his shoulders hunched. He had done this before. He knew how to stage it.</div> <div class="indent">“Hey, Matty,” he said, lightly touching the man’s shoulder, a slight snarl to his voice. “You got a minute?”</div> <div class="indent">Matty, deeply startled, gave a gasp and turned toward the voice. Rondello stepped closer, manufacturing an evil smile. Matty took a quick step back in fear.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello sneered. “Willie says hello,” he snarled, then lashed out a backhanded slap, catching Matty hard across his right cheek.</div> <div class="indent">And that was it. John Rondello, aspiring radio star, headliner at Manhattan’s swinging Alimony Prison—now a murderer.</div> <div class="indent">Matty the Milkman fell backward from the top of the stairwell. Halfway down the steps, his neck broke. When his tumbling body finally slammed onto the tile entryway floor, his skull split with a sickening, wet sounding thud. Dead because John Rondello needed to keep Willie the Widow Maker happy; appease him in order to ensure the continued success of his own career.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello, initially frozen in terror, had finally fled. A death occurring during the commission of a felony is legally classified “felony murder.” It carries the same penalty as first degree murder: life imprisonment or death by electric chair; in mob-related cases the latter usually being the punishment of choice.</div> <div class="indent">When Rondello told him what had occurred, Willie was displeased but not particularly concerned. “Stuff happens, kid,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just write off Matty’s debt and set you up with an alibi. If the cops ever figure this for somethin’ more than an accident, which I doubt will ever happen, you’ll have three witnesses ready to say you were with them. Forget about this.”</div> <div class="indent">Now, sitting in the New Jersey bar, Rondello lit a cigarette and tried to force thoughts of Matty the Milkman from his mind. Instead, he thought of Bobby Arena. Poor, pale, skinny Bobby. Sometimes Rondello believed it was Bobby’s secret love of poetry that had propelled him to the Marine Corp recruiting office that December day two years earlier. Bobby Arena, “Arena the Cleaner,” the street guys nicknamed him after Guadalcanal. Bobby had used a flame thrower on the Canal, moving under fire from rat-hole to rat-hole, burning to death the pitiful, half-starved Japanese kids who huddled down in those holes, chained to their machine guns. Bobby had sprayed the liquid fire into the holes then listened for screams. He cleaned them out alright, scores of them, and thus the nickname “Arena the Cleaner,” for the gentle, quiet boy who proved to himself and everyone else that he was no sissy.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook his head to clear it of the haunting ghosts and ordered beer from the slight, pimply-faced waitress who had suddenly materialized next to his table. He watched her shuffle away.</div> <div class="indent"><i>And I’m no different</i>, thought Rondello. What am <i>I </i>trying to prove? Here I sit dressed in this costume waiting to catch a bus from Fort Dix to New York City for thirty days’ Christmas leave. And then what? Europe for sure. Rondello had heard the rumors. He had sized up the situation. The Wehrmacht was collapsing. The Russians were already kicking them back to Germany. An allied invasion was imminent, the glory-seeking generals had figured out a surefire way of getting themselves into the history books. Invade Europe, probably from England and probably soon<i>. God almighty why didn’t I just have my damn eardrum punctured?</i> he thought. <i>What was </i>I<i> trying to prove?</i> His thoughts slipped back to Willie Cosentino’s reaction when he told him he hadn’t gone through with the procedure. While Rondello attempted to explain that which he couldn’t fully understand himself and most likely never would, he had seen the fury ablaze within Willie’s muddy brown eyes.</div> <div class="indent">“You didn’t do it?!” Willie had screamed. “You stupid moron, you didn’t do it!”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie, I… I couldn’t. Everybody else is going. I gotta go, too. I don’t know why exactly, maybe for Bobby, I don’t know. It’s just bad luck that I’m draft age in nineteen forty-three and there’s a war going on. I <i>gotta</i> go.”</div> <div class="indent">Willie reached out a stub-fingered hand covered with coarse black curly hair. He took hold of Rondello’s shirt front.</div> <div class="indent">“You stupid sucker!” he hissed, his eyes slit and his breath sour and foul. “You just don’t get it. You think they won’t have a war for slum kids to fight in 1953? 1963? 1973? Didja check out Ford’s profits last year? Kaiser’s? General Electric’s? They found their answer, kid, same as we found ours. <i>Our</i> future is dope: heroin. It’s the new bootleg, the future gambling and prostitution, ‘cause that’ll all get legalized someday. But never heroin. That’s <i>our </i>future, and we’re gonna eat up and spit out dead a whole bunch of slum kids with that dope. And Ford and them others, they do the same thing with the same slum kids. War, Johnny, that’s <i>their</i> answer, that’s their future. War.” He pushed Rondello away from him. “Go fight for them, kid. Go get killed. But believe me, if you survive it, you can forget about singin’ in <i>this </i>town. You wanna kiss up to the citizens, kid, you go ahead. But I’ll see you dead before you ever get a job in this town again. You’ll be finished. Now beat it.”</div> <div class="indent">“Listen, Willie,” Rondello pleaded, “this war, it’s the defining event of my lifetime. Of my whole generation. Twenty years from now, what am I going to say, what do I tell people? Bobby went and died—what do I tell people <i>I</i> did?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie shook his head. “You ain’t no different from the politicians who started this mess, Johnny. You’re just looking for a place in history, and you’re too damn stupid to see that it don’t make a rat’s ass bit a difference to nobody what you do.”</div> <div class="indent">“But Willie…”</div> <div class="indent">“No!” he hissed. “No. Save it. I had big hopes for you, kid. You’re with me or against me. You do this, if you go, you’re against me. End of story.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello leaned his head back and brought both hands to his forehead. He slowly massaged his brow before lowering his eyes back to Willie’s stone chiseled face.</div> <div class="indent">“Why, Willie? Why does it have to be like that?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie sighed. “You really don’t know, do you?”</div> <div class="indent">“No. I don’t.”</div> <div class="indent">“Because, kid, you were gonna make me legit. You were gonna be a star, a big star. On the radio. All the best joints, gigs with the real big-timers—Dorsey, Miller, all a’ them. You were gonna go places I could never go, meet people I could never meet. That’s why I helped you, that’s why I used up favors and promised out favors, leaned on people. You were gonna make it real big, kid, and it would be because a’ me. And then someday maybe I’d live in some big house out on Long Island somewheres, and all my neighbors would have their noses up in the air every time they seen me. But then I’d call on you, Johnny Rondello, the big star, and you’d be right there for me. Maybe sing at my daughter’s wedding even. And all them people, all them white bread bastards, they’d all know I was <i>somebody. </i>They’d know I was somebody <i>big</i>! Somebody they would have to respect.”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie, please…”</div> <div class="indent">“No, kid, that’s it. Beat it. You was selling shoes when you came to me for a break, and I set you up in Sally’s club in Flatbush. Remember? You was sellin’ shoes. And if them krauts don’t kill ya first, which I hope they do, then that’s how you’re gonna die—selling shoes.”</div> <div class="indent">The waitress’ reappearance pulled Rondello from his memories. She set the bottle of Pabst down in front of him.</div> <div class="indent">“Twenty-five cents,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">He dropped a dollar on her tray. “And bring me a double shot of J & B, too,” he said, realizing a sudden need for harsh liquor in this throat.</div> <div class="indent">After she had come and gone a second time, Rondello drank the scotch quickly, washing it down with the cold beer. There had been a time when he avoided hard liquor, fearful of its ravishing effect on his vocal cords, but those days were long gone.</div> <div class="indent">Now his fear was of the future, a steeped, utter fear, and it was a new experience for him. His future had always seemed so bright, so promising, and now it loomed black and bleak before him. He had been so very much afraid lately. It was hard for him to sleep even after long, grueling days of Advanced Infantry Training. The nights would enhance his terror, and it would creep across him with an icy liquidity, stirring loosely in his bowels, knotting the muscles of his jaw.</div> <div class="indent">Because he knew what was coming. His imagination had often been cruel to him growing up as he had on the streets of Brooklyn, and now that imagination stabbed at him without mercy. In the senses of his mind, he heard the combat, smelled it, even tasted it. He was just too imaginative for the infantry. It was that simple.</div> <div class="indent">He sipped at his beer and thoughts of Bobby Arena returned to him. They had grown up together, sharing a magical secret bond of imagination. They dreamed their dreams together, each one separate, different, yet so alike and so sweet. Bobby with his dreams of poetry, Rondello with his dreams of singing, performing, becoming a star on the radio. And now Bobby lay rotting, buried raw and bloody in some distant volcanic ash of a grave, his poetry silent, dead forever on his decaying, maggot-ridden lips.</div> <div class="indent">The other kids had no idea about the poetry—not Jake or Zoot or Little Danny. Bobby’s eyes had often twinkled with their secret as he and Rondello moved into their teens, cocky and swaggering, exploring the girls, testing the waters…</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook the memories from his head and drained his beer. He called to the waitress and sat blank eyed as she brought the second round. He lifted the scotch to his mouth. “For you, Bobby,” he said, and knocked the liquor back into his throat.</div> <div class="indent">And now it was his own dream which lay dead and gone. Even if he did come away from the war undamaged, which he seriously doubted, there’d be Willie to deal with. Willie the Widow Maker did not make idle threats; he did not change his mind. He had the means to make good his threat to Rondello. If Willie got on the phone to Manhattan, Rondello would be through in New York. Not one club, not the Copacabana, not the Latin Quarter, certainly not the Alimony Prison would touch him with a ten foot pole. Not if Willie said no. Not if they wanted their linens cleaned, their waiters at work, their liquor delivered. No, Johnny Rondello was finished in New York, even if he managed to survive long enough for it to matter. And if he dared re-locate to Chicago or Los Angeles or anywhere, the ultimate threat still existed: Matty the Milkman and that horrible tenement staircase.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello’s thoughts then turned to his last show at the club. A scout from NBC had been there watching, listening, assessing him. The guy had come away impressed.</div> <div class="indent">“Call me,” he had said. “When you get out of the service, call me. I really like your style.” Rondello smiled a bitter smile and drank his beer dry. Would the guy still like his style when some bent-nose walked into his office and asked for a special “favor” for “the boys”? When a police detective came in voicing allegations and alluding to murder? No, style wouldn’t be enough then. There were plenty of guys with style, and they would come with no strings attached.</div> <div class="indent">He called for yet another round and glanced again at his Timex. It was just after eleven, and he was drinking much too fast. He shrugged away the thought. So what? Maybe he’d manage to get some sleep on the bus ride if he were drunk enough.</div> <div class="indent">He was just finishing off another scotch when the shadow fell across his table. He looked up to his right and saw her standing there. It was the hooker from the bar, the beer sipper. She smiled at him.</div> <div class="indent">“Hiya, Johnny,” she said. He frowned. They always call a guy Johnny, these bimbos. An unfortunate coincidence in his case.</div> <div class="indent">“I’m not interested, sister, beat it,” he said, reaching for his beer and dropping his eyes from her.</div> <div class="indent">She didn’t move. Rondello let five seconds pass then looked back at her face. He saw that she was about his age, slightly younger. She had short, strawberry-blond hair that was almost natural and high cheek bones. Her nose was small and cute, and she had nice green eyes. It came as a surprise to him that she was pretty. He blinked the surprise away.</div> <div class="indent">“Look, honey,” he said in low, cold tones. He wanted to hurt her, drive her away, make her leave him to his scotch and beer and dead friends and dead dreams.</div> <div class="indent">“Look,” he repeated, his eyes hard, “it ain’t my problem you’re all dressed up with no one to screw, okay? Just leave me alone. There’s fifteen other guys in here for you to impress. You don’t need me.”</div> <div class="indent">He could see hurt come into her face and waited for her anger. He had dealt with pushy whores before, ever since he was seventeen and just starting to work the bars and clubs. He knew the routine. He figured now she would curse him and call him queer and then buzz off. But the hurt remained. There was no anger in her eyes. He frowned. What the hell…?</div> <div class="indent">“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked in a tiny voice, a girl’s voice. “I thought maybe you just didn’t see me when you first came in, but that’s not it. You <i>really</i> don’t remember.” Rondello slid his chair back and looked at her hard. His memory stared back at him blankly as he scanned her features, her mannerisms. She stood still before him almost like a child, clutching her purse against her stomach, eyes wide.</div> <div class="indent">“Look, sister, let’s not waste each other’s time,” he said, using a softer tone than before. “If this is some kind of hustle, let me tell you, you ain’t in my league. You’re a small-town kid playing dress-up, okay? So if it’s a hustle, you better just forget about it.”</div> <div class="indent">The girl looked at him, and he could see a slight defiance come into her face. He felt a sudden deepening of his sadness and wondered why and tried to push it away. He knew he was already drunk.</div> <div class="indent">“I’ll go, Johnny,” she said, and this time he realized she knew his name, he wasn’t just another john to her. “If that’s what you want. But you should remember. You said you would.” She seemed to brace herself then, throwing back her shoulders. “And anyway, I don’t care if you forgot. I almost forgot, too. I woulda forgot except for, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’ Except for that, I woulda forgot, too.” She began to turn from him.</div> <div class="indent">He reached out a hand, grabbing her arm.</div> <div class="indent">“Wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. What, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’? What does that mean?”</div> <div class="indent">She turned to face him again. He could tell that although she was trying not to, she began to smile at him.</div> <div class="indent">“You sang it for me, Johnny,” she said softly. “You sang ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ just for <i>me</i>.”</div> <div class="indent">His face remained blank while his thoughts swirled behind his eyes. If he had a nickel for every broad he had sung to…</div> <div class="indent">The girl slipped her arm from his light grasp.</div> <div class="indent">“I’ll ne-<i>ver</i> smile a-gain until I smile at you.” She sang slowly and off-key in low tones as he watched and listened. He found himself beginning to remember.</div> <div class="indent">He stood up slowly. “I’ll never laugh a-gain—what good would it do?” he crooned in a barely audible voice.</div> <div class="indent">“You’re… Linda, right?” he said. She slapped lightly at his chest. “Lucy,” she said. “Not Linda, Lucy.” She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.</div> <div class="indent">“Well, hell,” he said, pulling out a chair for her, “don’t get mad. At least I had the right letter of the alphabet.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed and sat down. “I’ll bet that’s better than you usually do,” she said happily.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny sat and looked across the table at her. Lucy was smiling serenely. It was as though nothing unpleasant had just occurred between them. She appeared totally pleased, completely at peace with being there with him. Rondello called for the waitress, and while Lucy ordered beer, he took the opportunity to remember her more fully.</div> <div class="indent">Although he couldn’t quite place the face, and indeed the woman across from him could very well be a complete stranger, he had at least recalled the particular event. It had been about two months earlier, while he was in Basic Training. His company had received a twenty-four-hour pass for high performance on the rifle range, and Rondello, like most of the others, headed for this small town nestled just beside the sprawling Fort Dix.</div> <div class="indent">He remembered drinking quite a lot, something he rarely did. It seemed to him now, thinking back, that he had been trying to drink away his need for a woman. By that point he had been confined to one or another Army post for a long time and was thoroughly sick of unrelenting male companionship. In retrospect, he found his logic questionable; he wondered if it was, in fact, even possible to drink away the need for a woman. It certainly seemed unlikely at best, counterproductive at worst.</div> <div class="indent">And so he had found a woman, and they had a pretty good time in whatever bar they were in. He felt fairly certain that it hadn’t been this bar, the one they were in now, but he couldn’t be sure. They wound up in a room somewhere, and he vaguely recalled some discussion about price and nature of services. Now he fought to push away the blanketing dark fog on his memory.</div> <div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said as he watched her sip at a fresh beer, “I’m a little shaky on the details, you know, about that night, but I do remember I had a good time.”</div> <div class="indent">She smiled around her glass. “So did I, Johnny,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny had heard enough tactful chatter from pros to smile at her answer. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll just bet. But what I want to know, if you don’t mind me askin’ is, well… did I <i>pay</i> you?”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “Well, we weren’t exactly on a date, you know. I <i>was </i>working.”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh,” he said. The information disturbed him. He had only paid for sex once. He was sixteen and he and Bobby had gotten themselves hooked up with two older guys from the neighborhood. He remembered the stark tenement on Pacific Street and the haggard, bleached-out old whore that had taken the four of them. He shuddered. Damn shame he hadn’t been blind drunk <i>that </i>night.</div> <div class="indent">“Oh,” he repeated and drank more scotch.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy looked across at him. Her eyes were twinkling. “You really don’t remember much about it, do you?”</div> <div class="indent">He shrugged. “I do remember singing to you. ‘I’ll Never Smile Again,’ one of my big numbers.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy giggled. “Oh, I shouldn’t even tell you, you’re so silly. But I will anyway.”</div> <div class="indent">Johnny cocked his head to one side. He could never remember a hooker using the word ‘silly’ before, and it had an innocently appealing ring to it. He suddenly began to worry. <i>How lonely am I? </i>he thought.</div> <div class="indent">“Tell me what?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, you did pay me. Three dollars.” She shook her hair and brushed a strand from her forehead. “And then I paid you. Three dollars.”</div> <div class="indent">“What?” he asked, his brows arching.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “It was <i>your</i> idea. You said, ‘I’ll pay you for sex, and you pay me for a song. You’re a pro, I’m a pro.’” She began to giggle. “Then you said, ‘Tit for tat, tit for tat,’ and got all hysterical laughing. You were so <i>silly.</i>”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “Remind me never to switch to a comedy routine.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy was still giggling. It seemed the more they talked, the more animated her features became, the prettier she seemed to become.</div> <div class="indent">“You were really nice,” she said. “A real gentleman. At first I was a little scared, you know. When we went into the room, you led me right to the bed and made me sit down. Your hair was all messed up, and you kept muttering about something and then you would laugh. I knew you were from the city, from New York, and some of you guys from <i>New York</i>! Well, I could tell you some stories, believe me. But you turned out to be nice. Really swell. But so <i>silly</i>!”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, that’s me, nice guy all the way.” He looked at her. “But don’t you get scared lots of times? I mean, with some of these guys?” he jerked his head towards the bar and the sullen, hunched shouldered group of G.I.s. “Some of these guys are really animals, especially these rebel rouser characters from Ole Miss’ or wherever.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy shook her head. “The worst are you New York guys. Believe me, I could tell you some stories.”</div> <div class="indent">They sat and drank for a while. Johnny could feel a strange conflict developing within himself as he grew more drunk. There was such an easy lack of tension between them; it was so comfortable to sit in silence with her that he ironically found himself beginning to tense up. He didn’t <i>want </i>comfortable silence; it seemed dangerously intimate to him. What he wanted was slick conversation and false bravado, the phoniness he usually brought to his always transient female relationships. It was what kept him free and in charge and out of danger. Yet, he found himself enjoying this. His thoughts suddenly returned to Bobby. He and Bobby had spent much time together in comfortable silence. Sometimes, when they were kids, they would hop on the Third Avenue trolley and ride up to Shore Road and the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. They would climb down the ridge to the edge of the Narrows and sit with their backs against huge rocks and gaze across the flat water to Staten Island. Sometimes they would smoke two-for-a-penny cigarettes, and Bobby would read silently from his battered book of Whitman poetry. When was the last time he had thought about Walt Whitman? It seemed very long ago.</div> <div class="indent">Now he sat and drank for a while longer before leaning slightly forward across the table toward Lucy. He felt the sudden rush of the beer and scotch envelop him. <i>Damn</i>, he thought, <i>I’m scared and very drunk and lonely and sitting with a whore that could be somebody sweet. Careful, careful, don’t talk, don’t speak.</i></div> <div class="indent">But he did. He seemed to be observing himself from somewhere off in the corner beside the sad Christmas tree. He imagined Bobby there in the corner with him, amused. “Go ahead, Johnny,” Bobby whispered to him, “go ahead, Buddy, open up. Open up. It won’t <i>kill</i> you.”</div> <div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said softly, his eyes pleading. “Lucy, I’m scared. Really scared.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy saw the change come over him. She put her glass down. Her face grew serious, yet, at the same time remained oddly soft. “I think maybe you’re pretty drunk, Johnny,” she said into his sad brown eyes.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, okay, I know, I’m drunk. But I am scared, Lucy, scared real bad.”</div> <div class="indent">She reached out a hand and gently touched his cheek. “I know, baby, I know. All you guys are scared. It’ll be okay. The war can end soon, real soon, maybe even before you get there.”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “Not without an invasion, Lucy. They won’t let it end without that. It’s what they want, a big, flashy invasion for the newsreels and the history books. These guys, these presidents and generals and premiers and kings, they don’t live for their <i>lives</i>—they live for history, for some scatterbrained idea of immortality. They don’t care about people’s dreams, your dreams, Bobby’s dreams, my dreams. They just care about history, <i>their</i> place in history, nothing else.” Through the banging now suddenly sounding in his head, Johnny could hear an echoing of his words, an echoing of Willie the Widow Maker’s words.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy didn’t know who Bobby was, but she knew about dreams. She had her own dreams once, and they hadn’t included whoring in some run-down bar in New Jersey.</div> <div class="indent">She couldn’t think of anything to say that would be comforting and still carry truthfulness. It occurred to her that truth rarely held comfort for anyone anyway; certainly not for her. So she remained silent, taking his hand and rubbing it gently between her own.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny raised squinted eyes to meet hers. “Lucy,” he said softly. “Do you believe in fate? Some intervention from God or the universe or something—some force that evens up the score? Do you think there’s an ultimate justice to everything, like we all get what’s coming to us?”</div> <div class="indent">She pondered it, instinctively aware of, without fully understanding, the deep need in him, the sudden importance of her opinion.</div> <div class="indent">“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “But—from what I’ve seen so far in life—I’d have to guess, no. No—there is no ultimate justice.” She found herself tensing, her throat seeming to close on itself. “No justice at all.”</div> <div class="indent">He gave a slight head shake. “I’m not so sure about that. I think, maybe… I’m gonna get what’s comin’ to me.”</div> <div class="indent">“You’ll be okay, Johnny, you’re not going to get killed.”</div> <div class="indent">He looked deeper into her eyes. “Killed?” he asked as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Killed? It’s okay if I get killed, Lucy. If I get killed, the show’s over, that’s it, goodnight Irene. I can get killed, that’d be okay; I’m not leaving anything behind. But there’s worse things than that, things I’m <i>really</i> scared of. What if they blow my legs off or shoot my arms off? What if they burn me up, Lucy? I saw a guy back in the neighborhood, some kid I never liked, he’d been a tank gunner. They cooked him in that tank like a roast pepper. He came back lookin’ like a monster. He had no eyelids, Lucy, no eyelids! He had to wear special glasses that made him look like a giant house fly.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy felt her eyes tearing up. “I know, Johnny, I know,” she said. “It’ll be alright, you’ll be alright.”</div> <div class="indent">He sat back in his chair. Johnny could feel his heart racing. He looked quickly at his watch. It was nearly time to go across to the depot, catch that bus, get out of here. Get back to the neighborhood, maybe go see Willie. Yeah, he thought, that was it. Go see Willie. Tell Willie that he made a mistake, what a fool he had been not to listen. Get me out of this, Willie, please get me out of this! All I wanna do is sing, that’s all, I got nothing against the krauts, the Japs, or those Italian clowns! Just let me stay home and sing. The bartender suddenly cleared his throat harshly. “Okay, folks, drink up, drink ‘em up. Last call, this is it, last call. Closin’ time is midnight, and this here is the last call.”</div> <div class="indent">Johnny looked at Lucy with panic in his eyes. She forced a smile across to him.</div> <div class="indent">“It’ll be okay, Johnny. You’ll see, it’ll be okay.”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t. I’m not afraid to die, Lucy, ‘cause I’m already dead. My <i>dream</i> is dead. All I got left are my arms and my legs and my eyes, but no dream. Just like Bobby has no dream left. It’s over, Lucy.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy felt a flutter of fear and pity in her heart and believed he was right, sensed somehow he knew what was coming. Her eyes over-brimmed with moisture as she leaned across the table and squeezed his trembling hands.</div> <div class="indent">“It’ll be okay. You’ll have your dreams, Johnny. It’ll be okay.”</div> <div class="indent">But cool, hip, smooth-talking Johnny Rondello knew better. It wouldn’t be okay. Maybe it had never been okay.</div> <div class="indent">He pulled his hand away from Lucy’s and drained his beer glass. As he set it down with trembling fingers, he could feel tears running freely down his cheeks.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy stood and moved to his side. She took hold of his arm and helped him to his feet. He was unsteady, very drunk.</div> <div class="indent">“Come on, Johnny,” she said gently. “It’s last call. Let’s get out of here.”</div> <div class="indent">She took a final look around the barroom.</div> <div class="indent">“It’s last call,” she repeated.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

Lou Manfredo

A Dozen Ways To Die $17.95

Step into the gritty world of crime and consequence with award-winning author Lou Manfredo's first collection. "A Dozen Ways to Die" offers twelve meticulously crafted tales that span the breadth of American history and the depths of human nature. From the smoky speakeasies of Prohibition to the neon-lit streets of modern cities, Manfredo's stories peel back the layers of morality, justice, and the human condition. Meet a cast of unforgettable characters: hardboiled detectives, conflicted soldiers, cunning gangsters, and ordinary people facing extraordinary choices. Among the twelve stories in this collection, "The Alimony Prison" is a Prohibition-era tale of corruption and survival; "Last Call" is a poignant exploration of a World War II soldier's moral struggle; and "Soul Anatomy" is a contemporary story that delves into the complexities of police shootings and ethical dilemmas. Manfredo's prose crackles with authenticity, drawing on his extensive experience in law enforcement to paint vivid, realistic portraits of crime and its consequences. His unique blend of classic noir sensibilities and modern storytelling creates a collection that is both timeless and timely. "A Dozen Ways to Die" is more than just a collection of crime fiction – it's a journey through the darker corners of the American experience, where the lines between right and wrong blur, and every choice has a price. Perfect for fans of Raymond Chandler, Dennis Lehane, and anyone who appreciates finely crafted crime fiction that goes beyond the surface to explore the complexities of the human psyche.

René Appel (translated by Josh Pachter)

The Amsterdam Lawyer $17.95

Up-and-coming Amsterdam lawyer David Driessen thinks he’s hit the jackpot when a wealthy client showers him with praise, glamour, and plenty of money. But David learns far too late that every gift from the shady realtor comes with a catch—and a price tag. As his gambling addiction, his constant need for cash, and his wife’s infidelities combine to drag him deeper and deeper into his client’s twisted world of money and despair, David struggles to stay ahead of it all… before his time runs out. In The Amsterdam Lawyer, René Appel—two-time winner of the Golden Noose, The Netherlands’ equivalent of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award—once again demonstrates the skill that led leading Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad to proclaim him “the godfather of the Dutch psychological thriller.” “A fascinating novel, bubbling over with greed, mistrust, and ruthlessness.” Gijs Korevaar, Algemeen Dagblad "René Appel is a first-rate Dutch crime writer. The Amsterdam Lawyer is a compelling and twisted legal thriller, the first of what will hopefully be many of his books to appear in English." Steve Steinbock, reviewer for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine The Amsterdam Lawyer is translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter.

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