first 2 chapters

 

Here are the first two chapters of my mystery novel ONE LAST HIT:

CHAPTER 1

    Looking out at a Brooklyn night can be like listening to an old blues tune: endlessly sad in a detached kind of way.  That might be why I prefer classical music, especially when I'm on my perch.

    I feel I ought to make one thing very clear, right at the beginning: I'm no Spartan crusader.  My three-room apartment on the fourth floor has a waterbed, recliner, couch, two overstuffed chairs, complete kitchen set, complete and modern entertainment center, and hot-and-cold running water.  

    But my favorite place to sit, when I need to think or sulk, or just for those deep kind of times at night, is on my perch, a.k.a. windowsill.  Sometimes I go all the way onto the fire escape landing for a more panoramic view of the street.

    That's where I was one night in early October, as I took slow sips of hot coffee and looked down at the night's dark, quiet and furtive activities.

    Next door was an empty lot that had once held a building like the one I loved in.  But when the taxes got higher than the rents, the owner chose to pretend it didn't exist and it eventually had to be demolished.

    An old, rusted, abandoned car with no tires or windows or engine sat where someone had left it in the weeds.  For neighbors it had two broken refrigerators, about a dozen ruined tires, and lots of other interesting artifacts of that sort scattered throughout the lot.  Toward the back, three ramshackle huts made of fruit-crates and scrap wood leaned into each other.  Around the corner a lot more of them clustered in the basement of an abandoned building that we called "Cardboard City", but here we just had the three of them.

    Diagonally across the street was another abandoned building...according to official documents it was abandoned, anyway.  Someone had dug a hole in the bricks over the doorway and three "shooting galleries" operated inside of it now.  That's not a police target range kind of thing; it's where the addicts find a room and sit on the floor in a circle around the cooker, sharing needles, drugs and AIDS.

It was an unusually quiet night.  No boom-boxes were blaring rap or salsa music at decibel level, no one was sitting on the sidewalks or stoops, no one was yelling at anyone.

    I was, however, beginning to notice a pattern in the sparse pedestrian traffic.  I'd seen the same two guys pass by three times already.  They were dressed alike in sweatshirts, jeans, sneakers and ski caps, so I couldn't tell much about them from the fourth floor.

  Other than that piece of business, South Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, seemed to be taking a break.

    The quiet was disturbed by a faint scraping sound from the building across the street.

    There were other buildings, on both sides of the street, and other lots.  But my attention often focused on that one old shell of a building.  It reminded me of a huge, dying beast, being eaten up from within.

    I watched someone sliding out through the hole in the bricks over the front door.  A white guy, about 5'6".  Long brown hair, so he was either into playing rock music or at least thirty years old.

    When he was finally outside, he reached back in and pulled out an old, wooden crutch.

    That's when I recognized him.  It was Alfred, known on the street as "Pegleg", a military veteran who'd lost a leg and gained a habit in the service of  his country.

    There were several stories about how it had happened, and nobody seemed to know which one was real.  I tended to reject the "heroic action" stories and lean a little more sympathetically toward the "unnecessary tragic accident" stories.  I'm not saying that Alred couldn't have been capable of heroic action at one time.  I'm just cynical, I guess.

    He started hobbling across the street, then looked up and saw me.  "Yo, Eric!" he called.

    I waved back, not wanting to shout.

    "Eric...I need to talk to you!" he yelled.

    Well, up utnil now I'd been enjoying the fact that nobody was blasting any radios, but now I wasn't so happy about that.  Now every hooker, junkie and struggling family on the block knew that Alfred needed to talk to me.

    Don't get me wrong, now.  I didn't mind being seen with him, but Alfred's needs were really nobody else's business.

        I hated to do it, but I was going to have to yell back.  He was getting ready to give me True Confessions at the top of his lungs if I didn't stop him.

    "Wait there, Alfred," I called, "I'm coming down, okay?"

    "Okay," he yelled back, "I'm waitin', Eric, just like you said to."

    I was staring to climb into my apartment when the blast of a gunshot shattered the quiet and sent blood pounding in my ears.

    Alfred jerked, his back arching, his crutch falling away.  Another gunshot ripped the night and he jerked again, crumbling in a heap.

CHAPTER 2

    That was all I saw.  I scrambled into my room, grabbed my .44 Magnum and ran for the door.  For once I regretted all the safety locks as I fumbled with them.  

    Then it was the stairs.  I could hear people shouting, whimpering plaintively behind some doors, and I could feel the raw fear behind the silent ones.

    Down to the third floor...breathe through the mouth, take in more air...around the landing and down to the second.  The yellow walls looked dingy in the light of 25 watt bulbs dangling from the ceilings.  For some crazy reason I noticed new graffiti on the walls.  On my way down to the first floor I lost my footing and almost went head-first the rest of the way.

         I made the lobby, ran to the front door and stopped, hyperventilating.  When the red cleared from my vision, and the noise left my ears, I studied the scene through the glass panes.

    Alfred was very still, a heap in the street, close to the sidewalk.

    Then I heard more shots, a little muffled this time.  One, followed by a silence, then two, three, four.  
Whoever was doing the shooting had moved back indoors for more targets.

    I opened the door and ran to Alfred, stopping just long enough to see that he was beyond anything I could do for him.  His face had a surprised look, but it would soon go slack.

    Then I headed for the building he'd just come out of...where I thought the shots had come from.

    I jumped to the right of the walled-up, kicked-out entrance and turned, flattening my back against the wall.  Three heartbeats later, I felt safe enough to charge through.

    Getting in was awkward.  I tried to keep the Magnum ready, my eyes alert and my body moving.  It didn't quite work. but I made it without incident.  then I moved to the right and crouched, waiting for my eyes to adjust tot he darkness.

    No matter how many times I've been inside those places, I'm always surprised at how filled with trash they are.  I started for the stairs, but thee was no way I could move silently.  What I couldn't kick out of the way I had to jump over, hoping I wouldn't stumble on something when landing.  

    Not even the stairs were clear, though I was okay if I went sideways and twisted a lot. 

    On the second floor I saw a light toward the rear of the building, to the right: one of the shooting galleries.  But before I could look in on that, I had to go to the left.

    The door I wanted was wide open.  Peeking through, I saw the hole that had been knocked in the bricked-up window with the faint illumination from the streetlight coming through.

    She was under it.  Lori, who had once been a proud and defiant black woman.  Lately she was a ninety-five pound shadow of herself who earned her drugs by being a lookout for the narcs' approach.

    Now, she was dying.

    The huge eyes focused on me out of her skeleton face.  She coughed, blood welling out of the fist-sized hole in her stomach.  "Eric," she whined, her voice reflecting her pain, fear and confusion, "why'd he do that for?"

    "Who, Lori?" I asked, "Who did this?"

    She didn't hear me.  "Why, Eric?"

    I grabbed her shoulders gently and put my face right in front of hers.  "Who did it, Lori?"

    "Why, Eric?"

    "Who, Lori, who?"

    No use.  She sighed, relaxed, and her eyes rolled up until could only see the whites.

    I put her down gently, almost angry at her.  If only she'd told me something!

            *        *        *

    As quickly as I could, I ran back to the room with the light coming from it.  The stench, even worse than usual, hit me first.  I had to hold my breath to peek in.

    Thee bodies with shapeless, bullet-ripped heads all slumped around the cooker, which burned uselessly in the middle of the garbage-strewn room.

    There was no point in trying to figure out who they were at this moment.  They wouldn't have any identification, they were totally unrecognizable, and I'd have passed out if I tried to spend any time  in there.  These buildings had no plumbing anymore, and some of these people never left. 

A muffled crash made me jump and run for the stairs.  As fast as I could, I started up.

    "Why, Eric?"  "Who, Lori, who?"

Third floor.  I knew there was another shooting gallery up here, but it was totally dark.  They were in one of the rooms, shivering with fear and nightmares, waiting for the crisis to pass so they could get back to their slow self-destruction.

    Fourth floor...someone was there, standing in one of the doorways, a deeper shade against the darkness.

    I pointed the .44 at the shape and froze, waiting.

    There wa silence for about three heartbeats, and then a deep voice said, "He went up."

    I lifted the gun so it pointed straight up and said, "Thanks.  I'm Eric."

    "Figured that out."

    From here it was a ladder to the skylight.  The glass was broken out of it.  That might have been the crash I'd heard.

    I had to stop carefully up the ladder.  Several steps were missing, and none of them seemed very secure.

             "Why, Eric?"  "Who, Lori, who?"

    A few stars were in view and the moon was almost full, so visibility would be good up here.

    For both of us.

    Very, very slowly, I lifted my head up through the skylight.  I felt like the bulls-eye in a real shooting gallery.   

    There was less garbage up here.  No broken furniture or huge lawn bags.  Just beer cans, cigarette butts, used condoms, broken crack vials and other nameless trash.  No people, though.  They probably would have taken off at the first shot.  When the police start investigating, nobody wants to be where they're not supposed to be.

    The silence was profound.  I waited, braced to duck, then climbed to where I was crouched on the ladder, my head a little higher over the roof.

    When nothing happened, I launched myself up, somersaulting in the air and waiting for the tearing of a bullet through my body.

    I landed on my back and rolled, the .44 clutched and ready, my head swinging in all directions.

    Silence...stillness.

    There!  Three roofs away, a movement!

    I ran, in a crouch, to the first partition and hurdled it, making noises that sounded thunderous to me.  

    There was another furtive movement up ahead, closer this time.  I ran across the roof, sidestepping some crates, and straddled the next partition while trying to keep my head low.

    I could hear sirens, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.  Something was always going on around here, and the things that happened weren't always reported to the police.

    I only had to make it over one more partition and I'd be where I'd seen the movement.  This time I stretched out along the top of it and rolled, coming up in a crouch.

        Someone was sitting behind one of the small, useless chimneys.  I could see the legs stretched out limply...

    But that wasn't right.  No one who was hiding would sit like that, unless he was sure he wouldn't be found, or...

    I got to the chimney and reached my gun-hand around, following it.  There was the back of a head, with short black hair.  A young guy, probably from the neighborhood.  I tapped him gently over his ear and was about to say something when he slumped oer sideways.

    Great, I thought, At this rate, there won't be many people left by the time I caught up with this lowlife.

    "Why, Eric?" 

    Then I heard the splintering of glass on the roof ahead of me and I knew I only had seconds to catch up to him.  He was on the move, and in a moment he'd be down the stairs and out the door.  By the time I got down there he'd be around the corner and out of sight. 

    "who, Lori?"

I stood up and was about to run after him when I heard the crack of a pistol behind me and a female voice yelled, "Freeze!"

Here's hoping that whets a few appetites!  The book is available from Barnes & Noble, Writers Exchange and amazon.com

Enjoy!