Eric Beetner - Pulp Ink

PULP

INK

Editors: Nigel Bird

and Chris Rhatigan

Assistant Editors: Aldo Calcagno

and Melanie Reichwald

Special thanks to Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw

Published by

Chris Rhatigan, Nigel Bird and

Needle Publishing

Individual stories Copyright 2011 by the individual authors of each story.

All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Individual stories Copyright 2011 by the individual authors of each story.

First eBook Edition: August 2011

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living, dead, or somewhere in-between, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

Cover by Nigel Bird using http://www.makesweet.com/tattoo/

Table of Contents

By Nigel Bird

By Reed Farrel Coleman

By Jodi MacArthur

By AJ Hayes

By Sandra Seamans

By Eric Beetner

By Allan Guthrie

By Matthew C. Funk

By Nigel Bird

By Paul D. Brazill

By Chris F. Holm

By David Cranmer

By Patricia Abbott

By Michael J. Solender

By Naomi Johnson

By Ian Ayris

By Gary Phillips

By Chris Rhatigan

By Richard Godwin

By Jim Harrington

By Kate Horsley

By Hilary Davidson

By Jason Duke

By Jimmy Callaway

By Matt Lavin

Editors Note

By Nigel Bird

Someone had scratched an e from the sign on the door, so I ended up going into the care#rs office to find my vocation.

I love writing, I said. Music. Films. I want to be either Jack Kerouac or Charlie Parker. Sinatra or Presley of The Velvet Underground. Gary Cooper or James Dean. William Burroughs or Barry Levinson. Think you can swing it?

She wrote it all down, scratched her pretty little head and went over to the files. Pulled out a few and dropped them on the table.

Pizzaland need a kitchen porter.

I didnt move. She went to the next one.

Theres a job at the cement works. Two meals a day and as much cement as you can use.

Two meals a day? Had me interested, but I wasnt going to let on.

Theres this crazy notion of an anthology. Take the soundtrack and snippets of dialogue from a crime movie that defined the 90s, send prompts out for inspiration to a host of writers that are right at the top of their game, get them to write stories about them. All youd need to do is read them all, check out what works and what doesnt, smooth out the bumps and put it all together. And you dont do it alone. You get to work alongside the most talented and generous Chris Rhatigan. Pays lousy, long hours, youll have music and stories flooding your dreams and echoing round your head for months. Youll get to read some of the best stories written, but they wont all be nice. In fact, some pretty nasty things are going to happen to some pretty bad people. Good people, too. Imagine being at the helm of one of the most exciting and best quality projects around and you pretty much have it.

Free meals? I asked.

She shook her head.

I picked up the card for the cement works job. Nodded to the lady and left the room ready to make a call.

Requiem for Spider

By Reed Farrel Coleman

Her heart was lonelier than Sergeant Peppers and the whole fucking band. I could see that from across the bar, not that across the bar was like seeing across space and time. It was more like twenty feet and, at that time of night, the view was relatively unobstructed. She had last call girl written all over her. Dont misunderstand, she wasnt a call girl. She wasnt even much of a girl anymore. Thirty, at least, she hadnt fit that description for quite some time. What I mean to say is that she was the kind of woman who probably had more than her share of men, but only because she understood that desperation was her ally. She was that pair of shoes on the discount rack you bought because you needed shoes and you only had so much money and the store was closing. When the bartender screamed Last call for alcohol, it was her mating song. She was a last call girl.

I watched her quarry approach, lean into her, buy her a drink; watched them leave, him on unsteady legs, her propping him up. I imagined the sting she would feel tomorrow morning when she saw that look in his eyes, when he was no longer too-full of drink and desperation, no longer in need of that last pair of shoes, when dashed hopes would again break her lonely heart. But as fascinating as she was, she wasnt why I was here.

I was here because I was bored. It was that simple. I couldnt stand another minute as a shopkeeper, selling wines to nouveau riche assholes who understood even less about quality than I understood about the role of subatomic particles in the structure of the universe. What they thought they understood was the implication of price, which meant they understood very little about substance or value. Well, fuck, when your president is an ex-actor and not a very good one and the world of high finance turns on junk bonds and hostile takeovers, value and substance dont count for much, do they? I was here because Id taken the kind of gig I vowed never to take when I got my investigators license. I was here to watch Spiders back and this particular spider lacked the evolutionary adaption of rear-facing eyes to do the job himself.

Having grown up around the corner from one another, Spider and I had been friends for as long as I could remember. Dick Thomas got the handle Spider because he was a gangly bastard as a kid, all arms and legs, each limb seemingly with a mind of its own. He wore thick glasses and dressed like an unmade bed, but he stuck out for all sorts of reasons in the old neighborhood. In a place where you were either Jewish or Italian, a place where Jews could recite the Hail Mary and the Catholic kids ate bagels and lox, being a Wasp marked you as a freak. We had no clue what Protestants did or what they were about. Another thing about Spider was that he always had a book in his hand. Always. He once told me he had visited worlds the rest of us couldnt even imagine. I suppose he told me because he thought I was smart enough to understand or maybe it was because I was the one kid in the neighborhood who, even then, had his back.

If our senior class at Lincoln had voted on the least likely among us to become a gangster, Spider Thomas wouldve won in a landslide. Yeah, but you cant pay attention to that kind of shit. Spider sure as hell didnt. He graduated from Baruch College with a degree in accounting and promptly set about building an empire. He ran underground gambling parlors all over the five boroughs of New York City, a few in Yonkers, and one or two on Long Island. He made sure not to step on anyones toes; gladly, even eagerly sharing as much as fifty percent of the profits with either the local Mob families that controlled the territories his clubs were in or with the gangs that ran the remaining territories. They were thrilled to get the cash without taking any of the risk. Because of Spiders largesse, his de facto partners provided protection against robbery and police raids.

Moe, he once told me, when you spend your whole childhood trying to not get the shit beat out of you, you get good at figuring out effective survival strategies. After the first time I got held up for my lunch money, I started keeping half the money hidden in my sock. It kept everybody satisfied. Ive never forgotten that lesson.