The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors Read Free

full-time employ of a journal now defunct.
    It was not his reflection across from him after all, he realized, as the train rattled into the Sixty-seventh Street station, but another autonomous human being, yin to his yang, dressed in a similar scuffed leather jacket and black hoodie beneath, but with light-colored pants where the journalist’s were dark, and blond Timberlands where the journalist wore a cheaper, knockoff brand of shoe. The other clung to him, tight as his shadow, as the journalist stepped onto the platform and moved toward the caged stairs that led down to the street. At the first landing an arm wrapped around his trunk from behind—reaching toward the front jacket pocket where the phone was (why not the wallet on the hip?). Half prepared for something like that, the journalist spun his shoulder into the other man, checking him into the wire of the cage.
    A hand came toward him and he managed to catch it by its thumb and forefinger and roll the wrist clockwise, pulling the trapped arm straight so the lock went straight from the shoulder into the spine. But when he heard the other man grunt, doubling over as the pressure forced him down from the waist, he released the hold and jumped down the remaining stairs. A bolt of pain from a soggy landing on his right knee. He ran, in his heavy, ill-fitting boots, till he was breathless, which turned out not to be very far.
    Definitely getting too old for this sort of thing. He could feel the single cigarette he’d smoked, telling on him with a wheeze. No one had followed him, however. He had managed to jog as far as the south-side beach and now he sagged, gasping, against the pipe rail of the boardwalk, looking across the blocks of scrubby waste ground between the strand and the lights of Edgemere Avenue, thinking confusedly of the fields of fire surrounding various third-world palaces where he had once reported.
    All this beachfront somehow undeveloped—and likely to stay that way, now, for a good while longer. When he had caught his breath enough he lit another cigarette in the shelter of his hood, then turned to face the wind and water. There was surf, beating down to white foam on the waterline. Perhaps a mile to the east were the lights of the high-rises. Westward, the dull glow of the city lit a sagging belly of snow-filled cloud.
    When the cigarette had burned to the filter he flicked it out onto the sand and turned in the direction of the address William had given him. It was astonishingly cold and there was no one else on the street. The attack on the subway stairs had been random, he thought. Just a blast from the past—from the city he used to live in thirty years ago. He remembered that he hadn’t remembered his knife, and that he was lucky he hadn’t been shot.
    *  *  *
    Etheridge Elliot had lost his two top front teeth but his smile exuded the same überconfident charm as before. He wore a blue bandanna secured at the center of his forehead with a row of gnarly little knots of a style once favored by a certain Flatbush Crips set. Or so the journalist seemed to recall; it was ten years or more since he’d reported that one. A blast of heat swirled out of the basement door Elliot had opened and the journalist stepped gratefully into it, clenching his teeth so they wouldn’t chatter.
    â€œRagamuffin!” Elliot cried. The journalist fumbled a hipster handshake. They were standing in a square of partially finished basement; a drape of kente cloth hanging from the ceiling tiles divided them from what must have been the larger part of the space.
    â€œWattagwan wid wi?” Elliot said, expanding his smile around the black gap of the two missing teeth.
    â€œSame as it ever was,” the journalist said, after a moment of bewildered cogitation. The patois he’d picked up among the maroons had long since rusted away, and to the best of his recollection Etheridge Elliot had spoken reasonably standard