Night must fall in the Tolerance Zone, the same way it does everywhere. Tonight it fell hard. I watched the shipping crate in the bed of the Escalade pickup parked behind the cantina, the crate filled with the ripe kumquats—three snuffed picture brides—that Yee Chung Toy had tried to smuggle from Fujian Province to Veracruz, and then across Mexico, through Ensenada, and into San Francisco . . .
After Dad went to prison for running over a six-year-old girl while driving home from the Sandbar, I had to make money fast so Mom could feed her prescription pill habit—as well as my younger brother—and pay the rent . . .
She stood in the shelter of the doorway of the Chicago Yacht Club, watching as the sky darkened and clouds enveloped and erased the tops of the skyscrapers . . .
The floor was covered with Timothy’s blood when Maurice came down the steps from the dining room to see how things were moving along . . .
I was born in 1962 in Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class housing development located on the East Side of Manhattan. When I was young, I used to see an older kid who rode his ten-speed bicycle through the neighborhood. He always wore a Superman costume, and he steered the bicycle with his feet, with his hands always high over his head and his red Superman cape flapping in the wind behind him . . .
Tedesco was dead, frozen and wrapped in a tarp in the back of the Chevy Suburban when Berlin stopped for coffee in Tiburon . . .
Mondays Are Murder features brand-new noir fiction modeled after our award-winning Noir Series. Each story is an original one, and each takes place in a distinct location. Our web model for the series has one more restraint: a 750-word limit. Sound like murder? It is. But so are Mondays. This week, Siobhan Lyons takes us back […]
I was running a dust cloth across the top of the glass display case housing my most prized first editions—Hammett’s The Dain Curse and Christie’s Perilat End House among them—when the bell above the door jingled and a middle-aged man stepped into my used bookshop in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood. His cashmere trench coat made me hopeful for a big sale, but the ratty Yankees cap and knockoff sunglasses he didn’t remove gave me pause . . .