Praise for Expiration Date
“Expiration Date is a skillful, fast-paced, rock ’em, jolt ’em, spook ’em, leave-em-laughin’ story with believable characters and a pedal-to-the-floor narrative drive. Top-of-the-line entertainment.”
—Tom Piccirilli, author of Shadow Season
FOR
LOUIS WOJCIECHOWSKI
1926–2009
WELL—
SO IT GOES:
TIME HITS THE HARDEST BLOWS.
—JOSEPH MONCURE MARCH
See that body sprawled on the hardwood floor, marinating in a pool of his own blood?
That’s me.
Five minutes ago I was shot in the back. Three times, right between the shoulder blades. The guy who runs the late-night beer bodega downstairs, Willie Shahid, heard the shots—bang bang bang—then saw somebody with a revolver go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. After a few minutes, he walked upstairs to check it out.
Now Willie’s outside the apartment door. He knocks, and then waits a second. Something’s not right. He sniffs the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper fills his nostrils. Gunpowder. It’s not an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.
Watch Willie Shahid take out his cell and dial 911, giving the proper address and even the floor. Guy’s a real pro.
If you hang around a little longer, you’ll see the EMTs arrive, and then the Philly PD, 15th District. They’ll move me to a stretcher and carry me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train and past a bunch of dudes in oversized white T-shirts and deadpan expressions.
Soon the surgeons at nearby Frankford Hospital will dig the slugs out of my back, place them in a kidney-shaped steel tray. From there, they’ll transfer them to a plastic evidence bag and send it down to the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensics lab at Eighth and Race. Standard procedure—bullets from GSWs always go right to the lab for ballistic analysis.
A few days later confusion will sweep over the forensics guys’ faces. Identifying the type of bullet will be no problem: .38 caliber.
No, something else will trouble them.
After analyzing the slugs and gunpowder, the CSI guys will determine that the bullets are at least forty years old. They’ll also discover that this specific type stopped being manufactured back in 1967.
Now, old bullets can still work. But they’ll have to be asking themselves: Why use forty-year-old ammunition to snuff somebody?
Some people have the idea that when you die your life flashes before your eyes, like a movie on fast-forward.
Not quite.
Time’s arrow only appears to fly straight when you’re alive. Dead is something else. Once you cross that invisible line, you see things how they really are. You see that every moment seems to happen all at once.
Which makes telling this story—or the most important parts of it, anyway—difficult. Usually, you start at the beginning. Or the middle, so the listener doesn’t get bored.
Problem is, I’m very hazy on the beginning and the middle, as I came in during the end. I can speculate, but it’d be nothing more than a wild guess.
I guess I should start with the day I moved into the apartment and went back in time.
I
Thomas Jefferson Goes to a Porno
I was sitting on my front stoop, drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. At eleven bucks a six-pack, Sierra’s a splurge beer, so I tried to savor every sip. I’d probably be drinking pounder cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from now on.
After a while Meghan came out and I handed her the last one. She thanked me by bumping shoulders. We sat for a while and drank our beers in the warm downtown sun. It would have been a perfect day if I wasn’t moving out.
Meghan leaned back on her elbows, blond hair hanging down across her forehead.
“You sure I can’t give you a ride?”
I swallowed, enjoying the bitter taste of hops in my mouth, the bright sun on my face. Then I looked at her.
“Frankford’s kind of a bad neighborhood.”
“No neighborhoods are bad, Mickey. They’re just misunderstood.”
“No, seriously. It’s bad. There was a story in yesterday’s Daily News. Some high school kid there was murdered by three of his friends. And I don’t mean over a dumb fight over sneakers or drugs. I mean, they planned his execution, killed him, then worked hard to hide the evidence.”
“They didn’t work too hard if the Daily News found out about it.”
Meghan and I had been friends since the year before, when I moved to Sixteenth and Spruce, just a few blocks away from swank Rittenhouse Square. If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia, you know the square I’m talking about—high-end restaurants, high-rise condos. I couldn’t afford this neighborhood even when I was gainfully employed.
But two weeks ago my alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City Press, decided they could get by with only one staff writer. They wished me all the best. Since no other papers were crying out for my services, here or elsewhere, I joined the ranks of the newly unemployed. Just like hundreds of thousands of other people.
So now my meager possessions were almost packed and I was waiting for a ride from my mom so she could take me to my grandfather’s cramped—yet rent-free—efficiency in Frankford, which was a long, long way from Rittenhouse Square.
Normally I refused to accept any help or advice from my mom. The less she knew about my life, the less I owed her, the better. But my back was up against the wall now. I couldn’t afford another week in this apartment, let alone another month. I had no money for a deposit on another apartment.
I was moving back to Frankford.
Slumming is one thing when you’re twenty-two and just out of college and backed up by a deep-pile parental checking account. But moving to a bad neighborhood when you’re thirty-seven and have exhausted all other options is something else entirely. It’s a heavy thing with a rope, dragging you down to a lower social depth with no easy way back to the surface.
Worst of all, you can still see them up there—the friends you graduated with fifteen years ago—laughing and splashing around, having a good time.
The last thing I wanted was Meghan to escort me to the bottom of the ocean, give me an awkward hug, then swim back up to the party. She’d offered to drive me at least a half-dozen times over the past two weeks, and I repeatedly had told her no, my mom insisted on taking me.
Which was a total friggin’ lie.
“You don’t want to go to Frankford,” I said. “It’s one of the busiest drug corridors in the city. It even used to have its own serial killer.”
“Now you’re just making stuff up.”
“Completely serious. Happened when I was in high school—in the late 1980s. The guy was called the Frankford Slasher, and he killed a bunch of prostitutes. I wrote a piece about it for the Press.”