“Trigger? What–?”
“A long story. Ceil can tell you about it. But I guess when she found out how much he hated her, how he’d wanted her dead all these years, when she saw him ready to murder her, something must have snapped inside. When she came out of the closet and found him helpless on the living room floor, she must have gone a little crazy.”
“A little crazy? You call what she did a little crazy?”
Jack shrugged. He handed back the ME’s report and opened the car door.
“Your sister crammed ten years of pay back into three hours. She’s going to need a lot of help to recover from those ten years. And those three hours.”
Schaffer pounded his mahogany steering wheel.
“Shit! It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this!” Then he sighed and turned to Jack. “But I guess things don’t always go according to plan in your business.”
“Hardly ever.”
Jack got out of the car, closed the door, and listened to the Jag roar to life. As it screeched away, he headed back to Julio’s. A new customer was due at noon.
introduction to “The Long Way Home”
Toward the end of May, 1990, Joe Lansdale called, looking for a story for Dark at Heart, an anthology he was editing with his wife Karen. He wanted it dark but without any supernatural. I suggested a New York mean-streets story starring Jack. He loved the idea. “The Long Way Home” was the result. I started it in late May but due to a crowded plate, didn’t finish it until the end of July.
Fifteen years later my agent contacted me about Amazon Shorts, a new feature at Amazon.com that would allow readers to download a short story for a nominal fee. Could I write something for them?
What was on my plate at the time: The tenth Jack novel, an RJ short story for ITW’s Thriller, scripting five issues of The Keep graphic miniseries, adapting four short stories for Doomed, revising the text and writing a foreword to the Infrapress edition of Wheels Within Wheels, revising Reprisal for Borderlands Press, revising The Tery and “The Last Rakosh” for Overlook Connection Press.
No, I couldn’t do a short story.
But I did have a long-lost Repairman Jack piece called “The Long Way Home” from Joe and Karen’s four-hundred-copy anthology that hadn’t been seen since 1992. I showed them that.
On the morning of May 11, Amazon, adamant about no previously published material, rejected it. By afternoon they’d reversed themselves. I was told that Jeff Bezos himself had said to screw the technicality in this case.
So I revised the story to bring it into the twenty-first century and sent it in. Amazon Shorts launched in August. “The Long Way Home” became the second most downloaded piece (and the #1 fiction download) during the program's first eighteen months.
The Long Way Home
1
Jack saw the whole thing. Another minute’s delay in leaving for home and he’d have been a block away when it went down. And then a different man would have died on the pavement.
But Julio had held him up, detailing his current bitch about all the yuppies chasing out his tavern’s regular customers. He was especially irate about one who’d offered to buy the place.
“You believe that?” Julio was saying. “He wanna turn it into a bistro, meng. A bistro!”
An incomprehensible stream of Puerto Rican followed. Which meant Julio was royally pissed. He was proud of his command of English and only under extreme provocation did he revert to his native tongue.
“He was only asking. What’s wrong with that?”
“Because he offer me a lot of money, meng. I mean a lot of money.”
“How much?”
Julio whispered it in Jack’s ear.
Right: A lot of money.
“I repeat: What’s wrong with that? You should be proud.”
“I don’ know ‘bout proud, but I was tempted to take it.”
“No!” Jack said, genuinely shaken. “Don’t say that, Julio. Don’t even think it.”
“I couldn’t help it. But I tol’ him to get lost. I mean, I like money much as the next guy, meng, but I only risk so much for it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the motley collection of scruffy locals leaning on the bar behind him. “You know what those guys do to me if I sol’ out to a yuppie? Have to run for my life.”
“You may still have to if Maria finds out how much you turned down.”
“Don’ tell her. Don’ breathe a word, Jack.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
Jack left with his cold six-pack of Rolling Rock long necks and turned the corner onto Amsterdam Avenue, heading downtown. Quiet on the Upper West Side tonight. A lot of the restaurants were closed on Mondays and it was too cold for a casual stroll. Jack had the street pretty much to himself.
Gentrification had slowed in these parts – mainly because everything had been pretty well gentrified – and was seeping into Harlem and even Morningside Heights. This neighborhood, once ethnically and socioeconomically mixed, had homogenized into an all-white, upper-income enclave; neighborhood taverns had metamorphosed into brasseries and bistros, mom-and-pop grocery stores and bodegas into gourmet delis, sidewalk cafés, overpriced boutiques and shoppes – always spelled with the extra “-pe.” Rents had taken up residency in Mir’s old orbit.
At the next corner Jack spotted a blue-and-white parked by the fire hydrant in front of Costin’s. His first instinct was to turn and walk the other way, but that might draw attention.
He checked himself out in his mental mirror: average-length brown hair, NY Jets warm up Jacket over a flannel shirt, worn jeans over dirty white sneakers. Just an average Joe. Virtually invisible.
So he stayed on course.
Waiting on the curb for a car to pass, he did a quick scan of the scene. Quiet. Only one cop in the unit, in the passenger seat, looking relaxed. His partner was stepping into Costin’s. The light filtering through the open door revealed a very young-looking cop. Baby-faced. Probably picking up some donut-shaped teething biscuits.
Costin’s had been there forever – a Paleolithic prototype of the convenience store. Now it was one of the last mom-and-pops in the area. Old Costin had to stay open all hours just to meet the rent. The locals left over from the old days remained loyal, and most of the cops from the Two-oh stopped in regularly to help keep them going.
Jack was halfway across the street when he heard a boom. He knew that sound. Shotgun. Instinctively he ducked behind the nearest parked car on the far side. The sound had been muffled. An indoor shot.
Shit. Costin’s.
He set the six-pack down and peeked over the hood. The cop was out of the unit’s passenger seat now and on the sidewalk, drawing his pistol. Just then the door to Costin’s burst open and a giant leapt onto the top step. He stood six-six at least and looked completely bald under the flat black leather cap squeezed onto the top of his head; the loose sweatsuit he wore only emphasized his massive, bulked-up frame. He was snarling, his shiny black features contorted in rage. He held a sawed-off ten-gauge pump-action against his hip, aimed down at the cop.
In the clear air, lit by the mercury vapor lamps lining the block, the scene had an unreal look, like something out of a movie.