Day 1, Word Count: 1860
The City, Wide - So it begins; only 48,140 left! Read on with the link below . . . The City, Wide
Chapter One
He picked up the phone on the seventh ring.
“City Desk.”
“Terry,” said a thoroughly flustered voice through the receiver. “It’s your brother--”
“Sorry, Mac, McGruder’s out chasing down a lead,” Terry McGruder said into the phone. He knew the rubes loved that 40s detective lingo. “Message for him?”
“Fuck you, Terry, I know it’s you. I’m your goddamn brother, fer chrissakes! Don’t fuckin’ Mac me!”
“Like I said, sir. Mr. McGruder’s out of the office. He got a hot tip and flatfooted it down to the East Village. Can I take a message.” McGruder had notched his voice up a pitch for this exchange. He was eyeing the NY Post opened before him on his desk. There was a pony named All She Wrote in the late afternoon run at Belmont that was tickling the back of his brain.
“Sure, asshole. Tell Mr. McGruder that he can fucking die,” spat the voice on the other end of the fiber optic line. “I don’t want the grand he owes me and I never want to see his fucking face again. Fuck you, Terry.”
The line went dead.
McGruder hung up the phone without ever taking his eyes off the racing sheet. “Angie, get me Henderson at OTB on 52nd on the horn, wouldja?”
“Screw you, Terry,” said an aging blond from across the bustling City Desk office of the New York Union-Dispatch. “You have enough fingers to dial and to go fu--”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” McGruder cut her off. “What kind of assistant are you, anyway?”
“I’m not you goddamned assistant, Terry. I’m you’re editor. And you should be worrying less about the ponies and more about that assignment that’s due in about, oh, I don’t know . . . two fucking hours!” shot back Angie as she started to stalk towards McGruder’s desk.
“You mean that fluff piece on the old lady who’s rent controlled apartment got robbed on Park Avenue? Send the goddamn kid out on that. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Bullshit. That’s what you’ve got, Terry. Bullshit. And that’s what you are.”
“Hey, language, Angie,” McGruder smirked at the woman as she stood over him. “We’re a respectable news-gathering organization. That language is strictly for the pulps.”
“Listen, Terry, I’ve had it. You don’t want the story? Fine, Skellings gets it. But if you don’t bring me a front page, banner headline by the end of the week, you’re fucking fired,” Angie said, all breathy and exasperated. “Kapish?”
“That’s what I do, Ang,” McGruder said as he stood up, tucked the paper under his arm and threw his ratty corduroy sport coat over his other shoulder. “That’s what I do.”
Chapter Two
McGruder hailed a cab on the corner of 42nd and 6th Avenue, heading uptown.
“116th,” he said and started in on the racing sheet again.
“Columbia University, sir,” said the Jordanian hack behind the wheel.
“That’s right, Mohammed,” wise-cracked McGruder.
“My name’s Robert.”
“Whatever. Just drive. Hold the chit chat for the tourists.”
“Asshole,” muttered the cab driver.
Terry McGruder was a 45 year old red-blooded American. He had salt and pepper close cropped hair, a square jaw, slightly bulbous nose (a few too many nips from Jameson bottles in the last few years), and a barely noticeable scar running from the middle of his forehead through his left eyebrow, over his eye socket and onto the plane of his left cheek. Barely noticeable.
If you were blind.
McGruder had been at the Union-Dispatch for the last three years. Before that he had been with the NY Post, The Daily News, The New York Observer and in the distant past, before “the Incident,” he’d been at the New York Times for twelve years.
But that was all ancient history. Today he wasn’t an investigative journalist. He wasn’t a column man. He wrote for the city desk. Usually uncredited, over-edited and underpaid. Plus, work on the Dispatch’s city beat was far from glamorous.
The Dispatch covered the stuff that was too small for even the Post. They did accounts of neighborhood stories – the guy who’d been found with fifty cats in his studio apartment above a Chinese take-out joint. Or, say, the dudes who were running a White Supremacist publishing company from the basement of the local electrical workers’ union hall. All interesting and exciting if you lived in the same building as the cat guy (or ordered delivery from Mei Sing’s), but to the rest of the city that never sleeps, those stories were the least of its worries.
Today, though. Today, McGruder was going to change that. He actually did have a hot tip on a story. That was the only thing that he had said to his pain-in-the-ass accountant brother that wasn’t bullshit. He’d gotten a call the night before from a friend at the Midtown South precinct house.
It had been the middle of the night and McGruder was still sort of awake – a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead open on his lap, his head nodding up and down, reading the same sentence again for the third time. The rattle of the obsolete rotary phone shaking in its cradle snapped McGruder to attention. He let it ring a fourth time while rubbing the sleep sting from his eyes before reaching for the receiver.
“Yeah,” he had croaked into the phone. Drymouthed from the two juice glasses of whiskey he had downed earlier that night.
“Terry, its Jim Moynihan, from the Two Three,” answered the voice; barely above a whisper.
“James, me foine boyo,” McGruder put on the brogue. “A bit late ta’be callin, innit?”
“Enough with that, Terry. Th’s serious,” answered the cop.
McGruder had come suddenly and fully awake. He smelled a story. He had actually gotten excited, but the second his friend Jimmy had started speaking the excitement turned sour.
Now, riding in the back of the cab towards Columbia, the reporter had a hard time recalling that sick feeling in his gut. He wrote the memory off to the Jameson, the lack of a solid meal and his never-ending ulcer. Besides, he thought, its only a goddamned rumor.
Even as that thought went through his head, in his gut the acid started to rumble and his mouth went dry.
Chapter Three
Abraham Krebs woke up with the afternoon sun shining in his eyes. The only thing that saved him from being blinded was the grime that coated the window of his basement apartment in Park Slope. The artists and yuppies had taken over most of the Brooklyn neighborhood, but there were still some slum landlords that preferred anonymous tenants who didn’t complain about the pressure-less showers, the non-working radiators, or the rats in the back alley. They charged less and provided nothing in return.
Krebs was happy being anonymous. Plus, unless he wanted to be the only freckle-faced, redhead from Kansas living in Spanish Harlem, this was all he could afford.
The paper thin young man rose from the mattress on the floor and fumbled with the things on top of the orange crate next to the bed for his glasses. The crate served as his makeshift bedside table.
Now able to see, Krebs moved to the other side of the basement and opened his mini-fridge. The only contents were three ½ gallon containers of orange juice and a brown unmarked plastic bottle of pills. He grabbed one of the open juice cartons and drank deeply from it. He replaced it and then took the pill bottle. Shaking out two of the large pink pills, Krebs shivered in the cold apartment.
It was only the middle of September, but there was already a slight Autumn chill in the air and Krebs had found that his humble abode was always ten degrees colder than it was outside, no matter how high he turned up his single rusting radiator. Of course, in the heat of the city summer, the apartment was twenty or more degrees hotter than the outside world and opening the two street-facing windows to allow in a breeze only brought in the exhaust a passing cars, cabs, and busses. Once it had also let in a slow trickle of miniature Doberman Pincher piss. Krebs kept the windows closed after that day.
Now fully hydrated and filled with this half of the day’s medication Krebs moved to the bathroom to shower and dress. This didn’t take long. He had no beard stubble to shave, very little hair to wash (he’d had it buzz cut the week before in the style of 1950s test pilots – or so he thought) and his wardrobe consisted only of faded jeans, saggy-assed chinos, white v-neck undershirts and a few worn plaid flannel shirts. Uniformed, he filled his pockets with keys, subway pass, pocketknife, and wallet and headed for the street.
“Mr. Abraham,” a small voice called to him from the foyer as he was locking his door. The voice was heavily accented, but the origin of that accent was nearly impossible to place. “You owe me the rent toyesterday.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian,” Abraham answered. He turned around, towering over the stout woman in her fluorescent orange babushka. “I will slip it under your door this evening. I am going into the city today to get my paycheck.”
“So you say, say you so,” the super replied. She always talked in this repeating, reversing litany. “But still. One day later your have been.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian. I know, I’m sorry. Next month I’ll be on time, I promise.”
“Last time for a free rider, yes?” She arched a particularly bushy eyebrow. “Free rider for the last time, okay.”
“Okay. No more free rides, I get it,” Krebs answered, shrugging his shoulders and squeezing around the beachball-shaped woman. He had to get out of there. The smell of fried fish and drying cabbage was making his stomach somersault. “I promise, I’ll be on time next month.” Knowing that he wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be on time then, since there would be no next month. At least not for him.
“This is good, Mr. Abraham.” She turned away and headed back for the stinking apartment at the back of the first floor corridor.
Krebs reached the ancient door to the apartment building, slammed it open, moved past the mail slots lined on both walls, and burst through the street door into the sparkling sun and the relatively fresh air. He breathed deeply of that exhaust laden air and the tears that had been forming in his eyes from Mrs. Arkadian’s fish/cabbage stench spilled over his sallow cheeks. He let out a slow sigh and began his journey, heading for the nearest Manhattan-bound 6 Train.
Chapter Four
When Krebs finally left the subway station at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan (after a thirty minute delay for “routine track maintenance”) it was nearly three o’clock. The park where he had risen to from the underground station was nearly empty. A few homeless were rummaging through trash barrels for the leavings of the Wall Street lunch crowd. Those Wall Streeters themselves were no where to be seen; their day coming to a close brokering deals and selling paper in the towering edifices hovering around the park.
Chapter One
He picked up the phone on the seventh ring.
“City Desk.”
“Terry,” said a thoroughly flustered voice through the receiver. “It’s your brother--”
“Sorry, Mac, McGruder’s out chasing down a lead,” Terry McGruder said into the phone. He knew the rubes loved that 40s detective lingo. “Message for him?”
“Fuck you, Terry, I know it’s you. I’m your goddamn brother, fer chrissakes! Don’t fuckin’ Mac me!”
“Like I said, sir. Mr. McGruder’s out of the office. He got a hot tip and flatfooted it down to the East Village. Can I take a message.” McGruder had notched his voice up a pitch for this exchange. He was eyeing the NY Post opened before him on his desk. There was a pony named All She Wrote in the late afternoon run at Belmont that was tickling the back of his brain.
“Sure, asshole. Tell Mr. McGruder that he can fucking die,” spat the voice on the other end of the fiber optic line. “I don’t want the grand he owes me and I never want to see his fucking face again. Fuck you, Terry.”
The line went dead.
McGruder hung up the phone without ever taking his eyes off the racing sheet. “Angie, get me Henderson at OTB on 52nd on the horn, wouldja?”
“Screw you, Terry,” said an aging blond from across the bustling City Desk office of the New York Union-Dispatch. “You have enough fingers to dial and to go fu--”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” McGruder cut her off. “What kind of assistant are you, anyway?”
“I’m not you goddamned assistant, Terry. I’m you’re editor. And you should be worrying less about the ponies and more about that assignment that’s due in about, oh, I don’t know . . . two fucking hours!” shot back Angie as she started to stalk towards McGruder’s desk.
“You mean that fluff piece on the old lady who’s rent controlled apartment got robbed on Park Avenue? Send the goddamn kid out on that. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Bullshit. That’s what you’ve got, Terry. Bullshit. And that’s what you are.”
“Hey, language, Angie,” McGruder smirked at the woman as she stood over him. “We’re a respectable news-gathering organization. That language is strictly for the pulps.”
“Listen, Terry, I’ve had it. You don’t want the story? Fine, Skellings gets it. But if you don’t bring me a front page, banner headline by the end of the week, you’re fucking fired,” Angie said, all breathy and exasperated. “Kapish?”
“That’s what I do, Ang,” McGruder said as he stood up, tucked the paper under his arm and threw his ratty corduroy sport coat over his other shoulder. “That’s what I do.”
Chapter Two
McGruder hailed a cab on the corner of 42nd and 6th Avenue, heading uptown.
“116th,” he said and started in on the racing sheet again.
“Columbia University, sir,” said the Jordanian hack behind the wheel.
“That’s right, Mohammed,” wise-cracked McGruder.
“My name’s Robert.”
“Whatever. Just drive. Hold the chit chat for the tourists.”
“Asshole,” muttered the cab driver.
Terry McGruder was a 45 year old red-blooded American. He had salt and pepper close cropped hair, a square jaw, slightly bulbous nose (a few too many nips from Jameson bottles in the last few years), and a barely noticeable scar running from the middle of his forehead through his left eyebrow, over his eye socket and onto the plane of his left cheek. Barely noticeable.
If you were blind.
McGruder had been at the Union-Dispatch for the last three years. Before that he had been with the NY Post, The Daily News, The New York Observer and in the distant past, before “the Incident,” he’d been at the New York Times for twelve years.
But that was all ancient history. Today he wasn’t an investigative journalist. He wasn’t a column man. He wrote for the city desk. Usually uncredited, over-edited and underpaid. Plus, work on the Dispatch’s city beat was far from glamorous.
The Dispatch covered the stuff that was too small for even the Post. They did accounts of neighborhood stories – the guy who’d been found with fifty cats in his studio apartment above a Chinese take-out joint. Or, say, the dudes who were running a White Supremacist publishing company from the basement of the local electrical workers’ union hall. All interesting and exciting if you lived in the same building as the cat guy (or ordered delivery from Mei Sing’s), but to the rest of the city that never sleeps, those stories were the least of its worries.
Today, though. Today, McGruder was going to change that. He actually did have a hot tip on a story. That was the only thing that he had said to his pain-in-the-ass accountant brother that wasn’t bullshit. He’d gotten a call the night before from a friend at the Midtown South precinct house.
It had been the middle of the night and McGruder was still sort of awake – a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead open on his lap, his head nodding up and down, reading the same sentence again for the third time. The rattle of the obsolete rotary phone shaking in its cradle snapped McGruder to attention. He let it ring a fourth time while rubbing the sleep sting from his eyes before reaching for the receiver.
“Yeah,” he had croaked into the phone. Drymouthed from the two juice glasses of whiskey he had downed earlier that night.
“Terry, its Jim Moynihan, from the Two Three,” answered the voice; barely above a whisper.
“James, me foine boyo,” McGruder put on the brogue. “A bit late ta’be callin, innit?”
“Enough with that, Terry. Th’s serious,” answered the cop.
McGruder had come suddenly and fully awake. He smelled a story. He had actually gotten excited, but the second his friend Jimmy had started speaking the excitement turned sour.
Now, riding in the back of the cab towards Columbia, the reporter had a hard time recalling that sick feeling in his gut. He wrote the memory off to the Jameson, the lack of a solid meal and his never-ending ulcer. Besides, he thought, its only a goddamned rumor.
Even as that thought went through his head, in his gut the acid started to rumble and his mouth went dry.
Chapter Three
Abraham Krebs woke up with the afternoon sun shining in his eyes. The only thing that saved him from being blinded was the grime that coated the window of his basement apartment in Park Slope. The artists and yuppies had taken over most of the Brooklyn neighborhood, but there were still some slum landlords that preferred anonymous tenants who didn’t complain about the pressure-less showers, the non-working radiators, or the rats in the back alley. They charged less and provided nothing in return.
Krebs was happy being anonymous. Plus, unless he wanted to be the only freckle-faced, redhead from Kansas living in Spanish Harlem, this was all he could afford.
The paper thin young man rose from the mattress on the floor and fumbled with the things on top of the orange crate next to the bed for his glasses. The crate served as his makeshift bedside table.
Now able to see, Krebs moved to the other side of the basement and opened his mini-fridge. The only contents were three ½ gallon containers of orange juice and a brown unmarked plastic bottle of pills. He grabbed one of the open juice cartons and drank deeply from it. He replaced it and then took the pill bottle. Shaking out two of the large pink pills, Krebs shivered in the cold apartment.
It was only the middle of September, but there was already a slight Autumn chill in the air and Krebs had found that his humble abode was always ten degrees colder than it was outside, no matter how high he turned up his single rusting radiator. Of course, in the heat of the city summer, the apartment was twenty or more degrees hotter than the outside world and opening the two street-facing windows to allow in a breeze only brought in the exhaust a passing cars, cabs, and busses. Once it had also let in a slow trickle of miniature Doberman Pincher piss. Krebs kept the windows closed after that day.
Now fully hydrated and filled with this half of the day’s medication Krebs moved to the bathroom to shower and dress. This didn’t take long. He had no beard stubble to shave, very little hair to wash (he’d had it buzz cut the week before in the style of 1950s test pilots – or so he thought) and his wardrobe consisted only of faded jeans, saggy-assed chinos, white v-neck undershirts and a few worn plaid flannel shirts. Uniformed, he filled his pockets with keys, subway pass, pocketknife, and wallet and headed for the street.
“Mr. Abraham,” a small voice called to him from the foyer as he was locking his door. The voice was heavily accented, but the origin of that accent was nearly impossible to place. “You owe me the rent toyesterday.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian,” Abraham answered. He turned around, towering over the stout woman in her fluorescent orange babushka. “I will slip it under your door this evening. I am going into the city today to get my paycheck.”
“So you say, say you so,” the super replied. She always talked in this repeating, reversing litany. “But still. One day later your have been.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian. I know, I’m sorry. Next month I’ll be on time, I promise.”
“Last time for a free rider, yes?” She arched a particularly bushy eyebrow. “Free rider for the last time, okay.”
“Okay. No more free rides, I get it,” Krebs answered, shrugging his shoulders and squeezing around the beachball-shaped woman. He had to get out of there. The smell of fried fish and drying cabbage was making his stomach somersault. “I promise, I’ll be on time next month.” Knowing that he wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be on time then, since there would be no next month. At least not for him.
“This is good, Mr. Abraham.” She turned away and headed back for the stinking apartment at the back of the first floor corridor.
Krebs reached the ancient door to the apartment building, slammed it open, moved past the mail slots lined on both walls, and burst through the street door into the sparkling sun and the relatively fresh air. He breathed deeply of that exhaust laden air and the tears that had been forming in his eyes from Mrs. Arkadian’s fish/cabbage stench spilled over his sallow cheeks. He let out a slow sigh and began his journey, heading for the nearest Manhattan-bound 6 Train.
Chapter Four
When Krebs finally left the subway station at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan (after a thirty minute delay for “routine track maintenance”) it was nearly three o’clock. The park where he had risen to from the underground station was nearly empty. A few homeless were rummaging through trash barrels for the leavings of the Wall Street lunch crowd. Those Wall Streeters themselves were no where to be seen; their day coming to a close brokering deals and selling paper in the towering edifices hovering around the park.
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