Escape: Dark Mystery Tales

By Lisa Polisar

From the quiet English countryside to the gritty streets of Boston’s Chinatown, there is a silent commonality among these eerie tales – Polisar’s fascination with the darkness of the human psyche. Whether it's murder in a jazz club or deadly assassins, Polisar’s intricate storytelling and startling characters will take you on an unforgettable journey from fear and terror to escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NukeWorks Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452420677

Lisa Polisar

Lisa Polisar is a mystery writer, an award-winning journalist, a musician, and a filmmaker. She is the author of Blackwater Tango, Knee Deep, Straight Ahead (nonfiction), and dozens of short stories. Polisar has lived in New Mexico since 1992. www.lisapolisar.com

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Praise for Lisa Polisar

"For fans of mystery and mayhem, short fiction doesn’t get much better than this."

-Mary Welk - The Rhodes to Murder series

"From the moors of Devon to Boston, ‘Frisco and the Midwest, Polisar’s finely drawn characters possess a dogged determination to escape various fates besetting them. Will they?"

-Albert Noyer - Getorius and Arcadia Mystery series

"Escape is the perfect collection of short stories for the reader who loves variety in their mysteries...perfect to keep your mystery muse wonderfully entertained."

-Marilyn Meredith - Deputy Crabtree Mystery series

Other Titles by Lisa Polisar

Fiction

Blackwater Tango (Hilliard & Harris)

Knee Deep (Port Town Publishing)

The Ghost of Mary Prairie (University of New Mexico Press)

Non-Fiction

Straight Ahead (Chile Piper Press)

Escape: Dark Mystery Tales

Lisa Polisar

Published by NukeWorks Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright © 2010 Lisa Towles

9 Lives, Dixie’s Glass and Three Measures Rest originally published by New Mystery Reader; Jewel’s Tell originally published by Aileron Literary Journal; Granite and Grass originally published by Nefarious Tales of Mystery; English Parlor and Edge of Bliss originally published by Conundrum Mystery Magazine; and The Last Sly Fox originally published by Detective Mystery Stories.

This is a work of fiction, names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover design by A&J Creative Services

Visit Lisa at www.lisapolisar.com

For L.T.

Acknowledgements

To all of my English teachers who introduced to me the art and magic of storytelling: Marie Bernard, Peter Moll, Frank Tierney, Tim Gabriel, Melvin Goldstein and, most importantly, Paulette Burns, my fourth grade teacher, who read the entire Chronicles of Narnia (among other things) to us in a circle every afternoon that year. You lit a spark inside me that still burns in my heart today.

To Kadi for your vision, patience and constant support in making this happen

To Missy for your expert eyes, endless encouragement, and for always saying yes when I want to send you something to read

To Gail for your ninja editing skills, reality checks, and tireless conversations about plot and characters

To my very first and most beloved teachers, Connie and Dick Striano - you continue to inspire me to be better than I am.

And to Lee, who just simply gets it. You are my greatest inspiration - creative and otherwise.

My love and gratitude to all of you who helped make this book happen…

Escape

Dark Mystery Tales

Dixie’s Glass

Three Measures Rest

9 Lives

The Last Sly Fox

Granite and Grass

Jewel’s Tell

Edge of Bliss

English Parlor

Dixie’s Glass

IF I knew one thing about Miles Rickman, it was how he arrived at a crime scene. As for myself, the bulk of my behavior arose out of nothing more than habit. No matter what the urgency, I’d carefully unhook myself from the seatbelt of my conservative dark blue sedan, zip my parka up to the very top, pull my hat down over my ears and plod forward to whatever grisly breakdown in human nature was waiting. But then Miles was younger and likely had more life vibrating in the marrow of his bones.

His red truck squealed around the corner of Tyler Street. The gigantic tires clunked onto the sidewalk stopping just inches from a fire hydrant. A mop of unruly black hair fell over his eyes as he slammed the door. I watched him cross his arms in front of him and take in what he saw. I know, Miles. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Under more normal circumstances, I would have said, Where’s the fire? when he approached me in front of the burning building, as irony had infused every one of our conversations lately. But this was different. Model Shoe Shine Parlor had been my father’s store for forty years, and in an hour it would be cinders.

I watched ten thoughts move through Miles’ head by a rash of conflicting expressions. Isn’t this— he started.

I just nodded.

Where the hell’s the fire department? I called them on my way and they said they’d been flooded with calls about this already. Miles could go from zero to outraged in the time it takes to sneeze.

I hear the siren, so they’re coming, I said. I yelled inside through the front door, but didn’t hear anything.

You think he’s still in there? Miles moved toward the small, standalone brick building and took stock of the flames bulging out the front windows and part of the roof.

I grabbed him and gave him one of my taming looks. Ernie knows enough to get out of a burning building. For God’s sake.

How do you know? Maybe he can’t get out. Or was someone else working tonight?

Thirty minutes later, the kind of chaos that only an inner city crime scene can cause clogged up all of Chinatown and was spilling into East Boston. Three fire trucks, almost twenty patrol cars, crime scene investigation crew, evidence team, ambulance, EMT’s, which as usual left Miles and me to piece it all together. To make matters worse, the investigation was being proctored by a mass of a hundred frightened onlookers. Though ninety percent of Chinatown’s residents were Chinese, over half of the businesses were run by Vietnamese immigrants and everybody was interested in spectating the burning shoe parlor. I could imagine their thoughts. Does fire jump from one building to another? Will this hurt my business if my store is in the same block? What caused the fire in the first place?

They must have deemed this a small fire, I decided as one heavily clad firefighter unrolled a relatively thin hose from the back of the long truck. In twenty minutes, the shoe parlor was dense with water and thick black fog. There was something still in there. I could feel the familiar vibration in my hands like I usually did before we found evidence. I could tell Miles was thinking the same thing. I followed him into the eerie blackness of the store with my hat covering my nose and mouth, and after only a moment of being inside, my flashlight beam lit up a body on the north wall of the interior. Miles held the light on the face and looked up at me.

Not him, I said without even looking. I knew it wasn’t.

While he bent down to find a pulse from the man’s exposed neck, I yelled for the EMT’s outside in the street.

Do you recognize him?

He had a lot of Vietnamese clients. Could be anybody. I shook my head and wondered. Ernie was as far away from Chinatown right now as I was from my own roots. Hell, he could be back in Naples for all I knew. My father, Ernie DiTroia, was the only old world Italian business owner on the whole length of Tyler Street.

The Chinese wear shoes, Francine, he would always say. So do the Vietnamese. Shoes get worn and dirty. Then they come to me. But having gone to work with him every day in the summers as a child, I knew shoes had little to do with why men went to Ernie’s shoe parlor. Every morning between late June and early September, we’d take the Orange Line, just the two of us, from the North End to Chinatown before anybody else was even out of bed. We’d stop at Montillio’s and he’d buy himself a coffee and buy me my favorite pastry—a Bismarck. We’d eat breakfast on the jiggling plastic seats of the subway and watch the flickering lights augment fleeting glimpses of the waterfront when the railcar came above ground.

Men came to Ernie’s shoeshine parlor to be with other men during a time in history before it was taboo to say such a thing. Of course, there were the bread and butter clients—the steady stream of Chinese and Vietnamese businessmen who had their shoes shined every morning while they sipped coffee and read the newspaper. But it was the other populous that really kept Ernie alive all these years. A group of elderly, mostly retired Italian laborers from the North End as well as some Irishmen from Southie, two old world Chinese acupuncturists, a few low-on-the-totem-pole wise guys and Uncle Oscar, Ernie’s older brother, met there every morning at seven o’clock. Of course in the beginning, their arrivals had been staggered and haphazard. After a while, though, Ernie said the men told their wives that they were going to a neighborhood association meeting. It wasn’t that far from the truth. They’d wear their best shoes and muddy them up on the way into South Cove, then sit with their coffee and cigars and donuts and complain about lawmakers and people with authority jammed up their asses. These were the meetings I got to see. Uncle Oscar always brought donuts and an extra little white bag with a surprise for me. I got passed around from the laps of old men of every age and ethnicity, and I thought the whole world was a big social commune like this. My culture shock didn’t come until later when I encountered the homogenous student body at Skidmore College. I still tried to fit in, even though I knew I didn’t. Then when I came back south, joined the Boston PD and met Miles, I stopped trying. Suddenly I knew a bigger misfit than myself.

Ernie never said much about the other meetings, not to me or my mother or to my two older brothers. But I was convinced Frankie and Rick knew something. When I asked Frankie, he was closest to my age, if Ernie’s store was actually a secret mob front, he didn’t answer. Sometimes during the summers when I used to go to the parlor with him, he’d let me go off and wander around Chinatown by myself for a while. For the first few weeks, I went into all the Chinese markets and herbal clinics and watched the ancient healers mash up stinky concoctions of roots and berries in heavy stone bowls. Uncle Oscar, a retired cop, used to walk me to South Cove and Ping-on Alley so I could see what most kids my age never got to see. That’s when I first wanted to be a police officer. Here I was holding Oscar’s hand, ultimately protected, watching him try to rid the world of bad things and bad people. To me, it seemed better than being a movie star.

When he retired, I started sneaking into the back of the parlor from the alley between Tyler and Kneeland Streets to listen to the Friday morning business meetings. Ernie said they were just businessmen talking about normal things. But as I got older and realized the same men had been coming there for eight years, I started logging their conversations in my diary. Of the ten who arrived every Friday at eight o’clock, four were real estate developers, one real estate broker, a state senator, two city councilmen, someone named Strand who wrote for The Globe and a man who worked for City Zoning. All nine of them sucked up to the zoning guy shamelessly, as he had the power to either approve

Reviews for Escape

[roses7184_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short stories are becoming my new favorite read of choice! After reading a particularly long set of books, it's nice to dive into a collection of short stories. They are like tiny hors devours, sating my appetite until I'm ready to take on another long book. My favorite type of short stories? Horror or mystery. So when I was approached by Lisa Polisar to review her newest collection, of course I agreed!

Let me say that I loved this collection of short stories! They are fast paced, full of great wit and dialogue, and each one is so different. Polisar is able to pack a huge punch into each and every story. By far, I have to say that I fell in love with her ability to create such fantastic characters in such a short word count. My favorite would have to be Francine from "Dixie's Glass". She was sassy, smart, and a bit lost. Loved her! All the characters in this collection are amazing though.

The only thing that lost me a little bit was the endings to a few of the stories. It may have been the fact that I just completely missed whatever the message was! I don't deny that it sometimes happens. However the stories I got the most out of were the ones that the endings really caught my attention and blew me away. Honestly, the best part about a collection of short stories is that even if one story throws you off, you have the ability to completely fall in love with the next one.

Are you a mystery fan? Do you enjoy short stories? Then this collection is definitely for you! I highly recommend it, and hope that you become a fan of Lisa's work as well!

[tvaleros_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

First off, let me just get this out of the way, I rated this book 3 Stars because this was my very FIRST mystery novel. I like to take a break sometimes from my young adult (ya) shelf, and this time I went for mystery. =) ... So, I'm baseing my rating on that I REALLY am not a mystery girl...I'll stick to YA fiction. This book is compiled with eight (8) short stories. This is great when you want to take a break from your usual reads. But there were at least 3 stories I was so upset at the ending because I wanted MORE!! Don't you just hate that when it comes to short stories!? Those stories had great potential to become full on novel material =D Ms Polisar has a great way of giving a vivid and indepth look on her characters. She had me well interested in getting to know more about them. And each ending were so different from each other and punchy, it's what had me turning pages to find out what was going to happen next and what's the next story going to be. I'm blown away on Ms Polisar's gift of weaving compelling mystery in such short stories and of few words. If you'd like to take a break from those longs reads, and want to get into some mystery - Escape is trully a worthy 'escape' from the norm. Thank you so much Lisa for giving me the oppotunity to venture into the mystery realm!! ^_^