Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº21

By Nick Petrie, Reed Farrel Coleman, Sharon Hunt and 4 more

Issue Nº21 features:

A new "Lewis" novella by Nick Petrie

A curated collection of short fiction including stories by Reed Farrel Coleman, Art Taylor, Alan Orloff, Sharon Hunt, Albert Kanach, and Jeff Markowitz. 

Essays, Interviews and Reviews by Heather Levy, Zakariah Johnson, and Dale Davis. 

Art and Photography by Arturo Arvizu, Kseniia Nikitina, and Bade Fuwa. 

This issue also features a preview of the new graphic novel "Where The Body Was" by award-winning duo Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. 

NY Times Bestselling author Reed Farrel Coleman has called Mystery Tribune “a cut above” and mystery grand masters Lawrence Block and Max Allan Collins have praised it for its “solid fiction” and “the most elegant design”.

An elegantly crafted quarterly issue, printed on uncoated paper and with a beautiful layout designed for optimal reading experience, our Issue Nº21 issue will make a perfect companion or gift for avid mystery readers and fans of literary crime fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mystery Tribune
• Release date: Jan 19, 2024

Book preview

Toasters

Fiction

Toasters

by Reed Farrel Coleman

I picked up Casey’s .45 after clicking off the phone. It was only then, having heard Mary Johnson cackling at me on the other end of the line, that I realized I had so willingly been played for a fool. That there was a zigzag-y line leading from Mary Johnson’s visit to my office to the bullet that Casey had just put through her brain. I wasn’t going to let that stand.

Revenge made no sense, which is why I wanted it more than anything. Perhaps more than anything else. Ever! I don’t know, maybe it was a shout into the abyss. Just lately, I’ve come to view all human life that way, a shout into the abyss. As a kid, I saw a western from the ‘70s, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Maybe it was like that. My declaration of being or having been. Of course, the abyss was no longer some metaphorical rabbit hole or bottomless pit, and there would be no them to tell or care. It’s like this entry in my moot diary. A shout destined to be unheard.

Since Red Sunday, we knew the abyss awaited us all. Yeah, yeah, death is our collective fate, regardless. I get it, but it’s different when you know it’s coming for you and everyone else on the same date. Tuesday, poker with the boys. Thursday, laundry. Saturday, End of the World. That’s how it was. That’s how it will be. Problem was we knew it was coming, just not when exactly. Until we got the bad news, we’d been able to fool ourselves that the daily grind had some intrinsic meaning and significance, but we’d seen the man behind the curtain and knew it would all come to nothing. The forty hours a week, two weeks paid vacation, five sick days, three personal days, the health plan, the 401k… Nothing! Not many folks felt motivated to don the blue vest to greet Walmart shoppers. Good morning. Toasters? Aisle 12. Toasters indeed! There was no bread to toast. With few people willing to work, shortages were a fact of life, though there were three things not in short supply: shortages, suicides, and predictions. For most of our history, we’d been dealing with doomsday dates. Until Red Sunday they’d all passed without incident, predictions easily ignored and forgotten. Not so easy now with the sun blotted out by volcanic ash and the stink of sulfur so intense that everything you ate tasted like it was seasoned with dried rotten eggs.

Always a restless soul, I’d moved back as far east as I could.

I was one of the people who’d kept at the grind. Within a brief timespan following Red Sunday, I’d gone from the NYPD to the NY State Police to the Federal Inland Police Department. With each assignment, I was relocated further inland. Swaths of both coasts were either under water, under lava, or under siege. When my marriage blew up, I traded in most of my pension for an M4, a Crown Vic, and a gas ration allowance. In the land of shortages and desperation, the man with a car, a full tank, and an automatic rifle is king.

Always a restless soul, I’d moved back as far east as I could. I once heard someone say that if she was going to die in a nuclear war, she wanted to stand at ground zero, right beneath the first explosion to get it over with. Maybe that’s what I was doing by moving back east, or maybe humans were more like salmon than we liked to think, and I just wanted to get back as close to home to die as I could.

The one romantic indulgence I allowed myself was to become a PI. It kept me busy, busier than you’d think. You’d be surprised at how guilt and knowing you were soon going to die motivated people to find family on whom they had long ago turned their backs or vice versa. Finding old lovers was big, too. The clients who were most plentiful were the the ones who wanted to repay old debts or who just wanted to apologize for some ancient transgression that had eaten away at them. Inevitably, those clients would mutter something about wanting to die in peace or with a clear conscience. Fools! Nine out of ten times, the people I found for them had long forgotten the transgression. Many had totally forgotten the person who’d hired me in the first place. Who hired you? For what? The biggest fool of all, Brian Schiavo, hired me to bring him into an FIPD field office to surrender for an unsolved murder he’d committed thirty years before. When we showed, the CO rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and told us to get out. Unless you’re bringing me Adolph fucking Hitler, stop wasting my time!

That thriving segment of my business began drying up in inverse proportion to the appearance of fissures like the Appalachian Divide and the Sierra Madre Split, when lava began pouring out into the encroaching oceans. Suddenly, guilt, unpaid debts, and old sorrows took a backseat to survival. The world became populated by scared rats climbing to the tallest mast of a sinking ship. A famous writer once said noir meant that everyone was fucked on page one and then things only got worse. It was like that. It didn’t get more noir than the end of the world, and we were a lot closer to the epilogue than the first chapter. My business dwindled to almost nothing until the day Mary Johnson, a woman seemingly as generic as her name, walked into my office with a tale of her dead baby and murder.

Mary Johnson, whose infant son James had almost certainly died of Sudden Unexplained Infant Death Syndrome—what used to be called SIDS—clung stubbornly to the belief the boy had been murdered. Her proof? A purposely vague second autopsy done by a heroin-addicted doctor living in the once posh netherlands of New Jersey. An area destined, in short order, to make the watery transition from wealthy inland outpost to oceanfront property to submerged. Like I said, my business had all but disappeared, and I needed something to keep me occupied.

She’d set me up just right, playing her approach in the perfect key of desperation, but without being shrill about it. She said I was her last resort, that without my help she had nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to. Her plea for help, like the rest of her routine, was skillfully done. Yeah, I guess it was insulting to be a last resort, but it was also a challenge. I’ll show you, Mary Johnson. Yes, I will. Armageddon be damned! And to top it off, she began to undress and undress me, offering herself to me as incentive. I said no, although I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t tempted. Since Jillian had split, I hadn’t been with a woman.

My first stop was the (B)order (E)vacuation (Z)one town where Doc Ellington practiced. Ellington, he of the vague second autopsy and opioid addiction. Looking like a yellowy-skinned Ichabod Crane, he greeted me with a forty-caliber Beretta. Once I assured him that if I wanted to do him harm, I wouldn’t have knocked and would have simply blown his head off with my M4, he let me in. Besides, he was jonesing for a fix and wanted rid of me A-SAP.

I guess I should have known I was being set up as a stalking horse when Ellington, sweating, sniffling, scratching his arm, mentioned in passing that he’d been doing abortions. My second hint should have been the shattering glass behind Ellington’s desk and his head fairly exploding in my face. The third hint… the perfect replica of a female human fetus, umbilical cord attached, that I found outside Ellington’s house. A red-painted crucifix around the tiny fetus’s neck. But I didn’t see the zigzag-y line then. I should have known. A meaningless phrase unless in retrospect.

After Red Sunday, the already stark lines drawn dividing both sides of the abortion issue took an abrupt U-turn as if the planet’s magnetic poles reversed. Oddly, that was about the only way the Earth remained stable. With the end days at hand, the bulk of the most radical pro-lifers—the clinic bombers and provider assassins—flipped their position, deeming it a sin beyond all others to bring new life into a doomed world. That to do so was to show utter contempt for God. They were known unofficially as the Holy Defilers, for they had set up an underground network to perform as many abortions as was possible before D-Day.

It was why I’d gone straight to Brixton from Ellington’s house. Brixton was a shithole town in an evacuation zone where anything went, the kind of place where the HDs could operate in relative obscurity amongst the Russian roulette parlors, brothels catering to all tastes, and the churches where hope, forgiveness, and salvation were bartered for finance, food, or flesh. I had no idea that there in Brixton was a living piece of my long-ago past. Her name was Casey Rucco.

She was working behind the first bar I walked into. I didn’t recognize her so much as her sapphire blue eyes. Eyes without a face like on the cover of The Great Gatsby. Eyes I couldn’t forget even when the rest of her memory had faded away with time. Casey Rucco, my high school crush. The girl I’d come this close to being with back in high school, but who had slipped through my fingers and out of my life. Casey, who I found out was one of the leaders of the Holy Defilers. Sleeping together at last, we got back what we had lost on a bus in Brooklyn somewhere between the Kings Plaza Mall and the Windjammer Motel. A ride during which her Yes, please became a soul crushing No, I can’t. I’m sorry. The what if of that bus ride had haunted me on and off for decades.

Only afterward, when the shudders and sighs had subsided and reality, like the stink of sulfur, had set back in, did I understand we were no longer who we once were and that fucking now did little to erase the decades of hurt, yearning, and resentment. Satisfying old curiosities was a Band-Aid on a tumor. Casey, her breathing calmed, revealed the ugly and obvious truth to me that Mary Johnson’s story of a murdered baby had blinded me to. I had led Doc Ellington’s killers—Casey’s former allies, the (S)till (B)elievers—to her doorstep, and that she would be dead by morning either at their hands or her own. She chose her own.

My eyes finally opened by the sound of Mary Johnson’s derision, I took Casey’s .45, her satellite phone, and got out of Brixton. I had no desire to spend my remaining days caught in the coming crossfire between the HDs and the SBs. The irony of two groups who believed their view in the sanctity of life was the better claim murdering one another in the streets when we were all just going to die soon anyway wasn’t lost on me. It was to laugh, no? I wasn’t laughing. Vengeance didn’t leave me time for that.

I still had friends in the FIPD. I knew I could count on Bob Mark. Bob, who had moved with me from the NYPD to the NYSPD to the FIPD, would have put in his papers when I did, but he was older and had no other family except for the cops.

Where would I go, Ish, if I quit now? he’d said to me, patting me goodbye on the biceps on my way out the door. What would I do? Too late to take golf lessons or learn how to build ships in a bottle.

I was thinking about Bob as I rode east back towards Ellington’s house. I figured he wasn’t using it, and I doubted anyone would bother looking for me there if anyone bothered to look. The way I saw it, Casey’s old Defiler chums would soon be too busy defending themselves to come after me for bringing trouble to their door. Clear of Brixton, I pulled off the road, set up the phone, and gave Bob a call.

Ish!

You sound surprised to hear from me, Bobelu.

I’m surprised to hear from anybody these days. A lot of the squad followed your lead and left. Most of them didn’t bother asking and just took their weapons and whatever vehicles they could find.

Page 19

But not you?

C’mon, Ish.

Yeah, I know, no golf lessons or ships in a bottle for you.

So…

I need some intel, Bobelu.

Sure.

The SBs. Where are they based these days.

There was silence at the other end of the phone. Then, Why?

Because.

It’s like that, huh, Ish?

Just like that.

They’ve set up camp in a little town on the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border, a place called Unionville. You figure on going there?

Maybe.

You do, you take care. The SBs have made it their own, and if you thought they were cult-y after Red Sunday, forget about it now. Once the Appalachian Divide made it to the Atlantic, things took a bad turn. When we sent our first team in there to keep order, they were forcibly kicked out. Their message to us was that they’d keep order in their own town their own way, and we better not come back. You remember Captain Byrnes?

Dennis Byrnes, sure.

He didn’t take to being told what to do by a group of civilians, so he took a team into Unionville. We never heard back from them.

Thanks for the heads-up, Bobelu.

Forget heads up. You go in there, you keep yours down low.

I didn’t bother with goodbye. What was the point?

I turned around and headed back west. Unionville and Brixton were less than fifty miles apart. As is often the case in bitter conflict, the warring parties were nearly side by side. If I’d had any doubts that Casey’s prediction of her impending murder had been wrong, they were erased by the convoy of vehicles—two armored Iraq-era Humvees with mounted miniguns and three M939 trucks, their cargo areas full of armed men and women—heading past me toward Brixton. These people were serious and seriously deranged. Deranged had lost all meaning these days. I suppose everyone sliding down the drain was looking for something, anything to grab hold of as a distraction from the inevitable. Who was I to judge? I was a ridiculous PI cum avenging angel. They wanted blood. I wanted blood. My reasons made no more sense than theirs.

One thing that convoy told me was that I probably wouldn’t be able to simply drive into Unionville without justification. My suspicions were confirmed by the warning signs on both sides of the road leading into and out of town. Every half