Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

“I never... hurt anybody,” he said. “I just fucked ’em, thass all.”

Nikki shoved him into a deck chair, pressed the button for the mechanical winch, and the anchor rose. She climbed to the fly deck and started the twin engines. When she was done here, she would simply steer the boat to the small fishing dock, hop off, and let the tide take The Dog’s Life back out into the dark bay. But first Nikki descended to the deck and packed up the picnic basket which she’d take with her, then washed the flute glass, filled the champagne bottle with water, and threw them into the bay. She used the Windex to wipe her fingerprints from everything she’d touched on board. She’d get rid of her sneakers before she got home, in case they left footprints.

Nikki led Dr. Sheridan, who was barely able to walk, to the edge of the aft deck. She opened the entry gate and looked him in his bleary eyes. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.

His head flopped like a bobble doll’s. “Shuuunday.”

“It’s the third Shuuunday of Juuuuune, assbag,” she said, mocking him. “That’s the day my mother, Eileen Lavin, jumped from this bridge twenty-five years ago.”

“Fuckin’ nutjob.” His voice sounded like it was coming out of a deep well.

She opened the gate. “Fuck you.”

“How... can joo do thish... to me?”

“Easy,” Nikki Lavin Sheridan replied, shrugging. “I have your blood in my veins.”

“Please...”

“Happy Father’s Day, Dad,” she said, and pushed him into the black water. She watched him flail and kick. The ketamine was paralyzing him. He tried to scream but his mouth filled with water, and Nikki watched Dr. George Sheridan slip into the same grave that had swallowed her mother under the Throgs Neck Bridge.

The Rockaways

He’s waiting for her to die, Rose knows. She’s no dummy. It’s June and her son, Paulie, is once again thinking about inheriting her house on Rockaway Beach.

“You’re getting up there,” is this year’s phraseology, as if turning eighty-five begins her ascent. Up and up, she’ll levitate a little higher each birthday, while Paul, Maureen, and the kids line up on the sand waving bye bye. Paulie’s latest brainstorm is to just move in now — this weekend. “We’ll take care of you,” he insists, somehow oblivious to the way this sounds.

“Maureen’s a doctor, after all. You’ll get to play with your grandkids. All the time!”

“Oh, they’d sure love the free baby-sitting...” Rose is telling her new Chinese friend, Li. “But at fourteen and ten? Those kids think I’m boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do! I’m no dummy!”

This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she’s collapsed in a stained dining room chair, cradling her arthritic elbow. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first ever crimes (give or take a little parking on her late husband Vincent’s handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with pride. If Vin, may he rest in peace, could see Li lying here in his favorite shirt — the ivory one with black piping and breast pocket snaps — he’d surely be impressed. Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to spend each Sunday morning riding around Belle Harbor on their mopeds. “The Good Guys” they called themselves, and went looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to this Robin Hood level: A good deed and a crime too!

“It was mostly his excuse to get out of church,” Rose adds and crosses herself; a reflex.

“ Yesu Jidu! ” Li suddenly claps from his spot beneath the dining room table, an awkward choice of seating conversation-wise but okay; maybe it’s cultural.

“ Yesu Jidu?... Parla Inglese? ” Maybe he’s dreaming with his eyes open. So weak and emaciated, it’s like taking care of a child again. Like Vin in the end. But this fellow can’t be much older than thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal frame and wet-looking hair even now that it’s dried. In one hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With the other, he points a shaky finger at the iron crucifix from Calabria hung over Rose’s marble sideboard.

“ Yesu Jidu, ” he repeats. “Me!”

At last, Rose gets it. “You’re Jesus Christ! Well, no wonder we’re hitting it off!”

And not an hour ago, he was on his knees, in his undies, puking up the Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.

For some reason, this cracks her up all over again.

When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was ringing too. Rose fumbled for her bifocals. Three a.m.

“Are all the doors locked?” Paulie panted. “Turn on the TV! There’s a boatload of illegal chinks out—!”

“Who taught you to talk like that?”

“I’m comin’ over.”

“Who said?”

“Don’t you get it? They’re washin’ up by — what?”

“What?”

“I heard something.”

“Helicopters?”

“Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!”

It was easier to just push aside the window curtain. Yes, the giant metal insects were out there hovering. But that was not so unusual here on the shore where they’re often called in for drownings, drug traffickers, and big-wig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound dead whale that just washed up in Arverne Friday, the sky had been pocked with press copters all week. But this new swarm buzzed the other end of the beach, up near Riis Park, and seemed to be composed of police and Coast Guard choppers.

“Get Dad’s gun; I’ll feel better.”

“Paulie...”

“Get it, Ma, or they’ll be stormin’ our fuckin’ house.”

“Who taught you that language?” Our house.

“If you don’t get it, I’m comin’.”

So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She’d never get back to sleep now anyhow. Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Paul’s old red surf-shop sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammer toe or two.

The gun, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent’s Bootery on 116th Street was hidden, appropriately, in one of Vin’s old cowboy boots. It was painful, physically and every which way, for Rose to crouch in the closet and extract it. Yet she lingered, running her hand along the familiar broken-in black leather and fancy white boot stitching, letting herself miss the husband she mostly despised. The revolver sagged heavily in her big front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. Vincent’s Bootery was now a cell phone store.

The backdoor sticks. To open it, you have to lean with your whole weight, wham , shoulder-first. Each time Rose does this, she imagines falling onto the brick patio where she’ll lay in crumpled agony until 8:30 a.m. when, obligated, Paulie comes to check she’s not drinking, and forevermore forces her to wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of emergencies.

“I know you would have come and rescued me,” Rose says, as she shuffles toward Li with a breakfast tray. “If I were out there wailing in pain, I know you would.”

Li just bows (or has a cramp). He reaches clumsily for the tray and a bowl skids off, smashing. Together, the two wrestle the food down to the scratched-up dining room tile. Can he hear all her joints popping? she wonders. His smooth black eyes both avoid and study her as if she’s a phantom or royalty, the Queen of Queens maybe.

“The Queen of Queens and Yesu Jidu will commence to dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca.”