Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

Branko needed to get back to his car, so he headed west on Fleet Street, averting his face as he crossed Wolfe in case anyone was on the lookout down at Flip’s. Once safely across he felt better. Then he began wishing he had the rest of that second Natty Boh. Watery or not, he needed a beer in the worst way.

A few blocks later he was calmer, perhaps because he had yet to hear a police siren. What Branko didn’t know was that the police were the last people Dusko would have called. For one thing, his green card was expired. For another, he too had old friends from the old country who would be happy to lend a hand.

In any case, Branko’s wandering as he tried to get his bearings-it was too dark to get out his map-had put him within sight of a bar on Ann Street. It was called the Wharf Rat, a promising name even if it briefly reminded him of his embarrassment back at Flip’s. A second beer would be all he needed to settle down. Then he would check the map and make his way back to the car.

The beer here was better, but it was $4 a pop. Another major dent in his stash.

“You should get that looked at,” the waitress said, and for the first time Branko noticed an ugly cut on his left hand, already crusting over with darkened blood.

“Yes,” he said, “you are right. I caught it in my car door.”

No sooner had he drained his glass than he had company-two rangy fellows, also in black leather jackets. Branko experienced a moment of recognition, much as Dusko had earlier, before one of them said in their native tongue, “Come with us.”

He reached for his jacket pocket, but a huge hand stopped him, while a second hand reached inside to retrieve the Glock. So much for self-defense. He figured he had better act quickly, while there were still other people around. So, just as the fellow was pocketing the gun, Branko bolted.

He barely eluded their grasp in his sprint for the door. He bowled over an entering couple, then managed to slip out just as the door was closing, heading left down the cobblestoned street. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the two men were only ten yards behind. He expected gunshots at any moment. The waterfront was dead ahead, and he dered if he was going to have to leap into the harbor. He n’t a good swimmer, and the water hadn’t looked like the sort you’d want to swim in. Footsteps pounded behind him, loud slaps on the stones, but still no shots. Nearing the end of the block, he was relieved to see a cross street going in both directions along the wharf.

But it was the sight to his right that suddenly seemed to make all the difference. He recognized it instantly. In fact, he would have known it anywhere, in any context, but especially here in Balty-more-the hulking brick building with grand arched windows and five fat marble columns aligned across the second-story façade, the blue and white lampposts out front flanking the marble steps of the entrance. And now, as his racing footsteps and rising spirits led him closer, he could make out the black and gold lettering on the plate glass above the door: “Baltimore City Police.”

No wonder his pursuers hadn’t fired shots. They’d been practically standing in the cops’ backyard. Branko ran harder even as his sense of relief grew. How appropriate that some desk sergeant would now be his salvation. Sure, he had botched the commission, but that too might sell as a script: the hapless hit man, so far from home, saved by the homicide squad, then sent home amid gales of affectionate laughter and promises that he would be a good boy from now on.

He still heard footsteps, but they’d be giving up soon. They wouldn’t dare pursue him inside, although it certainly was curious how dark the building seemed. Not at all the vibrant sort of place it was on television. And you would have thought a policeman or two would be in sight by now.

It wasn’t until Branko reached the top steps and found the doors locked that he realized his mistake. He shook the handles in vain, peering inside. Empty. Dark. Probably had been since the show left town. Wallpaper peeling in great shards, the floor in ruins. A pigeon strutted into view from the shadows, shitting as it walked.

But even as his assailants reached him, and even as they spun him round by the shoulder and sank a cold barrel into the flesh of his scrapple-filled stomach, Branko couldn’t resist a last fleeting vision of what this might all look like on film-camera dollying high for a downward shot of his darkened head and frightened face, the Balkan hit man with the tables turned, yet still with stars in his eyes.

Greenspring Valley

It wasn’t simply that the ghost of Slink Ridgely couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Annie Brewster’s marriage to the red-haired man. It was more than that. Much more. Slink knew. Of course he did. Ghosts know. Slink watched the ceremony mainly from the area of the empty choir stalls at Saint David’s, where he could best see Annie’s nervous and hopeful face. He watched the strong freckled fingers take hold of Annie’s shaky hand and work the ring onto her finger. Coming in close, he saw the mean truth in the man’s eyes. Annie’s truth, he already knew. He’d known it for quite a while now.

Doomed, he said to himself. Doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed…

Slink’s real name had been Edward. “Little Eddie,” up until he was around five, when he had landed in Johns Hopkins Hospital for a fairly nasty appendectomy and had received not one, not two, but three Slinkies as get-well gifts. Little Eddie was nuts for his Slinkies. Shing, shing, shing, he undulated them from hand to hand for hours at a time, one eye trained on the black-and-white television in the corner, for he was nuts about television as well. Hands-down favorite? The Early Riser. It was Little Eddie’s dream to grow up and get a job like the Early Riser, a janitor in a darkened TV studio who said, “ Pssst, come over here, ” to the camera first thing in the morning before anyone else had arrived for work, and then put cartoons on for the kids at home to watch.

It didn’t work out that way of course. There such job, except for the one guy who already had it, and of course he wasn’t a real janitor, he was the station’s weather guy wearing fake dusty clothes and a large fake bottle-brush mustache. Instead, Little Eddie grew up to be a milkman for Cloverland Dairy. Though by then he wasn’t Little Eddie anymore, nor Edward, nor Ed, and not even Slinky, which was what the large nurse with the nose mole had taken to calling him during his five days at Hopkins and which Little Eddie’s mother had picked up on. By the time he hit his tenth birthday, the diminutive had dropped away and he was Slink Ridgely, right up until his twenty-seventh year and the school bus/milk truck collision at the intersection of Caves Road and Garrison Forest Road. Slink’s tombstone read Edward Charles Ridgely. The first time Slink saw it he’d scoffed, “Right. Who the hell is he?

Strange day for Slink, that first day of being dead and buried. He logged ten straight hours hovering in one spot-directly in front of his tombstone-and just thinking. Unusual for a guy like Slink Ridgely, who had been a bobber and a weaver, always on the go, go, go.

Slink had loved his job. Four hours sleep was generally all he had needed, so rising and shining at 4 in the morning to start his route had been no big deal. He’d slide behind the wheel of his trusty Olds 98 with a cup of coffee in one hand and a Chesterfield dangling from his lips and be halfway to the dairy before the first light of day cracked the horizon. Skinny as a post, Slink would slip into his white delivery suit in the company locker room, lower his hat carefully over his precious wavy hair, then give a poke to the underside of the brim, easing the cap back on his head just so. Loading the truck took about twenty minutes, then a quick pop into the office to tell pale Sally a racy joke and have her straighten his bow tie for him, then he was ready to roll. The company frowned on its drivers smoking while on their routes, which is why Slink’s customers grew to know him as the skinny milkman with the rakish grin and the ever-present toothpick.