Fear City
Authors: F. Paul Wilson
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the usual crew for their efforts: my wife, Mary; David Hartwell, Marco Palmieri, and Becky Maines at the publisher; Steven Spruill, Elizabeth Monteleone, Marc Buhmann, Dannielle Romeo; and my agent, Albert Zuckerman.
Once again,
Surviving the Mob: A Street Soldier's Life Inside the Gambino Crime Family
by Dennis N. Griffin and Andrew DiDonato offered valuable insights into Mob life in the 1990s.
Special thanks to Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Deidre Murphy, and Peg Tyre for writing
Two Seconds Under the World,
an invaluable resource regarding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
Fear City
will be the last Repairman Jack novel for a while ⦠maybe forever.
After sixteen novels (counting
Nightworld
) in the main sequence plus three juveniles and three prequels, Jack needs a rest. With his return in 1998, he took over my writing career. I don't regret it. We've had a great run and I loved every minute of it. But his tale was never intended as an open-ended series. We had a destinationâ
Nightworld
âand we reached it. Now I'm going to go back to my genre-hopping ways, and will be plugging new work into the Secret History when appropriate.
I'm not saying I will never write another Repairman Jack novel. If an idea pops up that's perfect for our guy, I won't hesitate to write that book. But the routine of a new Repairman Jack novel every fall is over.
See you again soon, I hope. I've got some surprises for you.
âF. Paul Wilson,
the Jersey Shore
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CONTENTS
The Secret History of the World
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TUESDAY
FEBRUARY 16, 1993
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1
“Is this the Shadow?” Jack said, holding up the cellophane envelope. “I mean,
the
Shadow?”
The sixtyish guy behind the counterâlank hair, three-day stubble, ratty brown cardiganâlooked annoyed as he brought it close to his smeared glasses and squinted at the label. Jack wondered how he saw anything through them.
“If it says âgenuine glow in the dark Shadow ring,' which it does, then that's what it is.”
Attracted by the
BACK-DATE MAGAZINES
sign, Jack had wandered into this narrow, coffin-sized store off Times Square. The place seemed to specialize in
Life
magazine and had moldy issues piled to the ceiling. Jack had been curious to see if the place stocked any old pulps. It did, but only a few, and those had disconcerting titles like
Ranch Romances
and
Fifteen Love Stories
. None of the
Black Mask
types he was hunting for. But tucked in among the yellowed, flaking issues he'd found the ring.
The white plastic body was shaped like the Shadow on each sideâJack could even make out a .45 Colt semiauto in one handâbut the stone set in the top was bright blue and shaped like Gibraltar.
“But this looks nothing like the Shadow's girasol ring.”
The guy stared at him. “Do you even know what a girasol is?”
“Fire opal.”
This seemed to take him by surprise. “Okay. Point for you. What are youâeighteen?”
Jack didn't react. He got this all the time. “You're half a dozen short.”
“Coulda fooled me. But still a kid. How does a twenty-four-year-old like you know about the Shadow's girasol ring?”
“Read a few old issues.”
“That's the pulp Shadow. The character started on radio, sponsored by a company called Blue Coal. That blue plastic âstone' there is supposed to be a chunk of blue coal.”
Jack was thinking it was just about the neatest thing he'd seen in a long time.
“And it glows in the dark too?”
“That's what it says. Never tested it.”
“How much?”
“Twenty bucks.”
“What?”
“That'll be a bargain next year after the movie comes out.”
“What movie?”
“
The Shadow
. Gonna star Alec Baldwin, I hear.”
Jack remembered him from
The Hunt for Red October
. Yeah, he had the look for the Lamont Cranston part.
“So if I'm tired of it next year you'll buy it back for more?”
“Can't promise that. Can't even promise I'll be here, what with Disney moving in.”
News to Jack.
“Disney? Here?”
“Word is they're negotiating a ninety-nine-year lease on the Amsterdam.”
“Donald Duck on the Deuce? No way.”
“Everybody's scared shitless because it'll be proof that the Times Square cleanup every mayor since LaGuardia's been talking about is gonna happen, and you know what that means.”
Jack pushed aside a vision of Minnie Mouse in hot pants saying, “Hiya, sailor.”
“What?”
“Rents through the roof. Guys like me forced out, moving over to Hell's Kitchen or farther downtown or just closing up and walking away.”
“Oh, no! Where will people go for their copies of
Ranch Romances
?”
His eyes narrowed behind the grimy lenses. “You a wiseass?”
Jack could see the guy was genuinely worried. He thought about boxing up and moving all those copies of
Life
and regretted the remark.
“Sometimes the mouth runs ahead of the brain.”
“People get in trouble that way.”
“Tell me about it.”
He forked over a Jackson. The guy slipped it into his pocket and didn't ask for sales tax. Fine.
Jack walked out with his treasure and slipped it onto his pinky finger. He ambled east toward Times Square, thinking not of the Shadow but of Disney instead.
What he remembered most about Disney World from the couple of times his folks had taken him there during the seventies was how clean it had been. Could that happen here? Times Square was anything but clean, and 42nd Street even less so. But grime and kitsch and porn and fringe people were part of the ambience. Take that away and replace it with a bunch of high-end chain stores and what did you have? You had a freaking mall. Might as well move back to Jersey.
As he crossed Duffy Square and headed up Seventh Avenue, he realized the writing had been on the wall for a couple of years now, ever since the state started buying up properties along the Deuce, especially the old theaters.
Plus ça change�
Jack doubted it.
If the magazine guy was right about the Amsterdam, then change was sure as hell coming and, as far as Jack was concerned, not for the better. Well, better if you were a landlord, but no way for a small businessman. Things would not, as the saying went, stay the same. All the quirky little stores and all the quirky people who frequented them and all the quirky people who ran them were going to go the way of the Neanderthals.
His growing dark mood about the end of an era was blown away by the sight of a familiar face trying to hail a cab across the street from the Winter Garden. She was talking on a mobile phone as she waved her arm.
“Cristin?”
She turned and, for an instant, looked not-so-pleasantly surprised. Then she smiled. “Jack! How nice to see you!”
They shared a quick, slightly awkward hug.