Authors: Ryan David Jahn
Good Neighbors
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
GOOD NEIGHBORS
Ryan David Jahn grew up in Arizona, Texas, and California. He left school at sixteen to work in a record store and subsequently joined the army. Since 2004 he has worked in television and film. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Mary.
Acclaim from the UK for
Good Neighbors
“A terrific debut . . . A wonderfully visual book—the effect is of watching, unseen, through a dozen different windows as Jahn switches from one scenario to the next. Powerful, compassionate and authentic, it works both as a mystery and as a snapshot of America in the early 1960s.”
—
The Guardian
“Gripping . . . Jahn takes the nub of the real Genovese case and weaves a superb series of fictional stories around it. . . . He constructs a convincing edifice of doubt, anger, jealousy, despair and a host of other emotions leading inexorably to the same conclusion: do nothing.”
—
The Times
“A striking first novel . . . It contains genuine insights into the way people act under pressure.”
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The Sunday Times
“An astounding piece of fiction. It grips you like a vise from the beginning and doesn’t let you go. . . . [Jahn is a] bright new star to crime fiction.”
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Crimesquad
“An audacious, inventive piece of literary thriller writing . . . Jahn’s novel is subtle, delicately constructed and displays a fine ear for dialogue. It also announces the arrival of a distinctive new talent.”
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Daily Mail
“Brutal and immediate . . . Cleverly written, accomplished and gripping . . . At times I had to stop reading to catch my breath.”
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The Bookseller
“Dark, compelling and powerful . . . Jahn is a rare and fine talent.”
—R. J. Ellory, author of
A Quiet Belief in Angels
“Without a doubt, the most outstanding novel I have read this year.”
—Rhian Davies, It’s a Crime!
“Jahn’s violent amorality tale has . . . drawn well-earned comparisons with Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy. . . . Gripping, and layered with juicy, scathing insights into the relationships and politics of the era, Jahn proves himself as a promising noir talent.”
—
The List
“Addictive and compelling.”—
BookTime
“A gripping and thoughtful psychological thriller . . . Terse, telegraphic and present-tense, Jahn’s style creates a voyeuristic distance between reader and characters that perfectly matches his theme, the fearfulness and atomization of urban life that encourages each man to be an island.”
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Financial Times
“A very accomplished debut, a gripping thriller based on a real event in ’60s America. Moving quickly from perspective to perspective, it scoops the reader up from page one and does not let go. This is not only a crime novel, but a brilliant evocation of’60s New York in terms of its prejudices, its corruption and its humanity.”
—Crime Writers Association Dagger Award judges’ citation
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, • Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, • New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Great Britain under the title
Acts of Violence
by
Macmillan New Writing, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd 2009
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Ryan David Jahn 2009
All rights reserved
Excerpt from
Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo.
Copyright 1939 by Dalton Trumbo. By permission of Kensington Books.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Jahn, Ryan David.
Good neighbors / Ryan David Jahn.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-52870-9
1. Murder—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Crime prevention—Citizen participation—Fiction. 3. Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.A356G66 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011007445
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Mary –
with all of my love
1
It begins in a parking lot.
The lot sits behind a sports bar, a brick building which has been wounded and scarred many times during its long history. It’s been hit by drunk drivers who went backwards instead of forwards, had initials carved into it, and been attacked by drunken vandals. Once, fifteen years ago, someone tried to set it on fire. Unfortunately for the potential arsonist, the forecast included rain. And so the sports bar still stands.
It is nearly four o’clock in the morning, three fifty-eight, a dead-dark time before even a hint of light has touched the eastern horizon. Just darkness.
The bar is closed and silent.
Only three cars sit in its usually bustling parking lot: a 1957 Studebaker, a 1953 Oldsmobile, and a 1962 Ford Galaxie with a dented fender. Two of those cars belong to patrons. One of them a door-to-door salesman who spends his days trying to unload vacuum cleaners; the other unemployed, spending his days staring at the cracked ceiling of the apartment for which he’s three months behind on rent. Both had a few too many earlier in the night and found other means of getting home, taxi rides most likely. Particularly the unemployed guy. The salesman might have hitched a ride with a buddy, but the unemployed guy almost certainly took a cab. If you have thirty dollars and rent is eighty, there’s no point in saving any of it. Drink till you’re drunk and pay for a ride home. You might as well enjoy your trip to the bottom. It’s when you’ve got eighty-seven dollars and the rent’s eighty that you need to save.
Paper cups and other trash – newspapers, food wrappers – litter the sun-faded asphalt. A whistling breeze pushes the litter across the cracked surface, just for a moment, rearranging the refuse slightly before going still again.
And then a pretty girl – a woman, really, though she doesn’t
feel
like a grown-up – pushes her way out the front door of the sports bar.
Her name is Katrina – Katrina Marino – but almost everyone calls her Kat. The only people who still call her Katrina are her folks, to whom she talks every Saturday on the telephone. They live four hundred miles away, but still manage to saddle up and ride her nerves just fine. When are you going to finally wise up and leave that cesspool of a city, Katrina? It’s dangerous. When are you going to settle down with a nice young man, Katrina? A girl your age shouldn’t be single. You’re closer to thirty than you are to twenty, you know. Soon, you won’t have the youthful beauty to catch a nice man, a doctor or a lawyer, and you’ll have to settle. You don’t want to have to settle, do you, Katrina?