Read L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Online
Authors: Jonathan Santlofer
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Short Stories (Single Author)
L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (15 page)
“You drive in here, and you drive right out in that nice little Ford we got for you. California plates. You change clothes first, head north. The Mex car disappears, and so do you. Sound good?”
“Good enough,” the smaller man said.
“Not for me, it ain’t,” O’Reilly said. “What if the cops decide to stop that car? Me, I don’t speak Spanish.”
“The cops?” The obese man laughed. “Who do you think runs this town, the fucking mayor? The studios, that’s who’s in charge. The cops already got the license plate. If there’s one car that
ain’t
gonna be stopped tomorrow night, it’s that one over there.”
The man with O’Reilly lit a cigarette.
“You’d think they’d learn, wouldn’t you?” The fat man chuckled. “I mean, it was only a couple of months ago that they had to take out that yid? You know, the one Virginia Hill ended up with? Now
this
fuck, he thinks he’s out on this coast, they can’t reach out and touch him, too?”
“I’ve spent the night in better places,” O’Reilly said, surveying the space above the garage.
It was bare-bones, lacking even a radio, but it had two separate cots, a bathroom, and a refrigerator.
“And worse.”
“That, too,” O’Reilly agreed, watching his companion nail a large-scale map of their target area to the wall. “You really think it’ll be as easy as that fat slob says?”
“We come south on Formosa,” his partner said, drawing a line with a thick red grease pencil. “Then left on Melrose. We wait for the target to walk toward us. Soon as he passes by the car, I get out, step behind him, catch up quick, and put a couple in his head.
“I get back in the car. You take off. Make a left on Mansfield—see, right here?—a quick left again on Waring, takes us right back to Formosa. Go up a couple of blocks, make a right, and follow it all the way back here… Barton Avenue, that’s where we are now. After that, there’s nothing for us to do but drive back home.”
“How come I drive?”
“You’re a better driver than me.”
“What kind of piece is that?”
“Luger.”
“Never heard of it,” O’Reilly said. “Me, there’s nothing like the army-issue .45. It ain’t no target pistol, but whatever you hit with it, down they go. They
stay
down, too.”
“This one’s army-issue, too.”
“Huh?”
“German army. Just for officers—like yours—and very precise.”
“It don’t look like much.”
“Smaller rounds. Nine-millimeter. A little less than a .38, but very fast.
Has
to be. The way they designed these things, you need a lot of recoil to chamber the next cartridge.”
“Nine-millimeter. Even
sounds
weird.”
“Nine-millimeter Parabellum, they called it. The Germans, I mean. It’s from Latin. Means: if you want to be left in peace, be prepared for war.”
“Yeah? Makes sense to me. Okay. You want the shower first?”
“I’m good.”
The next night, at 10:57 p.m., a man wearing a black coat with red silk lining turned on Melrose and began to walk down the block. He glanced neither right nor left, but drew covert glances from a wide variety of nightcrawlers.
As he passed a blood-orange 1945 Chevrolet dropped almost to street level, a man got out of the passenger seat, fell into step behind him, pulled a pistol from his suit jacket, and shot him in the back of the head without breaking stride.
He fell to the sidewalk, face up, the red lining of his overcoat mocking the promise of the neon wash from a nearby window.
The shooter stepped close and shot him three more times, carefully placing each round into the dead man’s face.
Instantly, the shooter spun, eyes sweeping a now-empty street. He walked back toward the lowrider. As he passed, he emptied the magazine of his Luger into the driver’s face, head, and neck without breaking stride.
The shooter pocketed his pistol and kept walking to the end of the block. There, he climbed into the backseat of a fog-gray Cadillac that had been idling at the corner.
The Cadillac slid into traffic. Neither of the two men in the front seat turned around.
The man in the backseat snapped a new magazine into his pistol.
Megan Abbott
is the Edgar award–winning author of the crime novels
Queenpin
,
The Song Is You, Die a Little,
and
Bury Me Deep
. Her writing has appeared in
Wall Street Noir,
Detroit Noir,
Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year,
Phoenix Noir,
Storyglossia,
the
Los Angeles Times Magazine,
The Believer,
Queens Noir,
and
The Speed Chronicles
. She is also the author of a nonfiction book,
The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir,
and the editor of
A Hell of a Woman,
an anthology of female-themed crime fiction. She has been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Her newest novel,
The End of Everything
(Little, Brown, July 2011), is set in the suburbs of the 1980s and tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend disappears. Abbott lives in Queens, New York.
Charles Ardai
is the Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author of four novels, two of which (
Little Girl Lost
and
Songs of Innocence
) are currently in development as feature films from Universal Pictures. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, ranging from
Time
to
Twilight Zone
, as well as in series such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. As founder and editor of the acclaimed pulp-fiction series Hard Case Crime—described by Neal Pollack in
The Stranger
as “the best new American publisher to appear in the past decade”—Ardai has had the opportunity to work with authors such as Stephen King, Mickey Spillane, Pete Hamill, Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain, Madison Smartt Bell, and Lawrence Block. He is also a writer and producer on the TV series
Haven
.
In addition to his work as a writer, publisher, and entrepreneur, Ardai serves as a managing director at the D. E. Shaw group, in which capacity he has had responsibility for technology ventures such as Schrödinger, a leading developer of software for computational chemistry (Ardai serves as the firm’s chairman). His best-known creation is the Internet service Juno, which provided free e-mail and Internet access to millions of computer users in the 1990s.
Lawrence Block
is the highly prolific and respected author of more than sixty novels and eleven collections of short fiction. He has won almost every major award available to mystery writers, including four Edgar Awards, four Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards (presented by the Maltese Falcon Society in Japan), and the Nero Award. A past president of the Private Eye Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America, Block has published articles and short fiction in
American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, GQ, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
and the
New York Times.
Three of his novels have been turned into major studio films.
Joe R. Lansdale
is the author of more than thirty novels and many short stories and articles. He also writes comic scripts and screenplays. His novella
Bubba Ho-Tep
was turned into a film of the same name, and his short story
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road
was made into an episode of Showtime’s
Masters of Horror
. He is currently producing a film based on his story
Christmas with the Dead
.
Joyce Carol Oates
is the author of a more than fifty novels, twenty collections of short fiction, ten poetry collections, and numerous nonfiction pieces and plays, including, most recently, the story collection
Give Me Your Heart
and the memoir
A Widow’s Story
. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, honoring excellence in the art of the short story, an O. Henry Award, the Bram Stoker Award, National Book Award, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
Francine Prose
has written fifteen novels, among them
Blue Angel,
which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently,
My New American Life.
Her books of nonfiction include
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, Gluttony,
and
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
. Her book
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
was a
New York Times
bestseller. Her stories, reviews, cultural criticism, and essays have appeared in such publications as
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, the
New York Review of Books
, and
ARTNews
, and she is a contributing editor at
Harper’s
and
BOMB
. Formerly the president of PEN American Center, Prose is the recipient of the Washington University International Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edith Wharton Achievement Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA grants, and a PEN Translation Prize. She is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and has been a resident in literature at the American Academy in Rome. She was one of the first recipients of a Director’s Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Jonathan Santlofer
is the author of five crime novels, among them his debut novel,
The Death Artist,
which received national attention and was translated into more than twenty languages, and
Anatomy of Fear,
winner of the Nero Award in 2008. He is also coeditor of the highly acclaimed anthology
The Dark End of the Street
. The recipient of two NEA grants, he has been a visiting artist at the Vermont Studio Center, the American Academy in Rome, and serves on the board of Yaddo, the oldest arts community in the U.S. His short fiction appears in several anthologies and collections, including
The Rich and the Dead,
edited by Nelson DeMille, and the forthcoming
New Jersey Noir,
edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Santlofer is also a well-known artist: his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and JPMorgan Chase.
Duane Swierczynski
is the author of several crime thrillers, including the Edgar Award–nominated
Expiration Date
and
Fun & Games
, the first in a new series published by Mulholland Books. He’s also written about the characters Punisher, Cable, the Immortal Iron Fist, Werewolf by Night, Black Widow, and Deadpool for Marvel Comics, and is collaborating with
CSI
creator Anthony E. Zuiker on the Level 26 series of bestselling “digi-novel” thrillers, including
Dark Origins
and
Dark Prophecy
. He and his family live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Andrew Vachss
is a lawyer who represents children and youth exclusively. His many books include eighteen novels in the Burke series and four collections of short stories. His work has appeared in
Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy
, and
The New York Times,
among other publications. For more information about Mr. Vachss and his work, visit
www.vachss.com
.
Produced and developed by Rockstar Games and Team Bondi, L.A. Noire is a dark and violent crime thriller that blends breathtaking action with true detective work to deliver an unprecedented interactive experience. Following the story of a young detective’s rise to prominence in the LAPD, L.A. Noire lets players solve complex, historically-inspired crimes in a beautifully-recreated and fully interactive rendition of 1947 Los Angeles. Interrogate witnesses, search for clues, and chase down suspects as you struggle to find the truth in a city where everyone has something to hide. L.A. Noire is available for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system.
About Rockstar Games
Founded in 1998 and based in New York, Rockstar Games is the publisher of some of the world’s best-selling and critically acclaimed videogames, including the record-breaking Grand Theft Auto series, Red Dead Redemption, the Max Payne series, Manhunt and Bully.
New from the authors of
L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories
The End of Everything
Megan Abbott
A Drop of the Hard Stuff
Lawrence Block
Devil Red
Joe R. Lansdale
A Widow’s Story: A Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates
My New American Life: A Novel
Francine Prose
The Murder Notebook
Jonathan Santlofer
Fun and Games
Duane Swierczynski
The Weight
Andrew Vachss
Copyright in the collection © 2011 by Rockstar Games
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Charles Ardai
Copyright acknowledgments follow.
The right of the contributors to be identified as the Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Mulholland Books
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
First eBook Edition: June 2011
The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978 1444 730883