Good Neighbors Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgements

  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.”

  —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.”

  —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.”

  —Daily Mail

  “Brutal and immediate . . . Cleverly written, accomplished and gripping . . . At times I had to stop reading to catch my breath.”

  —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.”

  —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.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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. Tw
o 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?

  Once outside, Kat reaches back through the door, feeling the wall just inside, trying to find a protrusion. Then she does find it, a switch, and she pushes the switch down. Click. The windows looking into the sports bar go dark, and the light which had splashed out into the parking lot, painting the gray asphalt white, vanishes.

  Kat pushes the front door closed and locks it, checking the knob to be sure, then swings a metal gate home, bang, and clips a padlock into place.

  The gate and the padlock are less than six months old and don’t really match the decrepitude of the rest of the place. Also new are bars on the windows. Someone broke in through the back door, emptied the register, took a case of whiskey, and broke out through a window. Why they didn’t just walk out the door, no one knows.

  The money lost in whiskey and cash was, in the scheme of things, not so big a deal. But the cost of repairs, that was a killer. Plus the lost revenue. The place had to stay closed for two days.

  Kat’s only the night manager, but she still feels responsible for the place.

  As she starts toward her Studebaker, tired, the long night finally catching up with her, the adrenaline of the evening spent, Kat sees that her car seems to be tilting rightward, but at first she can’t tell why, or even whether it’s real. Maybe it’s an illusion, a trick of shadows.

  She has to halve the distance between herself and her car before she sees that the tilt is real, that her gee-dee car has a flat tire.

  ‘Son of a gun,’ she says, angrily stomping the asphalt, feeling the impact ride up her shinbone.

  She makes her way to the car, heads straight to the trunk, slips the key into the scratched keyhole, turns it left, wrong way, then right, hears the lock tumble, and pushes the lid up.

  She can’t see anything in there.

  She fumbles for the flashlight she keeps stored on the left side of the trunk, tucked into the corner there. Her hand bounces around in the darkness for a while before her fingers finally find its cold smooth surface. She wraps her hand around it, flips it on. The light is weak and yellow, but at least it’s there. And now that she can see them, she grabs the spare tire and the jack, and as she does, a brief smile touches the corner of her mouth.

  Kat’s always been a self-conscious person, always sort of watched herself from a distance, and the sight of her, five foot one, a hundred pounds even, wearing a blue wool dress with a white short-coat over it, carrying a tire almost as big as she is, and a heavy jack – the sight of it must have the same effect as a hippopotamus in a tutu. And thinking of that, a smile touches her lips. But it’s erased quickly as she thinks of the task at hand.

  A moment later, Kat is sitting on her haunches, jacking her car up so she can change the gee-dee tire, watching the wheel well seem to expand while the tire stays firmly planted on the ground – and then finally it starts to lift, the bottom of the tire staying flat. It seems like it should fill with air, expand, as the weight is removed, but it doesn’t.

  And then – a sound behind her.

  She stops moving, hoping that it was nothing, that the sound won’t repeat, but it does, and she turns her head to look over her shoulder, afraid of what she might see, but having to look anyway. Kat is a person who’s always covered her eyes when the most horrible things happen onscreen at the drive-in movie theater – but she’s always sneaked a look through her fingers, too.

  Newspaper pages skitter across the asphalt, carrying away yesterday’s news.

  ‘Just the wind, dummy,’ she says. Just the wind.

  She turns back to the car and continues her work.

  Kat dumps the flat tire and the diamond-shaped jack into her trunk, not caring how they fall, and slams the trunk lid shut.

  It was a nail that caused the flat. The rusted, bent thing was hooking out of the inside wall of the tire like the lone tooth in a mouthful of gums. She vaguely remembers driving through a construction area on her way to work, men with tanned arms carrying broken chunks of wood with shiny nails sticking out of them to the back of a truck, working on repairing a half-burned row house.

  Her hands are black with grime, with brake dust, and she’s afraid to touch herself, afraid she’ll smear black across her light blue dress or her white short-coat. Smear more black. She already managed to get a little on her dress when she carried the tire to the trunk.

  Stupid effing flat tire.

  She wants nothing more than to go home, slip out of her clothes and into a warm bath, wash herself clean, and then slip again, this time into her bed, beneath her nightcool sheets, where she can sleep till noon, maybe one, and if she’s lucky, from the time her head hits the pillow till the midday sunlight coming in through the window wakes her, she’ll have pleasant dreams.

  But first she’s got to get home.

  She opens her car door and falls into the driver’s seat, sticks the key into the ignition and turns it clockwise. The car groans, the sound of a three-pack-a-dayer clearing his throat. The engine turns over once – slowly.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ Kat says.

  She pumps the gas pedal.

  The engine turns over again, this time a little faster. And again. Gaining speed. She lets off the gas, doesn’t want to flood the engine. It turns again. Coughs. Farts. And finally it starts in earnest.

  Thank goodness. Kat wipes her brow, glad she won’t have to call a cab, and as soon as she does, she remembers the grime on her hands, looks at herself in the rearview mirror, and laughs.

  A black smudge drawn across her forehead like on a tramp in a silent movie.

  And she can’t even wipe it off; trying would just make it worse. But Kat doesn’t care. It’s been a long night. She worked ten hours straight and she’s tired, but all she has left to do is get home.

  That’s her one last task before the sun comes up.

  2

  Kat pulls a knob on her dashboard and the headlights create two yellow beams in the night. She can see dust motes and insects floating around in the light and she remembers a time when she was three, maybe four, lying on her parents’ bed, which seemed enormous, as big as an island. She was supposed to be sleeping – it was nap time; that’s why she was there – but she was awake, looking at a beam of white sunlight coming in through the window, falling on her bare legs. The heat felt
good, and she could see dust motes floating in the light. She thought the dust motes were living things. She laughed watching them dance and reached out trying to grab them, but for some reason she never could. They always knew she was coming and floated out of the way of her pudgy fist just before it reached them.

  Kat turns a different knob and the radio comes to life. A static-throated male voice, artificially deep, saying, ‘. . . and President Johnson said in a statement today that Cuba’s decision to shut off normal water supply to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base was unacceptable. In other news, Jimmy Hoffa, who last week was convicted of tampering with a federal jury in . . .’

  Kat grimaces, turning the dial.

  News is nothing but blah-blah-blah, confirming over and over again that she is small and the world is big, that she can do nothing to stop or even alter the most important things. Kat prefers to focus on things she can change, the lives of the people around her, her own life. Little changes, attainable goals.

  Like pouring a drink. Like changing a tire.

  ‘. . . expect a low of forty-two degrees tonight, with early morning showers, and . . .’

  Again, she turns the dial.

  ‘Here’s Buddy Holly and the Crickets with “Not Fade Away” recorded just two years before Mr. Holly’s untimely death. It’s hard to believe it’s been five years, isn’t it? Well, this is Dino on your radio, reminding you that here on WMCA, Buddy still lives.’ And then the song kicks into existence with its cardboard-box-banging Bo Diddley beat.

  Kat turns up the radio and puts the car into gear.

  As Buddy Holly sings from beyond the grave, explaining how it’s gonna be, Kat drives through a night city which is filled with silence and hollow, passing a theater advertising Dr. Strangelove on its marquee; passing a bookstore with a bunch of forty-cent Gold Medal paperbacks piled in its window; passing a stack of dewy morning-edition newspapers tied together with twine and dropped in front of a newsstand which is padlocked shut for the night.