Hipster Death Rattle Read online

  Sweat flowed down Patrick’s back.

  He waited.

  He checked his iPhone for no good reason, and when he did he realized the light around him was dim, dimmer than it was farther up and down the street. Neither of the two streetlamps on the corner where he stood was lit. He looked up and saw that the remnants of the jagged remnants of their bulbs. Kids playing ball in the streets, probably. He used to be rambunctious once, too.

  He waited. It sure was hot.

  With his earbuds in, Patrick didn’t hear the flutter of bicycle wheels. But as he made a slow circle out of boredom, he saw someone on a bike coming fast down Kent. A man or a woman. Too dark to tell. This could be it. He thought about waving Hi, but reconsidered it. That wouldn’t look cool. Anyway, at the speed this person was moving, he or she must’ve just been rushing to get home.

  Whoever it was was coming really fast.

  And then Patrick noticed: The biker wore a hoodie tied tightly around his or her face. Why would anyone do that in this stifling heat? Maybe someone trying to sweat off weight…

  Then he saw that the bicyclist held something in his or her hand, against one of the handlebars.

  A knife. A very large knife. A machete.

  Patrick stepped hard on his skateboard, but at the wrong angle. It slid out from under him and he tumbled onto the concrete. He dropped his phone and his earbuds popped out.

  The biker sped right past him. Patrick relaxed. He felt like such a douche. What a story he would get out of this. Maybe an editorial. Maybe a blog post. Maybe something for the novel.

  Then he heard wheels spin on asphalt. The biker, twenty feet away, was turned toward him. The machete raised in the biker’s hand.

  “Oh shit!” Patrick said. He reached for his iPhone, but his hands were slick with sweat, and he couldn’t grip it. The spokes ticked closer.

  “Shit!” He decided to go for his skateboard. There were people, crowds of people, only a block or two away.

  The first slash came so fast Patrick didn’t register it till he felt a line of pain in the back of his leg. “Dammit!”

  He backed up against a wall of the abandoned factory. He steadied himself against the brick wall and pulled up his skateboard like a shield, its wheels spinning.

  “Stop it! I’m a reporter!”

  The biker halted his bike in the street. In the dimness, his face was hidden. He raised one long leg over the handlebars and let the bike clang on the blacktop. He took a small step to the right, and Patrick moved to the left. Then the biker went left and Patrick wondered if he should go right. Patrick was paralyzed against the wall, waiting for an opening to run. Back and forth the biker feinted, like a little dance, holding the blade up high.

  Then, to Patrick’s surprise, the biker tackled him, knocking the skateboard away and crushing him into the brick wall. Patrick tried to punch, but the biker knocked his hands way with one hand then forced his elbow into Patrick’s neck, knocking his head back and pinning him against the brick.

  “You fucker. Just take my stuff,” Patrick grunted, staring at the machete. “Fuck! Please! Just take it!”

  The biker placed the tip of the blade right under Patrick’s sternum, just under the “❤” of his T-shirt, then pulled back and jabbed once, twice.

  Patrick sank back against the wall. He tried to block, but the machete bit into his arm. It stuck. The biker put his foot on his chest and pulled out the blade, making a wet sound.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god.” Patrick tried to reach for his iPhone again but it wasn’t anywhere near him and his trembling hand was greasy with blood and he felt so weak, so weak.

  The biker faked a swing to the left and then to the right. In the hoodie, his laughter was muffled. Then he stepped forward and, using two hands, casually took one more swing and then another.

  Patrick slumped onto the concrete. He looked up at the black sky. He thought of his parents, of his mother, of his ex-girlfriend in her lacy pink teddy. He thought about Brooklyn. He thought about his apartment. He loved his apartment. Someone else would snatch it up in no time, and no one would remember he lived there.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As Erin Cole and her husband Steven Pak burst through the entrance of the Verge—a thirty-five-story glass tower condominium complex on Kent Avenue, perfectly situated on the waterfront and boasting breathtaking river and city views—she was greeted by the smiling, moon-shaped face of Angel, their tries-too-hard doorman.

  “Mr. Steven. Ms. Erin. Are you okay?” he said. In his little, worn-out doorman uniform with dirty white gloves.

  Steve blurted, “Oh god, we—” but Erin cut him off. “We’re fine,” she said. “Just tired.”

  “You sure?” Angel said.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “It’s just so so so so hot.”

  She walked as quickly as she could. She was very pregnant and genetically thin as a straw, so now she looked like a straw with a pea stuck to it. She held her baby pea as it bounced, past Angel’s little podium and to the elevators. “We’re so happy to be home.”

  “I hear that,” Angel said. “But—”

  “We’re fine. Thank you. Gracias!” she said using her best Spanish accent, which she knew was good because some of her best friends back home in Texas were indeed Mexican, and they said her accent was good.

  Angel probably thought they’d just had an argument. Whatever. Let him think what he wanted. He was just a doorman. Come tomorrow morning, he’d forget he’d ever seen how scared they must have looked.

  That’s what they were, right? Scared. Freaked out.

  As soon as the mirrored elevator doors closed, Erin backed herself against the wall. Steve looked ill, like he was about to hurl. And she hoped he wouldn’t because that would make her hurl. Catching herself in the mirror behind Steve, she realized she didn’t look so great herself.

  Her hubby was about to talk, but she shushed him. “Be quiet, kumquat,” she said, whispering. “I think these things are bugged.”

  Steven smacked his forehead. It was something he liked to do when he couldn’t understand her. It always left a red mark on his head. “But we have to help that man.”

  “Quiet! Wait till we get upstairs!”

  She crossed her arms as well as she could across her belly and stared ahead. Her ears were hot. But with the mirrors, she was stuck seeing her husband’s look of complete discombobulation and the red mark on his forehead staring back at her.

  They had been walking home from dinner on South 6th Street, a new Burundian place that had been written up in New York. It wasn’t a short walk, and the night was hot, but Erin had nixed the idea of a cab. She was seven months pregnant and her body temperature was all over the place, so she couldn’t stand the idea of being trapped inside a car with the air conditioning going on full blast, feeling like some momsicle.

  They had been talking about getting out of town for July 4—before she popped, before their lives changed forever, and because New York became such a ghost town then except for all the very, very slow, very, very fat tourists.

  And as she and Steve turned down from South 4th onto Kent, they heard a sound, maybe like the chopping of wood—no, more like the sound of a ceramic knife hitting a bamboo cutting board. They didn’t look and kept walking. They weren’t native New Yorkers, but they had learned there were too many weirdos and too many strange things that happened in the big city, you just couldn’t worry about them all. In this town, you were on your own.

  But then she had looked down the street and over, and slumped halfway to the ground was a young guy, and covering his shirt—was that? It was! Yes!—blood. Blood blood.

  Standing above him was a man with a long machete. That machete was the clearest thing she could see and it shined with that blood. It was surreal, something out of a horror movie, so she and her McSteven just watched it like it was one, frozen in place, holding hands.

  That’s when Erin realized the guy with the machete had been wearing a hoodie. Only bec
ause he had stopped to tug it off. Who could blame him? With the heat.

  It was dark, and they weren’t that close. Did she really see something of his face, or did she just imagine it? She couldn’t be sure.

  Then they heard something between a moan and a wheeze from the man on the ground, a sound like her Grandma Betsy made just as she passed.

  Steve-o-rini fumbled with his iPhone, aiming it. He was going to take a picture! But her survival instinct made her back away, pulling hubby and his phone with her. They looked at each other and turned and began to walk. Quick, firm steps. When they heard the sound of bicycle wheel spokes—yes, there had been a bicycle on its side behind the man in the hoodie—so they began to walk-run. Erin held her belly and Stevie reached out to hold it, too. They turned back onto South 4th, kept going up to Bedford, where stinky hipsters crowded the streets like a thick-bearded herd of buffalo.

  She usually hated them, hated the way they smelled and dressed and talked and everything, but this time she was ecstatic to be around people, oh Lord Jesus, even some stinky hipsters.

  Without talking, she and Steve walk-ran through the herd and up to North 5th. Then they turned back toward the riverside park and their building. Here, blazing streetlights cancelled the night. Here, preeminent luxury condominiums jutted into the sky, and adults and children and dogs could mill about safely away from the darkness.

  She and Stevely had never looked back, back at the scene on Kent, which was only a few blocks down. But she knew her husband was thinking the same thing she was thinking, although neither said it out loud: Did the man with the machete see them seeing him?

  Upstairs, before Steven opened the door, Erin heard their dog, Deeogee, whimpering. She knew he was twitching his butt with excitement on the other side.

  “Hurry,” Erin said to Steve.

  She knew if he didn’t open the door fast enough, their lovely chocolate cocker spaniel would let his excitement get the best of him.

  But Steve’s hands were shaking. Erin took the keys from him and opened the door. They were too late. The dog had messed on the floor of the uniquely spacious layout.

  “Dammit, Steverino,” she said, then to the dog: “Bad Deeogee! Bad, bad Deeogee!”

  The shameless dog spun in the thoughtfully designed and appointed vestibule like a dervish, like it was trying to tuck its head into its ass.

  Erin stepped over to the chef kitchen and got the mop. She handed it to Steven.

  But he stood there, not mopping. “We just saw somebody get killed.”

  Erin turned the thermostat down to frigid—now she wanted to feel like a momsicle. She turned on the OLED TV.

  “We don’t know that,” she said.

  “If we see something, we’re supposed to say something.”

  “That’s for terrorists, m’dear.”

  Steve mopped the stunning but pissed-on white oak floor. Then he took out his iPhone and began tapping in his passcode. Erin trotted up to him and slapped it out of his hand. It clunked on the floor.

  “My phone!”

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He picked up his iPhone, shaking it to see if anything was loose. “Calling the police.”

  “Stevebug, we’re not going to get involved. Let someone else call the police.”

  “What if he’s still alive?”

  “Please. Leave it alone. Someone else will find him.”

  “Erin, I can make an anonymous call.”

  “That anonymous stuff is bullshit. Nothing is anonymous in this world anymore,” she said, massaging her belly. She felt totally gassy. “They’ll know who we are.”

  “I can’t believe you’re being like this.”

  She went to the leather couch and sat down, cradling her belly. “Fuzzy Penguin, please,” she said. “My stomach. I’ve got such heartburn. Can you get me a ginger ale?”

  He stood there unable to move.

  “We still have ginger ale, right?” she said.

  Later, in bed, she couldn’t sleep. In her mind, she saw the man’s blood on the street—redder than she had seen it in reality, color-corrected by her imagination. She kept seeing what had happened, over and again. The guy on the ground—was he young? Not a boy? No. A guy, just a guy.

  And the man with the machete. Had he been sitting on the bike? Or was he standing next to it? Of course, he hadn’t seen them, right? Or else he would have kept coming after them, right? It’s not like they were getting away on horseback.

  The killer’s—that man’s—face had mostly been a blur. But, yes, he had been facing them. From a block away. Was it a long block? She didn’t remember.

  Enough!

  She was about to get out of bed, when Steven suddenly did. He couldn’t sleep either. No wonder.

  He had run to the bathroom. Even from their bedroom, Erin could hear him vomiting, which of course made her think about vomiting. Maybe the Burundian bananas and beans dinner didn’t agree with him. Or that weird wine, which had tasted off.

  A few minutes later, she heard the whir of his electric toothbrush.

  She focused on that sound—she knew he would take a while—and rolled off the bed and got on her knees. She scrunched down and got a box from underneath it.

  She remembered what her father had said about New York. “Lots of criminals and rapists,” Daddy had warned her. “Better safe than sorry,” he had told her. “Always be prepared.” From the box, she took out the gun that her father had given her, a Taurus PT-111 9mm semi-auto, on her seventeenth birthday—“Not heavy or gritty and easy to conceal,” he had told her—and put it in her purse. She added the ammo, sealed in a sandwich baggie, that Daddy had given her the day she left for New York.

  Better safe than sorry.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Just after two a.m., Detective Jimmy Petrosino parked his silver PT Cruiser on Kent Avenue, behind a trio of patrol cars.

  Wide, tall, and thin as a front door, Petrosino had a helmet of hair, cotton white, and a thick mustache, stained nicotine yellow. He also happened to be wearing a green polyester tuxedo with a white shirt and red leather bowtie. His shoes were white bucks.

  And he didn’t want to hear any smartass jokes about it.

  When he climbed out of his vehicle, Detective Eddie Hadid marched over. This was Petrosino’s new partner, assigned to him just three weeks ago. The kid had so far shown himself to be a quick thinker, good with the paperwork. Boxy and broad, he looked like he’d do good in a scrape. The real problem with Hadid was his mouth, ’cause, boy, did he like to run it.

  Hadid started talking before he was even in Petrosino’s earshot. “…sorry to get you away from whatever I got you away from, but wait till you see this. You’re gonna like it and you’re gonna hate it, wait and see—whoa-ho! Wait! What’s with the getup, Petro? You look like a Christmas tree. Is Christmas coming even earlier this year?”

  Petrosino held up a finger to shush him. There was a crowd beyond the yellow tape, a bunch of oglers with their cell phones out. Williamsburg. They couldn’t just rubberneck like normal people. They had to take pictures and share the moment.

  Without looking at his partner, Petrosino said, “Get a couple of uniforms go around tell them to stop taking pictures.”

  “Really? Can we do that?”

  “Yeah,” Petrosino said. “Why not?”

  “Hey, while I’m at it, I can have them ask if they saw anything.”

  “You’re learning, brother. Now go. Then come back and give me the what’s what.”

  Petrosino shook out a cigarette, lit it, and looked over at the crime scene. Hell of a lot of blood. A Mets fan telling by that hat. Deadhead skateboard a few feet away.

  Hadid walked back, his mouth again working before he even got in hearing distance. “…I want to know is why Brooklyn smells like shit? I mean, it’s like a sewer went to the bathroom out here.”

  Petrosino blew out smoke. “And I suppose the Bronx is all perfume and roses?”

  Hadid coughed and wa
ved the smoke away. “Well, it ain’t perfect. But it ain’t this bad, Petro. I mean—”

  “Run this down for me.”

  “Vic’s still alive, but barely. On his way to Woodhull. White male, twenties. Multiple stab wounds, slashes. But we still got his wallet.”

  “ID?”

  “Patrick Stoller. Got some cards and other numbers in here.”

  “Cell phone?”

  “That’s a ‘no.’”

  “Right-o,” Petrosino said. “So, is it what I think it is?” His instinct told him the answer but he had to ask.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was telling you, was why I interrupted whatever it was you were doing dressed like Christmas puked up on your night off. Looks like the attacker used something long, something sharp. Likely a machete.”

  “Dammit,” Petrosino said, flicking his cigarette all the way to the other side of the street. “Another one.”

  “That’s number three. That means we got a trend. This neighborhood sure like its trends, am I right? The papers ain’t got a good name for these guys, the Slasher Gang. It should be something cool. Like ‘The Cutting Crew.’ Or ‘Brooklyn Rippers.’ Or ‘Slashr,’ you know, without the ‘e,’ like an app—”

  “Hadid!” Petrosino lowered his voice to a hostile whisper. He moved his partner away from the tape. “You ass. If one of these iFucks catches you mouthing off, you’ll be all over the fucking Twitter in less than a New York second. Listen to me: This isn’t the Boogie Down Bronx where nobody gives a shit what happens. Here we’re being watched all the fucking time.”

  “Shit. Me and my big mouth. My wife is always telling me I have to reel it in. Sometimes I can’t help myself. Listen, I didn’t—”

  “’S’enough.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Petro.”

  “And, dammit, cut it out with the fucking nickname.”

  Hadid slunk away, and Petrosino fished in his jacket for another cigarette. As he was doing that, he realized one of these hipsters in the crowd was snapping a picture of him.

  Before he could sic a uniform on him, the hipster was turning away, waving and yelling, “Merry Christmas, officer!”