“A Question of Execution” by Basil Rosa

I’d heard Tiny Aria say a million times that in Fortuna, if you scratched beneath the surface, you’d only find more surface. He laid this on me again when he phoned about the Reno Morelli kidnapping. Reno managed The Gutterball, a dive where mooks, con-men, and low-level operatives met to figure out which cops weren’t […]

“Coffin Dress Girl” by Heather Santo

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “A girl.” “Aren’t we all?” replied the punk. He took a drag from the cigarette stub pinched between his thumb and index finger, then exhaled dramatically. I watched as the large plume of smoke rose, flashing alternating colors in the club’s strobe lights. Red, blue, green, yellow and back […]

“The Coming Storm” by D. V. Bennett

Pulling up carefully on the latch handle, Jack Winslow stepped out of his Chevy Impala onto the lonely tree-lined street. The intense rain and wind would cover most sounds, but he was careful not to allow the low-register thump of his car door to cut through the din. Repossessing a motorcycle in the middle of […]

“Nightfall” [excerpt] by David Goodis

It was one of those hot sticky nights that makes Manhattan show its age. There was something dreary and stagnant in the way all this syrupy heat refused to budge. It was anything but a night for labor, and Vanning stood up and walked away from the tilted drawing board. He brushed past a large […]

“Much Worse Ways” by Joseph Hirsch

This was Ant’s first time in Ohio, and he wasn’t impressed. Pennsylvania, he knew from the Poconos, but this was pure boondocks. The sticks. His passenger, Carmine, didn’t seem to like it either. The morning sun came rushing through the tinted windshield of the rental car, and Carmine spoke while playing with the rounds in […]

“White Summer” by Brian Greene

Danny was a guy who made an impression. When he came into the restaurant to apply for a job as a waiter, a couple weeks before Memorial Day weekend, he did so wearing a flashy suit. I’d been working at the place—a steak and seafood eatery on the top floor of a Holiday Inn at […]

“One-Shot Deal” by R. Daniel Lester

At the yacht club, the dock creaked and swayed beneath my feet. There was brine in the air and the smell of money in my nose. Big money, family money. Ancient dollars that had sired so many other dollars it was exhausted and weary and just wanted to be left alone. I felt about as […]

“End of the Line” [excerpt] by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

Like a silver eel the streamliner rose from the flats of the dusky desert, skirting the toes of the wrinkled hills, sweeping upward into the clear green twilight in the pass. Thunder followed it under the ground and a wind rushed outward at its passing. Lizards and cactus owls and a few jackrabbits froze at […]

“The Action Man” [excerpt] by Jay Flynn

The dawn seeped, thin and gray, through the restless morning fog, lightening the hardly-moving surface of the bay, alerting the birds in the live oaks and pine forests of the hillsides. It caused a rooster to crow and a dog to bark at the rooster. And in the house that backed up on the yard […]

“Bit Player” by Jim Shaffer

I sat in a small bar just off Broadway somewhere in the fifties. It was my first time there. A cold snap had descended on the city, and I just wanted to sit some place warm, relax, and have a drink. Mellow jazz crept from the jukebox. It could have been Ben Webster. It had […]