Tracking Shot by Colin Campbell (i can read book club .txt) 📗

a preview from Trigger Switch, a crime novel by Bryon Quertermous, published by All Due Respect, an imprint of Down & Out Books.

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Chapter One

I met Dutchy Kent at a bar in Long Island City an hour after I flew in from Detroit. It was nasty, the kind of place I didn’t know even existed anywhere in the twenty-first century anymore, let alone somewhere as overpriced as New York City. He led me into a narrow wood paneled alley where two people could barely stand next to each other facing the back wall. We took the two seats at the end furthest from the door and ordered beer. I half expected to see the bartender draw our drinks from a tap with a generic black and white handle that just said BEER.

Instead, he opened two cans of PBR, poured them into mason jars, and slid them down to us. It didn’t take long after that to realize we were in a hipster bar and it looked like this on purpose. I took a long gulp of the beer and enjoyed the ironic flavor until Dutchy gave the bartender a twenty and didn’t get any change back.

I’d been to shitty bars around Detroit where that could have bought an entire round. Not these days. And not downtown anymore. But a few years ago someplace like Taylor or Melvindale where they still had guys who worked in the auto plants making okay money. What the hell did anyone do around here that they could pay ten dollars for a beer but had to live in a shitty apartment building on a street that smelled like toasted garbage and electric pee?

Dutchy sucked his beer down in one long gulp and ordered another. And a shot of whiskey. And a cheeseburger. He never asked if I wanted anything. I never wondered what I would have said if he had asked. I just sipped my beer and waited for Dutchy to say something to make this all worthwhile.

Dutchy had been an asshole to me in high school, as he was to most of us in the class who didn’t quite know what to make of someone appearing on our televisions Saturday mornings and then showing up for homeroom on Monday. But by college his brief career as a child star had come to an end and we’d bonded over pulp novels and our disdain for the rest of our classmates. We maintained something of a friendship, even though he had a nasty temper, a penchant for mean-spirited—and often dangerous—practical jokes, and the tendency to get us both into heaps of trouble. We lost touch over the years until our relationship was reignited over the internet. He’d read my first novel and loved it and emailed me to find out if it was really me, because he never believed I had any talent. We emailed back and forth, became Facebook friends briefly, and then a week ago he’d emailed me a script based on one of my published short stories. He said he wanted to put it on in New York City to help revive his acting career.

The whole thing sounded too much like one of his epic shitstorms, but I was desperate to get out of Detroit, out of Michigan, and away from my ex-wife’s family who claimed they didn’t hold a grudge for me murdering her, but I wasn’t exactly sold on their change of heart.

“It’s been ages, man,” he finally said. “I can’t believe we’re still here. You know?”

“Still alive you mean?”

“Still alive, man,” he said, pushing the plate away from him. “Alive in the spirit. Alive in the arts. Alive in our dreams.”

“Oh, right. I guess.”

“Look around, man. Look at the saps out there going to a job. Cashing a check. Riding the train. Living their bullshit.”

“Ten-dollar beers, man,” I said, holding my mason jar high. “Gotta do something to keep ’em coming.”

“I don’t know. It all seems so…I just don’t know man. I couldn’t do it.”

I nodded and bit my tongue. I didn’t want to argue. I just wanted another beer and a sign that things weren’t as shitty as I suspected they were.

“Which makes this all even harder,” Dutchy continued.

“All what?”

He pushed the rest of his dishes down the bar so there was nothing in front of him but a wet napkin. He balled the napkin up in his hand and held it out to me.

“All of this.”

“Is this a metaphor?”

“It’s a reality. It’s all we have left.”

“You gotta give me a little more here. I’m not—”

“We’re busted. Broke. Done.”

“The show?”

“The theater. All of it.”

“Well shit,” I said. “That would have been good to know before now.”

“Probably.”

He looked away from me and stared down the other end of the bar for a while.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked. “My flight doesn’t leave for another week and I don’t have the money to change it.”

“I do have some ideas.”

The way he said it, the tone, put me off. It wasn’t right. It was planned. It was rehearsed. He was playing me. I waited for him to keep talking. I wanted to see how far he was willing to go.

“Are you in?”

I nodded, sort of. I still didn’t say anything though. So he kept talking. I used to have a problem keeping my mouth shut, and it never failed to come back around and kick me in the ass. Dutchy rambled for almost half an hour before he said something that made sense.

“There’s some money,” he said. “Some money that went missing from the theater that I’ve been looking for. If we can find that, and I’m close, I just need a…I need a partner, someone with some life experience in this stuff, if you know what I mean, but if we can find this cash, we’ll be set up right.”

“This is bullshit,” I said. “I’m out.”

“That’s no way