Read Online Good Neighbors by Ryan David Jahn - Free Book Online

hacked it off at a forty-five degree angle with a machete and a nose shaped like a tipped-over three. It’s a face you could forget – except there’s something wrong with it. Frank isn’t sure what exactly. There’s nothing to point to – that there’s the problem, sir; I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy – but the combined parts are somehow almost disorienting, like an optical illusion, like something Escher would create.
    Then it’s gone, and the man’s hand is pulling the lighter back into the shadows.
    ‘Thank you,’ Frank says, wondering what this guy is doing standing in front of his apartment complex at four oh something in the morning. But it’s a big complex and for all Frank knows the guy lives here too and just came outside for a breath of fresh air. Besides, he’s got more important things to worry about.
    He takes a drag from his cigarette and crosses the street, heading toward his 1953 Buick Skylark, its white canvas top up, its red paint beginning to oxidize but still managing a little shine beneath the moon’s pale light. The car’s a little rusty around the edges but it’s in pretty good shape nonetheless. Someone brought it into his shop on Fortyseventh Street five years ago to have the transmission worked on and never returned. Frank claimed it.
    He lets himself take one more look over his shoulder at the man with the bad face before he arrives at his car. Then he finds a flashlight in the glove box – which has never seen a glove as far as Frank knows – and walks around to the front of the car.
    He flips the flashlight on and drags the beam across the chrome front of his car. There’s a fist-sized dent there, on the right side of the bumper. Fist-sized – or maybe about the size of a baby’s skull. It’s a shallow dent, a couple centimeters deep at most, a dent that might have been there for years. He’s just never been a man to look for things like that. He regularly tunes the car up, or has one of the boys do it, but a dent here and there is nothing he’s ever paid attention to. And yet, he’s almost certain the dent is new – less than an hour old – and about the size of a baby’s skull.
    He turns the flashlight off and puts it back in the glove box. He walks around to the other side of the car and squeezes his large frame in behind the wheel. He sits there a moment thinking.
    About the size of a baby’s skull.
    Then he sticks his key in the ignition and starts the car. Looking over his shoulder, he backs out of his parking spot, shifts into drive, and turns left onto Austin Street.
    Buddy Holly is on the radio, singing ‘Not Fade Away’ but that’s the last thing on his mind.
    At least he found no blood or hair or flesh.
    As he drives down Austin Street, he passes one of his neighbors in her Studebaker. He thinks her name is Katrina, but she goes by Katy or Kat. Something like that, anyway. He jump-started her car for her once. He waves and smiles behind his cigarette – as if I’m just heading to the store to get a bottle of milk, he thinks – and Kat waves back at him. Then they’ve passed in the night.
    Frank glances in his rearview mirror and sees Kat’s Studebaker pulling into the Long Island Railroad parking lot, pulling into the spot he just pulled out of, and then he makes a right onto a side street, passing a cop car which is making a left off of it. Which is making a left onto Austin Street. Which is now driving toward his apartment complex.
    What if the fuzz are coming for Erin?
    Frank pulls the Skylark to the side of the street, puts it in park, and, leaving the car running and his door open, walks to the corner so he can look down Austin Street, so he can see where the patrol car is heading. It continues on past the Hobart Apartments without even slowing and keeps on moving, taillights shrinking.
    Thank God.
    Frank allows himself to breathe, heads back to his car and gets inside. A moment later, his left turn signal clickclick-clicking, he pulls back