Precinct 19 by Thomas Adcock

Author:Thomas Adcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

There were three of them and they were doing just about everything in their power to attract the sort of trouble that makes a lot of people who live quiet lives west of the Hudson River believe that Manhattan is an island madhouse.

Two were blond and the other redheaded and they all had big blue eyes and lived in suburban Indianapolis, where they were studying to be fashion designers at a community college not widely known for producing innovators in haute couture. Midway through their two-year course of studies, they decided to throw in together on a trip to the Big Apple and a look at the fashion capital of the United States, where they were certain their futures lay.

They wandered aimlessly around Times Square on the night in question, gape-jawed and high-heeled with the sort of neon-sign tourist expression of simultaneous fear and fascination that reads money in the bank to entrepreneurs of the Great White Way, legitimate and otherwise. They would learn in very short order that New York isn’t very much like My Sister Eileen would have it; they would learn that New York doesn’t always issue tender embraces to its visitors, not even fair-haired, blue-eyed flowers of Indiana maidenhood. But the possible danger of the place, much as they had discussed it back home, was the furthest thing from their uncautious minds; the promise of something unexpected in their lives, for once, even if it was dangerous, was fatally glamorous that night. And who knew when they might return next to this Emerald City?

There was nothing at all like Times Square back home, of course. Nothing remotely so chaotic, so squalid, so oddly beautiful, so uniquely illusory and alluring. Certainly nothing so outrageously sexy.

Cheap hotels, blazing billboards that turn night into mazda day, record shops that blare their audio wares into the streets around the clock, smut parlors, informal pharmaceutical trade at every other step (“Pass me by, you don’t get high!” whispers the reed-thin young black man in the shadows), morose prostitutes sizing up their clientele from among the passing parade of convivial conventioneers and motorists gliding slowly by with New Jersey and Connecticut license plates fastened to their station wagons, impresarios of dubious physical culture studios (“C’mon, rubberneck! Sex for dinner! Live boy-girl acts! It’s showtime!”) and gaunt men and women staring dumbly and dead-eyed from the doorways of a hundred dives, their ulcerated junkie ankles bulging out the tops of their ragged shoes from all the times they smacked up down there when the veins in their arms and necks and the backs of their papery hands couldn’t rope up tight enough for the fix.

All that and Broadway, too. Rehearsal halls and prop shops, costume lofts, photo studios, producers’ suites, theatrical pubs full of loud singing, press agents’ offices, wig-makers and flymen and the ghosts of a thousand shows, fat dowagers waddling beneath tentlike mink stoles, angular young women in flowing evening gowns with sequins glittering in all the right places, tall dark

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