Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth by Tim McLoughlin

those avenues came together, and on that island was a brightly lit stand where you could buy coffee, sodas, pizza, and soft-serve ice cream. There was an outsized Bickford’s cafeteria across the street, and a block south on Fourth was a doughnut shop. The stand, the cafeteria, and the doughnut shop were gathering places for junkies that went strong twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
    A short walk from the Bickford’s was the Long Island Rail Road terminal, with tracks running under the streets of Brooklyn. Commuters—the good guys heading home to Mamma and the tykes in Massapequa and Hicksville—could stop for the lurid thrill of a quick ten-dollar blowjob, or else a ten-minute stand-up fuck from one of the dozens of hookers roaming those gathering spots.
    I was an undercover narc and I could buy drugs all day and all night. Hordes of addicts and pushers were everywhere. Mostly I was buying dope from the walking dead, people so stoned that once they sold me drugs they might turn around and walk into an oncoming bus. It was no challenge at all. The dealers were ghosts who aimlessly walked the street. Fire your gun alongside their ears and they wouldn’t even blink.
    The closer I looked, the more I found the drug world a dark, painful, and unforgiving place, a world where only the strong and quick-witted survived. And when they survived, it was never for long. The plague was far and wide.
    I was convinced that what we were doing was poorly conceived and just as poorly justified. Back then, I had neither the expertise nor the experience to come up with any real answers. But at least I knew this war-on-drugs business was bullshit.
    I have always believed in the inevitability of personal fate. It’s a paradox because although I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I do not believe in preordained destiny. I believe that if you find yourself in a serious trick-bag, that trick-bag is the ultimate manifestation of a series of behavior patterns. So if you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime. You like playing in traffic? You’d better keep your head up and look out for the oncoming bus. I didn’t, and that’s another story.
    Back in the day, as I am now able to say, those Brooklyn streets were a glorious show. When the full moon was out, there was no better place to be. You were in a place where you didn’t belong, using new language. You saw and did things you would someday pay for. But at the time, it was one hell of a soirée. The world exploded around you, there was excitement, you’d get tremors and goose bumps; it was party time.
    The streets themselves had names that raise hair on the back of my neck because of what it was I did there. Van Brunt Street—and Union, President, Columbia, Kane and Pacific, Sackett and Hoyt, Fourth and Atlantic, Flatbush and Atlantic. Just moving through those streets late at night, when the only people out and about were pushers and hookers and street gorillas and pimps. Everyone searching for the drug, hunting for heroin, the “white lady.” I arrested a lot of drug dealers. As a cop, it was practically all that I did. But the number of dealers arrested meant nothing, changed nothing. There were always more.
    Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Notes from Underground, wrote:
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away … Man is bound to lie about himself.
    So it was for me on those Brooklyn streets.

THE MORGUE BOYS
    BY T HOMAS A DCOCK
    Brownsville
    1. La mise en scène
    I t is best to plan your excursion to Brownsville for a warm Sunday morning. This is when the neighborhood churches open their stained glass windows and the creamy-voiced tambourine ladies carrying on inside