Bust by Jason Starr, Ken Bruen

scribbled Felicia’s number on the back of one of his business cards, then leaned back as she gave a nice, slow table dance. First she crouched backwards with her butt high in the air. Then she turned and danced with her breasts in Max’s face. The bags were so big they were stretching the skin around them, and her nipples were sticking out like pencil erasers. In the middle of the dance, Max looked at his watch and saw it was 6:08. If all had gone according to plan, Deirdre had been murdered eight minutes ago. Felicia saw him looking at his watch and said, “You got a date tonight, baby?”
    “No, I’m just checking the time. It’s a little after six,” he added so she would remember if anyone asked.
    “A little after sex?”
    “ Six ,” Max said.
    “Oh. I musta heard you wrong, baby.”
    “Right side,” Max said to Asir Aswad as the cab turned onto East Eightieth Street. In the middle of the block, Max said, “Right here,” and the cab came to a stop.
    The meter read $9.70. Max gave Asir a twenty and took back the entire ten dollars and thirty cents change. He never tipped cab drivers and wasn’t going to start now. He didn’t want the police to think he had been acting in any way unusual minutes before discovering his wife’s body.
    It was 10:27. Max had dropped Jack off at Penn Station twenty minutes ago. Jack had seen Max writing down Felicia’s phone number and it had impressed him a great deal.
    “You gonna call her?” Jack asked.
    “When I get around to it,” Max said.
    “If I were you I wouldn’t wait on that,” Jack said. “I’mgetting a little tired of that Russian coffee cake. I might be in the mood for some chocolate pudding one of these nights. If you don’t use that number, why don’t you hold onto it for me?”
    Jack was drunk, but not so drunk that he wouldn’t remember that Max was with him all night while Deirdre was being murdered.
    Of course Max had no intention of calling Felicia. Seeing those big gazongas in his face had definitely got him thinking, but before he had sex with a cheap stripper he’d need to see some blood work. He was just egging Jack on, trying to maintain his swinger image since Jack seemed to like it. It was part of the sales technique that he had perfected — never show the client that you are in any way above him . In other words, if the client sleeps with cheap hookers, then you have to come off as a guy who sleeps with cheap hookers. Besides, Max had Angela and he’d probably be spending the rest of his life with her. Although, he had to admit, it would be nice if Angela had knockers as big as Felicia’s.
    Max headed up the stoop to his townhouse. Through the lace curtains in the front windows he could see that there were no lights on inside. As he put his key in the first lock, he remembered what Popeye had said to him when they’d met in the pizza place, about how he might kill Max, too, if Max came home while he was still in the house. Max looked at his watch — 10:29. Popeye must have left more than four hours ago. There was no way in hell he could be inside there now.

Seven
    “Can’t we go someplace else?” Mickey said. “How about one of those Irish pubs up on Second Avenue?”
    “Irish pub?” Chris said. “What do you want to do, fuck an old man?”
    J ASON S TARR , Tough Luck
    After Angela’s mother died, her father suddenly started telling Angela she had to find her Greek roots so last summer, partly just to shut her father up, she figured, Why not? and found a package on the Internet and went for a visit.
    Bad idea. Real bad.
    She thought she’d chill on the beach, work on her tan, but it turned into the trip from hell. All everyone kept asking her was when she was going to get married. She was twenty-eight, for god’s sake, she didn’t even have a serious boyfriend. One of her aunts made her promise that when she got back to New York, she would call Spiros, the cousin of someone on the island who was supposed to be a very