New Title 1 by Patrick Lestewka

for years, but he would come. This man would cut their arms off and stab their eyes out and hack a trench down the center of their faces until the pressure forced sections of their brains, dull grey and glistening, through the wounds. The knowledge of this man’s existence prevents me from retrieving the silenced .22 Kirikkale pistol from under my seat, jamming it through one of the quarter-sized perforations, and painting the backseat yuppie-red.
    That, and the steam-cleaning bill.
    “That’s All” is followed by “Workin’ For a Living” by Huey Lewis and the News. Vanessa holds something in her lap that I mistake for a balled-up Kleenex until it yips and I realize, with dawning sadness, it’s a dog: papery, vein-shot ears and black marble eyes that seem on the verge of popping from its skull. My gaze locks with its through the rearview mirror and, in an unprecedented canine-human mindmeld, we simultaneously acknowledge the utter frivolity of its existence. It yips again—token protest?—and Vanessa soothes, “Shhh, Tootsie, shhh.” I pity the thing: it’s the latest pet-du-jour that, like the chinchillas and chows and Shar Peis and Abyssinian cats before it, will be tossed aside in favor of the next treat-of-the-week. I once picked up a lady outside Bloomingdale’s who’d slung a live ferret around her shoulders and the sight triggered the memory of…
    …Alex “Slash” Trimball, twenty-three years old, walking away from the blazing village of Bu Von Kon with the flayed corpse of a Viet girl draped around his shoulders. The village was in flames, the air rich with burning bamboo and burning palm leaves and burning…other things. The girl’s skinless body shimmered, blood-glazed tissue reflecting firelight the way moon rays reflect off a placid pond’s surface. “What do you think?” Trimball asked. He shrugged; the tiny body flapped bonelessly. “Keen… fashion sense,” I said. Trimball was a sharecropper from Iowa. Devout Methodist. Father of four. He shaved a ribbon of muscle off the girl’s thigh with the detached air of a man whittling wood. The jungle’s like that: it gets inside you, under your skin and into your bloodstream, plants roots in your heart and mind and soul. You surrender to its madness as a matter of basic survival…
    …I drop the Vanessasoff at a brownstone on the corner of Riverside and Eighty-first. One of them pokes a ten-spot through the window to cover a nine-eighty fare. The two of them perform an intricate farewell ceremony: they clasp hands, bend at the knees, air-kiss, then produce identical daytimers to plan their next excursion. Feels like I’m watching a wildlife documentary: Inane Rituals of the Manhattan Socialite.
    The CB squelches: “ Need an answer…need an answer man… ”
    I switch to a safe band. “Go.”
    “ Got a hardcase. Real John Dillinger-type .”
    “Sunchasers. Thirty minutes.”
    I cut up Fifty-Seventh and hang a left on Fifth. Sunchasers is the newest high-society phenomenon: the tanning salon. Some poor yuppie had to cancel a trip to Cancun? No problem. Fifteen minutes on a tanning bed, bombarded with 2,500-watts of ultraviolet light, he’s a dead ringer for George Hamilton. Sunchasers is owned by Marco Sorbetti, an old-school Moustache Pete and current Capo of the Westside Outfit. It’s a front: drugs, guns, and stolen merchandise are hustled out the back. Half the beds aren’t even plugged in. It’s the most obvious front I’ve ever seen—it’s in Harlem .
    Who the fuck needs a tan in Harlem?
    How many yups are trekking to the ghetto for a tan?
    I park two blocks away and retrieve my black bag from the spare tire well. Stopping at a bodega to buy some heavy-duty trash bags, I spot a bottle of Coppertone oil beside the magazine rack. Eying my purchases, the clerk jerks his head towards the snow-covered sidewalk.
    “Bad time of the year to be seeking coloration.”
    “Taking a trip,” I lie. “Milan.”
    Sunchasers is