The smell hits you first: stale tobacco and old newsprint as you step inside the News Depot.
Old Gus hawkes the usual papers and magazines, but my business was with the real stuff hidden behind the cigarette packs—the truth. And Gus was a guy in the know..
“You came looking for trouble, didn’t you Jack?” Gus rasped, leaning over the counter. “Free piece of advice. If you ever meet a dame in dark glasses with a red purse… run. Don’t walk away. Run! Now get the hell out of here!”
I went out the door, with cynical laugh. A red purse, a femme fatale. The old man’s warning was a breadcrumb, and I figured I’d follow it.
I headed to the diner for lunch, the air was thick with coffee and burnt toast. I was nursing a cup, when the bell above the door jingled ansd a shadow caught my eye.
She walked in, shaking water from her coat like a stray pooch. In her hand, a loud splash of color against the drab morning, was a red purse. A cold knot tightened in my gut as Gus’s words roared back.
She slid into the booth across from me without a word, pushed a small, damp piece of paper across the table, and was gone, swallowed by the rain.
I unfolded the paper. In jagged, hurried letters, a single phrase was scrawled: “Remember December.”
The words hit me like a shot to the stomach. December. The coldest month of the year, the month my father died, and the year a 13 year old kid started running numbers for old Bronson. I was still that kid, chasing the ghost of a dead man. I headed back to the office.
I found his name in the old journals right where I knew it had to be: Claude Bronson. He was the man who had taken me in when my father went to prison, taught me the rackets, and gave me a name in this town. He also taught me that no good deed ever came without a string attached.
I ran my hand over the chipped paint of the desk, tracing the worn edges of the single photo I’d carried in my wallet for decades: my mother and father, smiling.
Then—Bang! Claude’s voice screamed out at me from the past: “Jack, if you’re going to bet, bet hard. And bet it all on red.”
I thought again about that femme fatale with the red purse, and I knew my next move. I had to find a girl playing a dangerous game.
I worked the streets like a surgeon, peeling back the layers of the city’s grim facade. The waitress gave me a blank stare, the cashier told me to beat it, and the bums traded questions for quarters. My little red-haired fish was lost in the currents.
Defeated, I found myself in The Blue Note, a dive where the smoke was thick enough to chew. I ordered a whiskey, letting the sad wail of a saxophone wash over me, and then I saw her.
She was on stage under a single yellow spotlight, singing in the same low, melodic hum I’d heard in the diner. This was her: the girl with the red purse.
I watched through three sets and a dozen whiskeys until the place was empty. She came out from behind the stage, and when our eyes met, her smile vanished.
“You’ve been looking for me,” she said.
“I have,” I replied. “What’s this all about?.”
Fear flickered in her eyes.
“You’re a fool, Jack Hammer. A stupid fool. I’m engaged to Rocco Racini. And you have no idea what that means.”
My blood ran cold. Rocco Racini. He was the grandson of the old man that my old partner Frank Vance and I had put away for fraud a few decades ago.
“He’s been waiting,” she whispered. “He knows what you and Vance did to his grandfather. He’s been waiting for you to get close to me. Rocco isn’t a man you play with. He’s a man who breaks you.”
She left me there, and I had a new target on my back. The case wasn’t just a case anymore; it was a debt coming due with interest.
The whiskey sat there, a cold reminder of the target on my back. My rules said you face the music, but you don’t do it alone. I needed a bigger fish, and one name kept coming back: my uncle Frank Hammer. He knew every rat and cop in this city and had built his own empire out of the scraps.
I took a cab into Old Town, the run-down slum I grew up in. I walked up the cracked steps of his brownstone and found him sitting in a worn armchair surrounded by ghosts of cigar smoke.
“Rocco Racini,” I said, cutting to the chase.
Frank grunted, lighting a fresh cigar. “That boy’s got a long memory and a long reach.”
“He’s got a hit on me,” I told him. “Some kind of setup.”
Frank took a slow drag. “Family business always comes back to blood and loyalty. Rocco’s looking for you, and he ain’t sending flowers. He’s runnunig a high-stakes backroom poker game where a trigger man will be playing. Only the chosen few get a seat.”
“How do I get in?” I asked.
Frank gave me a look that said I was dumber than I looked. “You don’t. Everyone there knows everyone, or they know who you are. A hitman doesn’t like it when his target is onto him. That’d force his hand, faster, harder.”
He was right. The moment I showed my face, I’d be looking at a one-way ticket to the morgue. I left Frank’s house feeling lower than a bug’s ass, a dead man walking with no other moves to make.
I stepped back onto the pavement, the target on my back heavier than ever. I took a cab straight to Jamie Diamond’s usual haunt, an upscale card room downtown. We had been tight ever since I saved his hands from the mob after he caught them rigging a game.
I found him at a back table, stacking chips with effortless precision. I slid into the chair opposite him and cut right to the chase, laying out the intel Uncle Frank had delivered: Rocco, the hit, the backroom poker game, and the unnamed trigger man.
“Frank dealt me a new hand, and I need someone to play it for me,” I said, leaning forward. “No one knows your face, Jamie. The game’s an inside job in a barred-window warehouse on the bad side of town. The door requires a secret knock—the rhythm to ‘Shave and a Haircut’—and a password. The password is ‘I’m looking for Jack’. You have to show five grand cash to get in the door, and I’ll stake that.”
Jamie was cold as ice, taking a slow sip of his whiskey. “So you want me to sit in for a marked man? Sounds like my kind of high stakes. And what’s my cut?”
“Everything,” I said. “And your life, if this thing goes sideways.”
Jamie smirked. “Five grand? I’ll make the rest up in the first hour. But I wouldn’t insult you by taking less. The deal stands.”
“That’s why you’re my guy. You’ve got a photographic mind for names, dates, and details. If there’s a whiff of a clue, you’ll sniff it out.”
“I’ve already cased the joint,” I continued. “The game’s in a three-story building right across from a four-story fleabag hotel. I’ve rented a top-floor room with a perfect shot of that steel door. It’s a war room with cameras and telescopic lenses. My eyes on the street, your mind on the table.”
Jamie smiled. “With all that equipment, Jack, maybe a camera isn’t the only thing you should be shooting from that room.”
I shook my head with a wry smile. “If only it were that easy, Jamie. If only.”
At 2 A M the night before the game, a cab dropped me in the alley behind the flophouse. I hauled a heavy trunk up the grimy stairway, locked myself in room 4, and hung the do not disturb sign.
I opened the trunk, unboxing my tools: two finely crafted cameras, one with a telephoto sharp enough to lift fingerprints off the steel door across the street. I set up the gear, sat in the uncomfortable chair facing the window, sipped my bourbon, and drifted into a half-sleep, imagining Jamie preparing the only way he knew—by laying cards down and calculating odds.
The next day dragged like the watch was running backward. At five o’clock, the street traffic roared, and I began fine-tuning the lenses. Ten p.m. was game time. I was ready.
[JAMIE]
I’m Jamie Diamond, and this game is mine.
The cold bit at my neck as I approached the steel plate door in that grimy canyon of brick and shadow. I knocked the rhythm: tap tap-tap tap tap, pause, tap-tap. The sliding peephole shot back, revealing yellowed, cold eyes.
“What’s the word, slick?” a voice growled.
“I’m looking for Jack,” I said low and steady.
The bolt slid back, and a mountain of a man ushered me inside. The room hit me with the thick, gray soup of stale whiskey, cheap cigars, and the coppery tang of greed. Seven men sat around a heavy oak table under a single low-hanging lamp.
I took my seat and immediately began drinking in their tells, categorizing them by number:
- Number 8: A slick-haired weasel running his thumb over a gold pinky ring—a poser.
- Number 5: Bloodshot eyes and a twitch—in a bottle.
- Number 4: Just old, three up on my left. He could barely lift his glass.
- Number 6: Shaking from the game—a loser.
- Number 2: A sharp like me.
That left 3 and 7. Me at 6, a bald rat who smelled of death at 9, and a dark, curly-haired guy at 3 sitting directly across from each other.
The bald rat at 9 was dangerous, but Number 3 was the real concern. The moment I walked in, his eyeballs rattled around in their sockets. Panic, dread, and anger flashed across his face. I calculated the seconds until the explosion of recognition.
5… 4… 3… 2…
“Jack Hammer! I saw you with Jack Hammer!” he roared.
I didn’t wait. I slammed my hands down, flipping the heavy oak table. Cards and chips flew. The chaos bought me a fraction of a second as the brute and the bald rat lunged. I scrambled past the chairs and put my shoulder into a wooden door leading to a dark hallway, using the mental map I’d drawn.
I took the steps two at a time, spilling out onto the cold sidewalk. I bolted and hunkered down behind a cargo van, heart hammering against my ribs, and saw Jack coming across the street.
The mountain and the bald rat burst into the street. A shout tore from my lungs: “Jack! Look out!”
[JACK]
From my perch in the war room, my telephoto lens captured the flying chips and the flipped table. The gig was up. I hit the rickety elevator, rode it down, and kicked open the flophouse door just in time to see Jamie leap behind the cargo van.
“Jack! Look out!” he screamed.
On the street stood Rocco and the bald rat—the hitman I immediately placed. As my hand went for my gun, the hitman’s sights squared directly onto my chest. The target on my back had moved to my heart. He was a pro; this was the end.
At that exact millisecond, something leaped on me, clinging heart-to-heart like an alley tiger. The hitman’s gun fired, the bullet ripping straight through her back. As I slowly lowered her to the ground, I saw the loud splash of color: the red purse. The woman in dark glasses looked up at me with big, soulful eyes, coughed blood, and gasped: “Oh Jack… Jack… I’m your dahha…”
And she was gone.
A low roar tore through the street. Rocco, his face a mask of pure grief and rage, strode over and fired a shot into his own hitman’s gut for missing the mark and killing his girl. Then he turned his smoking gun directly at my chest.
“I loved her, Jack,” he snarled, his finger tightening on the trigger. “And you being her father made me hate you even more.”
Before he could fire, another shot cracked through the alley. Rocco staggered back, a red stain blooming on his chest as Jamie Diamond stepped out from behind the van, his small gentleman’s revolver smoking. Rocco fell to his back, propping himself up on one elbow, gasping, “Dammit, Jack. I loved her. But I hated you more. I promised the family… blood and loyalty, you know.”
A panicked Jamie grabbed my arm. “Jack—this is bad! I’ve never killed a man before.”
“And you still haven’t,” I said, staring into Rocco’s open eyes. I looked at his heaving chest, raised my gun, and pumped five bullets into it, finishing the job.
The roar of the gunshots faded to silence. I walked away from Rocco and knelt beside the girl, holding her cold hand. The red purse lay there, a cruel joke of a warning I should have heeded. I wasn’t a cynical detective; I was just a father holding the hand of a daughter I’d known for all of five seconds.
“Jack… we gotta go,” Jamie panicked, checking the alley corners. “The other players ran. They won’t talk. The street’ll be a tomb by the time the cops get here.”
“I can’t leave her,” I rasped.
Jamie laid a hand on my shoulder, his eyes showing a grim understanding. “Jack. Her family will take care of her. They’ll take her home.”
The distant wail of a siren began to grow—a final, cruel buzzer. I bent down and pressed the first and last kiss I would ever give her to her cold forehead. We turned our backs, fading into the labyrinth of alleys as the sirens chased us into the night.
[JAMIE]
We moved through the wet neon streets like ghosts, jumping at every shadow. The phantom weight of the dead man followed us, and the cold rain couldn’t wash it away. Jack ushered me through a door into a dim table in the back of an anonymous bar—a sanctuary. He brought back a bottle and filled my glass to the rim, filling it again the second I downed it.
“You’ll be alright,” Jack said, trying to offer absolution. “You only did what you had to do.”
“I pulled the plug,” I muttered. Jack tried to take my sins as his own, but I knew Rocco’s fate was sealed the moment my lucky shot scraped his black heart. I killed him, and I’ll carry that stone for the rest of my life, but I’ll never tell Jack that.
Jack poured the medicine down his own throat, settling back as his thoughts rose. He thought of the angel in the street, far too young to have her wings clipped, missing all the tea parties, birthdays, and proms. Was he to blame? Or was it just because he was born Jack Hammer? Whoever he was, change had come. He went to the payphone, called a cab, and we left the bar. Jack assured me on the ride home that he had made the kill shot, and I let him believe I believed it, but we both knew the truth. I got out at my house and we said good night.
[JACK]
The cabbie tipped his hat as I stepped out onto the concrete in front of my office. Inside, the stale air felt like a second skin. Old Jack died out on that street tonight along with the angel. Jamie walked away, but a piece of his soul stayed behind.
My hands, which had so often held a gun, now held a stack of papers—the secrets and lies of a city I was done with. I took every single file and dumped them on the floor, looking at the pile of my old life. I was through. I cracked open a bottle and drank until the morning sun trickled through the blinds, dragging me into a nightmarish maze of angels and demons.
At ten past ten, the clanging of my telephone violently awoke me. I grit my teeth and lifted the receiver on the tenth ring to tell whoever it was that I was out of business.
“Is this Jack Hammer?” a soft, elderly, grandmotherly voice asked. “The Jack Hammer who lived on the streets of Old Town?”
The words hit me like a slap from a ghost. Nobody knew that part of my life.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
“This is Erma Bennett from Old Town. Do you remember me?”
Erma Bennett—the mother of Angela, my first true love from that summer when I was a fourteen-year-old gangster running numbers for Bronson.
“Jack, can you meet with me? I have so much to tell you,” she pleaded.
“Could you please tell me what this is about?” I asked.
“No, Jack. This water is much too deep to go into with sandals on. Today is Tuesday. I’ll be arriving by train tomorrow. Could you meet me Thursday at my sister Alison’s house in Old Town? This needs face to face.”
She hung up, leaving me holding a dead line, the past bleeding irreversibly back into the present.
