Story Excerpts

Margo and the Femme Fatale
by Terence Faherty

“The next time the station is passing out free Dodgers tickets, Miss Banning, keep me in mind.”

Margo, the Banning addressed, stopped in mid stride. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

She liked the man who’d stopped her, Sid Matthews, one of the panelists on the radio show she oversaw, Gotham Goings On. Matthews was a moonlighting sports columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who reminded Margo of her grandfather, being short and gray and liberally sprinkled with cigar ash, and he was the least troublesome of the show’s three regulars. The least temperamental, as well. Even this remark about free tickets, which would have sounded like a complaint if Mamie Gallagher, Gotham’s statuesque show business expert, had made it, was merely a pleasant greeting from the smiling Matthews. READ MORE

 

Dark Equation
by Michael Nethercott

On that cold day in the fall of 2000, Burt Lentz had been in a rancid mood even before the gunmen stormed in. Starting with the commute to work, the day had gone against him. As evidence: the bottleneck on 495; the coffee spilt in his lap; the sudden, blinding rain burst and the defective windshield wipers. Then, as he marched across the parking lot of the community college, the folder under his arm slipped open, dumping half the corrected exams into a fresh puddle of rainwater. Lentz cursed, scooped up the dripping papers, and muttered, “Perfect, just perfect.”

Even though he was running late, only three of his students had arrived before him. These few had positioned themselves as far away from each other as possible, and only one—round, white-haired Mrs. Peller—offered him a hello. For his part, Lentz merely nodded and grunted noncommittally. READ MORE