Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [79]
I raced downstairs in pants and socks. Across the street sawdust was flying from the main trunk. Marcy Stern was on the sidewalk, taking people’s business cards and handing out pictures of model apartments slated for a new twenty-story residential tower. Each had a wonderful view of the Empire State Building.
“You can’t build here!” I and several panicked neighbors screamed. “The seminary is landmarked.”
“Not this part.”
“The whole block.”
“Not the new part.”
“But—”
“We found the same loophole they did when they built the new part.”
Steel rises quickly in New York. The last Samantha and I saw of my view was a hard-hatted iron worker silhouetted against the Empire State Building like King Kong.
THE LAST ROUND
BY C.J. SULLIVAN
Inwood
Danny Stone woke up angry. He sat up in his lumpy double bed and felt a rage tearing through him. His fists were clenched and he was breathing hard. He knew it was the dream. It was always the dream.
He shook his head and tried to erase the images of his long night. He knew he threw punches in his sleep and that is why he slept alone. Since he lost his wife, every woman he went to bed with woke him yelling that he was hitting them while he was dreaming. Sleep boxing, he told them, he suffered from sleep boxing. He said it as a joke but none of the women found it funny. Or slept with him again. In his waking life he had never struck a woman, and even in his dreams it wasn’t a woman he was trying to hit.
He got out of his bed and stretched his tight body. The cold linoleum felt good on his bare feet as he walked over and looked out his bedroom window down to Sherman Avenue. A cold blast of wind blew brown leaves around a fire pump. Danny watched an elderly man carrying a plastic black bag and rummaging through a garbage can looking for beer and soda cans for the nickel reward.
Danny turned away from the window. He felt a lump in his throat. He blocked that out with another long stretch. His muscles and bones popped and then he dropped to the floor to do one hundred sit-ups followed with fifty push-ups. Some men woke up to coffee, some to brushing their teeth. Danny Stone woke up and worked out. He did this every morning since he could remember. As a young boy he wanted to be a boxer and that is where it began. It took him through his fighting career and it would now take him into retirement.
“Too old, boy … you too old.”
He tensed up on his last ten push-ups as he heard those words in his mind. His trainer, Victor Garcia, had said that to him at Obert’s Gym yesterday when Danny floated the idea of one more fight.
Too old? How is thirty-five too old? he thought. Thirty-five is the prime of life for most men. But for a boxer? He knew the dirty secret of his profession. You didn’t slowly lose your skills in the ring. They deserted you in seconds, and a contender for the middleweight crown—which is how Danny thought of himself, although Ring Magazine had never ranked him higher than number ten—could go from youthful potential to a washed-up bum in under three minutes. That is all it took. One bad round. You cannot hide in a boxing ring and all your weaknesses are eventually exposed. In his last fight, one of the best middleweights of all time, Roy Jones Jr., looked old at thirty-five, and Danny knew he was no Roy Jones Jr.
“You too old.”
Those words.
Cutting and cruel.
He knew there was something to them. Age for a boxer is deadly. It is like a door you pass through, and when it closes behind you there is no going back. A part of Danny Stone knew that was true, but like most boxers he thought he could go one more time. He figured he could get a $50,000 pay date as an under card at the Garden. Good enough for a stake.
Start a business. Maybe use it as a down payment for a condo. Take on some rising young kid and drop him on his cocky ass with his still-powerful left hook.
He could see it as he laced up his running