Expiration Date Read online

  Praise for Expiration Date

  “Expiration Date is a skillful, fast-paced, rock ’em, jolt ’em, spook ’em, leave-em-laughin’ story with believable characters and a pedal-to-the-floor narrative drive. Top-of-the-line entertainment.”

  —Tom Piccirilli, author of Shadow Season

  Praise for Severance Package

  “A kinetic story, which never stops moving…turbocharged entertainment.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

  “Swierczynski writes a brand of thriller whose pacing forces us to reexamine our casual use of the word breakneck…. This is essentially one long action scene that begs for the next Tarantino to direct. But if that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t: there are both enough cliché killers and comedy to make us raise two thumbs up. If you want your thrillers to be, well, thrilling, pop a big bowl of corn—you won’t leave your seat until the end.”

  —Booklist

  “The best word to describe Swierczynski’s latest thriller is frenetic, and even that is likely an understatement.”

  —Library Journal

  “This action fest moves swiftly to its darkly satisfying conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A guilty pleasure of unparalleled magnitude, with pedal-to-the-metal pacing, characters who appear to be meek cubicle dwellers à la Office Space but are really cold-blooded black-ops killers, and enough gut-churning violence to make a Quentin Tarantino movie look like a Disney musical replete with singing candlesticks and teapots. The dark, twisted energy in this novel is palpable.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Wildly violent and way funny, the book’s a summer blockbuster waiting to be filmed. Grade: A-.”

  —Philadelphia magazine

  “Duane Swierczynski speeds through his action-filled plot, replete with bloodshed, mayhem, and twists. His prose draws the reader in, and his short chapters and revved-up action sequences make Severance Package a one-sitting read…. This novel is as powerful as an unexpected punch in the stomach.”

  —The Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska)

  Praise for The Blonde

  “Compulsively readable…rockets forward with inventive ferocity. [The] plot uncoils in a rapid-fire series of time-coded moments that generate a relentless tension. Brilliantly paced insanity.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Two parts adrenaline rush, one part medical thriller, this twisted story starts with a bang and rarely slows down. Full of offbeat characters, excruciatingly reckless twists, and sardonic humor, this fun ride shows great promise for a rising author.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “This is delicious postmodern hard-boiled punk rock storytelling. Swierczynki’s hit man character is as funny and fresh as he is fierce and quick. The Blonde is masterfully paced, wonderfully rendered, and devastatingly entertaining.”

  —Greg Rucka, Eisner Award–winning author of Queen & Country and 2006 Barry Award–nominated thriller Private Wars

  “Duane Swierczynski’s new novel, The Blonde, is as lean as a starving model, mean as a snake, and fast as a jet. It’s also one hell of fine read. This guy has got to be the hottest new thing in crime fiction, and The Blonde is one of the best crime reads I’ve had in some time.”

  —Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar-winning author of Sunset and Sawdust

  “Page-turning tension…a story so bizarre that it just might be true.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A hilarious nail-biter, a tour-de-force by a young writer who has already carved out this unique take on the crime genre, so it’s futile to compare it to anything else…. It is sui generis. It is perfect.”

  —Laura Lippman, bestselling author of What the Dead Know

  “Another fast, funny, and action-packed outing from a writer who, fortunately for us, doesn’t seem to know how to slow down.”

  —Booklist

  “Quite a ride. The prose is hard-boiled enough to crack walnuts and the action more precipitous than a bobsled run.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Mr. Swierczynski knows how to streamline a story, keep the pace breakneck, sucking all the oxygen out of the room while he tells you this very gritty and nervy story about a pickup gone wrong. Delicious dialogue, funny realizations, and one hell of a ride.”

  —Frank Bascombe, Ain’t It Cool News

  Praise for The Wheelman

  “If you are partial to fast-paced thrillers that present this world as an unforgiving, blood-soaked wasteland, you should love Duane Swierczynski’s first novel. Swierczynski’s novel, like those of [Elmore] Leonard, offers an undertow of humor beneath the churning sea of man’s inhumanity.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Swierczynski has an uncommon gift for the banal lunacy of criminal dialogue, a delightfully devious eye for character, and a surprisingly well-developed narrative for a beginner.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Adrenaline-charged…fast-moving and funny, The Wheelman is Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in an R-rated amusement park.”

  —Booklist

  “I canceled a night out and stayed up all night reading. That’s how much I loved this book…at every turn, I was blindsided. Hilarious and bloody violent.”

  —Ken Bruen, author of the Shamus Award–winning The Guards

  “A great heist story in the rich tradition of Richard Stark’s Parker novels and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing…keeps readers holding their breath to see what’s going to happen next. It is clearly the work of a maturing writer who is possessed of a keen style and abundant talent.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Dark stuff…hilariously funny at the same time. Swierczynski has come up with his own twisted and thoroughly enjoyable genre. Bring on some more, sir.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Oh, what style!”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  FOR

  LOUIS WOJCIECHOWSKI

  1926–2009

  WELL—

  SO IT GOES:

  TIME HITS THE HARDEST BLOWS.

  —JOSEPH MONCURE MARCH

  Contents

  I Thomas Jefferson Goes to a Porno

  II Good as Dead

  III The Thing with Three Fingers

  IV My Father’s Killer

  V The Clockwise Witness

  VI This Could Be the Last Time

  VII The Pit

  VIII No More Mickey

  IX Asylum Road

  X Slasher’s Revenge

  XI The Night Watchman

  XII How It Ends

  (XIII) My Other Life

  Notes and Thanks

  About the Author

  See that body sprawled on the hardwood floor, marinating in a pool of his own blood?

  That’s me.

  Five minutes ago I was shot in the back. Three times, right between the shoulder blades. The guy who runs the late-night beer bodega downstairs, Willie Shahid, heard the shots—bang bang bang—then saw somebody with a revolver go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. After a few minutes, he walked upstairs to check it out.

  Now Willie’s outside the apartment door. He knocks, and then waits a second. Something’s not right. He sniffs the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper fills his nostrils. Gunpowder. It’s not an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.

  Watch Willie Shahid take out his cell and dial 911, giving the proper address and even the floor. Guy’s a real pro.

  If you hang around a little longer, you’ll see the EMTs arrive, and then the Philly PD, 15th District. They’ll move me to a stretcher and carry me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train and past a bunch of dudes in oversized white T-s
hirts and deadpan expressions.

  Soon the surgeons at nearby Frankford Hospital will dig the slugs out of my back, place them in a kidney-shaped steel tray. From there, they’ll transfer them to a plastic evidence bag and send it down to the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensics lab at Eighth and Race. Standard procedure—bullets from GSWs always go right to the lab for ballistic analysis.

  A few days later confusion will sweep over the forensics guys’ faces. Identifying the type of bullet will be no problem: .38 caliber.

  No, something else will trouble them.

  After analyzing the slugs and gunpowder, the CSI guys will determine that the bullets are at least forty years old. They’ll also discover that this specific type stopped being manufactured back in 1967.

  Now, old bullets can still work. But they’ll have to be asking themselves: Why use forty-year-old ammunition to snuff somebody?

  Some people have the idea that when you die your life flashes before your eyes, like a movie on fast-forward.

  Not quite.

  Time’s arrow only appears to fly straight when you’re alive. Dead is something else. Once you cross that invisible line, you see things how they really are. You see that every moment seems to happen all at once.

  Which makes telling this story—or the most important parts of it, anyway—difficult. Usually, you start at the beginning. Or the middle, so the listener doesn’t get bored.

  Problem is, I’m very hazy on the beginning and the middle, as I came in during the end. I can speculate, but it’d be nothing more than a wild guess.

  I guess I should start with the day I moved into the apartment and went back in time.

  I

  Thomas Jefferson Goes to a Porno

  I was sitting on my front stoop, drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. At eleven bucks a six-pack, Sierra’s a splurge beer, so I tried to savor every sip. I’d probably be drinking pounder cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from now on.

  After a while Meghan came out and I handed her the last one. She thanked me by bumping shoulders. We sat for a while and drank our beers in the warm downtown sun. It would have been a perfect day if I wasn’t moving out.

  Meghan leaned back on her elbows, blond hair hanging down across her forehead.

  “You sure I can’t give you a ride?”

  I swallowed, enjoying the bitter taste of hops in my mouth, the bright sun on my face. Then I looked at her.

  “Frankford’s kind of a bad neighborhood.”

  “No neighborhoods are bad, Mickey. They’re just misunderstood.”

  “No, seriously. It’s bad. There was a story in yesterday’s Daily News. Some high school kid there was murdered by three of his friends. And I don’t mean over a dumb fight over sneakers or drugs. I mean, they planned his execution, killed him, then worked hard to hide the evidence.”

  “They didn’t work too hard if the Daily News found out about it.”

  Meghan and I had been friends since the year before, when I moved to Sixteenth and Spruce, just a few blocks away from swank Rittenhouse Square. If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia, you know the square I’m talking about—high-end restaurants, high-rise condos. I couldn’t afford this neighborhood even when I was gainfully employed.

  But two weeks ago my alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City Press, decided they could get by with only one staff writer. They wished me all the best. Since no other papers were crying out for my services, here or elsewhere, I joined the ranks of the newly unemployed. Just like hundreds of thousands of other people.

  So now my meager possessions were almost packed and I was waiting for a ride from my mom so she could take me to my grandfather’s cramped—yet rent-free—efficiency in Frankford, which was a long, long way from Rittenhouse Square.

  Normally I refused to accept any help or advice from my mom. The less she knew about my life, the less I owed her, the better. But my back was up against the wall now. I couldn’t afford another week in this apartment, let alone another month. I had no money for a deposit on another apartment.

  I was moving back to Frankford.

  Slumming is one thing when you’re twenty-two and just out of college and backed up by a deep-pile parental checking account. But moving to a bad neighborhood when you’re thirty-seven and have exhausted all other options is something else entirely. It’s a heavy thing with a rope, dragging you down to a lower social depth with no easy way back to the surface.

  Worst of all, you can still see them up there—the friends you graduated with fifteen years ago—laughing and splashing around, having a good time.

  The last thing I wanted was Meghan to escort me to the bottom of the ocean, give me an awkward hug, then swim back up to the party. She’d offered to drive me at least a half-dozen times over the past two weeks, and I repeatedly had told her no, my mom insisted on taking me.

  Which was a total friggin’ lie.

  “You don’t want to go to Frankford,” I said. “It’s one of the busiest drug corridors in the city. It even used to have its own serial killer.”

  “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

  “Completely serious. Happened when I was in high school—in the late 1980s. The guy was called the Frankford Slasher, and he killed a bunch of prostitutes. I wrote a piece about it for the Press.”

  “That was Jack the Ripper.”

  “It was also the Frankford Slasher.”

  “Still think you’re making it up.”

  I pushed myself up by pressing my palms on the warm brownstone.

  “I’d better finish packing. A couple of teenagers could be plotting my death as we speak, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

  “Or the Frankford Slasher.”

  “Fortunately, I’m not a prostitute.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nice.”

  There was an awkward moment of silence. Then Meghan looked at me.

  “Call your mom, Mickey. Tell her I’m driving you.”

  Frankford wasn’t always a bad neighborhood. A couple hundred years ago it was a nice quiet village where the framers of the Constitution would spend their summers to escape the stifling heat of the city. I could show you the place—Womrath Park—where Thomas Jefferson allegedly kicked back and read the Declaration of Independence for the first time in public.

  But take Thomas Jefferson to Womrath Park now. Introduce him to the new owners of the park—the hard young men selling little white chunks of smokeable snuff. Walk him into the triple-X theater across the street, where he’d be treated to projected images of people engaged in a very different sort of congress.

  You could almost imagine him marching back down to Independence Hall and saying: Look, fellas, I think we oughta think this whole “freedom” thing through a bit more.

  A century after Jefferson, Frankford the Quiet Country Village morphed into Frankford the Bustling Industrial Neighborhood. It was a popular way station on the road (King’s Highway) from Philadelphia to New York City. The streets were crowded with factories and mills, along with modest-but-sturdy rowhomes for the workers who labored in them. There were cotton mills, bleacheries, wool mills, iron works and calico print works. There was a bustling arsenal and gunpowder mill. The industry thrived for a while, then sputtered, then died. Just like it did in the rest of the country.

  But they say the neighborhood was truly doomed in 1922, the year the city ran an elevated train down its main artery—Frankford Avenue—shrouding the shops below in darkness and pigeon crap. White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, drugs found Frankford, and invited all of its friends to stay.

  And I’d told Meghan the truth: a serial killer really did prowl the dark avenue under the El, late at night, looking for drunks and prostitutes in the 1980s around dive bars like Brady’s at Bridge and Pratt. The Slasher was never caught.

  A Philly band called American Dream had a minor pop hit back in the early 1970s called “Frankford El.” The chorus explained that you can’t get to Heaven on
the Frankford El. Why?

  Because the Frankford El goes straight to…Frankford.

  Grandpop’s block looked like a junkie’s smile. Starting from the extreme left, you had the dirty concrete steps leading up to the Margaret Street station of the El. Right next door, an abandoned building. Then, a weeded lot. A three-story building. Weeded lot. Grandpop’s building, the ground floor occupied by one of those beer/rolling paper/pork rind bodegas that upset City Council so much. Weeded lot. Weeded lot.

  Out of an original eight buildings on this strip of Frankford Avenue, only three remained.

  My new place was up on the third floor, where it appeared I’d have an excellent view of the El tracks.

  Meghan gazed up at the dirty underbelly of the El through her windshield. Pigeons nested around up there, covering every possible square inch with their chunky white shit.

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “You’re right. If you squint, it’s eerily reminiscent of Rittenhouse Square.”

  “This is probably the next great undiscovered neighborhood. Look what they did to Fishtown and Northern Liberties.”

  “Yeah. They could level the area with a bunker buster and start all over.”

  She scanned the block. Across the street was a rusty metal kiosk that, if I remember correctly, used to be a newsstand. Now it appeared to be a community urinal.