Snitch World

Jim Nisbet

Description

“The Miata jumped the curb and sheared off a light pole. The impact deployed the airbags, but Chainbang was ready. He knifed Klinger’s before it was fully inflated and his own before it could crush the glass pipe in his breast pocket. The six-inch blade went through the nylon like a pit bull through a kindergarten.”

Snitch World takes place in a San Francisco of menacing technology, where the old cons come up short and the crimes of the gritty night have morphed into slick capers pulled off by the glow of a smartphone.

Klinger hangs out at the Hawse Hole, a sordid dive even by Tenderloin standards. All he really wants is enough cash to buy a cup of coffee, some cigarettes, a bug-free hotel room. The simple act of picking a carefully targeted mark’s pocket initiates a series of events that get stranger and more dangerous by the moment. Jim Nisbet, with his characteristic humor and brilliant prose, creates a world where trust, and even cash, are the avatars of a loser’s game.

This is Snitch World, where a nine-dollar app can be as deadly as a dirty needle.

Also included is a recent interview with Jim Nisbet, in conversation with Patrick Marks, owner and publisher of San Francisco’s The Green Arcade, talking about writing, books, and technology.

Sujets

• Technology
• Crime

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868746
• Langue: English

Extrait

"Few crime writers, living or dead, have the mastery of the English language, the ability to effortlessly set a scene, or pack the same noir punch, as Jim Nisbet." Garrett Kenyon, Spinetingler
"Nisbet has long been one of crime fiction’s best kept secrets." Woody Haut, Crime Time
"[A] contemporary noir titan." Publishers Weekly
"[A] rock ’n’ roll of violence, cruelty, humour, absurdity, psychoanalysis, oneirism, and poetry is the marque of Jim Nisbet." Libération
"Jim Nisbet is a cult favorite in Europe and it’s easy to see why. I’ve talked to a few people about this author and comparisons abound; he’s Thomas Pynchon crossed with Raymond Chandler; the lovechild of Patricia Highsmith and Don DeLillo, and on and on it goes. For my money I’d say he reads like Jasper Fforde meets Ken Bruen. One thing for sure, he’s unique and man does he have a vivid imagination." SleuthOfBakerStreet.com
"Jim Nisbet is a poet … [who] resembles no other crime fiction writer. He mixes the irony of Dantesque situations with lyric narration, and achieves a luxuriant cocktail that truly leaves the reader breathless." Drood’s Review of Mysteries
"Jim Nisbet is a lot more than just good … powerful, provocative…. Nisbet’s style has overtones of Walker Percy’s smooth southern satin, but his characters losers, grifters, con men hark back to the days of James M. Cain’s twisted images of morality." Toronto Globe and Mail
"Jim Nisbet’s work has been tapping directly into the pulse of America for decades. Like others who have done the same in the past, it’s only later that the rest of us catch up and realize just how right those trailblazers were all along. That time is now, for all of us to not only catch up to this unheralded master but to offer him the respect and regard that he deserves." Brian Lindenmuth, Spinetingler

Snitch World
© Jim Nisbet
This edition © PM Press 2013.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–60486–681–0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913629
Cover art by Gent Sturgeon
Cover layout by John Yates
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94102–5949
www.thegreenarcade.com
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
By the same author:
NOVELS
The Gourmet ( a.k.a. The Damned Don’t Die)
Ulysses’ Dog ( a.k.a. The Spider’s Cage)
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude to a Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
The Octopus On My Head
Windward Passage
A Moment of Doubt
Old & Cold
POETRY
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho ( with Alastair Johnston )
Small Apt ( with photos by Shelly Vogel )
Across the Tasman Sea
NONFICTION
Laminating the Conic Frustum
RECORDINGS
The Visitor
Baby, just about anywhere you die there’s somebody watching. It doesn’t make any difference whether they’re watching you die in bed or in a chair, somebody is going to be there. It’s strictly a spectator sport.
Eliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel
When it’s a man’s time to die God leads him to the perfect place.
Frank Herbert, Dune
ONE
The Miata jumped the curb and sheared off a light pole. The impact deployed the airbags, but Chainbang was ready. He knifed Klinger’s before it was fully inflated and his own before it could crush the glass pipe in his breast pocket. The six-inch blade went through the nylon like a pit bull through a kindergarten.
Or so he thought. His arms absorbing the shocks transmitted by the rim of the steering wheel, Klinger didn’t mind a nick on his right cheek inflicted by the blade, its vector skewed by the onrushing fabric. And then, shredding his own safety device, Chainbang stabbed himself too, under the chin.
Neither of them noticed.
The light pole crashed headfirst into the middle of the northbound lanes of Webster and sent a shower of sparks onto the sidewalk. The Miata wound up stalled beyond the opposite side of the median and pointed northbound in the middle of the two southbound lanes.
It was three-thirty in the morning. At the moment, there was no traffic.
Klinger keyed the starter. The solenoid merely clicked. He keyed it again. Same result.
"Fucker’s quitting while it’s ahead," Chainbang observed.
"Yeah, well," Klinger advocated, "it’s quitting while we’re behind."
Chainbang beat a tattoo on the lip of the disgorged dash with the blade of his knife. The nearest fire station is only four blocks away, at Turk and Webster. The nearest copshop is just around the corner from the fire station, at Turk and Fillmore.
As Chainbang stared up the street and paradiddled his knife over the vinyl, a swiveling red light came on over the garage door of the fire station.
"Senseless violence," Klinger was saying. He turned the key in the switch like he was turning a screw into a cork. "You think you killed that guy?"
Chainbang shrugged. "I hit him hard as I could."
"Might have done it," Klinger concluded grimly, and now, though he’d been patient with the nonrespondent starter, the shank of the key wrung off in the switch.
That’s the thing about adrenaline, Klinger thought, as he thumbed the stub of the key in the darkness adjacent the steering column. A man under its influence doesn’t know his own strength.
The preliminary moan of a siren emanated from the rising garage door of San Francisco Fire Station No. 5.
Klinger dropped his hand to the door handle. "It’s time for us to go." He held out his other hand. "Give me half of whatever comes out of your pocket."
Chainbang continued to stare through the wind-screen, and continued to drum the flat of the knife on what was left of the dashboard. His eyes refocused on the glass in front of him. Now he noticed the long crack that meandered from the lower-right corner of the wind-screen on the passenger side to the upper-left corner on the driver’s side. It meandered like the Snake River across the befogged reservation of his youth. Befogged is the wrong word. Chainbang’s memory of his youth lay beyond any number of smeared thicknesses of graffitied Lexan, securely obfuscated.
The engine of the ladder truck rolled through the open garage door of the fire station, lights throbbing, siren probing.
Chainbang thought of spearing the beckoning hand to the lid of the center console before he bolted. But, he reflected, word of this minor treachery would inevitably get back to whatever joint he wound up in after this or some other caper, and, shithead or not, nobody, even a Klinger so uniquely snitched out, was entirely without friends.
In that regard was not even he, Chainbang, one of Klinger’s friends?
The ladder truck, fully extruded like a pipefish from its den now, aimed many of its lights south toward the Miata, siren in full cry.
"Hey! Wake up! Fork it over!"
Chainbang thrust his free hand into the pocket of his windbreaker and fished up a fistful of bills. Though in the dark he had no idea as to their denomination or quantity, he crushed them into Klinger’s waiting palm. "You should invest some of this in driver’s education, you fuck."
Klinger didn’t waste a moment. His door, being the one that had impacted the light pole, was jammed. So, as they’d been robbing liquor stores with the top down, since they couldn’t figure out how to get it up, he tried to step up and out of the stolen sports car with dignity. But the remnants of the airbag entangled his legs, and he and his dignity spilled headlong into the street.
Going to school on Klinger’s experience, Chainbang took the time to gleefully lacerate his own airbag to ribbons before he opened the door and stepped onto the landscaped median, formerly home to the ruined light pole.
The fire engine was three blocks away now. From somewhere a little farther away came the distinguishable siren of an ambulance. This would be standard San Francisco emergency response: one or two fire trucks and an ambulance. Not until somebody had determined that a crime had been committed would the cops be called.
East across Webster, beyond the light pole, spread some eight square blocks of housing projects, with which Chainbang was all too familiar. Time was, he might have clambered over one of the entry gates and taken refuge in any of a number of abandoned units, or the various shooting galleries, or a unit known to take in fugitives for a price. In the old days the cops would chase a man to the edge of the projects and stop dead, no matter the hotness of their pursuit, for even the cops were afraid to broach the boundaries of this and other such projects without massive backup, even in broad daylight.
But those days were over. Tonight, Chainbang’s better chance was he cast his mind over the neighborhood Alamo Square, two blocks straight up Grove Street. He could spend the night burrowed into a clump of Mexican sage the size of a haystack. As long as the cops didn’t bring out the dogs, he’d be fine.
He rounded the back of the Miata and put his foot on the prostrate Klinger’s chest.
"Hey what the fuck?"
"Don’t follow me, man," Chainbang said. He pointed up the hill. "Go your own way."