Queens Noir Read Online Free PDF Page A

sneakers
every day.
    "Mmmm-hmmm," Nikki whispered, knotting her yellow
cotton tank top at her sternum and tying the laces on her
New Balance sneakers, sweat socks bunched at the tops. Her
white spandex shorts could not have been any tighter, accentuating her twenty-five-year-old ass that she'd slaved to sculpt
into bubble perfection on the butt buster, StairMaster, and at
the aerobics dance classes in the gym in the Bayview condo
complex where she'd rented an apartment for six months.

    Two things she'd noticed about all the women Dr. Sheridan chased-all were in their twenties and all had bubble
butts.
    Several minutes later, Nikki peered through the telescope
again. The sun twinkled on the blue eye of Little Neck Bay
as Sheridan boarded his forty-two-foot Silverton bearing the
name The Dog's Life at his private dock behind his modernized
Queen Anne-style house on a cul-de-sac off Shore Road. He
climbed to the fly deck, fired up the twin engines, and aimed
straight at Bayside Marina a half-mile across the water. Nikki
knew Dr. Sheridan would moor The Dog's Life there before
moving down the marina walkway to the jogging path. He
would run south to the end of the asphalt path at Northern
Boulevard, then make a U-turn and jog three miles north to
Fort Totten, where he'd turn and head back to the marina to
complete his daily six-mile route along one of the most idyllic
stretches of waterfront in New York City.
    "He's mine," Nikki whispered, before hurrying out of the
apartment and down the sixteen flights of stairs to work up a
good sweat before jogging out into the Bayside streets, passing the old colonials, the Queen Annes, the Tudors, and the
gruesome McMansions and boxy two-family condo units that
looked to her like they had been designed by shoemakers.
    She huffed east on Thirty-Fifth Avenue and over to the
secret little emerald called Crocheron Park. Nikki ran past
a fraternity of dog walkers who let their pets chase taunting
squirrels through the underused meadows. She legged past
the fields where a father in a Mets jacket towered fly balls to
his son who wore a Yankees hat. She nodded to three chunky
women joggers who gasped counter-clockwise on the onemile inside roadway and watched a tennis volley between two
seventy-something men wearing white designer shorts with indoor winter tans. They stopped the volley to ogle Nikki.
Since Viagra, seventy is the new seventeen, she thought. She
slowed to a walk as she approached the southern-most of the
two gazebos stationed on the steep leafy hill overlooking the
jogging/bicycle road parallel to the humming Cross Island Parkway. Through the budding trees she would momentarily clock
Dr. Sheridan making the southbound leg of his run.

    It was 9:17 a.m. now. She knew his moves better than he
did. Glistening with sweat, her red headband securing her long
dark hair, she gulped some Poland Spring water, then poured
out all but an inch from a twenty-ounce bottle. Through the
verdant trees she saw him, running hard, like someone fleeing
from his own footprints.
    Nikki bounded down the long stone steps from the park
to the Cross Island overpass. She leaped from step to step in
a graceful ballet, her body taking blurry flight between footfalls. She cut over the six lanes of the Cross island, busy with
Mother's Day travelers, about half of them on their way to
visit Mom now living in some old person's orphanage, with
a name like Shady Acres, after having been abandoned by
the very ingrates she had brought into the world. Nikki gazed
right and here came Dr. Sheridan hoofing toward her just as
she bounced down the final ramp onto the jogging path, her
breasts heaving, sweat lashing off her face in a spray of tiny
sunlit diamonds.
    They exchanged glances. Dr. Sheridan smiled. Nikki didn't.
A lifetime of running had kept his forty-five-year-old body as
trim as Nikki imagined it had been when he was twenty. She
pivoted, sprung, and ran ahead