Parks The Last Act

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ISBN: 978-0-571-34650-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Former Broadway star Tommy Jump isn't getting the roles he once did; as his final run asSancho Panza draws to a close, Tommy is getting ready to give up the stage, find a steady paycheck, and settle down with his fiancée. Cue Special Agent Danny Ruiz. An old school friend of Tommy's, now with the FBI, Ruiz makes Tommy an offer that sounds too good to refuse. All Tommy has to do is spend six months in prison, acting as failed bank robber 'Pete Goodrich'. Inside, he must find and befriend Mitchell Dupree, who has hidden a secret cache of documents incriminating enough to take down New Colima, one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. If Tommy can get Dupree to reveal where the documents are hidden, the FBI will give him $300,000. More than enough to jumpstart a new life. But does he have what it takes to pull off this one final role?

Brad Parks is the only author to have one the Shamus, Nero, and Lefty Awards, three of crime fiction's most prestigious prizes. A former reporter with The Washington Post and The Star-Ledger (Newark), his two most recent novels are the acclaimed standalone thrillers Say Nothing (2017) and Closer Than You Know (2018). He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children., Brad Parks received the Shamus (Best Private Eye) and Nero (Best American Mystery) for his debut novel, Faces of the Gone, the first book to take both awards. For subsequent books in his Carter Ross series he won a Lefty and a further Shamus (Best Hardcover Novel). Before starting his career as a novelist, Parks spent a dozen years as a reporter for the The Washington Post and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parks, Brad

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

I went to the theater that day telling myself this was it.

The last rush from hearing the seats fill up before the show. The last time striding out into the lights and losing myself in a character. The last opportunity to romance an audience.

I had been doing this, at venues both grand and grim, since I was seven years old. It had been a good run. No, a great one: probably better than ninety-nine point nine percent of people who had ever entertained the conceit that they could entertain; certainly better than an undersize, plain-looking, lower-middle-class kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, had a right to hope for.

But it is the one immortal truth of both life and theater that all runs come an end. Usually before the actor wants them to. Whereas I had once been prized for my precocity and small stature, and the ability to play child roles as a teenager and teenage roles as a young adult, I was now just a cautionary tale: the former child Broadway star who had finally grown up.

At twenty-seven, I was too old for kid roles (not to mention too broad in the chest and, lately, too thin in the hairline). At the same time, I was too young to play most character roles. And I was definitely too short to be the leading man.

I could also acknowledge, albeit painfully, that I had taken my talent as far as it could go. Being the pipsqueak who sang his heart out was nice, but it wasn’t the same as possessing the kind of once-in-a-generation gift—Mandy Patinkin’s range, Leslie Odom Jr.’s pipes, Ben Vereen’s feet—that might have kept me perpetually employed on the Great White Way.

Then there were other professional realities. My legendary agent, Al Martelowitz, had finally died this past spring. A week after his funeral, his agency dropped me, citing my paucity of recent revenue production and dim prospects for improving it.

From my inquiries elsewhere, I had learned that the number of elite agents willing to represent me was exactly zero. That effectively consigned me to cattle-call auditions, a process as brutal as it was pointless. Every sign seemed to be pointing toward the exit.

One of my favorite Broadway standards is “Corner of the Sky” from Pippin. It’s about a young prince who laments, “Why do I feel I don’t fit in anywhere I go?” While I had played the role several times—Pippin is short—I had never truly felt his anxiety before now. My corner of the sky had always been under stage lights. I wasn’t sure where I was going to fit in anymore.

So far, my search for a real job had been limited to one cover letter, sent to a former castmate who was now running a nonprofit theater in Arkansas and needed an assistant managing director. But I knew I was soon going to have to stop rubbernecking at the wreckage of my acting career and start adulting. Amanda, my fiancée, was a painter, and a damn good one. She was angling toward a show at the Van Buren Gallery—yes, that Van Buren Gallery.

In the meantime, one of us needed to have a job with a steady paycheck and healthcare. And Amanda couldn’t swing that and stay as productive as she needed to be. It was on me to finally put my college degree, paid for by the spoils of a more lucrative time in my life, to some remunerative use.

So this was it. The final curtain. The last act.

The Sunday matinee of Labor Day weekend was, for reasons both historical and practical, the end of the season for the Morgenthau Playhouse, a summer stock theater in the Catskills that had been surviving primarily on nostalgia for at least a quarter century. I was one of two Actors’ Equity members in the company, which meant the Morgenthau had splashed “… also featuring Tommy Jump!” across its promotional materials.

Like our geriatric audiences would remember that Tommy Jump had played Gavroche in the first Broadway revival of Les Misérables; or that he had been nominated for a Tony Award for his role as smart-mouthed Jackson in the short-lived but critically acclaimed Cherokee Purples, which had the misfortune of debuting in the depths of the Great Recession, when the last thing anyone wanted to see was a show about a family who had left the rat race in order to farm and sell the ultimate organic heirloom tomato.

(Go ahead and laugh. Then remember that the biggest hit of the last decade was a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury.)

The irony that my swan song was coming in the Morgenthau’s production of Man of La Mancha was not lost on me. I wasn’t Don Quixote. That would have been a little too on the nose. I was Sancho Panza, because the short guy always gets cast as Sancho. I had been tilting at windmills all the same.

Once the overture began, the performance seemed to pass in an eyeblink. Time onstage always seemed to go that way for me. I was soon peeling away my costume, scraping off my makeup, and saying good-bye to fast friends I might never see again. Before I knew it, the stage manager, eager to strike the set, was shooing us out. It was time to confront the rest of my life.

I had just exited the back of the theater, into an afternoon that felt like dog’s breath—the last febrile exhale of a steamy summer—when I heard a man say, “Hey, Tommy.”

Thinking it was someone who wanted me to sign his Playbill, I turned toward the voice, shielding my eyes from the glare of the setting sun. Through my squint, I realized I recognized his face. It was one I hadn’t seen in a long time, one I certainly didn’t expect to be grinning at me outside the Morgenthau Theater.

“Danny?” I said. “Danny Ruiz, is that you? Holy crap, Danny Danger!”

His nickname back in the day. Entirely tongue in cheek.

He chortled. “Long time since anyone’s called me that. I bet no one calls you Slugbomb anymore.”

His pet name for me, also a hundred percent facetious. We had been on the same Little League team, or at least we were when my acting schedule allowed me to play. I hit like a Broadway phenom, which is to say I don’t think I ever got the ball out of the infield.

“No,” I confirmed. “Definitely not.”

“Though I don’t know, maybe they should,” Danny said, shaking my hand and squeezing my biceps at the same time. “You got pretty jacked. What happened to little Tommy Jump?”

“He found the weight room,” I said.

“Damn. What are you benching these days? Like two-fifty?”

“No, no. I try not to get too big. No one wants to hire an actor who can’t put his arms down.”

“Still, you look great.”

“Thanks. You too,” I said. “Damn. How long has it been?”

“If I’m not mistaken, nine years ago.”

Which is when we graduated high school. I was so surprised by his mere presence, it hadn’t yet struck me how out of place it was that he was wearing a suit. On a Sunday. When it was at least ninety degrees.

There was another guy lingering nearby, similarly clad.

“You’re right, you’re right,” I said. “Geez, I can’t believe it. Danny Danger. What are you up to these days?”

“Working for the FBI.”

He delivered the line so straight I laughed. The Danny Ruiz I knew was a slacker who did his homework the period before it was due. He was at least three time zones removed from whatever preconceived notions I had about an FBI agent.

Then I realized he wasn’t joking. In a practiced motion, he drew a wallet out of his back pocket and opened it up, displaying a gold shield.

“Wait, you’re serious?” I asked.

“Gotta grow up sometime,” he said with a small shrug, returning his badge to his pocket. “I am now Special Agent Daniel Ruiz. This is Special Agent Rick Gilmartin.”

The other man nodded. He was taller than Danny, over six feet. He had blue eyes and a reserved, disapproving air about him—like I had done something wrong, but regulations forbade him from explaining it to me. Which probably made him just about perfect for the federal government. In his right hand, he clutched a metal briefcase.

“You want to get some coffee or something?” Danny said. “There’s something we’d like to discuss with you.”

At that moment, I got my first shot of nerves. This wasn’t Danny Ruiz, my onetime classmate, who happened to catch me in a show and now wanted to gab. He was acting as a representative of the United States government’s primary law enforcement agency.

“What’s this all about?” I asked in a faltering voice.

“Let’s just get some coffee. There’s a diner up the street.”

He said it in an open, friendly way. He was still smiling.

His partner wasn’t. The man hadn’t spoken a single word.

*

I knew the diner well because it was the cheapest place in town.

As we walked, Danny filled me in on his life since high school. After graduation, he went into the army—I vaguely remembered as much—where he was quickly disabused of his slacker ways. Then he used the GI Bill to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice. As a senior, he scored high on some test and was soon being recruited by the FBI. He was now with...