In a gritty thriller from the acclaimed author whom William Vollmann called "a real storyteller," a street-smart young woman takes what looks like an easy job and ends up having to solve a murder case -- before the next body that turns up is her own.
Queenie Sells is having what she thinks is a good day. After getting fired from her job at a calendar company for botching Daylight Savings, she is informally hired by a wealthy acquaintance to track down his girlfriend, a stripper named Trigger Happy. But Queenie's seemingly good luck turns hard when she finds Trigger dead in her apartment.
Now Queenie's daily routine of being a drunk smart-ass is put on hold as she becomes both a suspect for the murder and the target for an unknown predator. Hopping from bar to bar, from Coney Island clam stands to the Waldorf-Astoria, she inadvertently lands on the trail of Trigger's killer and puts herself in the line of fire.
Along the way she meets Rey, a private eye with a soft spot for tough-talking ladies; Detective Olds, the stuttering cop who thinks Queenie's the culprit; and a dozen New York denizens, among them a cult recruiter, a hit man, a thief, and even Rip Torn -- some strange, some sad, some sweet, and some deadly, every one dropping in and out of Queenie's life as she searches for each fragile piece of the puzzle that may eventually lead her to the truth.
With danger closing in on her, Queenie can't help but realize the precariousness of her own mortality. As she stares out of the window at an old lady on the corner, she thinks, "There is nothing separating you from that old lady right now -- maybe something, maybe time is all, but that's really nothing when you think about it." After all, thinks Queenie, it's just days. But unless she can find the killer before the killer finds her, Queenie's days are seriously numbered.
Chapter One: Monday It was June, the middle of June, and it was a Monday, and Queenie woke up with her face stuck to the pillow with drool. How exactly did last night end? she thought. And how did there get to be so much drool -- foamy waterfalls on Meade's red futon couch, all around her as she lifted her head and looked at the clock on the VCR, which read: 8:20. Have to get up, she thought, gotta get up, maybe a few more minutes, maybe you can be an hour late today, she thought. No, no, wait, you can't. You have to get fired today.She rolled off the futon and stood up, head full of mush, and walked to the kitchen and foraged for food for a minute, opening and closing cupboards. Spices and a can of beans. All the bastard had in the refrigerator were raw turkey burger patties separated by thin paper sheets in a styrofoam tray.She stared at the kitchen table and tried to focus, and she held her head with both hands. It felt like it was wobbling from side to side on its own.She picked up the cigarette boxes on the table and shook them, but they were empty. Not that anyone around here smokes, thought Queenie. Who knows how these got here. She sure didn't buy them, because she didn't smoke anymore. She used to carry around a folded-up Post-it in her wallet with three rules. A message from sober Queenie to drunk Queenie. It said, 1) Don't smoke.2) Don't stay up all night.3) Don't fuck anyone. After she'd broken all three she'd made an amended list that read, 1) DON'T SMOKE.2) Don't stay up all night unless you are forced to.3) Don't fuck anyone unless you really really want to. The first was definitely broken, but she'd been pretty good about the second two. The second two were softer than the first, the first really was a nutcracker, but two out of three wasn't bad. And she really hadn't had much of a chance to break the third, to be honest.There was one cigarette left in the American Spirits box. She shook it out and lit it and started coughing immediately. She went to the bathroom and spit up some phlegm. Yellow and red. Great, she thought. Now I'm coughing up blood. That's just super.She looked at her face in the mirror, at her doll hair in spiky little strands everywhere, snaky curves and dry ends. Her eyes were squinty, almost sealed shut with piecrust. Cut on her upper lip. How did I get that? she thought. She leaned in to the mirror and peeled the skin on her lip like an envelope flap, and her fingers shook and trembled, and she stared at the cut that looked like a small red blade of glass leading to the inside of her mouth. She touched it with her fingertip, and it burned.She took Meade's toothbrush from the sink and opened the cupboard, grabbed the toothpaste, flipped the cap, and squeezed too hard. Green gel spurted out in a lurid way. I must've excited it, she thought, toothpaste dripping all over her hand.It really wasn't until right then, when she was standing with toothpaste sliding down her fingers and on the T-shirt she'd borrowed from Meade, that she realized she honestly did not have a clue as to what to do next -- it could have been that she was supposed to wipe her hands and brush her teeth and clean herself up and get dressed and go to work, but it just as easily could have been that she was supposed to rub the toothpaste in football-player strips under her eyes and cut all her hair off and do a handstand. It wasn't really until right then that Queenie realized she wasn't hungover. She was still drunk.She started sweating like nobody's business on the E train. She wasn't wearing any socks because she couldn't find them at Meade's house, and that made things all the worse because she had three-dollar shoes and a serious sweating problem. Even though it wasn't very hot yet, every time she wore shoes with no socks in the summer her feet smelled like pure meat and cheese.She looked u
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