Free The Craigslist Murders by Brenda Cullerton

whose eyes were as dull as their edge after years of board meetings, distant wives, and charity benefits, Pavel was still sharp. He lived on the cusp of chaos and the brink of collapse. Experiencing that chaos, even vicariously, was a thrill. When she’d been with him that night at Anna’s, the night he’d asked her to redo the dacha, she’d felt both irresistibly alive and afraid.

14
    Charlotte felt her neck snap when the cabdriver slammed on the brakes.
    “Asshole,” she screamed as the driver hit the gas and her body bounced back against the seat. They’d been lurching down Fifth Avenue for twenty-five minutes. Traffic was so snarled up, it was nearly at a standstill. She could see the flashing lights and Con Ed truck parked in the middle of the avenue ahead.
    “I’m getting out,” she yelled as the cab reached the corner of 23 rd Street “Now!”
    Pumping the brakes, the driver turned around and flashed her an enormous grin.
    “First day!” he said, as proud as if he just announced the birth of a son.
    “Well, good luck!” Charlotte replied, flinging him a twenty and pushing the back door open. “You’ll need it!”
    Other people were popping up umbrellas. But Charlotte liked the sensation of soft, light rain on her face. Picking up speed and finding her rhythm, she strode west towards the river.
    Charlotte refused to use what she called “ear gear” on her walks: no Bluetooths, iPods or cell phones. They interfered with those rare moments of communion that she felt with the city.
    Despite efforts to live a life laid out in ruler-straight lines, Charlotte was constantly careening between wild extremes. She knew no middle ground. Here in New York and only here did even street signs speak to her in terms of those extremes:
    “Don’t even think of parking here!”
    “Get off the grass!”
    “Don’t litter. It’s selfish.”
    This was language that Charlotte understood. It was intimate and personal. It wasted no time in cutting her, and everyone else in town, down to size.
    This was the wonderful thing about New York. It was bigger than Charlotte. And somehow, she found comfort in that. This city was, for her, what religion was to others.She
believed
in it. No matter how dwarfed or diminished she might occasionally feel by its experience, no matter how her own hopes might have dwindled, she couldn’t abandon it. It was the only place in the world that she’d ever felt she belonged.
    Sticking to the pedestrian path along the river, as a blur of bikes and skaters swooshed past her, Charlotte remembered her first night in her loft. There had been a shootout between two Polish antiques dealers across the street. “The sound of gunfire was like Jiffy Pop,” she’d told Vicky later. “When the kernels are so hot, they start exploding up against the tin foil.” It was hard to believe that such an innocuous sound could be so lethal. But one guy was lying under a canopy across from her building, bleeding to death. The other guy had limped to the end of the street and collapsed on the corner of North Moore and Hudson. He’d been shot in the neck and lungs.
    “My God! Charlotte,” Vicky had gasped when she heard the story. “How can you possibly stay there another minute? I mean, why don’t you move uptown?”
    Unlike Vicky, who ventured downtown even less often than she ventured into her own $500,000 kitchen, Charlotte wouldn’t have dreamed of moving. The murders were just another chapter in the city’s story of extremes; an experience that brought Charlotte closer to the soul of this place—a place that never failed to embrace and console her.
    By the time she walked over the bridge and crossed the West Side Highway, the early autumn twilight had turned to dark. She could still hear the creaking of swings in the new children’s park across Washington Street and themurmur of mothers’ voices as they gave their kids a final push, cajoling them towards home with promises of dinner and bedtime