Excerpt from The Locals by Jonathan Dee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I was deleting the message, looking down, and walked smack into some huge dude on the sidewalk outside La Caridad. Completely my fault, I just bounced right off him. And those were the weirdest moments to me, actually, the scary moments, because no one was acting fucking normal anymore, everyone was all like, are you okay? All the time. Over nothing. Are you all right? So where normally this guy—who was wearing a tank top, who had a neck tattoo, who looked like he would maybe welcome the opportunity to get into a little beef with a rude stranger—might have at least made an aggressive remark to test me out, instead he just puts his hand on my shoulder, really gently, and he says, like he was the one who'd been looking at his phone while crossing the street, "Sorry, bro, you okay?" I did not like it, man. I did not like the way people were acting. This was New York. People were always looking for an excuse to go off on you. They were hoping for it. Now it was like being in this cult. It creeped the shit out of me. But I didn't dare do anything but smile back at this guy, because he was pretty ripped, and it's like they say, be careful what you wish for.

Beautiful out, one of the ten best days of the year, like the weathermen say. But it was a ghost town. In the windows of the locked stores, and especially on the upper floors where the apartments were, you were just starting to see that thing of where people put up flags, or else just taped pictures of flags to the inside of their window, some of them just cut out of the newspaper, some of them just black and white.

The lobby of the building on West Forty-eighth was humongous. Ceilings like four stories high. Completely empty, except for a few security guards, and two of them were right on me. They actually ran, or at least the young one did. The fat one tried. To be fair I didn't look like someone who was in that building on legit business. Especially after walking eighty-some blocks. I understood their reaction, is what I'm saying. They positioned themselves right in front of me.

"What's your name, sir?" the first one said. The younger and faster and more dickish one.

What's my name? What the hell kind of useless question was that? Did he think maybe he'd recognize it?

"Who," said the older guy, "are you here to see?" They both wore these matching maroon jackets, like suit jackets. It looked pretty gay. I told them I was here to see Greg Towles. He's a lawyer, I said.

"What firm?"

How the fuck should I know? I just thought it was a big building and this guy Towles had an office in it. It was probably on the guy's card, but if I reached into my pocket right now one of these jumpy no-necks would just shoot me dead. The older guy had sweat on his face. Everybody was on edge. The other guards were looking at us. Maybe the old guy was the young guy's father, and he'd gotten him the job, I thought for a moment, but no way, if it weren't for the Team Gay jackets they didn't even look like they were from the same country.

"Rice and Powers?" the dad asked me.

That sort of rang a bell. I nodded.

"They're closed today," he said. "In fact everybody's closed. There's not an office open for business in the whole building."

Then why did you bother asking me where I was going, I felt like saying, but instead I just asked if I could call upstairs to make sure.

"No," he said. "What, do you have a package for him or something?"

I held out my empty hands. I was getting irritated now.



"Try again tomorrow," he said, and gestured with his fat hand toward the door.So then the same long fucking walk back home.I went through Central Park this time, just for something differ-ent. In at the south end, out at the north. Fucking empty. On a day like that. Everybody was all frightened, but really that was just a way of trying to make the whole thing more about themselves, which it wasn't. Either you were actually there when it happened or it was something you watched on TV, period. But whenever some-thing major happens it's like everybody wants to insist on their little piece of the suffering. People had no idea what was coming next, that's true I guess— when something as fucked up as that hap-pens, something you weren't even imagining, it wakes up your imagination pretty good— but still, they were just overdoing it, I'm sorry. Get over yourselves. You weren't there, it didn't happen to you. Plus you know anything built that high is going to come down sooner or later, one way or another.

Excerpted from The Locals by Jonathan Dee. Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Dee. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.