SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: IF I WERE A RICH MAN

 Crown Vic 2:  If I were a Rich Man by Lee Goldberg  (from Eight Very Bad Nights:  a Collection of Hanakkah Noir edited by Tod Goldberg, 2024, as "If I Were a Rich Man"; also released by Lee Goldberg as a separate e-Book, 2025)  

Ray Boyd is not a very nice man.  He's an ex-con wandering the country in a used Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, going wherever this appetites lead him; his appetites being mainly money and sex.  He made his first appearance in Crown Vic (2023), a collection of two stories, "Ray Boyd Isn't Stupid" and "Occasional Risk."   When his brother Tod was assembling stories for the Eight Very Bad Nights, be suggested a Ray Boyd story would be a good fit for the anthology; and although Ray Boyd was not Jewish, so it happened.  The Ray Boyd stories are dark, violent, and erotic -- all good fodder for noir.

This time Boyd is on the track of a treasure trove of stolen diamonds.  One of the inmates Boyd spent time with while in prison was Phil Zarkin, an innocuous man serving time for second degree murder and one who was part of a huge diamond heist years back.  Zarkin never revealed where he had hidden his hare of the loot.  Now Zarkin was isolated in an assisted care facility suffering from dementia, his only solace appears to be the constant game of Battleship he played both continuously and poorly.  Boyd locates Zarkin and begins to visit him on the fourth day of Hanukkah, pretending to be his long lost nephew.

Complicating things are a sexy, hot to trot college coed with a penchant for blackmail and another villain on the trail of the diamonds; neither suspect that Boyd is always single-handedly concentrating on his own self-interests.

An entertaining tale of villainy.  Goldberg makes the pages fly and makes one long for more tales of Ray Boyd.  Luckily, Goldberg promises more stories coming sometime in the future.

Highly recommended.