Chapter 4

"Why didn't you tell me you had a middle name?" Victoria asked. "What else are you keeping from me?" She narrowed her eyes and tossed the pink message slip at him. It floated dead leaf to the floor.

Jake paled as he studied her face. "For the love of Christ, Victoria, who told you?" There were only two people on this god forsaken planet where cabs are no more sacred than company pens, only two who knew of the sandwich meat on Jake Wallerstein's birth certificate: his crazy whore of a mother who could never speak it after losing her tongue in a freak boating accident, and...

Chapter 3

Victoria, Jake's secretary, stabbed the "Hold" button on her Centrex V150 and prayed to the gods of satellite communications that it would work for a change. Hearing only a monotonous, high-pitched hum in her headset, rather than the angry, raspy voice of the building's landlord, she punched the "Link" button just below it. "Wallerstein Brothers Investigations," she intoned waspishly, desperately trying to mask her flat midwestern accent with something resembling upstate New Jersey.

"Let me speak to Mr. Wallerstein," demanded a thick, East European growl. "Would that be Mr. Jake Wallerstein, or Mr. Abner Wallerstein?" Victoria said through her nose. She hoped he asked for Abner. Abner Wallerstein existed only in Jake's imagination and served only as a source of running amusement for the two of them at happy hour.

"Jacob Allen Wallerstein," the voice demanded, dripping with venom. Allen? Jake has a middle name?

Chapter 2

Our hero, Jake, receives a death threat in the mail. From his years of experience in handwriting analysis (a hobby he picked up in the 'Nam), he deduces that the perp is a dyslexic homophobe with a club foot. Just as he's finishing up his questioning of regular patrons of the local gay bar, "Riverside's Other Side", something screeches by him on the sidewalk. He leaps and rolls onto the street in the knick of time, then watches the yellow blur skid into a turn and proceed down an alley. No, it wasn't a UFO. It was one of HIS missing cabs.

Chapter 1

Jake Wallerstein thought he knew New York better than any cab driver on the upper West side. But when yellow taxis began disappearing in broad daylight on Riverside Drive, Jake's expertise was questioned: where were these cars going? Could it be that the UFO sightings were real? Was it terrorism? Or was there suddenly a rash influx of cheap foreign imported parking spaces?