At 112th and Broadway, a blast of wind hits as the bus’ hydraulic doors open.
Eddie Gorsh rises.
Good luck with the garden.
A smile back at the kid.
Thanks.
I got a daughter, too.
Then take care of her, and maybe she’ll take care of you.
Out onto the rain-pelted sidewalk, head down, toward the building, Edna waiting for him there, relieved to have him back, the years they have left, a road he’s determined to keep straight. This, he knows, will make Rebecca happy, and that is all he’s after now.
The rain moves on, northward, toward the Bronx, leaving behind new beginnings, things learned, lessons applied. At 116th and Broadway, Jamie Rourke steps out into the million, million drops, thinking of Tracey and his daughter, how he shouldn’t have said what he said, made her mad, determined to call her now, tell her how everything is going to be okay, how it’s going to be the three of them against the world, a family.
The rain falls on lost hopes and futile resolutions, redemptions grasped too late, fanciful solutions. At 116th and Broadway, it falls on Barney Siegelman as he steps out of a taxi, convinced now that his son-in-law is a crook, news he has to break to his wife, his daughter, the whole sorry scheme of things unmasked. He rushes toward the front of his building, feels his feet slosh through an unexpected stream of water. He stops beneath the awning of his building and follows the rushing tide up the sidewalk to Our Lady of Silence, where a cardboard box lays beneath a ruptured drain, a torrent gushing from its cracked mouth, filling the box with water, then over its sodden sides and down the concrete stairs, flooding the sidewalk with the stream that splashes around Siegelman’s newly polished shoes. He shakes his head. Tomorrow he’ll have to have them shined all over again. He peers toward the church, the stairs, the shattered drain pipe, the overflowing box beneath it. Disgusting, he thinks, the way people leave their trash.
A NICE PLACE TO VISITBY JEFFERY DEAVER
Hell’s Kitchen
When you’re a natural-born grifter, an operator, a player, you get this sixth sense for sniffing out opportunities, and that’s what Ricky Kelleher was doing now, watching two guys in the front of the smoky bar, near a greasy window that still had a five-year-old bullet hole in it.
Whatever was going down, neither of them looked real happy.
Ricky kept watching. He’d seen one guy here in Hanny’s a couple of times. He was wearing a suit and tie-it really made him stand out in this dive, the sore thumb thing. The other one, leather jacket and tight jeans, razor-cut bridge-and-tunnel hair, was some kind of Gambino wannabe, Ricky pegged him. Or Sopranos, more likely-yeah, he was the sort of prick who’d hock his wife for a big-screen TV. He was way pissed off, shaking his head at everything Mr. Suit was telling him. At one point he slammed his fist on the bar so hard glasses bounced. But nobody noticed. That was the kind of place Hanny’s was.
Ricky was in the rear, at the short L of the bar, his regular throne. The bartender, a dusty old guy, maybe black, maybe white, you couldn’t tell, kept an uneasy eye on the guys arguing. “It’s cool,” Ricky reassured him. “I’m on it.”
Mr. Suit had a briefcase open. A bunch of papers were inside. Most of the business in this pungent, dark Hell’s Kitchen bar involved trading bags of chopped-up plants and cases of Johnny Walker that’d fallen off the truck; the transactions were conducted in either the men’s room or alley out back. This was something different. Skinny, five-foot-four Ricky couldn’t tip to exactly what was going down, but that magic sense, his player’s eye, told him to pay attention.
“Well, fuck that,” Wannabe said to Mr. Suit.
“Sorry.” A shrug.
“Yeah, you said that before.” Wannabe slid off the stool. “But you don’t really sound that fucking sorry. And you know why? Because I’m the one out all the money.”
“Bullshit. I’m losing my whole fucking business.”
But Ricky’d learned that other people losing money doesn’t take the sting out of you losing money. Way of the world.
Wannabe was getting more and more agitated. “Listen careful here, my friend. I’ll make some phone calls. I got people I know down there. You don’t want to fuck with these guys.”
Mr. Suit tapped what looked like a newspaper article in the briefcase. “And what’re they gonna do?” His voice lowered and he whispered something that made Wannabe’s face screw up in disgust. “Now just go on home, keep your head down, and watch your back. And pray they can’t-” Again, the lowered voice. Ricky couldn’t hear what “they” might do.
Wannabe slammed his hand down on the bar again. “This isn’t gonna fly, asshole. Now-”
“Hey, gentlemen,” Ricky called. “Volume down, okay?”
“The fuck’re you, little man?” Wannabe snapped. Mr. Suit touched his arm to quiet him, but he pulled away and kept glaring.
Ricky slicked back his greasy, dark blond hair. Easing off the stool, he walked to the front of the bar, the heels of his boots tapping loudly on the scuffed floor. The guy had six inches and thirty pounds on him but Ricky had learned a long time ago that craziness scares people a fuck of a lot more than height or weight or muscle. And so he did what he always did when he was going one on one-threw a weird look into his eyes and got right up in the man’s face. He screamed, “Who I am is guy’s gonna drag your ass into the alley and fuck you over a dozen different ways, you don’t get the fuck out of here now!”
The punk reared back and blinked. He fired off an automatic “Fuck you, asshole.”
Ricky stayed right where he was, kind of grinning, kind of not, and let this poor bastard imagine what was going to happen now that he’d accidentally shot a little spit onto Ricky’s forehead.
A few seconds passed.
Finally, Wannabe drank down what was left of his beer with a shaking hand and, trying to hold on to a little dignity, he strolled out the door, laughing and muttering, “Prick.” Like it was Ricky backing down.
“Sorry about that,” Mr. Suit said, standing up, pulling out money for the drinks.
“No, you stay,” Ricky ordered.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
The man hesitated and sat back down.
Ricky glanced into the briefcase, saw some pictures of nice-looking boats. “Just gotta keep things calm round here, you know. Keep the peace.”
Mr. Suit slowly closed the case, looked around at the faded beer promotion cut-outs, the stained sports posters, the cobwebs. “This your place?”
The bartender was out of earshot. Ricky said, “More or less.”
“Jersey.” Mr. Suit nodded at the door that Wannabe had just walked out of. Like that explained it all.
Ricky’s sister lived in Jersey and he wondered if maybe he should be pissed at the insult. He was a loyal guy. But then he decided loyalty didn’t have anything to do with states or cities and shit like that. “So. He lost some money?”
“Business deal went bad.”
“Uh-huh. How much?”
“I don’t know.”
“Buy him another beer,” Ricky called to the bartender, then turned back. “You’re in business with him and you don’t know how much money he lost?”
“What I don’t know,” the guy said, his dark eyes looking right into Ricky’s, “is why I should fucking tell you.”
This was the time when it could get ugly. There was a tough moment of silence. Then Ricky laughed. “No worries.”
The beers arrived.
“Ricky Kelleher.” He clinked glasses.
“Bob Gardino.”
“I seen you before. You live around here?”
“Florida mostly. I come up here for business some. Delaware too. Baltimore, Jersey shore, Maryland.”