• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 456 0

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 VISIT

BY 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