Another Life Read Online Free PDF

thing, you can make it happen. And if you’re not, it’s all over, anyway.

“You got no more cards to play, Pryce. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down the safe house, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie’s testimony loose on Hercules —any of that, you’re finished, pal. I don’t care what you put in the street, you’ll never find all of us, because you don’t know all of us. But one of us will sure as hell find you.”

“Get out of the car,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Get out now. I’ll call you.”

We watched the white Taurus drive away. Smooth and steady.

I crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Pulled up to a deli on Delancey. A Latino in an old army field jacket was leaning against the wall, just out of the rain. He walked over to my Plymouth.

Herk rolled down his window. The guy stuck his head inside, nodded at me. He went into the deli, came back with a paper bag full of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of apple juice.

I glove-handed him the wiped-down steel tube and a packet of five C-notes. He pocketed both and walked off.

Back in the car, Herk turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, no matter what, you know that. I don’t gotta understand why you did all that, but—”

“You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, brother? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”

“Bite the leg off,” the big man said. He probably couldn’t spell “education,” but he had a Ph.D. in Survival.

“Yeah. There’s two kinds of raccoons get caught in those traps. The ones with balls enough to do what they gotta do. And dead ones. A bitch raccoon gets in heat, she wants a stud that’s gonna give her the strongest babies, understand? You know what she looks for? Not the biggest raccoon. Not the prettiest one, either. A smart bitch, she looks for one with three legs.”

“I get it, Burke. But we got a problem. I think, anyway.”

“What?”

“There’s a meeting. Tonight.”

“Damn! Why didn’t you—?”

“I forgot,” the dumbfuck giant said glumly. “Until just now. I’m sorry.”

“Jesus, Herk. Even if Pryce goes for it, he can’t make it happen right now. He’s gonna need a day or so, minimum. The best we can hope for is the newspaper story. I thought we’d get to stand by and watch: Pryce makes it happen, then I believe he can do the immunity thing, see? That’s when I was going to have this lawyer I hired go in and tighten that up for you. But if you go to that meeting and Lothar isn’t there…”

“He’s not supposed to be there, right?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, he’s supposed to be out stalking his wife, right? And if Pryce comes through, he gets smoked doing it. No way I could know about that. None of us could. Why shouldn’t I just roll on into the meeting? It ain’t like me and Lothar was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”

“Herk, that’s if Pryce goes along,” I said, thinking maybe the big man wasn’t half the dummy we all took him for. Not anymore, anyway. “That’s if he can do it, even if he wants to. That’s if he hasn’t already decided to cut his losses and take down the whole fucking crew. If you knew about the meeting tonight, Lothar did, too. So he probably told Pryce.”

“What else can I do, brother?”

“You could jet,” I told him.

“I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t that stupid. I know what you was talking about. It was Lothar who got cut down, but me, I’m the one on three legs. So I’m hobbling, okay. But, fuck it, I’m hobbling in.”

We touched fists. I hoped it wasn’t for the last time.
    * * *
    The way it turned out, Pryce did his part. And Herk went on to do his. The night the cell’s plan was supposed to go down, a lot of men ended up dead on lower Broadway, but Federal Plaza stayed up. That was years before 9/11, but so was the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. The government’s always listening in, but it never learns to listen good.