Beach Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

Where you been keeping yourself all this time? I know about your many accomplishments, of course, but I’ve been waiting to toast you in person. Actually, I’ve been waiting to get you drunk! Why in Christ have you been such a stranger?”
    “The standard explanation includes long hours, parents in Sarasota, and brothers scattered with the wind. The pathetic truth, I’m afraid, is I didn’t want to run into Tom Dunleavy. Who, by the way, I just ran into.”
    “The truth is always pathetic, isn’t it? That’s why I avoid it like the plague myself. In any case, now that you’ve gotten over the dreaded encounter with Dunleavy, why don’t you come out here and put the little shit out of business? Not that it would be much of an accomplishment. I hear he bills about a hundred hours a year.”
    “Better yet, why don’t I just forgive him and move on? It’s been almost a decade.”
    “Forgive? Move on? Kate Costello, have you forgotten that you’re Irish?”
    “Macklin, you’ve made me laugh,” I say, and just then, none other than Mary Catherine wobbles across the room and flings herself at my legs.
    “Drivel aside, Mack, this is the true problem for me and Montauk. Of my two favorite people, one is twenty months old, the other eighty-four.”
    “But, Kate, we’re both just hitting our strides. This shillelagh nonsense is nothing but a corny piece of atmosphere.”

Chapter 19
    Tom
    THE NEXT DAY, to sweat out the funeral, I head to the beach, my four-legged personal trainer, Wingo, nipping at my heels. It’s the first Monday after Labor Day, the unofficial start of townie summer, and most of the insufferable New Yorkers are gone.
    On a cool, brilliantly sunny day, the greatest stretch of beach in North America is empty.
    Running on the damp, packed sand close to the water is no more difficult than running on the track behind the high school. To punish myself, though, I stay on the soft stuff that sucks at your feet with every step.
    In five minutes, everything that’s attached to me hurts—legs, lungs, back, head—so I pick up the pace.
    In another five minutes, I can smell the whiskey from last night as the sweat pours off my face. Five minutes after that, my hangover has nearly vanished.
    Later that afternoon, Wingo and I are recovering from our midday workout, me on the couch and Wingo asleep at my feet, when a knock on the front door rouses us. It’s about four, still plenty of light outside, and a black sedan is parked on the gravel driveway.
    At the door is young master Van Buren, the detective who ran the show on the beach the other night.
    Barely thirty, he made detective early this summer. Considering his age, it was quite a coup. He leapfrogged half a dozen pretty decent cops with more seniority, including Belnap, and it didn’t win him any friends in the station house. So guess what Barney’s nickname is?
    “Tom, I don’t need to tell you why I’m here,” he says.
    “I’m surprised it took this long.”
    Still dehydrated from my run, I grab a beer and offer him something, just to hear him say no.
    “Why don’t we sit outside while we still can,” I say, and then because of the force with which he rejected my first offer, or because I’m acting like a prick for no good reason, I repeat it. “Sure I can’t get you that beer? It’s almost five.”
    Van Buren ignores me and takes out a brand-new orange notebook he must have just bought for the occasion at the stationery store in Montauk.
    “Tom, people say you did a good job getting that kid to put down his gun the other day. What confuses me is why you didn’t call the police.”
    I can tell Van Buren doesn’t expect an answer. He’s simply letting me know that he can be a prick too.
    “Obviously, I should have, but I could tell the kid had no intention of using it.”
    “That’s not what I heard.”
    “I was closer. Believe me, he was more scared than Feif.”
    “You know what kind of gun it was?”
    “I don’t know guns,