Chasing the Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page A

the old-world way, with that high head of hers and the long nose and the eyes that tore you apart with a glance.
    “No. There was no need for an autopsy.” Salvatore shook his head. “The cancer was painful. The doctor fixed your father up with one of those medication implants. Demerol, morphine. I don’t know. Your father overdid it—he overdosed, a heart attack. Maybe it was better though, all things considered.”
    “He thought someone was trying to kill him?”
    “Delirium.” Salvatore shrugged. “It happens.”
    He felt his nephew studying him, peering into him. If they sat here much longer, Salvatore feared, he would change his mind and come forward with the specifics of his brother’s rantings—how he’d started going on about Strehli there at the end. Mark Strehli, who’d worked out at the customs yard in Oakland. Who’d been shot in the head and whose murder investigation Dante had challenged—to ill effect. Himself, he didn’t quite understand. His brother’s rantings were tangled with memories of business deals, arrangements that had seemed reasonable at the time but had a certain stickiness about them now. Much of that stickiness, though, was due to Salvatore’s own son, he had to admit. Pushing the boundaries. Looking for the easy dollar.
    Now Ernesto Mollini and George Marinetti appeared on the sidewalk, old buddies, his brother’s die-hard friends.
    Uncle Salvatore greeted them enthusiastically.
    “Come in,” he said. “Into the big, black car. We are waiting for you.”
    The two men had hung out with Giovanni almost everyday these last years, down in Paesano’s card room, and they would be pallbearers—or titular ones, anyway, walking behind the casket while younger men did the carrying—so it made sense for them all to be together.
    Before the limo could pull away from the curb, Joe Rossi hustled up to the car. “Let me ride with you?”
    The former mayor was a thickset man with luminous eyes and absolutely no hair. His head was a bald dome that showed off the dents in his skull. Though he was past seventy, the mayor was still the same old glad-hander he’d always been.
    “I thought you were going with Di Nido. In his Cadillac.”
    “That Di Nido, he’s blind as a monkey. My heart can’t take it.”
    “Mine neither,” said Marinetti. “Jesus himself wouldn’t ride in that car.”
    Uncle Salvatore relented. Ordinarily, he liked the mayor well enough. But Giovanni and his Lordship had had some kind of squabble in the days before his brother died. Rossi had gotten an odd manner about him, bullish in that way he could be, nosey as hell, as if somehow all this had something to do with him.
And maybe it did
, thought Salvatore. The mayor had directed a thing or two their way in difficult times, back when it looked like the warehouse would go under.
    The limo headed for the cemetery. Mollini and Marinetti began to banter, the way they often bantered these days, taking sides in an imaginary debate, mocking the rituals they had grown up with.
    “The way you tell me, Marinetti, I take the rites, there on my deathbed, the priest waves his cross, then I go straight to heaven?” asked Mollini. “No time in purgatory?”
    “That’s the truth. Approximately.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “It’s an article of faith. Like the virgin birth. You don’t believe it, so far as God’s concerned, you don’t exist.”
    “I have to believe it my whole life, or just then, at the last minute?”
    “If there’s no priest around, you can imagine him. You confess your sins, it’s an easy ride.”
    “What’s the deadline on this?”
    Marinetti hummed around. They could be maddening, these two, a distraction to whatever you had on your mind, and at the moment Salvatore was trying to sort through how much of his brother’s agony to pass along to his nephew, who slouched sideways in the seat in the same manner as his father used to do.
Should I give him the film
? he wondered.
    “There’s a