Cradle Lake Read Online Free PDF Page B

had tried to warn Alan against marriage. Women ran around on you. They were selfish and they cheated. And if they weren’t running around on you, they stuck by your side just to make your life unbearable. (Alan had often wondered how his old man had come upon this second bit of wisdom as no woman, as far as Alan could tell, had ever stuck by his side—including Alan’s mother.) Bill Hammerstun had been positively brimming with words of wisdom.
    Alan remembered coming home from high school one day in late May, just a few weeks before graduation, to a squad car parked outside the Upper West Side tenement where he lived with his old man. Two cops were standing on the stoop with Jimmy Carmichael, one of his father’s drinking buddies. The sight of the police car and the cops didn’t alarm Alan; he had come home to such things before. It was Jimmy’s presence that struck him as unusual. Jimmy did not associate with cops.
    As Alan mounted the steps of the tenement, Jimmy had eased off the porch railing with a grunt. The man’s considerable bulk shifted beneath his too-tight, sleeveless undershirt. Grinning sourly around a short black cigar, trying desperately to appear approachable, Jimmy had placed a heavy hand on Alan’s shoulder and exhaled fetid breath into his face.
Hey there, sport,
he’d said.
Hey there, kiddo.
    Both cops had taken a simultaneous step forward, their arms folded. For one fleeting second, Alan thought they were there to arrest him. He thought of shoplifting from the 7-Eleven and stealing money from the tip jar at the AfghanKebab. Also, there had been the silver BMW with the cryptic vanity plates—MRBBALL. Alan and his friend Ritchie Ulrich had smashed the passenger window and pried the stereo out of the dashboard with a screwdriver. Before running away, they had even glommed the loose change from the cup holders between the front seats.
    Hey there, sport. Hey there, kiddo.
    The cops had shuttled him off, along with Jimmy, to the city morgue where his father had already been pronounced dead. Jimmy stood behind him with one fat hand on his shoulder as Alan looked at his old man dead on the stainless steel table in the basement. Bill Hammerstun’s skin had already gone a fishy, sallow color. His face looked like a mold of himself made out of vulcanized rubber. There was something that resembled blue pool chalk on his cheek. And, of course, the dime-sized bullet wound in his right temple. Blessedly, the blood had been cleaned away.
    Alan had looked to Jimmy and, with little emotion, asked him what the hell he was supposed to do now.
    Jimmy rolled his big, meaty shoulders and said he didn’t know.
You’re eighteen now, ain’t you, sport? Guess you can do whatever you want. Happy trails.
    He had contacted his mother, who had been estranged from him since his early childhood. He had never fully understood what had gone wrong in his parents’ relationship, though he often wondered how any woman could have put up with Bill Hammerstun for the entirety of a marriage, so he didn’t necessarily blame her for leaving. He had located her somewhere in Michigan, and she passed along unemotional condolences over the telephone—a badconnection, the line popped and hissed with static for the duration of the phone call—but she did not invite him to live with her. The call lasted no longer than five minutes, and toward the end of it, Alan paid more attention to what sounded like a crying baby in the background than to the actual words coming out of his mother’s mouth.
    He received money from the sale of his father’s nightclub, which paid for the funeral costs and even set him up in an apartment in Manhattan. He took on two roommates—punk rockers with dyed hair and an affinity for clove cigarettes and fuzzy music with garbled lyrics—and Jimmy Carmichael gave him a job as a bicycle courier in Midtown while he put himself through college with