Deadly Lullaby Read Online Free PDF Page A

tantrum that ended with me throwing a plate of food at him. After he went away, mostly due to my whacked-out mother, our relationship slid straight downhill. We saw each other once a month for a while.
    Then once every two or three months.
    Twice a year.
    Our best years lost, I was seventeen the first time he was released, the day after I played the last football game of my career.
    My mother disappeared barely a month later.
    He killed her. This, this I know.
    And
he
knows I know this.
    A month or two after that, I was coming out of Botach Tactical store on Broadway, a boxed-up set of night-vision goggles in my hand (don’t ask me why I bought them), and ran smack into him. At first he looked at me like I was serving him with an arrest warrant, though I wasn’t a cop yet, and we regarded each other in awkward silence for a brief few seconds.
    “Hey, how you doin’?” he eventually said.
    I turned on my heels and walked away.
    He called over the years, and sent money, but I would never agree to see him face-to-face until today, when I had little choice.
    Now he says, “That time I broke the news to you about prison was a real bitch, yeah. A rare occasion, so why not forget it? Try to think positive for a change, give me a hand. It is difficult enough as it is trying to reconnect with you after eight years.”
    What?
    After a comment like that, all I can do is shake my head. Finally I say, “Old man, if there was a way you could reconnect with me, you missed it by a million fuckin’ miles.”
    This gives him pause.
    He reaches across the table for my fourth tequila shot, holds it up to the light, inspects it, drinks slowly, savoring every drop. “Ahh,
Patrón
, made from pure agave, premium stuff,” he says, and dabs his mouth with a napkin. He sighs. “You know, exactly one week and one day ago I had my chow in the sour innards of a prison mess hall with a bunch of smelly losers. Guards marched me there and told me where to sit, what to eat, and when to leave. Now, just look around.”
    No reason to look around, having already scoped out the main dining room behind me. The Giants are in town and Dodger Stadium is about three miles down the street, just beyond where Cesar Chavez turns into Sunset. The restaurant’s buzzin’ with pregame energy and the people wearing Dodgers caps and jerseys are hustling out the door to get a jump on game traffic.
    He says, “You don’t have to look because you’ve never been deprived of this. But me? It flips me out.” He gazes wistfully over my left shoulder. “The women are chattering and flashing cleavage and leg. The men, they are all speaking in normal tones and dressed in clean clothes. Nobody stinks or acts afraid. Nobody hocks and spits. Nobody farts….This is paradise.” He leans forward. “And I don’t want it to end, especially—”
    “So seven days into paradise you whack a notorious hood
and
arrange to have a cop witness it. You keep that MO going, old man, you better not get too accustomed to nice tits and good food.”
    He leans forward again and places his elbows on the table. “You seem to forget the cop I had at the scene happens to be my
son.
”
    “No, I haven’t forgot that, not yet. I’m only on my third tequila.”
    I gesture to our server for another round.
    Wincing with that
Goddamn you
look of his, he leans even farther in to me. “There is absolutely no way I could pass on this Macky thing; the money was too good. And, I repeat, we won’t get caught.”
    “You can’t be sure of that.”
    He shakes his head and lowers his voice even more. “Nobody will ever be able to prove Macky and the bodyguards are dead. Some guys are on the way now to pick up the bodies and incinerate them and—”
    Jesus.
    I halt him with a show of my palm. “I could’ve lived happily for a hundred more years without knowing that.”
    “Yeah, you say that now, but you’ll be happy you heard it when you wake up in the middle of the night, sweatin’ your ass