Father's Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

away. They’d be there in minutes. He leaned against hiscar and lit a cigarette. The cold felt good against his face. Judy came out, a bulky down coat over her waitress uniform and apron. She looked over at Lou. She pulled a pack of Newports from her pocket. Lou blocked the wind with his back and lit her cigarette.
    “That’s too bad about your girlfriend. She going to be all right?”
    “She’s not my girlfriend.”
    “Sorry I asked.”
    “Hey, thanks for the help in there.”
    She nodded, ran across the lot, and jumped into a red Buick. The cigarette came out the window as she sped past him, a noisy muffler blowing exhaust behind her. In the confusion, Lou failed to see the black BMW parked on the street, with Tommy Ahearn in the driver’s seat.

 
3
     
    Lou followed Haverford Avenue east into the city, through Overbrook, into the heart of West Philadelphia. He drove past Morris Park. It looked the same, an oasis of grass and trees surrounded by an urban desert. The old wooden swings were still hanging at the top of the hill, their rusty chains and steel frames black against the darkening sky. He drove past St. Lucy’s. Father Barone had died around the same time as his mother; natural causes, the paper said. He circled around onto Malvern, driving through the scarred neighborhood, a place where he’d lived and worked. Now he felt out of place, a stranger. He tried to focus on the green street signs, past Wynnewood and Lebanon. He turned a dark corner and stopped.
    He parked across from the Rusty Nail saloon. The Rusty Nail was a Pagan hangout, a hole in the wall small enough to make three people into a crowd. It was one long, narrow room with three tables for two on one side and a row of three-legged barstools on the other. In the back, an undersized pool table sat on a crooked wooden floor, spotted with burn marks whereplayers rested their cigarettes between shots. Two creaking ceiling fans spun overhead like rusty airplane propellers. The windows were painted shut with a coat of thick black paint. A heavy wooden door opened right onto the sidewalk. It was dark in there, a moving, living darkness. There was only one way in and one way out.
    Lou walked up to the Rusty Nail as if he owned the joint. That was the only way to walk into a place like that, looking to pull somebody out of there and pump him for information, looking for answers and willing to do just about anything to get them.
    He’d read about the place in the paper a few times.
The Enquirer
or the
Daily News
would run a special about crime in the streets, about a neighborhood under siege. Every day the headlines told the story—crack cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth; drug dealers operating under the nose of the police; people shot dead in front of the place; the stench of rotting flesh in a Dumpster behind the building.
    Fifty-third and Lancaster was especially notorious for it. The thunder of gunshots rumbled between a patchwork of dilapidated buildings, apartment complexes where the bullet holes riddled the brick and etched a decaying mosaic of life on the street.
    The shooters and the dead weren’t really people, though—not in this city, not according to the police, not according to the mayor and the city council or the gaggle of reporters who followed them around and printed lies as if it were truth, talked about jobs, and education, and opportunity. To the businessmen walking the cleanly swept streets of Center City, they were fodder, a news blip, human refuse.
    The real people, the people who had to live in that neighborhood, the people who went to work every day, who sent their kids to public school and stayed home at night, knew enough tostay away. They took cover when the midnight sun burned over the bar and the natives inside grew restless.
    Even the cops stayed away. There was rarely a blue uniform in sight, no ambitious young police dogs walking a beat down that dirty street. They knew better, too. It was one of the first things