Father's Day Read Online Free PDF

they learned if they wanted to stay alive.
    The Pagans were an outlaw motorcycle gang that operated in the Philadelphia area. They trafficked in speed, were hired for their muscle and for murder. Inside was a loosely knit group of toothless black beards with beer bellies and cheap tattoos. They were breaking into the heroin trade, big-time, marking their territory with street corner beatings and an occasional drive-by. Competition from the Bloods and the Kings and the Blue Dragonz, was heating up. There was a turf war brewing on the streets of West Philly. Winner take all.
    The night was getting colder. Lou could feel it bite his ears and his nose, could feel his fingers grow numb. It was cold enough to turn the stagnant pools of water in the street into a thin sheet of black ice. He zippered up his jacket, turned his back to the wind, and lit a cigarette. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the Rusty Nail, not a sidewalk like the ones he ran on as a kid, like the ones he remembered in South Philly, on Ninth St. near the Italian Market and then later, in Overbrook, where he moved with his mother. This one was wide and dark, bloodstained, a highway where people burned out and died.
    He paused in the doorway and glared at the bartender, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark. He drew an assorted collection of leers from the peanut gallery. The air inside was heavy with smoke and stunk of body odor, urine, and cheap perfume. In most places like this it was tough to tell the women from the men. They had faces like bulldogs, their bellies swollen with beer. They were also public property. They belonged to the gang, used as prostitutes, traded like used cars, tossed into the pot like apoker chip in a card game. Lou hoped Carol Ann Blackwell hadn’t unwillingly become one of them.
    Richie Mazzino sat near the back of the bar, perched on a bar stool, gripping a tall-neck bottle of Budweiser. He had long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a tuft of dark hair under his lower lip. He was tall and lanky and his face had that skeletal look, sunken eyes and protruding jaw as though the skin was pulled thin over a lot of hard, jutting bone. The bartender pointed him out.
    They called him Mazz. He was born and raised in South Philly but got most of his schooling in Graterford Prison. He’d come up through the ranks, running numbers and dealing drugs in his teens, committing robberies and burglaries in his twenties, and eventually doing hard time. There were more than a couple of murders with his signature on them but nothing anyone could prove. So he was a free man, for now.
    Lou pointed at Mazz with an outstretched arm and gestured with a curling index finger, which even Mazz couldn’t help but understand. It was the way mothers called their errant children and punks called their fickle girlfriends. At this particular moment, he was calling Mazz out. Mazz knew it and so did everyone else.
    He rose stiffly off his stool and slowly sauntered toward the door. Lou leaned his shoulder against the open door like he had all the time in the world. He wasn’t foolish enough to take more than a couple of steps inside. Pagans liked to use knives. They lurked in the darkness like a pack of hyenas. He could get stabbed a dozen times and never know where it came from. The crowd of cutthroats parted like the Red Sea and opened a path for Mazz to navigate. Lou kept his left hand low in the pocket of his black leather bomber, feeling for the Glock on his belt.
    Mazz stepped outside and the door swung closed behind him.
    “My odds seem to be improving, Mazz,” Lou commented, flicking the butt of a cigarette across the cold pavement and into the street.
    “Who the hell are you and how do you know my name,” asked Mazz, growing agitated as he felt an interrogation coming on. “You’re a cop and I don’t like cops.”
    Lou took a half step closer and came up alongside him, speaking with slow deliberate words.
    “My name is Lou Klein. I used