Hard Stop Read Online Free PDF Page B

twenty-four-hour diner in Hampton Bays having breakfast with Ackerman.
    “What did you do with him all night?” I asked.
    “I took him over to Hodges’s boat and cuffed him to a handhold inside the quarter berth. I took the salon. The wind was up and the boat rocked like a cradle. We slept like babies.”
    “I need you to let him go.”
    “I was afraid you’d say that.”
    I told him about my discussion with George Donovan, including everything about his involvement with the missing Iku Kinjo, and his attempt at extorting my help in finding her, but leaving out the preceding B&E. No sense furtherstraining his already strained sense of propriety. Instead, I worked on persuading him that Ackerman posed little threat to the community.
    “He’s not a criminal, just criminally stupid,” I said. “Anyway, you like it when I owe you a favor.”
    That tipped the scales. Sullivan kept me on the line while he told Ackerman he could go, as long as he left behind his gun and a promise to stay clear of Eastern Suffolk County for the next twenty years. I didn’t hear Ackerman’s reply, but I guess he’d agree to anything to get out from under Sullivan’s baleful glare.
    After I hung up I called Amanda and told her everything that had happened. Every detail I could remember. She almost seemed convinced that I was being fully candid and forthcoming. Which I was, almost. I diverted her by asking about the morning walk she took with Eddie and what she was making for breakfast. She didn’t fall for it.
    “Can I ask you to take care of yourself, even if I don’t believe you truly will?” she asked.
    “I will. In fact, I’m going back to bed for a few hours. Try to catch up on my sleep.”
    Which I did, with surprising success. Then I showered, shaved and put on jeans and a black T-shirt under the blue blazer. And black shitkickers. City garb. Then I called Allison, waking her up.
    “Time to get up, honey. It’s the crack of eleven-thirty,” I said.
    She said something like “mumph-umph” and coughed into the phone.
    “Hold that thought,” I said. “I’ll be there in a half hour with coffee and bagels.”
    “You can’t get here that fast,” she squeaked out.
    “I can if I’m only thirty blocks away.”
    Allison had a studio up on the West Side where she lived and designed on her own computer after recognizing she couldn’t manage a regular full-time job. She didn’t want it and full-time employers didn’t want her. Luckily, graphic arts was the kind of thing you could do as a freelancer and still do pretty well.
    I visited her place whenever I could. I always fed her lunch, which would take about the time needed to catch up and stay clear of the big emotional bear traps that would open in front of us if we lingered too long in one place.
    But that was fine. Compared to where we used to be, this was paradise.
    I was always glad to see her. I’d be glad to see anyone for whom I feel blind, unconditional love and devotion. Even when she met me on the sidewalk outside her apartment, red-eyed, with her dirty blonde hair looking like her mother’s did when I first saw her walking across Kenmore Square, clutching her books to her chest as if expecting someone to leap out of a manhole and snatch them out of her arms.
    “I can’t let you see the place right now,” she said, grabbing my arm and moving me down the sidewalk. “I’ve been cranking on this big crappy job all week and there’s crappy stuff all over everywhere. And no, there’s no boy in there.”
    “If there was I could get him to clean up the place.”
    She pulled me along quietly before asking the usual questions.
    “Are you alright?”
    “I’m great,” I said. She looked suspicious. “Honestly. Everything’s great.”
    “Everything’s always great. You sure there’s nothing you need to tell me?”
    “Such trust.”
    She trusted me enough to stop asking, though she didn’t look entirely convinced. I couldn’t blame her.
    She