Hurt Machine Read Online Free PDF Page A

’im.”
    “Nice.”
    “I’m just sayin’ is all …”
    “It’s okay. Will you help me?” I changed gears.
    “Anyway I can.”
    My instinct was right. If I’d told him the truth, he’d have closed his shell tighter than any clam he had on ice at the raw bar. In New York City, Alta Conseco, even in death, was as popular as Ebola.
    “Were you here that night?”
    “I was. Wasn’t supposed to be, but my manager called in sick and I filled in,” Nick said.
    “Anything unusual about that night … I mean, before the murder?”
    “Nah, nothing. Typical night. A little slow, if anything. Then all hell breaks loose.” He stood up from the table and walked toward the entrance of the Grotto. I followed. “She collapsed right here, bleedin’ like crazy. One of my guys called 911, but she bled out before he hung up the phone. The fuckin’ bodies, man, that’s what I couldn’t take when we was on the job. Remember the smell when we’d find some old guy who’d been dead for a week in a hot apartment?” He mumbled something in Greek and crossed himself.
    “She say anything before she died?”
    “
Ouch
!” Nick laughed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t make fun. I didn’t know who she was then.”
    “Hers wasn’t the first body to turn up here.”
    “Nope. She was the first since we bought the place, but there were others. I hate to say it, Moe, but the violence is one of the things that made this place a legend. We get a lot of people who come to sit at the table where Jimmy ‘Dollar Menu’ DePodesta took two in the head. Some of ’em even order what Jimmy was eatin’ that night. There was that biker from the Druids who was beaten to death by the Suicide Kings and that black kid that got hit by the car and landed over there when the Ricans were chasing him outta the projects. If people wanna come here for those reasons and not the pizza, what can I say? It’s sick, but it’s business.”
    I just shook my head no, but he was right. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “My brother and I have been in business for almost thirty-two years now and we’ve had to do some stuff to keep afloat that I’m not so proud of. Business is a strange kind of beast: a predator, scavenger, and a prey animal all at once. To keep it going, you’ve got to use what works, even if you gotta hold your nose while you do it.”
    We spent about another half hour together. He let me talk to the staff who’d been there the night Alta was murdered. Not surprisingly, none of them heard or saw anything. They were busy. After all, Alta had died at the Grotto, but she wasn’t stabbed there. Nick gave me the cards of the detectives who’d questioned him and burned me a disk of the surveillance video from that night. He sent me on my way with a pistachio gelato and a promise to get together soon. At least the gelato was tangible. The promise was something else altogether, something meant at the moment it was uttered, but something that would soon be forgotten. I’d made a thousand such unfulfilled promises in my lifetime without a second thought. The bill for them was about to come due.

SEVEN
     
    Some things it’s just better not to know. Like about mermaids, for instance. As a kid, I loved the notion of mermaids and of sirens singing suicide songs to ancient sailors. The images of beautiful winged or fish-tailed women luring men to their deaths were potent things in the head of a teenage boy. But somebody’s always waiting to piss on your fantasies. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Mr. Blumenthal, my ninth-grade English teacher, pissing on mine. He delighted in explaining to the class that those svelte and seductive mermaids of myth were really just dugongs, sea cows, manatees. That, as he put it, a peculiar quirk of dugong and human female anatomy combined with the deprivation and desperation of men who had been too many years on the bounding main led to the stories of sea maidens and sirens. So it was with the image of