Kristmas Collins Read Online Free PDF Page A

you give this to Alyson when you go home tonight? It’s for the Morzetti case. We have a meeting coming up, and she’s off tomorrow, so she wanted to do some prep work.”
    I looked at the folder, but didn’t say anything.
    “You are going home tonight, aren’t you?” she asked with a suspicious look.
    She always knew when I was up to something. And I was. But that wasn’t the reason for my silence. It was the realization that while I might be living with Alyson, home was a place that I’d never have again. So, no, I wouldn’t be going home tonight.
     
     
     

Chapter 5
     
    I took Metro North from Greenwich to Grand Central, and then hopped a subway to Penn Station. The journey ended an hour later with me standing outside a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” and watching weary holiday travelers pass by me without a second look.
    After another half hour dragged by, Zee stepped through the door. He was wearing his Amtrak engineer uniform of matching blue jacket and pants, along with a winter hat over his shaved head. He had a red bandana tied around his neck like he was a cowboy, but its purpose was to cover his tattooed artwork, a company policy, not a fashion statement.
    There was no emotional greeting. Or even an audible one. He just read my look and followed me through the train terminal. We had the ability to communicate solely through gestures and eye contact, as only people who’ve been connected at the hip since kindergarten could do. Using the touristy Christmas crowds as cover, we were able to avoid the New York media, which had been hounding Zee since it was discovered that the onetime prince of the city was now working as a train engineer—the technical word for the guy who drives the train. I could relate, as they followed me relentlessly when I first got out of prison, but like most people, they quickly grew tired of me. But this city had been fascinated with the ups and downs of Zee Thomas for over twenty years, and showed no signs of losing interest in him.
    Train Wreck, was the headline when his new career path was discovered. What didn’t appear in any of the articles—the ones with headlines like Amtrak Going To Pot— was that Zee has had a love affair with trains since we were little. That he worked day and night to build the most elaborate model train setup I’d ever seen when we were kids, and that trains were always as big of a love in his life as baseball. Or that he achieved a perfect score on the very challenging engineer test, and graduated at the top of his class at “Choo Choo U.”
    But even I would admit that there was a more troubling side to Zee’s sudden career move. The Thomas family lived across the street from us in Tarrytown—his father, Vic Thomas, was a commodities broker, who commuted to the city each day. But no matter how late he got home, I would be able to look out my bedroom window to see the lights on in the Thomas’ backyard, and father and son playing catch.
    To the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, Mr. T was the cool dad, and the Little League coach we all wanted to play for. He made us all feel like we’d be the ones who would be playing for the Yankees one day. But he was always different with Zee, and now with the perspective of thirty years of hindsight, I tended to think the way he pushed his son was more about his own failed dreams.
    The thing that always stuck with me was that Zee never cried after he was told that his father had committed suicide during our senior year, but the burning I’d seen in his eyes hasn’t left since that day. Instead of taking the train to the city, as he had done each workday for twenty years, his father had leaped in front of one that day. It was why the “train thing” had all those who care about Zee very concerned.
    We made it out of Penn Station unscathed, onto Eighth Avenue. Zee was spotted right away. Like always, he didn’t have much to say, but he was accommodating with the fans and politely