Shadows Still Remain Read Online Free PDF

friends. They seemed like brats. She didn’t.”
    â€œAnything else stand out about the night?”
    â€œHow about a beautiful girl, the night before Thanksgiving, closing down a place alone. Isn’t that weird enough? And it wasn’t like she was drinking herself blotto. It was more like she had nowhere to go.”
    O’Hara takes Conway’s cell number, and she and Krekorian walk back down the alley, where on second viewing even the graffiti looks bogus. Despite being filthy, the piece-of-crap Impala is a welcome sight, probably because it’s the only place in the Seven where they feel entirely comfortable. Krekorian starts the car and cranks the heat, and they sit in silence, givingeach other the space to think. A soft rain has begun to fall, and at 4:30 Rivington is already deep in shadows, the last bit of light falling out of the sky like a boxer taking a dive.
    â€œSomething’s off,” says Krekorian. “Pena tells her girlfriends she wants to stay and check out this hot prospect. Then, the minute he comes over, she shoots him down.”
    â€œI hate to be the one to break it to you, K., but a girl can change her mind at any time. Maybe Polanski looked even older up close. Maybe he had a creepy voice. Or worst of all, maybe he smelled bad.”
    â€œAccording to Conway, she didn’t let him get three words out. At three a.m. people aren’t that fussy.”
    â€œThey are if they look like Pena.”
    â€œThen why didn’t she leave? Why’d she stay and order another drink?”
    Slushy rain slobbers all over the roof, and O’Hara tracks a fat brown droplet down the windshield. In front of them on the curb, a tall Nordic girl wearing a purple and white NYU windbreaker, maybe a member of Pena’s track team, steps up to a light pole and tapes a picture of Pena over the sticker for a band called the Revolutionary Army of California. When the student moves on, Pena’s brown eyes stare down at them from the pole. O’Hara thinks of that mangy elk head on the wall.
    â€œI say we have another talk with your buddy McLain,” says Krekorian.

8
    They decide to leave the car where it’s parked and walk to Pena’s Orchard Street apartment, O’Hara glancing at her Casio so she can time the trip and see how long it might have taken McLain to get back and forth from Freemans. At 5:03, the sun’s gone and few lights have been turned on to replace it, and when they reach Chrystie, the steel skeleton of a condo in progress called the Atelier looms behind them. To the east, all is black, as if the night had taken the old neighborhood by surprise.
    They cross dark, skinny Rivington Park between a rubber-coated jungle gym and an overgrown garden, the damp air smelling of night and greasy egg rolls. Then two more dark blocks to Allen, past a Chinese nursing home and a boarded-up synagogue whose windows are shaped like the tablets Moses, the first cop, brought down from the mountain. The synagogue can’t be more than a hundred years old, but here, where a century is as good as a millennium, it’s an ancient ruin.
    On Orchard, lights have been strung overhead to announce the start of the Christmas shopping season. As O’Hara and Krekorian take it south, the Indian owners in the doorways whisper “very good price” and draw their attention to theracks of seventy-nine-dollar leather coats lined up on the curb. Even ten years ago this neighborhood was filled with bargains, its small narrow stores so stuffed with inexpensive merchandise it poured out onto the streets. These two blocks of Orchard between Rivington and Delancey are all that’s left, an anomaly in a neighborhood whose only purpose is to provide a backdrop of authenticity for fake dive bars, pricey restaurants and whitewashed boutiques.
    Seventy-eight Orchard is halfway between Broome and Grand, on the east side of the block. Less then eight minutes after