SIREN'S TEARS (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

There aren’t that many left on Staten Island, so I occasionally venture into Manhattan to shop with Alice Watts. Her taste in my clothes is better than mine.
    But I had to quickly replace much of my basic wardrobe after Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy, or whatever the hell they called that meteorological malignancy, blew the South Shore of Staten Island to smithereens a week earlier. 
    Not that the storm directly affected me. My part of the borough, on the North Shore, was virtually unscathed by Sandy. On St. Austins Place, where I lived in a 100-year-old side-hall colonial I’d inherited from my parents, no big trees came down, mainly because earlier storms eliminated many of the older and weaker ones. The neighborhood’s power was back on in 16 hours, a fact that I kept to myself when meeting people on the South Shore who were still hovering around street bonfires fueled by kindling from their shattered homes.
    After Sandy left town, I fired up my outdoor gas grill and cooked up all the meat in my larder and boiled eggs in a pot of water. The smell of barbecuing meat attracted several animals, including a three-legged raccoon, two dogs and two cats, all of whom looked bedraggled, not surprising considering that wind speeds had topped out at 80 miles an hour and the rain had been horizontal. The raccoon had apparently lost one of its limbs long before Sandy and was obviously a tough hombre. The dogs were mutts and the cats were, well, cats. All looked hungry.
    I was in the middle of cutting up some of the meat for them when Scar showed up. A big, almost feral, tomcat who adopts me whenever he feels like it, Scar didn’t look much worse than he usually does. His name, which I gave him, says it all. We have an understanding. I feed him and he ignores me. I have never petted him or even picked him up. I would bet Alex Rodriguez’s paycheck that he doesn’t purr, not that I will ever find out. I’d rather put a live grenade on my lap. His meow reminds me of fingernails on a blackboard, although to him it probably sounds like music to his one and a half ears.
    Scar walked majestically through the other critters and climbed the stairs as if he owned my deck, which, I suppose, he does.  I could have sworn that the raccoon eyed him warily. It made me wonder about that missing leg.
    I made Scar a plate and put it down in a corner of the deck. He rewarded me with his usual signs of affection. Which is to say, none. I then fixed up plates for the others. When I carried them down to the yard, far from Scar, the dogs and cats paired off and ate separately, which I sort of expected. It was like the U.S. Congress. That left the raccoon. I put his plate down by the garage and he waddled over and started eating. I looked around my yard. I had become a zookeeper. I didn’t bother putting out anything for the animals to drink. Standing water wasn’t going to be in short supply anywhere on Staten Island for days to come.
    I wanted to leave before the wildebeest arrived, so I wrapped up the rest of the cooked food, and went through my pantry, grabbing everything edible or drinkable. Then I drove to Midland Beach, perhaps the hardest-hit community on the Island, which had the most storm fatalities in New York City, where I joined an army of volunteers trying to mitigate the unimaginable.
    After giving the food to those I thought needed it most, I signed up with some ad hoc cleanup crews, which included people from all five boroughs and New Jersey, and even hundreds of runners who had come to New York for the canceled Marathon. It was dirty, often dangerous work, and I ruined every set of clothes I wore, rotating home every night to change. But I was glad to do it and seeing people come together like that restored a bit of my flagging faith in the human race. I even bumped into a couple of lawyers from the firm that owned the Stapleton building where my office is. And they weren’t trolling for liability or insurance cases.  
    The only