Slipping Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

cat’s paw. Old forgotten hungers began to stir inside him. Girls did not look quite this good when he went away. They weren’t quite so lean and voluptuous, so thrillingly bold in the way they carried themselves, so direct in how they looked at you.
     
    But then he fixed on the dark line circling one of her biceps. A barbed-wire tattoo. Not just any barbed wire, but razor ribbon with sharpened points of the evil kind used atop state prison walls. He stared, wondering why anyone possessing such pure lunar beauty—why any free person, in fact—would do this to themselves.
     
    Seeing desire light up his face, she stuck out her tongue. A small gold stud lay near the tip like a pearl on pink velvet. She snaked it out and waggled it at him, enjoying the riot of shock and dismay it provoked, then walked on by, a cool kitty licking the cream from her lips.
     
    He set down the duffel bag made of old towels sewn together with dental floss, and tugged self-consciously at his belt loops. His old clothes no longer quite fit him. His blue work shirt, which somehow had survived twenty years in the state storage system, was too tight around the collar and his Levi’s were too snug. It wasn’t just that he had filled out from lifting weights and eating starches, the styles had changed.
     
    He saw a group of teenage boys with jeans slung so low that the ass pockets were on the back of their knees, eating Chinese takeout by a white Cadillac Escalade. Ultraviolet lights circled the rims, and a rapper on the speakers shouted things that you could hardly even say on a record back before he went away.
     
    He let go of the belt loops that suddenly seemed too high on his waist, remembering himself at seventeen, buying these jeans at a Gap on East 86th Street for eighteen dollars, the private-school girl working at the register smiling shyly at him and tucking a few stray chestnut-brown hairs behind her ear.
     
    She was probably married now, with three kids and two cars in the suburbs. And here he was, twenty years later, dumped in Queens on a late-summer night, a grown-ass man, with jailhouse muscles, trimmed eyelashes, thick black hair graying slightly at the temples, and a quarter-inch razor scar under his chin signifying this was a child who’d had all the softness bled out of him.
     
    Something called the W train, which hadn’t even existed before, rattled by on the elevated tracks, screaking and squealing like a teakettle, the passing windows casting a harsh shuttering yellow light over the boulevard.
     
    “Say, Hooligan, you got a ride?”
     
    Timberwolf, a double-wide-load brother Hoolian knew from Attica, had just gotten out of the Department of Correction van behind him, six foot five, 280 on the hoof, carrying a brown paper bag with his clothes inside, T-shirt untucked, and sneaker laces untied like an oversize four-year-old waiting for a grown-up to come help him.
     
    “My cousin’s supposed to come pick me up in a cab, but I don’t know, man,” said Hoolian, his voice rough and sandpapery from the long upstate winters. “I think maybe she might have misunderstood and thought I was coming on the four-thirty Rikers bus. Or maybe she might’ve got tired of waiting and been and gone already.”
     
    “Yeah, tell me about losing patience.” T-Wolf yawned. “Seven motherfuckin’ years I did for selling two little faggoty bottles of crack. And then they tack on another six months at Rikers for some bullshit robbery I didn’t have nothing to do with. How long was your bid?”
     
    “I was in since ’84.”
     
    “ Damn, that’s more than half your life!” T-Wolf clutched his chest. “We definitely gotta get you some pussy tonight. You come to the right place.”
     
    He pointed across the twelve lanes of traffic to a “gentlemen’s club” that called itself Shenanigans in festive ruby letters, just down the block from a Marine Corps recruiting station. But the mere thought of being within touching distance of a woman made Hoolian’s heart