Slipping Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF

start to thud frighteningly.
     
    “Aw, man, I don’t think so. What if my cousin comes for me and I’m not here?”
     
    “You ain’t probably been with a natural woman in twenty years, son. They can wait a few minutes.”
     
    “Naw, I’m a have to take a rain check. I put my family through enough already.”
     
    “All right, I hear you.” T-Wolf sighed. “Guess I’m going to have to be an army of one. I’ll be thinking about you, man.”
     
    “Don’t think too much. Just do what you got to do.”
     
    “Heh-heh.” T-Wolf rolled up the top of his bag. “You gonna think about that other proposition we were talking about, right? My nephew could use a few more good men on the block.”
     
    Riight, thought Hoolian. I’m gonna risk my bail selling weed for some punk-ass little Hoe Avenue gangsta who wasn’t even born when I got sentenced.
     
    “I got your number.” He gave T-Wolf’s meaty fist the pound. “Stay strong.”
     
    “Peace.” T-Wolf picked up his bag and then hesitated. “Sure you don’t want to come along now?”
     
    Hoolian squinted and shook his head, hearing the trepidation, knowing that even just seven years of head counts, lockdowns, unannounced cell searches, and regimented daily programs could make a man in size 14 sneakers afraid to cross the street on his own.
     
    “Nah, dawg, I gotta watch myself,” he said. “One slip, I’m back where I started.”
     
    “Okay, I hear you.”
     
    Slowly and reluctantly, the big man ambled off, the plastic tips of his untied Nike laces scatting and scratching on the pavement. A blue-and-white police car cruised by, eyeballing the scene. Hoolian felt anxiety crawl across his skin like insect legs among the tiny dorsal hairs. Had they been tipped off he was getting out tonight? What if they’d seen him talking to T-Wolf? No, that was crazy. They didn’t have that kind of manpower. Still. “No associating with known felons,” the judge said, setting his bail. He decided he would throw away T-Wolf’s number the first chance he got.
     
    Cars hurtled by recklessly. He looked down the street again, wondering where his cousin Jessica was. She hadn’t visited in years and he wasn’t sure he would still recognize her.
     
    He fished around in his pocket for change and found a couple of quarters jammed in with the two twenties his lawyer had loaned him. Where would he go if she didn’t show up? After years of hanging on by his fingernails, his 440 motion had been granted so suddenly that he’d barely had time to make any contingency plans. He’d figured he’d be lucky to see a judge before Thanksgiving. Instead, he’d found himself hustled down to Rikers and taken to a dingy little hearing room this very afternoon, almost too stunned to register Judge Santiago’s setting aside his conviction but warning him that the indictment still stood.
     
    Stomach writhing from the van ride, he found a pay phone with the words “Praise God” and “Suck Dick” scratchitied into its chrome plate covering and pumped in a quarter.
     
    “Yo, yo, yo, whassup, y’all, this is Jes- sick- ahh,” her voice came on after the fourth ring, a baby wailing in the background. “I can’t come to the phone right now. Yo, shut the fuck up, I’m talking. Anyway, you know the drill. Wait for the beep.”
     
    He put the phone back gently, knowing she’d either forgotten about him or decided not to get involved. Could he blame her? She’d been— what?— maybe three, four years old when he went away.
     
    He looked up, watching the train pull out of the station, the wheels making a steel-on-steel grace note and a blinding spark on the tracks that made his whole nervous system shudder.
     
    “Hey, Rico Suave.” The same cop car that had passed him before was pulled up to the curb now, a young sergeant in blue shirtsleeves with his hair cut high and tight leaning out the window. “What do you think you’re doing?”
     
    He stiffened at the sight of the uniform. “Nothing.”
     
    “Go do it somewhere else. I’m getting sick