The Hidden Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

that song by Fergie, not the Dutchess of York, but the one who is booty-licious or something like that. And I didn’t think I could feel worse.
    “What do you do?”
    The good thing about intoxication is I can get lost for a while, but the downside is that Talia always finds me again, and this is when it’s the worst, when the defenses are down, the emotions the rawest. I heard, in my head, that little vocalization Emily used to make, once she hit three months, something between a moan and a squeal, capping off at a delightful, high-pitched squeak—
    “What do you do?”
    I directed back to one of the white girls, who was leaning over the table at me. Based on her outfit and posture, it seemed important to her that I take note of her cleavage, so I made a point of not doing so.
    “I’m a fortune-teller,” I answered.
    “You are not.”
    “I knew you were going to say that.”
    I caught eyes with a woman up near the bar, a woman in a green dress, the Lady in Green, who broke eye contact in an easy way, as if she hadn’t been looking at me. I suppose I should have been flattered but it made me feel uneasy, for some reason. Or maybe it was the five vodkas I had drunk. I pondered for the twentieth time tonight what I was still doing here, why I had come here to begin with, why I still feared God.
    I also wondered who had hired me to defend Sammy Cutler.
    “—a doctor or a lawyer or something.”
    I watched the Lady in Green’s eyes tour the bar again as she waited for her drink. She had a narrow, sculpted face. Her head angled upward, revealing a vulnerability that belied her confident appearance.
    “I’m a police detective,” I told the lady trying to converse with me. I say trying because she’d had more to drink than I had.
    “A cop .” She said it like a cuss word. Lot of people feel that way about our city’s finest. Sometimes I’m one of them.
    Now I had the attention of the entire tribe of women at the table. What kinds of cases did I handle? Did I ever shoot someone?
    “You don’t seem like a cop. You seem like a Wall Street banker.” This from the black woman, or I guess I’m supposed to say African American, but she had a British accent so did that make her English American? African British? I thought of asking her but I would need a bullhorn to communicate with her across the table, and no matter how I tried to phrase the question it would probably sound politically incorrect. Why bother? Why bother with any of this?
    “When I was a boy,” I said, “my parents were killed in front of me by an armed robber. I swore, that day, that I would devote my life to fighting crime.”
    Pete returned from the bathroom, wearing an enthusiastic grin, rejoining the conversation with renewed vigor. I doubted that taking a piss could have put him in that good a mood. I trained my stare on him and he knew it, but he avoided my look and the question it raised.
    “Jason’s a lawyer,” Pete chimed in. “One of the best in the city.”
    “That explains how he lies so easily.”
    I laughed, for the only time that night. I looked back at the Lady in Green who, yes, was checking me out again. The logical part of my brain, when it was functioning, told me that at some point in my life I would be interested in women again, but it seemed beyond comprehension thus far.
    I watched Pete work the ladies. The kid had been through some rough patches. He got it a lot worse at home than I did, growing up. My father could look you in the eye and convince you he was heir to the British throne, but in his soul he was not an enlightened man. He was bitter and temperamental and opted, instead of a psychiatrist’s couch, to relieve tension by taking swats at his boys. I went through a pretty good spell of it myself, though I spent more time working up a sweat dodging my father’s punches than actually receiving them. I would juke right, fake left, hit the floor, anything to make him miss, only heightening his drunken rage,