The Ninth Step Read Online Free PDF Page A

style?”
    “So, if I go there, I’m dead, right?”
    “Not if you turn yourself in and let the police handle it.”
    “Then it’s prison for sure.”
    “But you’d be alive. You’d be doing what you could to rectify the situation.”
    He didn’t answer.
    “Look, maybe the best thing is to take a few days, find a meeting, talk to some people  . . . Cotton?”
    He held the phone to his ear hating how Anita cared about him like he was good. He told her he had to go. He said he was sorry.
    #
    In addition to fry cook, Cotton worked a second job for Gooney doing maintenance on some rental property Gooney owned and within a matter of weeks he had enough cash to check out a few beaters in the neighborhood used car lots. The problem was he had no ID, not since he’d gone off the grid, and now he wasn’t sure what it would take to get back on or what the consequences would be if he did resume an ordinary life, his old life. He wasn’t sure anymore that he even wanted to be that guy again. That guy had worked his ass off and even after he’d had it made, he hadn’t been that happy. Not until he met Livie. Then he’d felt hope open inside him as wide as the sky. He had felt redeemed; he had thought in poetic rhyme, in melodies of song; he’d been every kind of a romantic fool.
    He’d believed he was worthy of her love.
    He’d believed he’d known who he was, too, and how he’d act under pressure, even extreme pressure. He’d figured he was tough, tough enough anyway. If asked, he would have said he was the kind of guy who’d do the right thing. Maybe not every time, but when it counted and it was bullshit, everything he’d believed. Cotton knew that now.
    He knew that guy he’d been hadn’t known jack about himself.
    #
    He was in the Laundromat around the corner from the hotel doing a load and reading the Sunday sports pages somebody had left behind when this kid came in to post an ad. He was maybe twenty-five, collegiate looking, Polo shorts, Aggie t-shirt, flip flops. Clean-cut. Unlike the guy dozing in the corner who looked more like a pile of rags than a person, who was probably homeless, who smelled like he was sleeping one off.
    But it was that kind of neighborhood. You could see anything here, a flophouse could be squatting on a square of scalped earth between a swank townhome and an immaculate restored Craftsman bungalow, or there could be a guy in a three piece suit at a bus stop with a wino right next to him puking his guts onto the guy’s Bruno Magli’s. Cotton had built a lot of the townhomes in the area. He’d been living in one of them when he’d met Livie. Living the high life, a swinging bachelor, the ace, the cool jerk.
    Not long ago, he’d walked over there and sat on a bench across the street watching a man mow the postage-stamped square of grass. A woman had come out onto the deep wrought-iron encased porch and watered a pair of urns that had contained tall spires of something purple under planted with a tiny silver-leafed trailer. Ivy of some sort. Livie would have known its name. She would have admired the style of the urns.
    “. . . selling my dad’s car,” Cotton heard the kid say now. He was talking to a woman who’d come to look over the bulletin board full of announcements.
    “What kind is it?” Cotton stood up, leaving the newspaper in the molded plastic chair.
    “Mercedes,” the kid said raising his voice over the rattle and slosh of machine noise.
    “Well, I can’t afford one of those,” the woman exclaimed with a laugh and she carried her laundry basket over to an empty washer and began the sorting process.
    Cotton saw something pass across the kid’s face, a painful sort of shudder that made him think there was a story behind the car, made him ask straight out in a low voice if it was hot.
    The kid shook his head. “Not so you’d go to jail if you were to get stopped driving it. I’ve got the title,” he added hopefully.
    Cotton took down the card and read