The Ninth Step Read Online Free PDF Page B

seem to have a lot of friends . He kept to himself.”
    “Do you happen to have any Pakistani employees here? Or Indian?”
    Mangiole looked puzzled. “No. Why do you ask?” Jack shrugged. “Just curious.”

CHAPTER SIX
    T HIS WAS THE LAST place on earth Jack Leightner wanted to be.
    After he and Richie interviewed some of the other salesmen at the appliance store, with little benefit to their investigation, he had given his colleague some advice about other avenues to pursue, and then he’d gone over to the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to give a deposition about another case. And then his shift was over, and he had started driving home, but he kept going, down toward the harbor, drawn back despite every instinct in his being.
    He had left this place as soon as he could after Petey’s murder; even though he was only seventeen, he’d managed to join the Army. He’d been shipped off to the Philippines, then Germany, eager to avoid his grieving parents, Petey’s friends, the whole goddamn neighborhood offering him pity every goddamn moment. (He never told the full story of what happened that day—just that he and his brother had been mugged.) He had gone to the far reaches of the earth, but he had never outrun what had happened on this spot.
    The trailer was gone, but the vacant lot was still there, where he and Petey had found the case of Scotch. It sat behind a Romanesque brick house of worship, now called the Red Hook Pentecostal Holiness Church. Jack looked off down the street: the waterfront lay to the northwest, just a couple of blocks down. He turned and set off the other way, though his feet practically stuck to the sidewalk in rebellion, retracing the route he and his brother had taken on that fateful morning back in 1965.
    The sky stretched over the waterfront—it always seemed more impressive here than elsewhere in New York City, a vast open plain sweeping high above the humble little two- and three-story brick houses. Jack walked up Sullivan Street to Van Brunt, which ran through the heart of Red Hook like the main street of some Wild West ghost town.
    He plodded along past the Patrick F. Daly elementary school, named after a principal who had been killed in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout back in ’92. Ahead rose the redbrick towers of the Red Hook West public housing projects, where he had lived as a kid, back when they had been filled with longshoremen and pipefitters and welders, with Norwegians and Basques and Italians and even Russians like his own folks. Back when the mighty Todd Shipyards, just several blocks away, had built oceangoing steel behemoths, when this neighborhood had been packed with bars and restaurants and movie theaters. Now the shipyards were gone, the streets so quiet you could hear the sea breeze whisper past, the Red Hook Houses transformed into an inner-city ghetto.
    The school looked like a minimum-security correctional facility. Jack’s chest tightened as he forced himself to turn its far corner, onto Richards Street. He could almost feel the weight of the case of Scotch in his arms. He could hear Petey singing “Help Me, Rhonda,” the way his brother would always get a song stuck in his head. Jack could picture him doing his impression of Norton from The Honeymooners or improvising some slapstick stunt to cheer up their often-depressed mother. He could even make their father laugh, when Max Leightner was not too deep into his cups. He had been a miracle, that kid, emerging from his screwed-up family like a bright plant rising from a dung heap. It wasn’t until he was gone that the others realized how he had held them together—and then they all retreated in different directions: Jack’s father into his drinking, his mother into her three-day periods of “lying down,” and Jack himself into his torturous guilt. (And maybe into a career as a cop.)
    He walked on, remembering how he and his brother had hurried that long-ago day, hoping to get their treasure to Joe