Wages of Sin Read Online Free PDF

jitter below the patrolman's right eye and he looked away. “So what about this kid who found the body?” Rourke said.
    Murphy took his time answering, not looking at Rourke, taking another drag on his cigarette before he gestured with his nightstick at the far corner of the factory where most of the lights had gone out. Rourke could just make out the shadows of a boy sitting on an upended oil drum, one hand cuffed to a water pipe on the wall.
    “Kid goes by the name of Carlos Kelly,” Murphy said. “He probably didn't do it, but you can always make him for it, being as how you homicide dee-tectives are always wanting to close the case quick to get on the good side of the brass. And a lowlife like him with a dago wop for a mother ain't gonna be no loss to society.”
    He fished the cuff key out of his pocket and tossed it toward Rourke. “Unless you'd rather pin it on some wharf nigger. I got a couple names I could give you.”
    Rourke snatched the key out of the air, then looked at Fio and heaved a put-upon sigh. “And here you were telling me what a tough case this was gonna be.”
    Even scared and filthy, Carlos Kelly had a face that belonged on a holy card, with his full mouth, cap of dark curls, and cerulean blue eyes. The handcuffs seemed almost an assault on such beauty.
    Rourke took them off before he pulled up an oil drum and sat down. He let the silence build. Over here you couldn't smell the blood and burnt flesh, just dust and rust and the oil that had been ground over the years into the floor.
    The boy, who had been staring down at his wrist, rubbing it, looked up. His gaze sheared off Rourke, went to the body, then slid away.
    Rourke took his hip flask out of his tuxedo pocket and held it out in a wordless offering. Carlos Kelly's hands trembled as he drank, his teeth knocking against the flask's silver lip.
    He handed the flask back to Rourke and tried on a smile.
    “You are sure in some kind of jam, Carlos,” Rourke said, putting an edge on it. “Man, killing a priest. The law's going to figure using our new-fangled electric chair would be going too easy on a guy who did that.”
    The boy's head jerked as if he'd just been slapped. “Hey, wait a minute. What are you…? Aw, Jesus. I didn't do it. Why would I do it and then run for help, huh?”
    Rourke said nothing. The boy moaned and leaned over, bracing his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands.
    “Sometimes,” Rourke said, gentle now, “a man can wade into trouble that ends up being way over his head.”
    The boy pressed his face into his hands hard, then he took a deep, groaning breath and slowly raised his head. “Do you know that sidewalk banker, Tony the Rat?”
    “Yeah,” Rourke said with a smile. “He and I go way back.” Tony Benato was a loan shark who sometimes dealt a little cocaine on the side to support his own habit, and who'd gotten the moniker Tony the Rat not because he'd ever squealed on anybody, but for the hole he had in his pointed nose, damaged by years of packing anything up there that would give him a high.
    “Well, my mama got sick and she needed an operation or she was gonna die, and so I borrowed a couple of Gs from Tony to pay for it, only the vig was a whole fifty percent, and I couldn't even keep up with the juice payments, let alone make a dent in the original two thou. Not even working two shifts on the docks.”
    “Yeah, that's tough. And so he sent his hatchet man to make an example out of you,” Rourke said, feeding into the kid's tall, sad tale in the hope that at least some of his lies were being coated with a gloss of the truth.
    Carlos Kelly's head was bobbing eagerly. “Tony's goon, he made me go with him to the Esplanade Wharf, and he had his heater, a big ol' hog's leg, pressed right up to the back of my head when this other gun went off and somebody screamed. The goon got distracted and I got away.”
    Rourke didn't bother to ask if the kid knew the name of the guy with the