Way Past Legal Read Online Free PDF Page A

busted for, I mean, there was plenty more where that came from. Aside from that, all I had up there was just, you know, personal stuff. But it was mine, you know what I mean? I didn't like the idea of someone I didn't know going through my shit, whether it was cops or the Russians or even the people I was subletting from. I got a flash then, how all those people I had ripped off must've felt, but I put it out of my mind. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or later—once it comes up you've got to decide what you're gonna do about it—but just then I was too worried about getting back into that apartment. See, there were two things up there that I wanted. I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted that laptop. It was nobody's business how much I spent on food or dry cleaning or women and it was all right there in Quicken, I hadn't even bothered to put a password on the file. And the other thing was my life list, which I had folded up in the front page of my copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds .
     
     
A life list is a record of every bird species you have personally seen and identified, and mine isn't even official because you're supposed to have someone with you to verify your sightings, is that a cedar waxwing, yes, by God, mark it down. That would have ruined it for me, this was a thing I had to do on my own, don't ask me why. I had never spoken a single word about it to a soul. But it was up there, and I had a lot of birds on it, too, everything from house sparrows to a great big beautiful son of a bitch of a barn owl, what he was doing in Brooklyn I'll never know, but I wanted that list. No way was I gonna start all over again.
     
     
There were some kids shooting baskets in a schoolyard not far away, and I hung out and watched them for a while. I picked out two of them. They were both tall, looked like they could run, and I gave them twenty bucks each to go put a couple of bricks through the back windows of one of those Ford vans. It was pretty funny, the way it went down. The kids come walking down the sidewalk, boom, there go the windows, they take off, the doors of the van burst open, the guys inside are cops and they can't help themselves, they come boiling out and go chasing after the kids, guy in the front seat hops out, he's red-faced, yelling at his guys to come back, and right then a car that I hadn't noticed which had been parked just up the block pulls out and goes screaming away, had to be Rosario waiting for me. The other Ford van jumps out and goes after him, and after a few minutes the cops all come back and get into the one with broken windows, and they take off, too.
     
     
Makes you wonder. Maybe Rosey just wanted to talk, maybe the cops wouldn't get him, maybe he wouldn't roll over on me when they did, maybe the Russians were too busy running for the hills themselves to come chasing after anybody. Right?
     
     
Sure. I was in and out in fifteen minutes. I grabbed an old Toyota out of the garage under the building. Hey, it was an emergency. I left it in front of some hotel in Queens, took my bags, and jumped into a cab. That way, I figure, dude gets his car back, the guys in the impound yard won't mess with it too much because it's an old crock, not even worth cracking the trunk open.
     
     
    * * *
When you have to run, the toughest thing in the world is to think about it first. I kept going over it on that ride to Manhattan, Rosey sitting there waiting on me, not noticing the cops waiting on him. That's what he was like sometimes, so focused on what he was doing that he couldn't see what was going on, and I began to wonder if I might not be guilty of the same sort of blindness, so busy running away that I didn't look for the trap. Rosario had to be on fire, man, he'd had all that money right there in his lap, and now it was gone. He wouldn't even consider that he'd been ready to screw me out of my cut, and put me in the ground when I found out. He was the offended party now. He could take me