People like to think God lets things happen for a reason, and they’re right. Why else would the family decide to have a sixty-fifth birthday party for Uncle Jimmy? And why else would Mikey LiDecca decide to sneak back and see his father? And why, when Mikey went to his old house on Grand that morning to see his old man for the first time in eleven years, walked right up and rang the intercom on the gate outside, and when Jimmy heard his son’s voice, of course he let him in, why, when they sat in the old kitchen with Christina and the girls long gone, did Jimmy’s heart just give up? Why did he die in Mikey’s arms right there, one day before he was going to turn sixty-five? Answer me that.
I offered Mikey a ride home from the hospital, where the medics had rushed Jimmy and Mikey, just in case there was a miracle waiting for the old man. There was not.
Mikey gave me a long, kind of foggy look. “Thanks, Ray.”
I parked my Caddy near the house on Grand. “You gotta see this, Mikey.”
“What’s that, Ray?”
“It’s not far.”
We walked down Grand, past Elizabeth and Mott and Mulberry. Like we’d done a million times as boys. It was still sunny out, but cold. Mikey shuffled along next to me, looking down.
“You said on TV that it got eaten up by a cancer,” I said. “But I say, fuck that, Mikey. It’s smaller, that’s all. It’s still a place for people like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“This. Little Italy. You say it’s dead, but it isn’t. It’s alive. Here. Look at this.”
I led the way down an alley behind the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. There were puddles of rain from the night before. I hopped around them, got out ahead of Mikey, then turned and faced him.
The alley was long and we were halfway down it, protected by the tall buildings. Mikey stopped and looked at me, and I saw that he got it. He finally got something. A little surprised, I think.
“With Jimmy gone, I can speak for the family now,” I said. “This isn’t just business. It’s personal, too.”
He did it right. Didn’t even put his hands up. I shot him, and he went down hard. Twice more.
I walked back the way we’d come, around the puddles, back toward the house on Grand. I felt like some long misunderstanding was now understood. Like the thing he wanted to say was said.
I felt bad for Mikey, but this was always our thing, and finally he’d gotten that, too.
T. JEFFERSON PARKER is the author of twenty crime novels, including Silent Joe and California Girl, both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His last six books are a Border Sextet, featuring ATF task-force agent Charlie Hood as he tries to staunch the flow of illegal firearms being smuggled from the United States into Mexico. His most recent novel, Full Measure, is about a young man who returns from combat in Afghanistan to pursue his dreams in America. He lives in Southern California with his family and enjoys fishing, hiking, and cycling.
EVERMORE
Justin Scott
Stark ran west on Eighty-Fourth Street.
Starry-eyed gentrifiers had renamed the shabby old block Edgar Allan Poe Street. He crossed Riverside Drive against the light, gave a bus the finger and a cabbie a look that made the man reach for the tire iron he kept under the German shepherd on the front seat. It was the winter of 1981; life was already harsh in New York, and just when it seemed the city couldn’t get more dangerous, Stark was on the lam.
He cut into Riverside Park, turned off the tarmac path, frightened a child, and climbed an enormous rock. It stood high as the fourth floor of the apartment buildings across the drive. He sat beside an old steel door someone had stolen from someplace and glared at the Hudson River.
On the lam came in two varieties. Holed up in a four-star Bahamas hotel with a suitcase full of dough was good lam. The job gone wrong, a woman gone south with your getaway stash, and witnesses reporting which way you’d gone was bad lam. Bad lam meant you had to pull another job, like right now. But spur-of-the-moment heists promised jail or the morgue. So did sitting on this rock until the cops caught up.
The old door slid aside, and a cadaverous long-haired man climbed out of the hole it had covered. He sat on the door, gazed at the river, sharpened a pencil with a penknife, and scribbled in an ancient leather-bound notebook.
“You going to be here long?” Stark asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, when are you going to haul ass outta here and leave me in privacy?”
Dark, mournful eyes drifted over Stark’s tough and battered face. They took stock of his clothing, the small rip in one knee, the solid lightweight assault boots, and the bulge under his sweat-stained gabardine jacket, which suggested either a firearm or an alarming pectoral. “I would imagine I’ll be here another seven or eight hours. And you, sir?”
Stark said nothing. He glared at the Hudson, instead, and wondered if he was losing his touch.
“Poe.”