A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

shit." He looked at me.
    He said, "Yes, I'm a trafficker, a dope dealer, whatever you want to call it, and yes, it's my intention to kill these fucks. So that's all out on the table.
    What do you say? Are you in or out?"
    My best friend, the man I'd planned to join in Ireland, was a career criminal. According to legend, he had one night walked the streets of Hell's Kitchen carrying a bowler's bag from which he displayed the severed head of an enemy. I couldn't swear it happened, but more recently I'd been at his side in a cellar in Maspeth when he severed a man's hand with one blow of a cleaver. I'd had a gun in my hand that night, and I'd used it.
    So if I was still very much a cop in some respects, in other ways I had undergone considerable change.
    I'd long since swallowed the camel; why strain at the gnat?
    "I'm in," I said.

    Chapter 3
    I got back to my hotel a little after nine. I'd had a long session with Kenan Khoury, filling pages of my notebook with names of friends and associates and family members. I'd gone to the garage to inspect the Toyota, and found the Beethoven cassette still in the tape deck. If there were any other clues in Francine's car, I couldn't spot them.
    The other car, the gray Tempo used to deliver her segmented remains, was not available for inspection.
    The kidnappers had parked it illegally, and sometime in the course of the weekend a tow truck from Traffic had showed up to haul it away.
    I could have attempted to track it down, but what was the point?
    It had surely been stolen for the occasion, and had probably been previously abandoned, given the condition of it. A police lab crew might have turned up something in the trunk or interior, stains or fibers or markings of some sort, that would point out a profitable line of investigation. But I didn't have the resources for that kind of inspection.
    I'd be running all over Brooklyn to look at a car that wouldn't tell me a thing.
    In the Buick the three of us traced a long, circuitous course, past the D'Agostino's and the Arabian market on Atlantic Avenue, then south to the first pay phone at Ocean and Farragut, then south on Flatbush and east on N to the second booth on Veterans Avenue. I didn't really have to see these sights, there's not a tremendous amount of information you can glean by staring at a public telephone, but I've always found it worthwhile to put in time on the scene, to walk the pavements and climb the stairs and see it all firsthand. It helps make it real.
    It also gave me a way to take the Khourys through it again. In a police investigation, witnesses almost always complain about having to relate the same story over and over to a host of different people. It seems pointless to them, but there's a point to it. If you tell it enough times to enough different people, maybe you'll come up with something you've previously left out, or maybe one person will hear something that sailed past everybody else.
    Somewhere in the course of things we stopped at the Apollo, a coffee shop on Flatbush. We all ordered the souv-laki. It was good, but Kenan hardly touched his. In the car afterward he said, "I should have ordered eggs or something. Ever since the other night I got no taste for meat. I can't eat it, it turns my stomach. I'm sure I'll get over it, but for the time being I've got to remember to order something else. It makes no sense, ordering something and then you can't bring yourself to eat it."
    PETER drove me home in the Camry. He was staying at Colonial Road, he'd been there since the kidnapping, sleeping on the couch in the living room, and he needed to stop by his room to pick up clothes.
    Otherwise I'd have called a livery service and taken a taxi. I'm comfortable enough on the subway, I rarely feel unsafe on it, but it seemed a false economy to stint on cab fare with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd have felt pretty silly if I ran into a mugger.
    That was my retainer, two banded stacks of hundreds with fifty bills in