American Gangster by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online

He didn’t even see his son’s puzzled expression as the boy lookedback at his father holding the gun on those bigger kids. The child felt a sensation that was far too complex for him to parse: shame intertwined with pride. But he would feel it again.
    And by the time Richie had made the teenagers clean up after themselves, his wife and son were long gone, and so were most of the other moms and kids, leaving him alone on the grassy patch where, minutes before, his son had played under a blue-gray sky on a day that seemed suddenly colder.
    Richie Roberts’s apartment in Newark was nicer than a junkie’s.
    Barely.
    Though the way he lived offered no proof, Richie was human and could hardly help but glance around his bleak little pad without thinking of the Manhattan town house or lovely suburban home he could be living in, if he weren’t a stick-up-his-ass fool. He had no choice but to think about the great food—French cuisine maybe (though he’d never really had any, unless you counted fries)—that he could be eating right now, as opposed to standing at his gas stove pouring a can of Campbell’s into a pot with his stitched-up black-and-blue hand.
    But it wasn’t just the nice digs he could be enjoying or the great food he might be chowing down on. It was denying those things to his family; that’s what grated.
    What kind of fucking idiot walks away from a cool million? Walks away, knowing he’s alienated not justhis own partner, but every goddamn cop in New Jersey and, when word got out (which it probably already had), New York to boot?
    He could still feel the eyes on him when he’d walked out of that Newark police station, all by himself—even Javy Rivera hadn’t been up to accompanying him—knowing this quiet, staring response was not out of awe or respect over Richie turning his back on all that crooked bread, no. These looks spoke of contempt, on the one hand, and fear on the other.
    He would never be trusted again by his fellow cops.
    The saving grace was that he wouldn’t have to be a cop much longer.
    He got himself a spoon and hauled his pot of soup over to the little cluttered desk, piled with law textbooks. Almost at random, he cracked open a text and started his night’s studies for the upcoming New Jersey Bar exam. On the wall nearby, casting silent encouragement his way, was a framed photograph of one of his heroes: heavyweight champ Joe Louis, standing over the sprawled, vanquished Billy Conn.
    When the soup was gone, the hunger sated but the tension gnawing, Richie went to the small wooden box that was his stash, where an ounce or so of grass waited along with rolling papers and clips.
    He rolled a joint, smiling to himself at his hypocrisy, and soon was mellowed out and deep in his studies, smoke swirling to the ceiling like his conscience trying to find its way to freedom.

5. Ding Dong
    A sprawling jumble of a city, Bangkok had all the humid heat, rank pollution, snarled traffic and diseased prostitutes its ragged reputation promised. Despite the colorful if grotesque palaces and temples, this was a world chiefly of weather-beaten cement with occasional splashes of tropical green poking through. Dirty, poor, crowded, its sidewalks clogged by stalls selling knock-off T-shirts and cheap jewelry, Bangkok made Harlem seem a paradise.
    In the deceptive candy flush of neon at night, Frank Lucas—in a short-sleeved sportshirt and chinos, just another anonymous tourist—rode along in back of one of the three-wheeled motorized vehicles called a tuktuk. Bicycles darted around like flies (and flies were darting around everything and everyone else), but the tuk-tuk did its own share of weaving in and out of the impossible traffic.
    Frank had checked into the Dusit Thani Hotel, where he’d skipped any tourist bullshit to catch the three-wheel taxi to his destination: the Soul Brothers Bar, which he’d been told back home was the top