Bad to the Bone by Stephen Solomita Read Free Book Online Page B

stage. “What about your grandson? It could be anybody’s kid. Maybe your daughter was trying to get back at you by inventing a grandson you’d never see.”
    “Smart, Moodrow. You ask smart questions. I had the lawyer check birth records for the year he would have been born and we found him easy enough. January 15 in Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue. A baby boy, Michael, born to Florence Alamare. She listed her address as 1117 Ludlow Street which is where the commune is.”
    “And the cops didn’t check out the Hanoverians at all?”
    “They went there and Davis Craddock told them my daughter left the commune two years earlier. He hadn’t heard from her and couldn’t care less. Look, Moodrow, one of the reasons I picked you is you spent your career on the Lower East Side. You know the territory.”
    Moodrow shook his head. “It’s not gonna be that easy. The Hanoverians aren’t neighborhood. They’re closed off.”
    “I want my grandson,” Connie said evenly, “and I’m willing to pay. I got a check for $10,000. Put it in the bank and mail me the bills. When that check’s used up, I’ll send you another one. You find my grandson, you get a $15,000 bonus. You get proof on Davis Craddock, it’s fifteen more. I got so much money, I need a computer to count it. What am I gonna spend it on? I need an heir and that girl lying in the bed needs justice. Do the right thing, Moodrow. Do the right thing.”

FIVE
    P ETEY RAGSDALE WAS IN seventh heaven: he had a pocketful of PURE and pretty Polly in her 13th Street apartment, the 4th of July and Christmas wrapped up in one beautiful package. More good fortune, he had to admit, than any junkie is entitled to in the course of a mostly desperate fucking life.
    But fresh is fresh, and he had no intentions of not enjoying his blessings, deserved or not. PURE hadn’t been on the market for more than a month and it was already the rarest dope on the Lower East Side. Every day (as soon as he scrounged the bank) Petey searched for PURE, but the one lousy dealer who controlled the PURE action, Deeny Washington, didn’t seem to have more than a few hundred bags a day.
    The worst bitch about it was that everybody knew about PURE. Every junkie in the city was lookin’ for PURE, but takin’ whatever brown shit the regular dealers were holdin’. For the last five days, Petey had gotten the same crappy story from his brothers in junk.
    “Maannnn, you missed the muthafucka by a hair. I got the last bags off his ass and they was tight, man. Baddest damn dope in New Jack City.”
    Not this time, though. Not this fucking time. He’d gotten lucky, today, spied an asshole delivery man leave the roll-up door on his GMC unlocked and been rewarded for his eagle eye with two thirteen-inch Sonys. You didn’t need no fence for no fuckin’ Sonys in the box. Just walked into the nearest gas station on Houston Street and the boss snatched them up for a buck twenty-five apiece.
    As soon as the money was in his pocket, Petey hustled his ass over to the projects on Pitt Street and waited for Deeny to show up. Course, he wasn’t the only sick junkie hangin’ out in the small playground. The swings and seesaws were covered with freaks, half of ’em lookin’ like they were dyin’ of goddamn AIDS. When Deeny dragged his black ass across the parkin’ lot, they moaned in anticipation. It sounded like the noise his granny made when the nurses tied her hands to the bed rails.
    After Deeny was gone, Petey’s best bro’, a car thief named Littlerock, asked Petey did he want to go off to a squat on Attorney Street to get off.
    “Can’t do it, baby. Got me some new pussy,” Petey told Littlerock. “Come down to the Lower East Side from Malapan, New Jersey. Like, her father does cows for a livin’. Milkin’ ’em and shit. Course, the bitch don’t care for no cows. The bitch wanna be hip. She wanna learn the Bohemian way and be like one of the fuckin’ people.”
    “And I know you