Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock Read Free Book Online Page A

go, his dick alive in his pants, the familiar heat in his blood. He walked to the kitchen, opened the bottle, took a long hard swig straight from it before pouring himself a generous double. He winced down a long sip, getting the amount in the glass to a respectable level. He was foggy now, numbed, but also relaxed.
    He was ready. He made his way to the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt. Alena lay propped up on the bed, the robe off now, nothing on but a pair of strawberry-colored panties. “Why, hello,” she said.
    “Time to pay the rent,” Jeremy said, grinning. Alena’s whole body stiffened, her face breaking like a dropped glass. Before Jeremy fully understood what was happening she had her robe on again, her back to him.
    “It was just a joke,” Jeremy said, his words sounding a little thick to his own ears.
    “I’m not a fucking whore,” Alena said with cold fury.
    “Of course not,” Jeremy said, reaching out to her shoulder, Alena sensing it and slapping his hand away before he’d even made contact. “I was just kidding around.”
    “Calling me your hooker is not kidding around.”
    “That’s not what I—I didn’t mean anything.”
    “You can stay if you want, but I’m going to sleep,” Alena said, sliding under the covers, still with her back to him.
    “Alena—”
    “Good night.”
    “Don’t go to bed angry.”
    “I already have.”
    “It was just—”
    “You said that already.”
    Jeremy sat there helplessly, looking at her stiff body under the blankets, the body he would be about to fuck if he hadn’t been so stupid. He picked up his glass, finished the dregs of the whiskey—how was it all gone already? Not knowing what else to do, Jeremy stood, glass in hand, and made his way to the kitchen to pour himself another drink.

5
    G RAVEYARD FOOT patrol in the NYPD’s Housing Bureau: no cop’s idea of a plum assignment. Officers Dooling and Garrity had done consecutive verticals in two buildings, walking up and down the stairwells, fourteen floors. Garrity, a smoker, started huffing after a couple of flights, his beefy face going red, sweat rolling along his jawline.
    After the back-to-back verticals Garrity insisted they skip a round, so the two of them stood behind the building they were supposed to be patrolling, Garrity lighting up a cigarette. Nightfall hadn’t broken the thick July heat: the air was muggy and still. Garrity, still sweating, logged it in his book that they were doing another up-and-down. Everybody skimmed on verticals, and in Garrity’s view two out of three was a reasonable compromise.
    The last straw for Garrity had been halfway up in Tower Two, when he’d turned in a stairwell, skidded in something wet, only a quick arm brace on the wall keeping him from falling on his ass. A cursory sniff confirmed his suspicion that it’d been somebody’s piss that had almost tripped him. He’d muttered to himself through his ragged breath for the rest of the climb, Dooling knowing to let his partner work through his anger before riding him about it.
    “You drop of a heart attack while the two of us are out here, you best believe I’m not doing CPR,” Dooling said. He could hear the faint rumble of traffic from the FDR Drive, which marked the eastern end of the project.
    “Like your black ass knows CPR,” Garrity replied. They’d been partnered for almost a year, rookie cops stuck in a dead-end beat. Like most partners with nothing in common, they interacted with a rude banter meant to cover over the fact that they didn’t actually like each other.
    “I know a man who needs to be put out of his misery when I see him.”
    Garrity took a deep drag off his smoke, blew it out at Dooling, though it dissipated in the air before reaching its target. Dooling took a step back anyway, going into a boxer’s crouch, feet dancing in the scuffed dirt, a show of energy.
    “I can bench four hundred pounds,” Garrity said. “So don’t get any ideas just because I don’t like