Dead Ball by R. D. Rosen Read Free Book Online Page B

us.”
    “You know,” Cooley said, “you’re all right, Bagel Boy.” He clapped him on the shoulder.
    Harvey looked in Cooley’s eyes, inspecting them for any sign of hostility, and decided there wasn’t any. “I may be a Bagel Boy, but at least I don’t get my hair done at Snakes R Us.”
    “C’mon, this hair cost me two bills.”
    This was good. At least they wouldn’t be wasting time skating around on thin, politically correct ice. “Oh, I think you can afford it,” Harvey said.
    “Damn right I can.”
    “I’ve gotta tell you something, Moss.”
    “What?”
    “At least Bagel Boy beats Professor.”
    “Must be ten thousand Professors in baseball.”
    “I know. Nothing more original ever stuck. Bagel Boy,” he mused. “Just don’t wear it out.”
    They walked out of the clubhouse and into the long hallway that led to the players’ parking lot, their footsteps clapping against the concrete floor and bouncing off the walls.
    Mike, the security guard, pushed opened the metal door for them, saying, “Good night, Cool, and congratulations.” The thunderstorm had left the blacktop littered with puddles. There were only a handful of cars left in the lot, none worth less than thirty grand. Cooley fished in his pocket for his keyless remote and pressed one of the buttons. Thirty feet away a Range Rover, beaded with rain, chirped and blinked its headlights at them.
    “We’re not taking your car,” Harvey reminded him.
    He jammed his keys in his pocket. “When you’re black,” he suddenly seethed, “you don’t ever get a day off. Every fucking day, your job is being black.”
    Harvey put a hand on Cooley’s shoulder. “You know, Moss, I think this could be the start of a beautiful relationship.”
    “Over here, Cool,” Marshall Levy called through the window of his Jaguar, which was idling by the gate.
    Harvey closed his eyes. After four years of dawdling in the shallows of motivational speaking, he was back on the high dive, stepping off now, no turning back, the dark current coming up fast to meet him. He had wondered how he would ever re-enter the river of time, and now he knew.
    “Moss,” he said, “is there anything you know about these threats that you didn’t want to say upstairs?”
    “You mean, do I know somebody who wants me dead, but I’m not fucking telling you?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Shit, no. Cool’s everybody’s friend.”
    Harvey handed Moss his hanging clothes. “Not anymore.”

5
    E VERY AFTERNOON AT FOUR , for as long as most people in Providence can remember, a lunch wagon hitched to a truck cab has pulled into a couple of parking spaces on Fulton Street next to the Second Empire-style City Hall and remained there until dawn. Set on an angle atop the wagon, a small neon sign blinks “ HAVEN BROS. DINER .” The diner is like some alien aluminum creature from another world, a fossil of the 1940s that seems to have crawled out of urban America’s unconscious, a film noir artifact spliced nightly into the city’s present. Throughout the night, in the shadow of the floodlit old Industrial National Bank Building on Kennedy Plaza, a trickle of the city’s powerful and powerless, Ivy League-educated and semiliterate, sleepless and snack-deprived, climb the portable steps of the diner for a bowl of red beans or a steamed hot dog.
    Haven Brothers is no culinary mecca. Its specialty is inedible—a serving of romantic desolation—and in that regard it was probably no accident that Mickey Slavin had suggested that they meet there. Their relationship had seen better days, which is true of most relationships that last more than a few months, but Harvey felt keenly that they had lost something that needed to be found again, or else they needed to find something they had never had in the first place.
    When Harvey pulled his Honda up to the curb at the Biltmore, a hundred feet from City Hall, he could see Mickey’s Jetta parked in front, and Mickey herself sitting on