Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita Read Free Book Online Page B

daydream. A tin-starred sheriff burst through the cabin door. Or a burly, foul-mouthed New York detective. Or an FBI agent, dressed to the nines. Or her own laughing-crying parents.
    “Well, how are we doing on this rainy day, Miss Lorraine?” Becky called, unlocking the door. She rushed on without pausing for an answer. “I do have the most wonderful news for you, Miss Lorraine. Daddy says we are driving tonight. And you are coming with us.”

FIVE
    I T WAS JUST AFTER three o’clock in the afternoon when I left the labs at One Police Plaza. Sixteen minutes after three o’clock, to be exact. There are some moments you never forget. (Like December 16, 1971, 10:44 A.M., when that C130 lifted off a Saigon runway with my intact carcass aboard.) I imagine convicts released from their prison cages experience the same sense of escape. Escape mixed with exultation. I made it, you son-of-a-bitch. I survived and you got nothin’ to say to me. Now or ever.
    It was not the afternoon of the morning I entered the lab. Even Manhattan’s sooty air smelled different now. It was the difference between the smell of the forest when you step into it on a short hike and the smell of the forest when you step into it with an Ml6 strapped to your chest. I automatically scanned the people on the street, separating the mutts and mopes and skels from the cops and common citizens.
    Jane Street, my destination and the home of the King Thong Task Force, was on the west side of Manhattan, a couple of miles from where I stood. I might have taken a subway up or grabbed a cab, but I decided to hoof it, ignoring the fact that New York was on the tail end of a cool spell and the overcast skies threatened rain. I had a tan Gore-Tex jacket on my back, a pair of thoroughly broken-in, waterproofed Western boots on my feet, and a Policemen’s Benevolent Association cap pulled low over my face. If worse came to worse, I could always unfurl the hood zipped into the collar of my jacket and make for the nearest subway.
    (The boots, by the way, were my pride and joy. Custom made of fine-grained black lizard, the sharply squared toes encased a steel core. Behind the steel, a thick bed of molded foam provided the necessary cushion for my own toes. I’ve never had the time to study one or another of the disciplines lumped together under the generic term “karate,” but I’ve absolutely mastered a snap-kick to the shin or knee. A snap-kick that’s proven to be more effective than Mace or a Taser in bringing a desire for sanity to the consciousness of the terminally belligerent.)
    I walked west on Chambers Street, dodging pedestrians as I made my way toward the Hudson River. One Police Plaza, in the heart of Manhattan’s civic center, is surrounded by federal, state, and city courthouses as well as the enormous Municipal Building with its gilded angel on top. City Hall is there, too, its grimy facade plunked down in the middle of a small, even grimier park.
    The few square blocks surrounding the civic center hum to the tune of the several hundred thousand low-level bureaucrats who feed and shop in the area. I suppose tourists must find it strange to discover a Blarney Castle cheek by jowl with the Ojavi West Indian Restaurant. Wong’s Chinese Fast Food, two doors down, probably doesn’t help matters. But that’s New York. The day when you could walk into a Jewish or an Italian or a German neighborhood and know exactly what to expect from the local restaurateurs is long gone. Only Little Italy and Chinatown, pure ethnic pockets institutionalized in the name of the tourist dollar, remain.
    I turned north onto Hudson Street, leaving the civic center behind. The developers call this neighborhood TriBeCa. It was created out of the old printing district by real estate sharks in the 1980s. The factories were carved up as the printers took their jobs to automated plants in New Jersey, carved up and converted into co-ops and condos. Now, the locals bustle from one