Hope to Die by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

I was late as it was; a cab pulled up just as I hit the sidewalk, and I held out a hand and flagged it.
    They were reading the Preamble when I got there. I took one of the few empty seats and realized this was my second meeting in as many days. I had the thought that I might go every day for a while, and my next thought was that I probably wouldn't go to another meeting for a week. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, and that, when you came right down to it, was why I was in that room listening to a skinny little girl with sharp features and blotchy skin tell how she'd started raiding her parents' liquor cabinet at eleven, how she was a crack whore at seventeen, and how now, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, she had high hopes, eight months of sobriety, and HIV.
    You get a slightly different crowd at the midnight meetings. In the old days at the Moravian church it wasn't all that rare for an active drunk to start throwing chairs until a couple of members teamed up to throw him out. You see a lot of tattoos at the midnight meetings, a lot of leather, a lot of body piercings. On average, the people who show up at that hour are younger and more newly sober, squeezing in one last meeting to keep from picking up a drink. By the time it's over, all the liquor stores will have closed. Of course the bars can stay open until four, and delis sell beer around the clock, but by one in the morning there's a chance you can go to bed sober and actually get to sleep.
    Along with the new and the desperate, the late meetings draw the people whom temperament or circumstance has made creatures of the night. And there are those, some long sober, who prefer a meeting with more of an edge to it, one where you might see someone pull a knife, or throw a chair, or have a petit mal seizure.
    I sat there with all my years, sixty-two of them, eighteen of them sober, feeling different from the younger, newer, wilder people around me.
    But not that different.
    When the meeting ended I thanked the speaker, helped with the chairs, and went out into the night. The air was thick and heavy as wet wool. I walked through it, west and then north, and wound up at the southeast corner of Fiftieth and Tenth and went into Grogan's Open House.
    Mick Ballou owns Grogan's, although his name can't be found on the lease or the ownership papers. In the same unofficial way he owns some other businesses around town. He used to own a farm in the Catskills, where he fattened a few pigs and kept chickens for eggs, but when the farmhouse burned down he walked away from it. The owner of record died that night, along with his wife and a lot of other people, and I suppose the nominal owner's son wound up with what was left of the farm. Mick, I know, hasn't been back to see. He won't go anywhere near the place.
    The farm was never designed to turn a profit, but he probably makes money at Grogan's, and with his other businesses. They could lose money, though, and it wouldn't matter much, as his real money comes from criminal activity of one sort or another. He robs drug dealers, and hijacks legal and illegal shipments, and lends money to people whose arms and legs are their only collateral. I'm an ex-cop, a once-licensed private detective, and this career criminal is my closest friend, and I have long since given up trying to explain it.
    Past lives, Elaine says. We were brothers once. And that's a better explanation than any I can offer.
    The bartender gave me a nod. I knew his name was Leeky, but I didn't know how he spelled it, two e's or e-a, for the vegetable or a plumbing problem or some Gaelic word unknown to me. He was fairly new, one of those close-mouthed lads who turn up at Grogan's fresh off the plane from Belfast. Ireland has more people entering than leaving these days, the result of the economic turnaround they like to call the Celtic Tiger. But Mick's visitors don't get to ride the tiger. They've got jail sentences hanging over them, or men looking to kill