Lieberman's Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page B

Bill Hanrahan turned off the bubbling whirlpool machine that hung precariously over the edge of the old claw-foot bathtub. Then he hoisted himself up, the water cascading off him, and, holding on to the towel rack behind him, he tested first one knee and then the other. The results could have been better.
    William “Hardrock” Hanrahan had been the fastest lineman on his Chicago Vocational High School football team, one of the fastest high school linemen in the whole state of Illinois, probably in the Midwest. In his senior year, Hanrahan had twisted his knee in a practice. The speed went; not overnight but in an instant. He had still gone on to a football scholarship at Southern Illinois, though he had been hoping for Notre Dame or Illinois; but even with a good knee a top-twenty school had been only an outside possibility. He had lasted two years at Southern, a journeyman lineman who lost his nickname and stopped finding the game a hell of a lot of fun. He had left Carbondale, left school, and come back to Chicago to join his father as a cop, as his father had joined his father before him.
    More than twenty-five years after his last football game the knee still locked on him, went numb when it had a mind to, referred a longing ache to his other knee, and made walking a chore; but Hanrahan covered up the problem to his satisfaction.
    He stood wet and aching, a hairy hulk of a man, wondering what his ex-wife Maureen was doing and with whom. He stepped carefully out of the tub onto the bath mat and dried himself. Jeanine had done the laundry. The towels were clean. But they didn’t smell as good as when Bill did them. Jeanine had cleaned the floor and, he had to admit, done a good job, but not as good as Bill did.
    Stepping into the clean jockey shorts he had laid out on the clothes hamper, Hanrahan considered, as he had done many times in the last month, what he was going to do about Jeanine and Charlie Kraylaw, who were now soundly asleep in the bedrooms upstairs.
    He had taken in the pair when he and Lieberman had ridden Frankie Kraylaw out of town. There had been no doubt in either of their minds that Frankie, who had torn up the store of a man who felt sorry for Frankie’s wife and son, was on the verge of doing something very crazy and very violent to his family. In the name of Jesus, Frankie had given signs of losing what little control he had been floating on.
    They were quiet, the young mother and son, too quiet and too anxious to please. Jeanine had found work at the McDonald’s on Western Avenue near Granville, gotten Charlie back in school, and begun to look like the pretty young woman she was instead of the frightened sheep who had come into the house Bill had once shared with Maureen.
    Hanrahan pulled on his pants, listening to the jingle of his change and feeling the heft of his wallet in the back pocket.
    Jeanine had said twice that she owed her and Charlie’s lives to Bill Hanrahan. She had even made it clear that she would, if he wanted, share Bill’s bed. Hanrahan had made it just as clear that he wanted no payment other than for her to work her way up to a job that would allow her to move into an apartment with her son. And so Jeanine stayed, saved a little money each week, and made Hanrahan extremely uncomfortable.
    He put on his blue button-down shirt and looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He saw a strong Irish face with a hint of the rose in his cheek and nose from the years of his friendship with the bottle. He saw the flat features of his father and grandfather, tempered just a bit by the warmer heart of his mother. All in all not a bad face to have.
    Jeanine, he thought, sitting on the edge of the tub and putting on his socks, was a good kid, but not a very bright one. Conversation tended to be brief unless he could bring himself to listen to her recounting her day with the fillet-o-fish and Big Mac. Charlie seldom spoke. The few times they had gotten