Onion Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online

probably won’t have to. People get stoned and they get stupid. People who want to get stoned can also get pretty desperate. Either way, they’ll talk to me.”
    “I trust you.” I took the C-note back. But if I thought Lids was going to leave it at that, I was wrong.
    He leaned forward and said, “And whatever you feel you gotta do, don’t do it yourself, man. I’m pretty close to people who, you know …”
    “What kind of people, Larry? Who we talking about, here?”
    “I owe you, Moe, but not that much. I know who I know. Leave it at that. You want something done, come to me and it will get done, but you won’t know who did it.”
    “Okay, Larry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful and I’m sorry for being so nosy. I’m just so mad about what happened to Mindy, I feel like I’m gonna explode.” I stood up, threw a five on the table, and patted him on the shoulder.
    He grabbed my wrist. “I don’t know what I’ll hear or if it will help, but whatever I find out … you still at the same number?”
    “Yeah. If you can’t get me there, you can get me at Burgundy House.” I wrote that number down for him.
    He grabbed my wrist again. “Something’s bugging me, Moe.” He started doing that twitchy face thing he did when he got overly excited. “Something’s bugging me.”
    “What is?”
    “They found Mindy on Glenwood and East 17th, right? That’s right near the subway station.”
    “Glenwood and East 17th, that’s what her dad told me, yeah.”
    “It doesn’t make sense. She lives in Canarsie. That’s in the opposite direction. What was she doing over there?”
    “I don’t know. When she comes out of the coma, I’ll ask her. It’s not important right now.”
    “If it’s not important, then why do you want me to find out where she was the other night?”
    “That’s different.”
    He was ticcing like crazy now. “No, it’s the same.”
    “Look, wherever she was when she got mugged, it was the wrong place. Like I said, it’s not important.”
    “But it is important. Where a person is when an event occurs is as important as where particles are when they collide. If they are not in that place, there is no collision. Without that collision, the universe is a different place, subtly different, maybe, but different nonetheless. Don’t you understand? It’s the key to everything: knowing where things are, or were, or where they will be.”
    I left him there, mumbling to himself about particles and uncertainty, his tics calmed, his eyes turned inward. I think maybe for the first time, I got a sense of how he’d come undone. I hoped Athena could rescue him from where he had gone to. I couldn’t. Even if Athena couldn’t do the trick, I had faith Larry would come out of it. He always did, always had. He had to. I needed him.
    As bad as I felt for Larry, my internal pressure had eased a bit. If nothing came of our encounter, at least I’d let off some steam. And who knew? Larry was good at finding out all sorts of stuff. People get stoned and they get stupid, that’s what he’d said. Yet another reason why I shied away from drugs. I didn’t need any help in getting stupid. Just ask my brother Aaron.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    While I was walking back onto campus, Lids’s words went round and round in my head. Not the esoteric stuff that had sent him spinning off into his own universe there at the end. No, I was used to that. Even before he went over the edge, even before the drugs, Larry had been out there on an astral plane somewhere. It was the part where he claimed to know people who would do violence on my behalf that surprised me. I guess I shouldn’t have been. I mean, Lids was a pusher, and I couldn’t help but see him as poor, pathetic Larry.
So he sold a little pot
,
so what?
But really, I had no idea what he sold, or how much he sold, or to whom. Of course he knew some “people” — everybody in Brooklyn knew someone connected to the mob.
    The guy I knew, who Larry and everybody