Onion Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online Page B

Bobby’s latest and craziest money-making scheme. He would pick you up at your door, drive you to the airport, and carry your bags into the terminal for free. The thing was, if you took him up on the offer, you had to take out flight insurance and name Bobby as the sole beneficiary. If there were two of you, both of you had to take out policies, if there were three … I’m not kidding here. Sick as it was, he had about two people a week take him up on the offer. Word of mouth really was the best way to advertise. He’d been doing it for about six months and so far, thank god, he hadn’t cashed in.
    “Matter of time,” he used to say when I’d bust his chops about it. “Matter of time.”
    “You have a better chance of getting killed in a car crash on the way home from the airport, you sick bastard. What do you do, listen to the radio all day to hear if the plane goes down?”
    “Sometimes,” he’d answer with a poker face. “You don’t understand business very well, do you, Moe? It’s a risk vs. reward kinda thing: small risk to me, long odds, big payoff. Besides, you don’t need to worry about me, buddy. I got more than this one oar in the water.”
    He was right. I didn’t know much about business, and didn’t want to. I don’t know whether I was just born this way or if it was that my dad hadn’t set a very good example. He wasn’t skilled at making money or at business in general. His only talent was for bad investments and failure. As it was, money never much mattered to me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew money would be nice to have, but other things just mattered more to me. Love, family, girls, sex, books, sports — they were always more important to me than money. Maybe my outlook would have been different if I’d had any money to begin with. Maybe if I could have experienced what having money was like and then losing it, then I might have invested more of my being into getting more of it or getting it back. I’d tried, I’d really tried to will myself ambitious, to be more like Bobby and Aaron. I’d tried to trick myself into putting money at the top of my pyramid. No luck. And Bobby needn’t have bothered to comfort me that he’d be all right even if the airport runs never paid off. Bobby Friedman was golden, bulletproof. Somehow you just knew he would always land on his feet.
    As crazy and twisted as his airport runs were, I was glad for the distraction, glad to be invited along, glad to have someone making small talk. For the moment, I conveniently ignored Mindy’s dire warning about keeping away from Bobby. My frustration over what had happened to her, my need to do something about it, and my impotence in the face of that need were eating me up. My guts were on fire. We picked up Mrs. Cohen — Stevie Cohen’s grandma; he was one of our Burgundy House brothers — at her apartment building on Ralph Avenue, settled her comfortably in the big back seat of Bobby’s Olds, and headed off to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Nothing had changed, nothing but everything. I just didn’t know it yet.
    Bobby and I had gone to visit Mindy on the way back from the airport. Only Beatrice Weinstock was there when we arrived. She lit up again at the sight of us. I guess that made me feel a little less useless, but not a whole lot less. She’d sent her husband out to get something for them to eat — “He was making me completely
meshugge
with his pacing.” She said the doctors had good news, that her daughter’s vital signs had stabilized and that there was brain function. This was all good, according to Bea Weinstock. It was good too, that none of Mindy’s other injuries proved to be life threatening. It’s funny how when things are really bad, good comes to mean anything less than catastrophic.
    Bobby and I took turns comforting Mrs. Weinstock and sitting with Mindy. When I was there with Mindy, I held her hand. I suppose I would have kissed her on the mouth if