Red Hook

Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen Read Free Book Online
Authors: Gabriel Cohen
hill: past the end of the street, the grand orange Staten Island ferry plowed the slate-blue water of Upper New York Bay. In the intersection ahead, a stout middle-aged woman with permed hair shuffled across at a stoic, deliberate Brooklyn pace. Jack reached into the pocket of his sports coat and pulled out a couple of tablets.
    “You got candy?”
    “Just some antacids.”
    “You all right?”
    “Would you shut up with that? I’m fine.”
    Daskivitch shrugged.
    On the north side of the Park, many of the storefronts were covered in Asian lettering. Times changed. Back in Jack’s father’s day, the neighborhood had been known as Little Finland, home to thousands of Scandinavians skilled in the building trades. That was before the Gowanus Expressway forced out many of the old Finnish homeowners, before the same highway ripped the heart out of Red Hook and the old man.
    When Jack’s parents first got married, they lived in a nice little house in the center of the Hook. Back in the 1940s, when city planner Robert Moses dreamed up the expressway, its path ran directly through the house. The city had condemned and demolished the property, along with hundreds of other homes.
    The highway continued on through Sunset Park. Though residents there had pleaded with Moses to place the route along Second Avenue, a marginal industrial strip, the planner ignored them, calling their thriving neighborhood a slum. He ran the elevated highway right above Third Avenue, the vital center of the place, a boulevard of little mom-and-pop stores, of newsstands and family restaurants. Half the buildings along the route were torn down. The new highway was so wide that it cast the avenue below into darkness. The surviving businesses didn’t survive long, with the thunder of trucks and cars overhead and the gloom below. After the central arteries of Sunset Park and Red Hook were destroyed, the blight spread through the smaller streets.
    The Gowanus Expressway was followed by the Belt Parkway, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, massive construction projects that further isolated the Hook from the rest of Brooklyn. More bad news arrived in the 1960s. In the old days, stevedores like Jack’s father lifted everything out of the ships by hand. But shipping technology advanced—cranes were able to hoist giant metal containers directly out of the holds. Red Hook caught on to the change too late and most of the shipping moved to yards in New Jersey, where it was easier to load the containers directly onto trains.
    Once, after his father’s funeral, Jack asked his mother why the old man had been so tough. “He was always kind of hard,” she explained. “But he turned mean after Robert Moses tore down our home.”
    Raymond Ortslee lived on a quiet street near the eastern edge of the Park. On the corner a red and yellow plastic sign read Muchachos Grocery. Across the way stretched a row of little houses with diamond-shaped windows cut in their front doors. White filigreed iron fences surrounded the tiny yards. Jack parked between a dented van and a repainted Mustang.
    The barge captain’s building sat ten yards back from the sidewalk, across a dismal yard. A dog barked somewhere in the back as Jack and his partner entered the cracked driveway. The apartment house was boxy and covered in faded mustard-yellow paint; one section of the facade was slightly darker, where some shingles had been replaced. An exterior staircase crawled up to the third story, where faded aquamarine curtains hung in the windows.
    As Jack led the way up the staircase, he saw one of the curtains move slightly. The doorbell rang inside with a harsh metallic clatter.
    The detectives waited on the landing. Daskivitch stepped forward and rang the bell again.
    “He’s in there,” Jack said quietly. “Right behind that curtain.”
    Daskivitch rattled the knob. Suddenly the door swung open and they were looking into the barrel of an ancient rifle. Behind

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