Redemption Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online Page A

dreaded.
    When he noticed I was awake, he stopped swirling the glass of Bushmills whiskey he held in his right paw. His full attention was focused on me. It was his turn now to size up his prey, to survey my weaknesses, as his daughter had before him. But I mean it less metaphorically with Francis Sr. For, although he’d not spoken a word in protest against my marrying Katy, I always got the feeling he was toying with me the way a feral cat does with a grounded sparrow.
    He took the opportunity, as he often did, to reinforce my uneasiness. My father-in-law smiled that cold, knowing smile at me and raised his glass in a mocking toast. Placing the whiskey upon his thigh, he continued to stare, continued to smile. That he despised me was fair enough. The feeling was more than mutual. It was only one of our silent secrets. What unnerved me was that he so enjoyed my discomfort. When we were alone like this, everything about him seemed to say: “Your day will come. You won’t see it coming, but it will come.” I think I understood what the grounded sparrow felt like.
    We never discussed the biggest secrets, the roles each of us had played in Patrick’s disappearance. He was one of the four people who knew about my having let Patrick slip away. I had tracked Patrick to his lover’s apartment in the West Village, fully prepared to haul him back to his family by the scruff of his neck if necessary. But Jack, his lover and protector, convinced me that Patrick would go back voluntarily in a few days. They both gave me their word that Patrick wouldn’t run, and, like a stupid-assed rookie, I believed them. No one had seen him since.
    It was a secret, of course, that could ruin my marriage. A bomb the old man could drop in my lap at any time. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, though, because it was him who’d driven Patrick away in the first place. It’d been very ugly between them, very ugly. No, Francis Sr. had already lost both his sons. He wouldn’t risk losing Katy, too. So, without ever discussing it, my father-in-law and I had created our own version of mutually assured destruction. But, just like it is with us and the Russians, I’m a lot more comfortable having my finger on the trigger than his.
    The silence grew so steep that the only sound I could make out above my own breathing was the cracking of the ice as it melted in the whiskey glass. I would not speak. I would wait him out. A word, even a cough, would be a sign of weakness, and weakness was something I dared not show my father-in-law.
    He transformed his cold smile into a cruel, joyless laugh. And, raising his glass to me a second time, grudgingly complimented: “A tough Jew, good. Good.”
    He was baiting me. I held my tongue.
    Bored by my unwillingness to engage him, Francis Sr. worked his way out of the recliner and started toward the kitchen to freshen his whiskey. He stopped, as I knew he would, as he always did when we were alone, to turn back for a parting shot.
    “Ghosts,” he said. “Do Jews believe in ghosts?”
    Ghosts again, always with the ghosts. I didn’t get what his preoccupation was with ghosts, and he never seemed inclined to enlighten me. Though tonight, given the job I was about to take on, the subject of ghosts seemed oddly appropriate.
    Katy was asleep when I got upstairs. I was exhausted, but almost too tired to sleep, so I took my first blind steps into the world Arthur Rosen had left behind. And “blind steps” was just the right term, for I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to find. Karen and Andrea were dead. The inquiries and inquests, no matter how shoddily performed, were sixteen years finished. Chances were the scene of the fire had been bulldozed, filled in, built over, sold and resold. All I had to work with were some disconnected words scrawled on a crazy man’s walls, some old newspapers, and a dead man’s paranoia. I was certain other detectives had worked with less. I just couldn’t think of their names at the