Crooked Read Online Free

in…well, couldn’t remember when. Took pride in being isolated. What fool said no man is an island? Just a matter of not letting any tourist land and spoil the place.
    When he approached Centre Street, he found a limousine waiting. Just like at the airport, a driver held up a card that read “Palihnic.”
    Grit from the gutter mixed with the wind and pricked the side of Nicholas’s head.
    “You Palihnic?” The driver gestured at his sign with mild annoyance. A burly Greek, he was the type Nicholas expected to see serving gyro platters at a diner.
    “In the flesh.” Nicholas climbed in the backseat. The door was slammed. They took off up Centre, toward Canal.
    He leaned forward and rapped on the Plexiglas partition with a knuckle.
    “You know who sent you?”
    “I got a call, I got the name Palihnic, now I got you.” The driver shrugged.
    Nicholas slumped back against the seat. The limo continued uptown, taking him to parts unknown. Well, whoever it was that had orchestrated the rescue mission, Nicholas figured his savior was owed some of his time.
    Gravy’s Tavern, just off Gramercy Park, was the destination, and the Greek driver summarily dumped him there.
    “We’re here. Get out.”
    None too soon. It had been a long, mostly sleepless twenty-four hours. Nicholas figured his gizzard was due a little single malt. Maybe something expensive. Not a birthday present to himself, but a reward. He’d toughed out a bad situation.
    He ran a hand across his stubble and pushed through the swinging doors. Gravy’s was an old New York pub, lots of cut-glass partitions, dark wood booths, and bartenders in ties. Another one of those barrooms claiming to be the oldest in Manhattan, where such-and-so wrote such-and-such with both feet in the bag. Each of these bars had bragging rights because some genius drank himself to death in their hallowed gin mill.
    It was past five, and the after-work patrons had already begun to flock around troughs of free chicken wings on the bar.
    Nicholas squeezed behind two women who were talking as fast as they gobbled the wings. He had a finger raised and a request on his lips, but the bartender spoke first.
    “You Palihnic?” She had both the requisite white shirt/black tie and a long blond braid.
    “What makes you think so?” After his encounter with the police officer, he was hesitant to proffer his sly grin, but he did it out of reflex anyway.
    The bartender returned the smile and shrugged.
    “Said you’d be in a tweed suit, thin tie, and maybe glasses.” Her blue eyes flashed playfully. “Said you had Pee-wee Herman hair.”
    “Uh huh.” Nicholas’s eyes narrowed. There was only one person who liked to make that crack about his hair. “Where is she?”
    “Upstairs, door at the end, says ‘Tammany Hall.’” The bartender pointed around to the back of the bar. “Said you should come on up.”
    “Not without a Macallan. You have the twenty-five year?”
    She put a hand on her hip. “Twenty bucks a glass.”
    “On the rocks with a twist.”
    Twenty on the bar and drink in hand, Nicholas made his way up the stairs to Tammany Hall.
    He found a paneled room with a big round table centered under an ornate skylight. A woman sat alone at the far side, shuffling a well-used deck of cards. Nicholas knew her from way back. She currently headed Trident Mutual’s investigative unit.
    “Nicasia, how the hell did you manage Fick? And from you—the woman who no longer returns my calls.”
    “Your ass now belongs to me.” Nicasia looked like she might just cut the deck for his soul, her dark, sarcastic eyes fixed on the cards. “Sit.”
    “Treating me like dirt seems to please you.” Nicholas made a point of not taking a chair. “Me, the guy that saved your life.”
    He’d met Nicasia Grieg in the Peace Corps. Nicholas flipped through his mental photo album: Nicasia falling into a raging jungle river. Nicholas pulling a Tarzan, jumping in. The long hike back to the village.