Silent Night Read Online Free

considering that.”
    â€œWhere do you live, ma’am? What I mean is, do you want to call anyone?” The policeman looked at the rings on Catherine’s left hand. “Your husband?”
    â€œMy husband is in Sloan-Kettering hospital. He’s very ill. He’ll be wondering where we are. In fact, we should be with him soon. He’s expecting us.” Catherine put herhand on the door of the squad car. “I can’t just sit here. I’ve got to look for Brian.”
    â€œMrs. Dornan, I’m going to get Brian’s description out right now. In three minutes every cop in Manhattan is going to be on the lookout for him. You know, he may have just wandered away and gotten confused. It happens. Do you come downtown often?”
    â€œWe used to live in New York, but we live in Nebraska now,” Michael told him. “We visit my grandmother every summer. She lives on Eighty-seventh Street. We came back last week because my dad has leukemia and he needed an operation. He went to medical school with the doctor who operated on him.”
    Manuel Ortiz had been a policeman only a year, but already he had come in contact with grief and despair many times. He saw both in the eyes of this young woman. She had a husband who was very sick, now a missing kid. It was obvious to him that she could easily go into shock.
    â€œDad’s gonna know something’s wrong,” Michael said, worried. “Mom, shouldn’t you go see him?”
    â€œMrs. Dornan, how about leaving Michael with us? We’ll stay here in case Brian tries to make his way back. We’ll have all our guys looking for him. We’ll fan out and use bullhorns to get him to contact us in case he’s wandering around in the neighborhood somewhere. I’llget another car to take you up to the hospital and wait for you.”
    â€œYou’ll stay right here in case he comes back?”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    â€œMichael, will you keep your eyes peeled for Brian?”
    â€œSure, Mom. I’ll watch out for the Dork.”
    â€œDon’t call him. . . .” Then Catherine saw the look on her son’s face. He’s trying to get a rise out of me, she thought. He’s trying to convince me that Brian is fine. That he’ll be fine.
    She put her arms around Michael and felt his small, gruff embrace in return.
    â€œHang in there, Mom,” he said.

3

    J immy Siddons cursed silently as he walked through the oval near Avenue B in the Stuyvesant Town apartment complex. The uniform he had stripped from the prison guard gave him a respectable look but was much too dangerous to wear on the street. He’d managed to lift a filthy overcoat and knit cap from a homeless guy’s shopping cart. They helped some, but he had to find something else to wear, something decent.
    He also needed a car. He needed one that wouldn’t be missed until morning, something parked for the night, the kind of car that one of these middle-class Stuyvesant Town residents would own: medium-sized, brown orblack, looking like every other Honda or Toyota or Ford on the road. Nothing fancy.
    So far he hadn’t seen the right one. He had watched as some old geezer got out of a Honda and said to his passenger, “Sure’s good to get home,” but he was driving one of those shiny red jobs that screamed for attention.
    A kid pulled up in an old heap and parked, but from the sound of the engine, Jimmy wanted no part of it. Just what he’d need, he thought; get on the Thruway and have it break down.
    He was cold and getting hungry. Ten hours in the car, he told himself. Then I’ll be in Canada and Paige will meet me there and we’ll disappear again. She was the first real girlfriend he’d ever had, and she’d been a big help to him in Detroit. He knew he never would have been caught last summer if he had cased that gas station in Michigan better. He should have known enough to check the john