Staten Island Noir Read Online Free

gonna go, or what?" He couldn't stop smiling. "I ain't got all night."
    The words accessory after the fact scrolled across my brain. I tried to console myself with the fact that no cop, no court on earth, would believe Danny's denial that he knew nothing about the body. How would he defend himself? Well, your honor, I was on the nod from a head full of backroom crank . I told myself that in protecting myself I was protecting him too. And my father, whose name was on the registration attached to the wagon's license plate. Really, I was protecting the whole family by returning to the scene of the crime and cleaning it up.
    I climbed into the driver's seat and started the car. Maybe you should have thought about protecting the family , a faint voice in the back of my head told me, before you took Snake Hill at twice the advisable speed while six drinks deep on a weeknight .
    It's too late , I argued back as I pulled us away from the curb, to do anything about those choices now .
    I took us back the way we came, the wide residential streets of our neighborhood narrowing into the older, winding commercial corridors of Amboy Road with its short canvas awnings hanging over the bricked storefronts, every building hugging the thin strip of sidewalk dividing it from the road. Coming around the curves, which I took slowly, it looked impossible to step out of the nail salon or the deli or the driving school and not walk right into oncoming traffic. At intersections, I lingered too long at green lights, petrified of committing some violation.
    The streets we followed back onto Richmond Road were only one lane each way and usually bustled, jam packed with traffic in both directions, but at that late hour the streets were dead. We saw not a soul. And that fact only made me sure that Danny and I couldn't have looked more suspicious being out and about at that hour. Riding around in our damaged car couldn't help our image much. And should we get pulled over, how would we explain ourselves? Or the lack of a rear bumper, which was a great excuse to light us up in the first place. I wanted desperately to speed, to push our errand to its end. The knots in my stomach pulled tighter as we moved away from the homes and businesses and the road darkened.
    We found the foot of Snake Hill and started our slow climb. I hoped we wouldn't encounter some version of my earlier, idiot self, careening down the hill road out of control at top speed.
    "Think of it like this," Danny said. "Could've been worse. What if that guardrail wasn't there? Most of Snake Hill doesn't have any. We could've gone spinning off into the trees. Into God knows what else. What's the drop-off like over there?"
    "I don't know."
    "How steep you think it is?"
    "I don't know that, either."
    "Right," Danny said. "And now we don't have to."
    "We should probably start looking for the bumper soon."
    I slowed our progress to a crawl, barely enough for forward motion, and decided I'd move as far as I could onto the narrow shoulder should someone come up behind us. Danny kept a steady watch on the roadside. He was humoring me, as we still had a couple hundred yards to go before we came anywhere near where the collision had been. I was grateful. I needed him to be quiet so I could think. I needed to decide how much to tell him.
    One of Danny's qualities that I most envied was his refusal to judge. I wondered if it was cynicism, optimism, or apathy that left him shrugging off every atrocity and most acts of kindness that he witnessed on the news or saw in the papers. He'd always viewed most of the world from a peaceful distance, and that was even before he found the drugs. Maybe that was what he liked about them. Maybe they made that distance deeper or safer or made it feel permanent and right. Maybe that distance got harder to maintain as he grew older. Or maybe it was Grandpa's death, or what it did to our mother, the way it stoked her hot tears and her raging temper, that made him want his