Staten Island Noir Read Online Free Page A

boat to drift even farther from shore. The agony in our house certainly made the fight look futile, even I could see that, and I believed in heaven.
    As we both peered into the roadside shadows, I found myself wishing I had left Danny home. Not that he would've stayed there if I'd told him to. He'd never have let me back out into the night alone.
    I heard a sharp "A-ha" from Danny and turned to see him pointing dead ahead through the windshield. And there, in the middle of the road, in all its slightly tarnished glory, was the Impala's bumper. Intact and lying there like so much chrome road kill.
    "Nicely done," I said, pulling the car over to the side of the road.
    There wasn't much of a shoulder and half the wagon hung out into the traffic lane. We'd have fair warning about oncoming traffic from either direction, though, and the later it got, the smaller our chances of encountering another driver, anyway.
    I threw the car in park, hit the hazards, and jumped out the door. I glanced into the woods, searching for the shoes in the weak glow of the Impala's dome light. I didn't see them, but I knew that didn't mean they weren't out there, or that Danny wasn't going to see them. Unless, of course, they'd never been there to begin with, something I could convince myself was true if I worked at it hard enough. I'd prefer having had a hallucination to the reality that I'd killed someone.
    I heard a groan. A faint, B-movie zombie groan.
    There was no way. The old man I'd hit had to be dead. I'd hit him with an out-of-control, two-thousand-pound automobile. Christ, I'd never considered the alternative. A fucking miracle.
    Danny was out of the car, looking at me over the roof and waiting for instructions. I didn't think he'd heard the groan in the woods. Maybe I hadn't either. Then I heard it again.
    "Fuck." I hung my head.
    "Fuck what?" Danny said. "The bumper's right here on the shoulder. We're golden. Let's dump it in the car and get the hell outta here."
    Another groan.
    "Did you hear that?" Danny asked.
    "It's nothing," I said. "Some animal in the woods."
    Danny laughed. "This is Staten Island, for Chrissakes. Animal in the woods , like this is fucking upstate or something. Gimme a break. Somebody's out there."
    We heard a faint rustling in the leaves. Faint enough that it could have been the wind.
    "Fuck this," Danny said. He went back to the car, pulled open the passenger-side door. He reached under the seat, and pulled out a gun from underneath it. A small black pistol.
    I was shocked to see it. "What the fuck is that?"
    "It's a Pez dispenser. What's it fucking look like?"
    "Where did you get that?"
    "I had it for a while, this dude at school bet me on the Jets game and didn't have the cash. What's it matter? You never saw it."
    He walked around the back of the car, peering into the dark woods. He stepped to the edge of the trees, to where I'd taken out the guardrail with the car, the gun held loosely at his side. "Yo! Fucknuts! You ain't scarin' nobody."
    Enough of this, I thought. I jogged over to the bumper, grabbed one end, started dragging it toward the car, the metal grinding on the asphalt.
    "Help me with this, Danny. Put the gun away. It's somebody's old dog or something. Open the back of the car."
    But Danny ignored me. He was staring into the dark woods, his head tilted to one side like a puppy that didn't understand a command. I stopped halfway to the car, bent over, panting, cradling one end of the bumper in my hands. I listened for what it was Danny heard. I heard it too. The old man's voice, a feeble attempt at words. Gibberish. Danny turned to me.
    "There's somebody out there," he said, quieter this time, no aggression or defiance in his tone. "What the fuck?"
    I set the bumper back down on the pavement. "I need your help. Me. Over here."
    Danny looked at me for a long moment then he started into the woods, picking his way over the dead fallen branches and through the underbrush, sloughing his way across the