Staten Island Noir Read Online Free Page B

carpet of dead leaves.
    "Goddamnit, Danny."
    I looked at the bumper at my feet, looked into the woods, where Danny was now a slow-moving shadow among the trees. He'd gone right by the spot where I knew the old man was lying. Danny was probably still drunk, I reminded myself. And still high, as well.
    The battered gray hulk of the station wagon sat silent by the side of the road, the pulsing hazard lights making the car look like a UFO awaiting liftoff.
    I wasn't a horrible person. I thought the guy was dead. I didn't see any benefit to anyone in confessing that I'd killed him. I'd get in trouble, as would Danny, who got in plenty without my help. I felt bad for the old man, bad for his family. He had people who loved him, though not enough to keep him from staggering along a dark road in the middle of the night. But why should two families suffer? It sucked that someone had lost their grandpa because I was a terrible drunk driver. Was it any worse than going by cancer? Any worse than a slow, awful death that traumatized your kid so bad that she traumatized her own? And why should my parents, one of whom had just lost her parent, lose their sons over the same accident, if they didn't have to? Nothing I did would bring him back to life.
    But all that was moot now, I thought, because the old fucker wasn't dead.
    I left the bumper where I'd dropped it and moved into the woods, making my way toward the shadow I knew was Danny. It got easier to find him when his disembodied face appeared in the golden glow of his lighter. He watched me the entire time I made my way to him. We'd ended up several yards deep in the woods. I'd thought the old man had been closer to the road. Then I figured it out. He'd crawled. Danny let the flame go out.
    "Shit gets hot," Danny said. "Did you know about this? Is that why you were all fucking freaked?"
    I said nothing. Hands on my knees, I bent over the old man, listening to his raspy breathing. How could he not be dead? I'd hit him with a fishtailing station wagon, flipping him over a guardrail. And yes, I'd left him there, broken and bleeding. Danny hit the lighter again.
    The old man had gray eyes. They stared straight up. They stared past me and Danny, up into the night sky, maybe searching through the branches overhead for the stars. Maybe he saw something or someone coming for him. It did not appear that he saw me or my brother standing over him. I thought about how sad it would be if in his head, the last feeble circuits were firing and what he saw as the famed white light at the end of the tunnel was in reality just Danny's lighter, glowing there in the dark like the lantern on the ferryman's boat. No one would even look for him until the early morning. He wore thin blue pajamas and a ragged maroon robe that was thrown open, the top soaked dark purple with blood. His chest was caved in like someone had dropped a safe—or a station wagon—on him.
    "This is a fucking mess," Danny said.
    It was. The old man had misused the last of his strength crawling deeper into the woods and away from any chance of somebody seeing him in time to save him.
    "We did this with the car, didn't we?" Danny asked. "You saw him, you knew he was here." He shook his head. "We gotta take care of him."
    "Danny, listen. Look at him. He's got minutes left, tops. What're we gonna do? Drive all the way down the hill and find a pay phone somewhere? Nose-diving down this hill started all this. We gonna knock on doors up here on the hill? How do we explain how we found him? It ain't that tough to figure out he got hit by a car."
    "I can't believe what I'm hearing. I never knew you could think like this." He let the lighter go out. "What if he doesn't have minutes left, what if it's hours? He's hung on this long."
    "I can't tell you what to do," I said. Fuck it. "We can carry him to the car maybe. You wanna take care of him, we'll take care of him."
    Danny hit the lighter again. "That wasn't what I meant by take care of