Beat the Reaper: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

seemed impossibly soft and old (she was younger than I am now, and all breasts turn out to be soft, but who knew?) squirms on you with her uniform shoved past her knees, and all the time you’re wondering how much harder you can push her to get some real, usable information from the Detective Grade 3’s and 4’s who must know something about who killed your grandparents. Plus it’s winter, so everything outside of her is freezing.
    What Officer Brennan eventually found out for me was this:
    The detectives didn’t think it was Nazis, neo or otherwise, since those people tend to target Hasidim. Nor was it much of a robbery, since so little was taken, and burglars avoid old people on the grounds that they’re home all the time and don’t tend to keep cash in the house anyway. The few things that were stolen, like the VCR, probably constituted either impulse shopping or a calculated attempt at misdirection.
    “So who?” I asked Mary-Beth Brennan.
    “He didn’t say.”
    “You’re lying,” I said.
    “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
    “Fuck that.”
    She told me. The murders had probably been the point of the whole event. Old people may not make great burglary victims, but they’re fantastic homicide targets. They move slowly, they have a better chance of lying around for days before they get discovered, and, like I say, they’re usually at home. Anyone determined to commit murder who doesn’t care who the victim is wants someone like my grandparents. And that kind of person falls into one of two categories: serial killers and auditioning mobsters.
    In West Orange, New Jersey, in early 1992, you’d be a jackass to bet on serial killers.
    So most likely this was someone looking to prove he could kill, and to give the mob leverage over him as an initiation fee. Or rather it was two people, since there was a victim for each, and my grandparents had been shot with bullets from different guns.
    According to one of the detectives Officer Brennan hit up for me, this meant there was a good chance that eventually these guys would be caught. Mob omertà bullshit runs both ways—the old guys blackmail the new guys, and the new guys finger the old guys. So eventually the police would hear about two particular fuckheads who’d gotten made at the same time, and they’d have their suspects.
    But that might be decades from now, and there might or might not still be evidence, or interest, by then. And it assumed that these guys actually managed to get “made,” and didn’t get rejected, or choose to just go back to their jobs at Best Buy or whatever.
    The whole thing was weak. It was thin. Maybe it had been a serial killer after all. Or some junkies.
    But the hounds don’t shun the fox for being mangy. The mob theory was all I had to go on, so I chased it.
    And nothing else was coming. I’d pushed Mary-Beth too hard one day, and she had cried on my chest and said she worried that I didn’t really love her.
    When you grow up in northern New Jersey you hear a lot of bullshit about the mafia and whose fathers are in it. But you also hear about a military academy day school in Suffern, where every time you meet someone who goes there he’s some smug dipshit with an Iroc-Z and a gold necklace that looks like it’s going to break his cocaine mirror. And where, when you look up luminaries of the Five Families in Who’s Who in New Jersey, a fuck of a lot of them turn out to have gone to school.
    I won’t name it. Suffice to say it has the same name as one of the more famous military academies in England, despite having been founded 150 years after the Revolutionary War.
    I’d been expecting a Catholic school, but it didn’t make much difference. I was already doing the push-ups.
    I transferred over the summer. The school was expensive, but I still had money from the wills and the insurance settlement. And, like I say, I didn’t have too many other needs.
    As a military school it was a hoax. Reveille at “07:30”