Losers Live Longer Read Free Page A

had to touch him.
     
    I took a deep breath, like right before swimming to bottom, then sank to one knee and reached out for him. Lifeless flesh and bone which could not do me ill .
     
    With my right hand, I went through the motions of seeking a pulse in his throat, while with my left I went through his jacket pockets.
     
    I was quick and graceless. The first pocket I clawed for and dug in was empty, and when I pulled my hand back out, the lining came out along with it. The next pocket yielded folded papers, and within, something hard, flat and flexible like a credit card. I palmed them and, shielding my movements with my bent-over body, shoved it all down the front of my jeans. Then started standing up again, backing up, shaking my head in pantomime of no-he-ain’t-going-to-make-it.
     
    But I must’ve stood too fast or shook my head too solemnly, because suddenly I was a little sick at my stomach. A headrush of sparkles blotted out vision. I felt myself losing balance, losing sense of up and down. Not sure where I was, what I’d been doing or what I was going to do next. I sucked in deep breaths to keep it all together, to look normal, blend in.
     
    I rode out the nausea, until my vision cleared again and I discovered I was still standing on my feet, but that was the only welcome news it brought me.
     
    It was a clear, too-bright September morning, quarter to ten, at a busy Lower Manhattan intersection. I had a dead man at my feet and plenty of people—witnesses—all around.
     
    Pedestrians, shopkeepers, deliverymen, and tourists, who’d been frozen in the shock of the sudden accident, but now were thawing out and beginning to creep closer.
     
    I looked to see if anyone had seen what I’d done, but none of the naked looks of horror were directed at me.
     
    The car, the one that must’ve struck him making its right turn onto Second, was pulled over to the curb thirty feet down the avenue. It was a livery cab, a black Lincoln towncar with a small dent now in its right front side panel as innocuous as a dimple in a bowler hat. The driver, a gray-bearded Sikh in a lavender turban, stood neck-high in the wedge of his open car door, his eyes unblinking, unbelieving.
     
    Diagonally across the intersection was a traffic surveillance cam mounted far up on the wall of the corner building, the seven-story apartment building with the giant yellow pig painted on its blank side. The camera was a narrow box-like affair trained on the intersection. The spot where Owl lay would be just out of frame.
     
    As more people converged, I eased into reverse. I had to go, I couldn’t stay. No, I had to go.
     
    Barefoot, no I.D., and I’d just rolled a dead guy. Not a reaction I could easily explain, not even to myself, let alone any authorities. I didn’t know what I was thinking, maybe even calling it thinking was a stretch, trying to sanction the mob of forces that controlled me just then.
     
    Bottom-line: I hadn’t seen—only heard—the accident. There was nothing I could tell the cops that wasn’t self-evident. An old man had stepped off the curb and been hit by a car still at the scene. Open and shut.
     
    Except, that meant Owl had been going away from my door.
     
    I shook it off, like a lingering effect of dizziness.
     
    Maybe he’d had some sort of seizure, or gotten confused and wandered heedlessly into the road. No way to know for sure. Relating my share in the tragedy would only cloud the situation, and add to it more tragedy, my own.
     
    Getting into the sights of the cops has never boded well for me. I’d done nothing recently, nor was I afraid they’d fit me up out of whole cloth. However, the police have a lot of open cases in their files and they’re like seasoned off-the-rack salesmen, always measuring you with their eyes. “What are you, 34 medium? I got something looks like it was made for you. Sexual assault in NoHo—fit you like a glove. Here, try it on.”
     
    And why? Because they’re