Losers Live Longer Read Free Page B

corrupt, evil, or lazy? Nope, it’s just every time they close a case, an angel gets its wings.
     
    Frenzied sirens gibbered five, six blocks in the distance.
     
    One last look down at Owl. Would that be me someday? Dying in harness? Nah, I’d never last that long, not in this business at least, I was already on my way out. But not as out as Owl, he was well out of it. I still had lumps coming.
     
    I made a hasty sign of the cross, turned to go, and—
     
    There was this blond kid staring right at me.
     
    Kid about fifteen with bangs the color of varnished oak hanging down over his eyes. He was dressed in baggy drab pants full of pockets down both legs and a white Mickey Mouse t-shirt, the mouse in his famous red shorts with big white buttons. Leaning against the corner building, balancing a skateboard on the toe of one sneaker, the kid kept staring right at me, or maybe just beyond, it was hard to tell because of his bangs.
     
    I didn’t try, I got going. And didn’t stop at my building, but shuffled past. If that kid, or anyone else, had seen me going through Owl’s pockets, the last thing I wanted was to be traced back to my building. Maybe if I’d had my keys on me I would’ve chanced it, but without them I’d have to buzz my upstairs neighbor and hope she was in. It wouldn’t do to hang around waiting to find out.
     
    A police cruiser pulled up to the curb and I continued putting distance behind me. Until things cooled down, it was best I had a little walk around. But that also presented a problem: nothing else for it, I needed shoes.
     
    On the sidewalk were pulpy brown smears, broken beer-bottle glass, syrupy yellow puddles, Con Ed metal plates possibly live with stray voltage, rusty old screws. I had to watch my step; this was New York City and I was in trouble again.
     
    Just like that. An odd mixture of emotions vied in me: exhilaration and repulsion, like when handfeeding a reptile.
     
    I headed for the far end of the block.
     
    The surge of traffic on Second Avenue registered as a steady throb against the soles of my feet, and when a flatbed truck ran over a pothole, the shudder traveled up my skeleton and rattled my back fillings.
     
    I heard the EMS van arrive behind me—doors opening, radios squawking—but I didn’t look back. At Eleventh I turned right round the corner and let myself breathe again when I was out of sight.
     
    This stretch of East Eleventh was a residential side street, apartment buildings and three- and four-story brownstones with garbage barrels lined up in front.
     
    I began lifting lids, looking for a pair of shoes roughly my size. I pick through garbage on a semi-professional basis, so I made short work of it, but without success.
     
    Gingerly walking on down the block, I passed under a sidewalk tree, a ginkgo. Its pink cherry-size seed pods, fallen to the ground and mashed underfoot, stunk of vomit. Stepping on them felt like I was walking over open eyes.
     
    I needed shoes. Comfort aside, if anyone had seen what I’d done and was now telling the cops, I didn’t want to fit their A.P.B. description of “barefooted man seen leaving.”
     
    But not to worry, this was the East Village, there’d be shoes. Time was you couldn’t turn a corner in this neighborhood without coming across a tossed-out pair of two-tone loafers, or snakeskin cowboy boots, or zebra-striped high-tops, or glittery platform pumps. Things couldn’t have changed that much.
     
    This is the East Village, I told myself, there’ll be shoes.
     
    Unless, of course, the neighborhood had changed that much, like the rest of the city around it, diluted and deluded, desecrated and desiccated, its character and flavor all but gone. If so, then I was lost here.
     
    Your neck of the woods, Owl had said. Yeh, ’cept these weren’t my woods anymore, and now there was only my neck.
     
    I passed a walkdown basement entryway beneath a building’s front stoop where years ago I’d been beaten up by