Samaritan Read Free

conference table, Egan sat facing Ray across the catercorner desk.
    “So I understand you’re from Hopewell Houses originally,” he said, hauling one leg up across the other, the weak afternoon sun hitting his exposed shin, making the fish-white skin there gleam like marble.
    “Originally,” Ray said, waiting for more.
    “I’m from the Howard Houses myself. Used to be half-Irish back then. It was never a picnic but it wasn’t like it is now.”
    “No kidding,” still waiting.
    “And you graduated from here, what . . . the late seventies?”
    “Seventy-eight.”
    “Seventy-eight. That’s great, just great. And for how long were you a writer on that show?”
    “Three years,” Ray said, understanding now that all this Q and A was nothing but a preamble to an apology.
    “Three years,” Egan mused. “Out in LA?”
    “Yup.”
    “I spent some time in San Diego when I was in the navy, but I never made it over to LA. Got any new projects in the works?”
    “Not really,” that question always weighing a ton. “Just kind of recharging my batteries for now.” Then, to speed things along, “Other than, you know, teaching this class here.” He gestured to the empty conference table.
    Egan looked at his wristwatch; winced. “You know I told my Language Arts people, ‘Get your kids to the workshop, it’s an incredible resource. Make sure you get them . . .’ You try to delegate responsibility around here. You try . . .” He winced. “Look, the truth of it is, getting a dozen kids in this building to commit and see through on a voluntary class? It’s like pushing a rope. But I know they want to do it. You want to shoot for tomorrow? Same time, same station. And I will personally, physically, get them in here.”
    “Sure,” Ray said, the day now like chalk in his mouth.
    Egan got up, shook his hand.
    “Hey, we have Wall Street guys coming in here seven, seven-thirty in the morning to tutor? I call the kids at home the night before. ‘Yeah, Mr. Egan, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.’” He shrugged. “Like pushing a rope.” He shook Ray’s hand again.
    “I thank you for your patience with us.”

Chapter 2
    Nerese—February 9
    Entering the Hook for the first time since graduation twenty-two years earlier, Detective Nerese Ammons, lugging two slide carousels featuring a freak show of murdered bodies, confiscated weapons and various drug still lifes, approached the security desk on shaky pins.
    The uniformed guard, tilting back in her folding chair as she watched Nerese coming on, was Tutsi-tall and sharp as flint, the set of her eyes and mouth exquisitely unforgiving, eight silver rings dangling in a crescent along the outer shell of her right ear.
    “You got a visitor’s permit?” It was more of a throw-down challenge than a question.
    “A what?” Nerese half-snapped, the impersonal hostility combined with the psychic disorientation of being back in this building working on her nerves.
    The guard just stared at her.
    “I’m here for a special assembly,” Nerese said more evenly.
    “Do you have, a visitor’s permit,” the guard said a little more loudly, a little more slowly, Nerese wondering if perhaps at some point over the years, she had locked up a member of this bitch’s family.
    “Let me ask you something!” Nerese near shouted as she prowled the stage of the auditorium, mike in hand. “Let me ask you”—addressing the fistful of hyped yet surly At-Risk students who made up her audience—“who do you think, remember we’re talking the police now, who do you think, is the more dangerous of the species. Male? Or female . . .”
    “Male!” the boys howled, hooted, spreading their tail feathers, but not really listening.
    “Male, huh?” She laughed, the detective’s shield clipped to the waist of her dark blue skirt suit winking gold in the mahogany-stained hall. “Male, OK, male.”
    Having blown off the entertaining yet useless slides after the first tray,