The Iceman Read Free Page B

wine in their religious ceremonies and Jews had money. They probably didn’t drink cheap stuff because they didn’t have to, so he figured this wine had to be worth something.
    He walked around to the front of the truck. The cab was empty. No one was around. His heart started to pound. It was right there for the taking. If he waited, the driver would come back, and then it would be too late. He looked all around as he went to the back of the truck. He let a couple of cars pass, then looked over at the loading docks at the Manischewitz factory. Nobody was there.
    Suddenly all he could hear was his heart beating. He reached up to haul down a crate from the top of a stack, but it was heavy, heavier than he’d expected. His hand was on the crate, but the whole stack was teetering, and he was afraid to step up onto the tailgate to get it down. If someone spotted him
in
the truck, it would
look
like he was stealing. But he wanted the wine. He’d never even tasted wine, but he knew he wanted it because it was worth something.
    With sweat beading on his forehead, Richie put his foot up on the tailgate, hoisted himself up just long enough to get the crate down without toppling the whole stack, and bounced back down to the pavement. The crate was heavy, very heavy. But he had it, and he was standing there at the curb with it, guilty as sin. He lifted it onto his shoulder and started to run with it, his back aching and his heart going crazy, thinking about the Paramount Theater downtown and the cowboy movies he’d seen there on Saturday afternoons, how the good guys always talked about catching the bad guys red-handed. That’s what he was now. Red-handed with red wine.
    He ran all the way back to the projects, straight to the incinerators, slamming the heavy metal door behind him. A window the size of an envelope on the face of the furnace sent a fiery glow intothe dark room. Richie set down the crate and closed the door. Staring at the fire, he remembered the bullshit the nuns always told him in school about burning in hell. He didn’t believe it. It was just something they tried to scare you with to keep you in line. He pulled out a bottle from the crate and examined it. The wine was so dark even the light of the fiery blast couldn’t penetrate it. He took out the penknife he carried and tried to figure out how to get the cork out. His heart was still pounding, and the heat of the furnace flushed his face. He picked at the cork with the blade of the knife, hoping he could pry it out, but that didn’t work, so he sliced the cork while it was still in the bottle and broke it into pieces. He dug out part of the cork, then jammed the rest into the bottle. His hand was shaking as he lifted it to his lips. The taste wasn’t what he expected. It was thick and sweet, but not a good sweet. But maybe this was what his well-off uncle Mickey had meant when he said something was an “acquired taste.” That meant it was really worth something even if it didn’t seem that way. Richie spit out cork crumbs and took another swig. He wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not. It must take time to acquire a taste, he figured. He drank as much as he could stand, then hid the rest of the crate under some old newspapers in a corner of the incinerator room.
    That night he was sick, and he threw up purple. He didn’t get drunk; at least he didn’t think so. He was just sick—
worried
sick that the police would come to the door and take him away, worried that they knew it was him who took the wine.
    His stomach bothered him for a week, but he didn’t say a word to his mother. He couldn’t eat, and he was afraid to go out, afraid that the police would snatch him off the street if he did. But nothing happened. It was two weeks before he finally convinced himself that he’d gotten away with it, and the wine was really his.
    But when he went back to the incinerator room to check his stash, the crate was gone. Someone had found it and taken