Third Rail Read Free Page B

job.”
    â€œThalia, I lost my gun.”
    â€œIt’s probably with your jacket.” Thalia points toward the couch.
    Harkness lifts his coat and finds the belt coiled underneath but no gun. He pats his coat pockets. They’re empty. “It’s not here.”
    â€œWell, you were pretty out of it last night.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œTalking shit. Crashing like a dead man, then waking up all wired and weird. You walked to the donkey place to get me smokes, ’member?”
    Harkness doesn’t remember. “What donkey place?”
    â€œThat gas station on Southampton Street, the one with the donkey on the sign.
Gas that’s got kick
. Must’ve dropped it on the way back or something. Just walk toward the corner.”
    â€œNo. No. No.” Harkness lifts up clothes, newspapers, dishes—and throws them to the floor.
    Thalia pulls the creased sheet up to cover her breasts. “Don’t get all freaked out.”
    â€œThis is serious, Thalia.”
    â€œThen go find it. Didn’t you tell me you were really good at finding things?”
    Â 
    Harkness retraces the straight route to the gas station with a kicking donkey on its sign, scanning the sidewalk and finding only cigarette butts, burger wrappers, beer bottles, receipts, losing scratch cards, crushed vodka nips, and a couple of mismatched gloves. He walks past tow lots with prowling Dobermans, a food bank with a line stretching around the block, and the low, hulking South Bay House of Correction, where Narco-Intel sent dozens of dealers. Harkness wonders if any of them are watching out the tiny square windows as he dives down over and over, hands on cold cobblestones, to look beneath cars.
    The Southeast Expressway roars with morning traffic and his head throbs like a slowcore band warming up. He’s had rough nights out before, but nothing like this—a lost night giving way to a cold reckoning.
    He walks into a cluttered convenience store attached to the gas station, the air thick with the smell of dawn smokers and burnt coffee.
    â€œYou!” The man behind the counter waves him forward. “What the fuck’re you doing back here?”
    â€œWhat’re you talking about?”
    â€œNo, really. Get the fuck out of here.”
    Harkness shakes his head.
    â€œYou really don’t know, do you?” The manager’s goatee rises and falls.
    â€œNo.” Harkness almost remembers being here.
    â€œOkay, then. Got something to show you.”
    â€œGotta go to work.”
    â€œYou,
amigo,
owe me a minute or two.” He leads Harkness into the office, and a sullen clerk shuffles from the lottery machine to the counter to take his place.
    â€œLet’s roll the tape, okay?” The manager reaches over and presses the buttons beneath a closed-circuit TV. The clerk flails his arms and customers flee backwards through the front door. When the time code hits 2 A.M. Harkness sees a cop barging from cooler to counter.
    The manager hits a button and the action slows to show the cop lurching through the store, pawing through bags of chips and knocking candy on the floor. Harkness is reassured and sickened to spot his Glock 17 dangling in his right hand.
    â€œMind telling me what the fuck you were thinking?”
    â€œLong night.” No amount of whiskey and beer could turn him into the monster he sees on the screen.
    â€œEven longer for my shit-shift guy. He called and woke me up, asking if he should call the cops or not. I said
no,
’cuz the cops were already here.”
    â€œThanks for that.” Harkness looks away and his eyes fall on the smudgy photo of the store manager’s smiling wife and chubby kids thumbtacked over the monitor. Looks like Dad’s been bringing snacks home . . .
    â€œHey!”
    â€œWhat?”
Focus, Eddy.
    â€œI was saying that we’re glad to see a cop around here. Almost never happens. Even if you were drunk and scaring