Read Online Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell - Free Book Online Page A

Coney on a sunny Saturday. Put one of my silver, wood-handled .45’s, unsilenced, in the inside pocket of my anorak and took my grandparents’ Nissan across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan then over the Manhattan Bridge out of it. Took the highway all the way down through Brooklyn. I was able to park at the Aquarium, midway along the Island, just by dropping David Locano’s name. They didn’t even check a list.
    I’d been to the Aquarium as a kid, and also west along the boardwalk to the old amusement park. Eastwards, into Brighton, was a mystery.
    It was jammed. Gangster-looking young blond guys in fluorescent sweat suits so bright they stung your eyes, and old people on the benches with bathing suits and socks on, with towels over their shoulders even though they were two hundred yards from the water. Also huge families of Hispanic people dressed for summer and Orthodox Jews dressed for winter. Everywhere you looked someone was beating a child.
    The beach curved away as I entered Little Odessa. The buildings looked like sets from a tenement movie. Elevated subway tracks above Ocean Avenue, and in the shadows down below ancient storefronts with either their original signs or new wooden ones in Cyrillic. I found the Shamrock within a couple blocks. It had a neon sign of a clover leaf, with the power off. I went in.
    The Shamrock had a cedar bar, splintered floor, and barfed-up beer smell that were probably from back when it was actually Irish, but it was better lit than you’d expect, and the small square tables had laminated red gingham tablecloths. Two tables were taken, one by a man and a woman and one by two men.
    The bar started by the door. Leaning against the wall behind it there was a young blond woman who didn’t look much older than I was. She had dark circles under her eyes and a thinness like maybe she’d missed out on a few key years of nutrition back in the Old Country.
    Her English was good, though.
    “If you want food you can sit at a table.”
    “Just a club soda,” I told her. “I’m looking for Nick Dzelany.”
    She came off the wall, toward me. “Who?”
    “Nick Dzelany,” I said, this time accentuating the “D.” I felt myself blushing. “Dzelany” is hard enough to say when you think you’re doing it right.
    “I don’t know him,” she said. After a moment: “Do you still want a club soda?”
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Is there another bar around here called the Shamrock?”
    “I don’t know.”
    When she brought my drink, in a ridiculously narrow glass, I said, “Is there anyone you can ask?”
    “Ask about what?”
    “Nick Dzelany.” I said it loud enough to be heard at the tables, in case those people knew him. “I was told people here knew him.”
    The bartender seemed to think, then she went and got a pen off the register. She brought it back with a napkin. “Spell, please.”
    I did. I was pretty sure I got it how David Locano had showed it to me, but I wasn’t completely sure, and I was getting less sure by the moment. Maybe Locano had gotten it wrong himself.
    She took the name over to a phone at the far end of the bar and made a call. It went on for minutes, in Russian. At one point she got strident, then apologetic. Not once did she look at me.
    She came back over. “Okay, I found out who he is. I am supposed to take you. Even though I am working.”
    “Sorry,” I said. I got off the stool. “What do I owe you?”
    “Four fifty.”
    Whatever. It was Virzi money. I left a ten. The bartender didn’t look at it, just lifted the gateway and came around the bar.
    “This way,” she said, leading me toward the back.
    We passed through a tiny kitchen where a fat blond woman was sitting on an upside-down plastic bucket, smoking and reading a hardcover book in Cyrillic. She didn’t look up. The bartender undid the three locks on the door on the other side and led me out into the alley.
    Almost immediately she tripped on a pothole and went down,