Read Online Suck It Up by Brian Meehl - Free Book Online Page A

playbook.”
    He stared out the window and thought about the other playbook. The one between him and Birnam that Penny knew nothing about. This book was also blank, except for the first page: to CD in front of Penny. Last night had been the wrong moment to come out. He would have to bide his time until the right moment presented itself.
    The cab turned off Delancey Street’s crowded boulevard and nosed down a narrow canyon of tenement buildings.
    Seeing his old street stirred up a riptide of feelings. It was the place he thought of when people asked him where he was from. And it was a prison. A prison he had thought he’d escaped from so many times, but each time he’d looked at it for the “last time,” he had been returned after flunking out of another family.
    The cab pulled to a stop in front of a small stoop. The building that housed St. Giles looked the same as the other six-story brick tenements on the block. The big difference was the occupants: nuns and an unruly bunch of boys ranging from infants to teenagers short of their eighteenth birthday, when they “aged out” of the foster care system.
    As Morning followed Penny onto the stoop, he glanced up at the wire web above the door. It protected a half-moon window with ST . GILES GROUP HOME FOR BOYS stenciled on the glass. A black handball was still wedged in the wire where one of the Mallozzi twins had thrown it while trying to break the window. Morning wondered if the Mallozzi twins had finally found a real life version of their perfect foster family: the Sopranos.
    Penny pushed open the door. “Wait here a sec,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back.” She stepped inside the entryway and rang a buzzer.
    He didn’t mind waiting. If Sister Flora wasn’t there, it wasn’t like there was anyone else he wanted to see. And if the Mallozzi twins had not been successfully placed in a crime family, he didn’t want to run into them. Even though they were two years younger than him, they were much bigger and the neighborhood bullies.
    He surveyed the tenements on the other side of the street. The bright splatter of fall flowers in windowboxes took him back to a day he had tried to imagine countless times. It was a summer morning, sixteen years earlier, when he had been stranded on the stoop for the first time. As Sister Flora told it, his mother, or someone, left him on the stoop in one of those plastic handbaskets used in grocery stores. A note was pinned to his baby blanket: “Please take care of me.” When Sister Flora opened the door and discovered the baby, she said, “Good morning.” The baby responded with a happy smile, so she started calling him Good Morning. She dropped “Good” during his terrible twos. McCobb became his last name in the St. Giles tradition of assigning surnames from the orphanage’s founders.
    Morning’s time travel was interrupted by the gun of an engine. He spotted a white van speeding down the street. A satellite dish rode on top. As it jerked to a stop in front of the stoop, he read the big logo on the side. HOUND TV . His eyes darted around the street looking for the slashes of yellow tape he’d probably missed. But there was no police tape cordoning off a crime scene. Hound TV, a local all-news channel, was famous for its crime reporting, and for showing grisly footage none of the other channels would show. “We report, you recoil” was how one New York comedian put it.
    The driver of the van hopped out and disappeared around the back. A handsome man with a helmet of blond hair emerged from the passenger side. His face was tan-in-a-can orange. Morning recognized him as one of Hound TV’s star reporters, Drake Sanders.
    â€œIs this St. Giles Group Home?” Drake asked.
    â€œYeah,” Morning said. “Did someone die?”
    â€œNah, we’re doing a three-hankie piece, backup for the day there’s a corpse