Read Online The Angels of Catastrophe by Peter Plate - Free Book Online Page A

ruddy features softened and blurred. “She left me because I have one fault in this lifetime. I loved her too much. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I was so insecure and possessive. All the attention, it made her phobic. She said to me, ‘Daddy, I have to go.’ And what was I supposed to do, say no?”
    â€œAnd you blame me for this?”
    â€œAbsolutely. You interfered with the flow of our process.”
    â€œHey, I didn’t do anything wrong.”
    â€œThe fuck you didn’t. What we had, it was organic. Not artificial like you.”
    Insults are a staple of life. But the barrage of name-calling was getting on Durrutti’s nerves. A coldness rushed
through his arms and legs. Deeper than anger. An emptiness that made him hyperventilate. Before he could stop himself, he walked over to where Ephraim sat and stood before him.
    It was a three story drop to the pavement on Mission Street. The sidewalks were congested with ice-cream vendors, homeless men and mariachi musicians. It would have been easy to push Rook through the window. The fall would kill him.
    When a friendship ended, it had to turn into something else. It wouldn’t rest or go away. Because of Sugar, something bad was looming on the horizon. Durrutti could feel it in his bones. He said, “You done talking, huh?”
    â€œActually, I was just beginning.”
    â€œGet the hell outta here. I’ve heard enough.”
    Rook made his exodus with a sneer and a promise. He made a show of being tough that was transparent even to himself. He was just bluffing. The only thing he had going for him was his clothes. “You’ll pay for this, Ricky. You have my word on that.”
    Durrutti escorted Rook to the door and watched him retreat into the hall. Then he looked down at his own feet. What he saw wasn’t pretty. What he saw made him ill. A letter addressed to him from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lay on the worn-out carpet. He bent over and picked it up. Kulak’s penciled scrawl greeted his eyes. He didn’t bother to open it. He knew what the Fed wanted without having to read his incorrigible handwriting.

Chapter Ten
    T he Federal Building looked as though nothing ever changed there. The tower’s concrete and steel walls were scratched and tortured by the wind. Shadows remained transfixed at right angles. The sun was merciless in exposing the defects of everything that moved on Golden Gate Avenue’s sidewalks. Homeless men from the Civic Center Plaza were outside the front doors begging and panhandling the lawyers, cops and judges for spare change. Inside the place law clerks were lockstepping like robots on caffeine.
    Kulak had changed, visibly so. The cop’s wart-ridden hands trembled when Durrutti plopped into a folding chair next to his desk. The drinking veins on his mountainous nose, which hadn’t been so pronounced during the first visit, stood out like beacons of despair. A patch of eczema was germinating on his jaw. It was gratifying to see the pressure was getting to him too.
    On his desk lay a pair of handcuffs, manila folders, a quartet of unwashed, lipstick-streaked coffee mugs and a boxy Dell computer the size of a tombstone. Durrutti’s police file lay on top of a stack of reports: his decade-old mug shots were stapled to the first page. He didn’t look
so spectacular in the photographs-no one ever did when a picture was taken of them in a jail cell with blood on their face.
    You stay long enough in San Francisco, the city will transform you. Some folks end in South of Market side streets strung out on black tar heroin, the kind that causes flesh-eating abcesses. Others become millionaires and buy high-priced houses in Noe Valley. Seeing his mug shots again displeased him—he was getting older. He said to Kulak, “What do you have these pictures out for? Are we gonna play show and tell?”
    Kulak ignored the sarcasm and made a circle