Read Online The Drop by Dennis Lehane - Free Book Online Page A

conspiracy to each other. And then she’d be the first to go, each of the little fuckers taking an end and just sucking her to pieces.
    Marv had a lot of ideas like this. One of these days, he kept telling himself, he needed to write them down.
    When American Idol returned, Dottie turned in her recliner and said, “We should join that show.”
    “You can’t sing,” he reminded her.
    She waved her spoon. “No, the other one—people going around the world looking for the clues and stuff.”
    “ The Amazing Race ?”
    She nodded.
    Marv patted her arm. “Dottie, you’re my sister and I love you, but between my smokes and your ice cream, they’re, what, gonna run beside us with defibrillators and those fucking shock paddles? Every ten steps we take— Bzzt! Bzzt! ”
    Dottie’s spoon scraped the bottom of her bowl. “It’d be fun. We’d see things.”
    “What things?”
    “Other countries, other ways.”
    It hit Marv—when they did jack the drop bar, he’d have to leave the country. No way out of that one. Jesus. Say good-bye to Dottie? Not even say good-bye. Just go. Man, oh man, the world asked a lot of ambitious men.
    “You see Dad today?”
    “I was by.”
    “They want their money, Marv.”
    Marv looked around the room. “Who?”
    “The home,” Dottie said.
    “They’ll get it.” Marv stubbed out his cigarette, exhausted suddenly. “They’ll get it.”
    Dottie put her bowl on the TV dinner table between them. “It’s collection agencies calling now, not the home. You know? Medicare cuts, me retiring . . . They’ll ship him off.”
    “To where?”
    “A lesser place.”
    “There is one?”
    She looked at him carefully. “Maybe it’s time.”
    Marv lit a cigarette, even though his throat was still raw meat from the last one. “Just kill him, you’re saying. Our father. He’s inconvenient.”
    “He’s dead, Marv.”
    “Yeah? What’re those beeps coming out of the machines? Those waves on the screen of the thing? That’s life.”
    “That’s electricity.”
    Marv closed his eyes. The darkness was warm, inviting. “I put his hand to my face today?” He opened his eyes, looked at his sister. “I could hear his blood.”
    Neither of them spoke for so long that American Idol had moved on to a new set of commercials by the time Dottie cleared her throat and opened her mouth.
    “I’ll get to Europe in another life,” she said.
    Marv met her eyes and nodded his thanks.
    After a minute, he patted her leg. “You want some more Rocky Road?”
    She handed the bowl to him.

CHAPTER 7
Deeds
    W HEN EVANDRO TORRES WAS five years old, he got stuck on the Ferris wheel at Paragon Park in Nantasket Beach. His parents had let him go on the ride alone. To this day he couldn’t understand the fuck they’d been thinking or fully comprehend that the park personnel had let a five-year-old sit alone in a seat that went a hundred feet in the air. But back then, shit, child safety wasn’t a big concern to most people; you asked your old man for a seat belt while he was barreling along 95 with a Schlitz tall between his legs, he handed you his tie, told you to figure it out.
    So there was little Evandro, sitting at the meridian of the wheel’s rotation when it jammed, sitting under a white sun that beat on his face and head like a bee swarm, and if he looked to his left he could see the park and then the rest of Hull and Weymouth beyond. He could even make out parts of Quincy. To his right though was ocean—ocean and more ocean and then the Harbor Islands followed by the Boston skyline. And he realized he was seeing things as God saw things.
    It chilled him to realize how small and breakable everything was—every building, every person.
    When they finally got the wheel going again and got him down, they thought he was crying because the height had scared him. And truth was he’d never be a real fan of heights ever again, but that wasn’t why he wept. He wept—and did so for so long that while they