Read Darkness, Take My Hand for Free Online Page A

in a first-floor apartment with a weak deadbolt on the back door.” He closed the notebook, looked at us benignly. “Me and my friends can come up with information like this, why the fuck would we need to mail someone a photograph?”
    My right hand was pressed against my thigh, the fingers digging into the flesh, telling me to stay calm. I cleared my throat. “Seems unlikely.”
    “Fucking right, it is,” Jack Rouse said.
    “We don’t send photographs, Mr. Kenzie,” Freddy said. “We send our messages a bit more directly.”
    Jack and Freddy stared at us with predatory humor in their eyes, and Kevin Hurlihy had a shit-eating grin on his face the size of a canyon.
    Angie said, “I have a weak deadbolt on my back door?”
    Freddy shrugged. “So I hear.”
    Jack Rouse’s fingers rose to the tweed scally cap on his head and he tipped it in her direction.
    She smiled, looked at me, then at Freddy. You’d have to have known her for a while to realize exactly how irate she was. She’s one of those people whose anger you can gauge by her reduction in movement. By the statue’s position she’d taken at the table, I was pretty sure she’d cruised past the extremely pissed-off point about five minutes ago.
    “Freddy,” she said and he blinked. “You answer to the Imbruglia Family in New York. Correct?”
    Freddy stared at her.
    Pine uncrossed his legs.
    “And the Imbruglia Family,” she said, leaning into the table slightly, “they answer to the Moliach Family, who in turn are still considered glorified caporegimes to the Patriso Family. Correct?”
    Freddy’s eyes were still and flat, and Jack’s left hand was frozen halfway between the edge of the table and his coffee cup, and beside me I could hear Kevin taking long deep breaths through his nose.
    “And you—do I have this right?—sent men to find security weaknesses in the apartment of Mr. Patriso’s only granddaughter? Freddy,” she said and reached across the table and touched his hand, “do you think Mr. Patriso would consider these actions respectful or disrespectful?”
    Freddy said, “Angela—”
    She patted his hand and stood. “Thanks for your time.”
    I stood. “Nice seeing you guys.”
    Kevin’s chair made a loud scraping noise on the tile as he stepped in my path, looked at me with those depth-charge eyes of his.
    Freddy said, “Sit the fuck down.”
    “You heard him, Kev,” I said. “Sit the fuck down.”
    Kevin smiled, ran his palm across his mouth.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pine cross his legs at the ankles again.
    “Kevin,” Jack Rouse said.
    In Kevin’s face I could see years of howling class rage and the bright sheen of true psychosis. I could see the little, pissed-off kid whose brain had been stunted and blighted sometime during the first or second grade and had never grown beyond that point. I could see murder.
    “Angela,” Freddy said, “Mr. Kenzie. Please sit down.”
    “Kevin,” Jack Rouse said again.
    Kevin placed the hand that had wiped the smile off his face on my shoulder. Whatever passed between us in the second or two it lay there wasn’t pleasant or comfortable or clean. Then he nodded once, as if answering a question I’d asked, and stepped back by his chair.
    “Angela,” Freddy said, “could we—?”
    “Have a nice day, Freddy.” She came around behind me and we walked out onto Prince Street.
    We reached the car on Commercial, a block from Diandra Warren’s apartment, and Angie said, “I got some things to do, so I’m going to cab it home from here.”
    “You sure?”
    She looked at me like a woman who’d just backed down a room full of Mafioso and wasn’t in the mood to take any shit. “What’re you going to do?”
    “Talk to Diandra, I guess. See if I can find out any more about this Moira Kenzie.”
    “You need me?”
    “Nope.”
    She looked back up Prince Street. “I believe him.”
    “Kevin?”
    She nodded.
    “Me too,” I said. “He has no reason to lie,