Free Icarus. by Russell Andrews Page B

did.
    We're thanking you for welcoming us…
    They would be welcomed, all right.
    They were thieves, both of them, the very worst kind of thieves. Had been right from the start. Stealing dreams. Stealing love.
    Stealing the future.
    We're thanking you for welcoming us…
    Oh, yes, they surely would be welcomed.
    And they just might be dead, too.
    If they were lucky.

SIX
    It took Jack less than fifteen minutes to drive down to the Fourteenth Street meat market area. At five o'clock in the morning, it took less than fifteen minutes to drive almost anywhere in Manhattan.
    His destination was two blocks south of Fourteenth, Gansevoort Street, where he turned right off Ninth Avenue. As always, over the past year or so, he was surprised by the almost daily change in the neighborhood. Much of it was as it had always been, at least for a long stretch of the twentieth century. The streets were old cobblestone, half the buildings were still warehouses – meat lockers and butchers – with generations represented by the words "And Sons" on almost every sign. Most could just as easily have read "And Grandson and Great-Grandson." The neighborhood was also still a haven – a graveyard, Caroline always said – for all the hot dog vendors in the city; these were the buildings where every street cart was stored. Watching the vendors roll out or roll in at the beginning and end of each day gave Jack the eerie feeling of being in a time long past, before fast food chains and department stores and Internet shopping. But the twenty-first century was rapidly encroaching on this last bastion of blue-collar Manhattan. Many of the butchers had succumbed to the high rents and disappeared, replaced by art galleries and chic women's clothing stores. Warehouses were being converted into precious co-ops. And upscale restaurants were springing up on every corner, luring models and actors and rappers with their posses. Briefly, Jack and Caroline had thought about opening up another place in what was being dubbed the Lower West Side but Jack had spent much of his adult life escaping from there. He loved taking quick dips back into this part of his past but, no matter how hip and trendy the area was becoming, he didn't want to retreat there on a full-time basis.
    He eased the car over to the right side of Gansevoort and parked directly in front of Dominick Bertolini's Meat Mart. A burly guy, his back to Jack, his overalls and white T-shirt streaked with blood, was lugging a huge side of beef out toward a truck. He glanced at Jack's car, a hostile glance, started to yell that he couldn't park there, then as Jack stepped out the hostility turned to recognition. He turned back toward his heavy load and, as Jack walked past him, nodded a professional hello.
    Jack stepped over a streak of light-red liquid – blood mixed with water – that was slowly streaming out of the warehouse. As he hopped up onto the metal-grating platform and toward the heavy sliding door that led to the enormous warehouse, he could hear, even from outside, the thudding and slamming of cleavers slicing through meat and striking into a butcher block.
    He stepped inside and could see Dom, writing at a small desk. His right arm – what was left of it – was holding down a piece of paper. His left hand was busy scribbling. As usual, he was muttering to himself as he wrote. Jack waited; he didn't say anything, just watched the old man concentrate on his figures. His back was ramrod straight. And even under his butcher's whites it was easy to see that his stomach was still flat as a board and his good arm was still hard and muscular. The old man was astonishing. He hadn't aged a day since they'd first met, Jack thought. Still as feisty, still as hardworking. Still as strong and arrogant as ever. He was certain that Dom didn't know he was there and Jack was content to watch and admire, to let his friend work, but then he heard the familiar cigarette-and-whiskey-stained voice say, "What, you