Free Crooked Numbers by Tim O'Mara Page A

the couch, and went to the kitchen. I needed something hot to drink and started up the coffee machine. It probably wouldn’t be as good as Boo’s, but it’d have to do. My kitchen is almost all windows, and they provide me with an outstanding view of the Manhattan skyline. A mess of gray and white clouds was coming in over the buildings from Jersey, and I remembered the guy on the radio this morning saying we were probably in for some flurries.
    I took two steps back from the counter and got into a runner’s stretch position. My knees were starting to feel the walk home in the cold. A hot shower would help, but I knew I needed to get my ass—and my knees—over to Muscles’s and do some real rehab. It had been over a year since I’d last had to use my umbrella as a cane. If I didn’t keep ahead of it, I knew I was going to be right back where I had started.
    When the coffee was done, I took a cup into the living room to check out the paper. I was about to open it, when I noticed the message light blinking on the phone. The number next to the light blinked, “9.” Uncle Ray wasn’t the only one to read about me this morning. I took a sip of coffee and pressed the PLAY button.
    Ten minutes later, I had listened to messages from my mother, my sister Rachel, Edgar, a few others from The LineUp, Uncle Ray, and Elaine Stiles, the school counselor. Edgar thought the article and picture made me look “cool.” My mom was proud and had already bought out all the papers in her neighborhood. Only Elaine and Rachel asked me how I was feeling. Good question .
    I opened the paper and turned to the article. It was a half page—Saturdays are slow news days in the big city—and the picture of me looking down at where Dougie’s body had been found took up a chunk of that. Allison had done a good job recapping the story, connecting me to Dougie, and commenting on how the cops were conducting a thorough investigation. All in all, exactly what I had hoped for. I grabbed my cell phone off the coffee table, scrolled down to Allison’s number, and dialed.
    “Hello, hero,” she said.
    “Don’t start. I just called to say thank you.”
    “I was about to do the same, Ray. Really. My bosses loved the piece, and they promised to let me get at least one more in. How about Dougie’s mom? She happy with the way we handled it?”
    “She’s my next call,” I said.
    Pause. “You called me first?”
    “To say thanks.”
    “Okay.” She cleared her throat. “Hey. What are you doing tonight?”
    In a day full of surprises, here was another one. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I don’t really have any plans.” Great, Ray. You don’t sound too much like a loser.
    “Well, now you do,” Allison said. “You know the new club on Metropolitan Avenue? Used to be a kosher deli or Laundromat or something?”
    “I can’t say that I do.”
    “I gotta be there tonight. The paper’s doing a new series: Saturdays at Eight. They want to spotlight the new hot spots around the five boroughs. Get the young readers turning the pages. Bullshit, if you ask me. All the hipsters get their info electronically or by word of mouth, but when your editors went to journalism school with Cronkite and Murrow, what do you expect?”
    “So,” I said, “you’re a crime reporter during the day and a trendspotter at night?”
    “The cheap fucks won’t spring for another reporter, so those of us still lucky enough to be hanging on to our jobs get to take turns club-hopping. And you, my friend, get to tag along. Come on, whattaya say?”
    “They serve beer?”
    “And apple martinis.”
    I laughed and grabbed a piece of paper off the table. “What’s the address?”
    She gave it to me. “Eight o’clock, Ray. And dress … hip.”
    She’d never seen my closet. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Later.”
    After she hung up—and I got the smile off my face—I called the Lee home. A woman’s voice I did not recognize picked up. “Lee