Free The Ninth Step by Gabriel Cohen

with his heavy leather belt.
    Jack remembered that threat, but now he was troubled by some other, deeper memories rising from the murk. Perhaps his father had not always been so set against the thugs. When Jack had been very little, some late nights he had peered out his bedroom window and watched his father get into a long dark car filled with men. Who were they? Where were they going? And why didn’t his father come home until the next morning?
    Somewhere along the line, those midnight trips had ceased, and his pop had begun to avoid the mobsters like the plague. And somehow, evidently, he had managed to seriously piss them off
    If Joey Gallo had been behind the lesson administered by Darnel Teague, the mobster had long ago received his just deserts: he had been gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in ’72. But if it wasn’t Gallo, who could it have been? Jack remembered what his father had once told him: loud men like the Gallos received all the attention because they craved it. But it was the quiet men, the ones you never heard about, who really held the power.
    He sat there in his car, in the newly gentrified neighborhood, with its exorbitant real estate and its rich young Wall Streeters, who seemed to be the only ones who could afford it anymore. Who was left from the old dark days?
    He knew that he could just go over to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Unit and ask. But he thought of his brother and the justice Petey was owed. He thought about how he might never find enough evidence to make any official charge stick. Finally, he thought of the unregistered snub-nosed Charter Arms .38 Special that he had found during his career as a patrol cop and kept in the back of his closet. If he finally found the man responsible for his brother’s death, maybe it would be best if word had not gone out that he had been looking for him.

CHAPTER TEN
    “I T’S PEPPERONI, NO CHEESE,” Jack said, later that evening. “Just the way you like it.”
    He set the pizza box down on the coffee table in front of his landlord, along with a cold six-pack of Schaefer beer. The old man’s rather dingy front room was illuminated only by the flickering blue light of his huge old battleship of a TV.
    “I like cheese,” Mr. Gardner replied. He held his stomach. “It just don’t like me.” He sighed. “I’m too old to give up all’a life’s pleasures. Speakin’ of which—” He started to push himself up from his battered, duct-taped old La-Z-Boy recliner, but Jack put a friendly hand on his shoulder.
    “I’ll get it.”
    Mr. G had difficulty walking these days, not just due to his age but because of a stroke he had suffered back in 2001. The man had once been quite robust, but his illness had stripped away the excess pounds and age had shortened him by several inches; now he looked like a bewildered garden gnome, staring up at the world through Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses. And though he had once been an avid home fixer-upper, he now spent most of his time parked in front of his living room window, staring down at life on the block, a life he could no longer participate in. Or he sat in front of the television, which was currently blaring the local evening news.
    Jack went into the kitchen, with its worn linoleum and time-browned, parchmenty window blinds. He reached up into the cabinets for a bottle of Seagram’s 7 and a couple of delicate little shot glasses made of pale green glass. Mr. Gardner had brought them back from Naples, which he had visited while in the Army, back in World War II.
    Jack returned to the front room. He cracked open a couple of beers, poured two shots of whiskey, and then he and his friend carried out their usual ritual.
    “ Cin cin ,” he said.
    “ Salut ,” Mr. Gardner replied from his throne by the window. The old man raised his glass toward a sepia photo on top of the TV, a portrait of his late wife—a rather horsey-looking woman, but very kind—then he and Jack clinked glasses