Free The Wolves of Fairmount Park by Dennis Tafoya

his fist, took the card and smoothed it in his hands, stared at the type, saw the perforated edge where it had been torn, so he knew it had been printed at home. A cheap card for a cheap, thuglike detective who would be his device, the mechanism that would transfer his fury to the world and make it pay for everything that had gone wrong.
    â€œTwo blocks.”
    â€œNot even.”
    George stepped back into the room, and everyone turned to him. Francine narrowed her eyes at his dry, appraising stare. He looked from face to face, and they all seemed unconscious, their gazes slack and sorrowful. He was aware of Collins standing beside him, and they were hunters together. He wanted another drink, would have it.
    He went to his son and looked down at the slight reed of his body. A blue blazer and tie he’d have never worn in life. The boy’s slender hands now carved from pale wax. George Sr. turned and looked out at the crowd with something that was forming into hate. He kept one hand on the lip of the box, as ifit helped him to claim his place in the chapel. He wanted to tell them something, make a speech, declare his intent to find and punish.
Someone in this room,
he wanted to say.
Someone in this room.

CHAPTER
6
    It was quiet on the street, and there was a haze that obscured the end of the block and muffled faraway sounds, gave Orlando a feeling of being on a stage, even walking down Cecil B. Moore to Mexican Bob’s house. When he got there he waved at the camera at the top of the door and LaDonna buzzed him in.
    Mexican Bob was sitting in his chair, a red leather chair that he loved, that made him feel, he would say, like a Captain of Industry, which Orlando said he most definitely was, there being no one more industrious than the working thief with a jones. He was bleary-eyed and quiet this morning, and LaDonna took him coffee and pointed at the cup to offer Orlando some, and he smiled but waved her off.
    Mexican Bob grabbed at her and she danced away into the kitchen, a red knit dress and perfect hair, despite it being so early in the morning when the streets were full of zombies clutching coffee cups and marching in their grim trains of the near-dead to work in the mausoleums down on Broad and JFK.
    Orlando loved to watch them, Mexican Bob with his limpid eyes and the cascading mustache of a nineteenth-century cavalryman, his wasp-waisted love hovering at his shoulder. Theyhad met in prison, when LaDonna was Levar and using all her guile to stay ahead of the tier gangs, and he wooed her and brought her home and paid for her surgery. It was one of those stories, beautiful and strange and transgressive, that cracked him open and made him love all of the doomed strangers in his world, even the ones that pointed guns at him or beat him with pool cues when they caught him unawares, nodding in the street on his way home in the middle of the night.
    They were waiting for Arthur, an Afghan vet who came home from Parwan with metal in his knees and a drug habit. Arthur was supposed to have the keys to a warehouse on Front Street with a bunch of snowmobiles, and Bob said they’d go look and see what could be done. To move them meant borrowing or stealing a truck and he wasn’t sure, but if they could bring it off it’d be a couple thousand apiece and would take the edge off for a few days.
    Orlando didn’t really know Arthur but had seen him around, and he seemed put together, his shit still relatively squared away for a full-on junkie, maybe the residue of the military. Tall, broad-shouldered, with short hair and a lot of bad road and long nights stored up in his eyes.
    Bob’s cell buzzed on the table, and when Bob just stared at it, Buddha-like in his chair, his arms holding his cup on his chest, LaDonna came in shaking her head and picked it up. She started to say hello but whoever it was cut her off, and she listened intently for a moment, then passed it to Bob, who frowned and fit it to his