Free No Safe Place by Richard North Patterson Page A

can
read.
” Suddenly Michael leaned across the bed and jerked Kerry by the T-shirt until his face was inches away. “They’re saying your father’s a
murderer
…”
    Kerry felt himself shiver. He could imagine his father and his closemouthed partner, a bottle of whiskey in the back of their patrol car, finding a black man in an empty store. Even now, his father’s eyes were like gray-blue bullets.
    “They’re saying your father’s a murderer,” Michael repeated, “and your fooking friend Liam won’t touch it …”
    When Liam Dunn decided to support the black mayoral candidate, Kenneth Gibson, against Hugh Addonizio, Kerry could not understand.
    There were murmurs in the bars, hard faces, threats on Liam’s telephone to murder his sons and give his daughter to a gang of blacks. Liam went about his affairs, taking no overt notice of the fact that business at Dunn’s Tavern was off, that fewer people spoke to him, that a popular ward leader, Paul Slattery, was making the Sunday rounds to talk of running against Liam when his council seat came up.
    To Kerry, the bars felt like a gauntlet. But he stuck by his godfather out of loyalty and anger at how some people shunned him. Kerry would apologize to no one.
    At the end of one tense Sunday, Liam took Kerry to the same bench in Ivy Hill Park.
    “I hear the boxing goes better,” Liam said. “School, too—no more Ds, and not a fight to your name.” He patted Kerry roughly on the shoulder. “All that, and you begin to understand politics as well. No telling how well you can do.”
    Thinking of Jamie, and then the hostile faces in the bars, Kerry clenched his fists. “I’ll never run for anything.”
    “No need to,” Liam answered. “You’ll find the thing that’s right for you.” He paused for a moment. “But, about me, don’t think that what you’re seeing is all there is. It’s just something that people
need
me to go through.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean they’re scared, so they’re angry, and they want me to tell them it will all go away—the blacks slowly moving into Vailsburg as friends talk about leaving, the crime they feel spreading, the loss of their own power, which began well before they noticed. But it would be stupid to tell them that hating blacks is an answer. Let alone a program.” He turned to Kerry. “Telling the truth when it’s hard is what political capital is for. Unless you want to be an errand boy.”
    But how can blacks be worth it?
Kerry thought. Finally, he said, “It seems like people hate you.”
    Liam looked at him. “You don’t hate me, do you?”
    Firmly, Kerry shook his head.
    As Liam stood, restless, Kerry sensed the pressure beneath his godfather’s air of calm. “Do the right thing, Kerry, and things tend to come out right in the end. But the first is the only part you control. And sometimes going to bed square with yourself is a day-to-day kind of thing.” For the first time, Liam smiled. “Of course, some of these fools can’t count. Like Slattery.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “That I may need black votes going forward, but blacks also need some of mine. And that the victory margin Paul Slattery thinks he’s tallying is moving to the suburbs.” Liam’s eyes were distant, sad. “Don’t know there’s any man can stop it—me included. Your brother James is well out of this. But then I wonder if he didn’t see it coming.”
    “What?”
    “The end of things, this life we have in Vailsburg. Slow but sure.” He paused again. “Not a burden Jamie should have on his mind, running for state senate in Princeton. A nice, safe, liberal place like that.”
    Suddenly Kerry had the sense that Liam had talked to James, and recently. In the next instant, he understood that a policeman father found to have murdered a black youth not only would make life terrible for Kerry and his mother but could do Jamie’s career great harm. And then the last piece fell into place. To his father’s arrogant