Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner

you? You’re my cousin and you’re putting me out on the street. What do you want me to do, thank you? ”
     
    “Yo, man.” Exclusive came into the kitchen. “What’s the problem?”
     
    “There’s no problem. I’m just talking to my cousin.”
     
    “Shorty asked you to leave. So why don’t you bounce?”
     
    “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business?” Hoolian made a fist. “How ’bout that?”
     
    He saw Exclusive freeze and look back toward the bedroom, as if he’d left his courage in there. Something about the way his cousin followed the look told Hoolian there might be a gun under the mattress.
     
    “Aw, forget about it, man.” Hoolian waved in disgust. “Y’all ain’t worth the trouble.”
     
    He went back to the couch and started stuffing the rest of his clothes back into his duffel bag, aware of the girl still tracking him, as if his skin were melting away, revealing a shivering shameful monster underneath covered with oozing sores and exploded carbuncles.
     
    “Yo, I don’t know what the hell you expected anyway,” Jessica said. “You may be la familia, but I don’t even fucking know you.”
     
     

    5
     
     
     
    THE COFFEE SHOP menu was longer than War and Peace, and Francis found his eyes getting tired as he scanned each page from side to side with its tiny columns of daily specials, soups du jour, pancake breakfasts, lunchtime wraps, triple-decker sandwiches, Greek dishes, and Mexican delights. Jesus, they really went on here, didn’t they? In a few years he’d probably need somebody to read it all for him. He closed the leather-bound book in disgust and looked up at the waitress.
     
    “Just give me two eggs over easy and a side of bacon, cup of coffee,” he said, defying Dr. Friedan’s warning about the effect of diet on his disease. “And gimme an English muffin with lots of butter on it.”

 
Across the table, Paul Raedo, the executive assistant to the Manhattan DA, ordered a plate of raw carrots and a cup of Lipton tea with honey and lots of sugar.
     
“And they call me a flake,” Francis grumbled.
     
Paul, who’d asked Francis to join him for a late breakfast near City Hall, was a human exclamation point, a sleek guided missile in a Brooks Brothers suit. Francis sometimes felt a trifle uncomfortable discussing cases with him in the office, because Paul would bounce off the walls like a hyperactive child, close-cropped hairs poking up like hundreds of tiny nail points through his scalp, black suspenders gripping his shoulders like restraining devices. But he was a good man to have beside you at the barricades, always ready to go for the top charge, agreeing to talk plea deal only after he’d shown a defendant the gates of hell. More than once Francis had begged off going to one of Paul’s famous Tuesday Night Massacre Poker Games, figuring that after a long brutal day in Homicide the last thing he needed was that kind of aggression coming at him across a stack of money.
     
“How are the kids?” asked Paul, closing his leather menu with a muted pfft and handing it up to the waitress like a sealed indictment.
     
“Ah, you know, competing to see who can give the old man a coronary first.”
     
Francis was wary of people without families inquiring too closely about his children, figuring maybe half the time there was an agenda. With women, it was an occasional stirring behind the smiles, like a sniper behind shades. With men who weren’t close friends, it was more often outright manipulation, an attempt to soften you up for a favor.
     
“Don’t you have a son in the army?” Paul squinted.
     
“Just got sent to Korea,” Francis said with a grunt, trying to ignore the way the thought made ice water seep into his stomach. “My daughter’s the one with her mother’s brains. Studying genetics at Smith. Says she wants to prove her father’s the missing link.”
     
A deep horseshoe grin creased Paul’s face. The man had no clue. Had never even been close to married. All his girlfriends seemed to come and