No Colder Place (37 page)
“Looks great.” I turned to DiMaio, standing in a sweat-soaked T-shirt, mason’s bag in one hand, hard hat in the other, grin beneath his sandy mustache. “Miss me?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Every time I look over where Ray’s working and he’s half a course ahead of me instead of two courses behind, I think how much I miss you.”
“Yeah, but does he do good work?”
“As good as you, Smith, I guarantee it.” He wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Didn’t someone say something about a beer?”
“I thought I heard that, too,” I agreed, and we headed for the Liffy, on Ninety-sixth Street, where DiMaio liked to drink.
“How’s Phillips?” I asked as we walked.
“Better.” DiMaio nodded. “He can talk pretty good now, and he got out of bed yesterday. They’re thinking he may be all right.”
“That’s good, Mike. Does he remember what happened?”
“Nah. They say he still might, but maybe not. He knows it was you saved his ass, though, because I told him. He says thanks.”
We waited for the light to change, felt heat radiate up from concrete and asphalt. “So Lydia’s your partner, huh?” DiMaio said as a cab pulled up, disgorged three passengers onto the sidewalk, then sped away looking for the next buck to make.
“Sort of,” I said, starting forward again. “I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you that from the beginning.”
“Shit, why should you? You didn’t know me from a hole in the ground.” His grin widened. “Must’ve been tough for you when I took her out.”
I shrugged. “Not my business.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“No, it’s true.”
He gave me a sharp look. “What is it, you guys keeping it a secret or something?”
“A secret? You mean me and Lydia?” I shook my head. “No, you’re wrong. It’s not like that.”
“What’s not like what? I’m not supposed to know? Christ, Smith, I’m the guy who saved both your butts the other day. Give me a break.”
“No, it’s just there’s nothing going on between me and Lydia.”
DiMaio snorted. “Yeah, okay, have it your way. Just, if a girl went charging into a roomful of guns to save
my
ass, I’d think maybe … But hell, what do I know?”
We reached Ninety-sixth Street, turned up the block. The steamy afternoon seemed to have gotten hotter, but the cars’ honking horns were sounding more harmonious notes than I’d ever heard them play before, and the fume-laden air suddenly smelled sweet to me.
“Anyway,” DiMaio was saying, “that’s your problem. All’s I want is a beer. Christ, I’m melting here. You know how when you start a job you can go inside the building and it’s so damn cold in there it cools you down, even in shit like this? I don’t know, maybe you didn’t do enough of this kind of work to know what I’m talking about.”
“No,” I said. “I do.”
He nodded, went on. “And then one day, the building’s halfway built and you try that and it don’t work anymore. Gotta be something to do with the mass of the concrete or something, I don’t know. Reg could explain it. Anyway, that’s what it’s like up there now. Since we come back on the job yesterday, you go inside, it’s just kind of warm, you know? Normal. Like anyplace else.”
He pulled open the door to the Liffy Tavern. As the cool air and the quiet talk of working men at the end of the day rolled out to greet us, I thought about the Armstrong building, the great steel skeleton and thick concrete slabs, the miles of wire and pipe and the complicated brick skin. I thought about the couple of days’ worth of bricks on the sixth floor, north side, that I’d put there, that would be part of this building now as long as the building stood.
As he moved through the room, I heard Mike DiMaio’s voice raised in greeting to the men he knew, from this job, from ones before. I let the door to the tavern close behind me and headed with him for the bar, to sit and have a beer at the end of the working day.
NO COLDER PLACE
. Copyright © 1997 by S. J. Rozan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For Umberto, Alessandra, Jurek, Tom, and Gary,
who should have been here,
and for Tommy, who was.
Steve Axelrod, my agent
Keith Kahla, my editor
perfect as always, and once again gentlemen
David Dubal
because architecture really is frozen music
T. Michael White
who can tell a hawk from a handsaw
Betsy Harding, Royal Huber, Jamie Scott, and Lawton Tootle
criticism is the highest form of flattery
Robert J. Randisi
the best of all
Deb Peters
at Brooklyn H.Q.
Steve Blier, Hillary Brown, Julia Moskin, and Max Rudin
and what’s more, baby, they can cook
Nancy Ennis and Helen Hester
still reading, after all these years
and, at the site:
John Addonisio, Sr., John Addonisio, Jr., Vin Barone, Peter Beltz,
John Chester, Shahir Erfan, Eric Hahn, Joan Hill, Mickey Kelly,
Mark Kitchell, Carl Koch, Jay Kurtz, Dan Lusterman, Steve Morhous,
Kent Nash, Jerry Quinn, Rory Ronan, Nazar Saif, Alma Shomo,
Carl Stein, Blaise Swiatkowski, and Bob Walsh,
not one of whom is in this book
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