Samaritan
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I: Contrecoup
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II: Blue Dempsy
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Coda
Chapter 37
A Note About the Author
Also by Richard Price
Copyright Page
For Judy, Annie and Gen,
with love
And for Archie A.—in memory
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the help of the following people: Larry Mullane, Nicky Luster, Jack Smith, Jeff Naiditch, Cassandra Wiggins, Robin Desser, Genevieve Hudson-Price, and especially, Denise Davis.
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.
—Matthew 6:1–3
Prologue
Out Of Time
Ray—January 10
Ray Mitchell, white, forty-three, and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Ruby, sat perched on the top slat of a playground bench in the heart of the Hopewell Houses, a twenty-four-tower low-income housing project in the city of Dempsy, New Jersey.
It was just after sundown: a clear winter’s night, the sky still holding on to that last tinge of electric blue. Directly above their heads, sneaker-fruit and snagged plastic bags dangled from bare tree limbs; above that, an encircling ring of fourteen-story buildings; hundreds of aluminum-framed eyes twitching TV-light silver, and above all, the stars, faintly panting, like dogs at rest.
They were alone, but Ray wasn’t too concerned about it—he had grown up in these houses; eighteen years ending in college, and naive or not he just couldn’t quite regard Hopewell as an alien nation. Besides, a foot and a half of snow had fallen in the last two days and that kind of drama tended to put a hush on things, herd most of the worrisome stuff indoors.
Not that it was even all that cold—they were reasonably comfortable sitting there under the yellow glow of sodium lights, looking out over the pristine crust under which, half-buried, were geodesic monkey bars, two concrete crawl-through barrels and three cement seals, only their snouts and eyes visible above the snow line, as if they were truly at sea.
Two Hispanic teenaged girls cocooned inside puffy coats and speaking through their scarves walked past the playground, talking to each other about various boys’ hair. Ray attempted to catch his daughter’s eye to see if she had overheard any of that but Ruby, embarrassed about being here, about not belonging here, studied her boots.
As the girls walked out of earshot, the snowy silence returned, a phenomenal silence for a place so huge, the only sounds the fitful rustling of the plastic bags skewered on the branches overhead, the sporadic buzzing of front-door security locks in the buildings behind them and the occasional crunching tread of tenants making their way along the snowpacked footpaths.
“Dad?” Ruby said in a soft high voice. “When you were a child, did Grandma and Grandpa like living here?”
“When I was a child?” Ray touched by her formality. “I guess. I mean, here was here, you know what I’m saying? People lived where they lived. At least, back then they did.”
At the low end of the projects, along Rocker Drive, an elevated PATH train shot past the Houses, briefly visible to them through a gap in the buildings.
“Tell me another one,” Ruby said, her breath curling in the air.
“Another story?”
“Yeah.”
“About Prince and Dub?”
“Tell me some more names.”
“More?” He had already rattled off at least a dozen. “Jesus, okay, hang on . . . There was Butchie, Big Chief, Psycho, Hercules, Little Psycho—no relation to regular Psycho—Cookie, Tweetie . . .”
“Tell me a story about Tweetie.”
“About Tweetie? OK. Oh. How about one with Tweetie and Dub?”
“Sure.”
“OK. When I was twelve? Dub’s thirteen, we’re playing stickball on the sidewalk in front of the building, about eight guys. You know what stickball is?”
“Yes.”
“How do you . . .”
“Just go.”
“OK. We’re playing on the sidewalk. Dub’s standing there at the plate, got the bat . . .”
Ray slipped off the bench, struck a pose.
“Ball comes in . . .” He took a full swing. “And behind him is this girl Tweetie, she’s just like, daydreaming or whatever, and the stick, on the backswing, like, clips her right over the eye like, zzzip . . . Slices off half of her eyebrow, the skin, the flesh—”
“Stop.” Ruby hissed, jiggling her knees.
“Dub, he doesn’t even know he did it. But she’s standing there, and you know, like Dub she was black, Tweetie, very dark-skinned, and it’s like all of a sudden over her eye there’s this deep bright pink gash, totally dry, she says, ‘Oh Dub,’ in a shock voice, not mad, more like upset, or scared. And, I remember what was freaky to me, was that from the waist up she was calm, but below? Her legs were running in place. And in the next second, that dry pink gash? It just fills up with blood. And now Dub sees what he did, everybody sees it, and I remember, she says, ‘Oh Dub,’ again, in this fluty voice and then the blood just . . . spills, comes down over that side of her face like someone had turned on a faucet, and everybody just freaks, just . . . We’re all twelve, thirteen years old, Tweetie is like, ten, but when we saw all that blood? People, the guys, everybody freaked and most of them, they ran away, they just ran, except me, I’m standing there, and Dub. Dub is still holding the stickbat and he has this angry look on his face like, it’s not, it’s more like he’s stunned, he knows he’s in trouble, he knows he should do something, apologize, explain why it’s not his fault, but he can’t, he can’t even move, you know, the blood, and now she’s crying, Tweetie, and me, I’m as freaked as anybody but I just wound up going robot on it. What I do is, I pull off my sweaty T-shirt, a white T-shirt, roll it up in a ball and I go over and put it on her eyebrow, like a compress. I’m holding it there with one hand, and I put my arm around her shoulder, she was a short little pudgy kid, a butterball, and I steer her to the curb and we sit on the curb rib to rib. I’m holding my T-shirt to that gash, I got my arm around her, and we just sit there. I have no idea what to do, what I’m doing, she’s crying, and Dub, he’s still standing there with the stickbat. He looks fierce, like he wants to punch somebody, but he is stone paralyzed . . .
“We’re sitting there maybe three minutes, me and Tweetie, I think I got the blood stopped, Dub’s playing statue, and all of a sudden I look at him and his eyes go, Pop! Buggin’. And he’s, someone’s coming from the other direction and just like that he drops the stickbat and hauls ass out of there. And he could run, Dub, but this wasn’t running, this was freight-training, he was pumping so hard he could’ve gone through a wall.
“So I turn to see what made him go off? It’s Eddie Paris, his dad. Eddie doesn’t chase him or anything.
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