Christmas with Harry



 

I thought I had wasted my time coming to New York to see Harry until the woman came up to me in the bar and handed me the note.

It was in Harry’s script and told me to meet him here later after he got off from work.

Work?

What kind of work does a gangster do?

I kept imagining streets flowing with blood while I wandered the city to waste time.

I don’t even know why he wanted to see me in the first place, just a phone call to my Chicago office and an airplane ticket stuff under my office door.

Rock and Bendon said he wanted to kill me for the hard time I gave him in LA years earlier.

But even gangsters don’t send airplane tickets to their victims.

So I came, even if it meant missing Christmas at home.

Neither Rockefeller Center with its huge tree nor Time Square with its lights could drag my mind back from Harry, and the question as to why he needed to see me, and on Christmas Eve of all nights.

I was exhausted by the time I got back to the bar and the first drink made me sleepy, casting a fog over my eyes that when Harry came in, I didn’t quite believe what I saw.

Harry, the killer, Harry the con man, Harry, the terror of Los Angeles and now New York, was dressed in a Santa Claus suit.

“I’m dying,” he told me when he sat down across from me in the booth.

He claimed he was trying to make amends before the end came and wanted to make amends with me.

We got drunk, said a lot of things, and lost ourselves in the night, me laughing most over the Santa Class suit, he crying over things I still don’t understand.

I last saw him staggering down Canal Street hat tilted over one eye.

I didn’t read about the city finding his body in the East River until I got back to Chicago.

 




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