Manner of Death

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Hank Roberts walked with a definite spring to his step and a whistle under his breath as he headed east on West 46th Street in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Until the late ’70s and early ’80s it was an Irish American working-class neighborhood with a plethora of seedy bars among its warehouses and tenements and boasted an impressive crime rate. Calling it gritty back then was a euphemism despite it housing the acclaimed Actors Studio and serving as the temporary home to many ultimately famous actors and actresses. Hank was aware of the area’s history because he’d been inappropriately brought there on a handful of occasions by his ne’er-do-well older brother from their home in Weehawken, New Jersey, when Hank was a skinny preteen in middle school and his brother was toying with the idea of an acting career.

To get to Hell’s Kitchen, Hank had taken a rideshare from the Upper West Side where he was presently residing, and he’d had the driver drop him off on the corner of Twelfth Avenue and 46th Street in the literal shadow of the WWII aircraft carrier Intrepid, which was now a museum permanently anchored in one of the Hudson River berths. The weather was clear and seasonably chilly, which justified his dark peacoat and a wool Navy watch cap. Dangling from his shoulder by a leather strap was a Gucci satchel that contained a Glock 19 fitted with a silencer as well as a few other tools and cleaning materials he thought he might need, including a second, ghost Glock, which he planned to leave at the scene.

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