Grady kept replaying his call with Sean, hope battling despair. Maybe the call had caused trouble, and if there was trouble already, maybe that would work in his favor. Or maybe Clara would just hate him again, hate him for being such a baby; whatever weakness had impelled her to call would be cemented over with her anger.They emerged from a slow crawl through bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, inexplicable at that hour, and were cruising down Queens Boulevard. A twelve-lane, in some areas sixteen-lane, main thoroughfare affectionately known as the Boulevard of Broken Bones because of the high rate of pedestrian deaths, it was one of the longest streets in Queens. It was modeled after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but to Grady it had none of that romantic aura of lost grandeur that the Concourse had, where magnificent old buildings had grayed with neglect, sagged with disappointment and sadness at the deterioration of a once-great neighborhood, modeled after the promenades of European cities.
