Cold Quarry Read Online Free

the church bathroom, I also saw a nice little bruise blossoming there. I exchanged glances with Toronto. He’d been the one who’d called to tell me about Chester’s death a few days before, but his expression, or lack thereof, gave nothing away.
    “Let’s just say I had a bad encounter with a pine tree,” I said.
    “Did you come all the way down from New York, Mr. Baldovino?” Marcia asked. She was the only one of us, besides Felipe, dressed appropriately for mourning: a long black wool overcoat, black pants and fashionable low-heel black shoes. From me she knew how Felipe had lived in Queens while his son had grown up mostly without a father on the streets of the Bronx and Yonkers. Felipe had worked for years as a longshoreman. He had also, according to Toronto, nearly drank himself to death, chased just about anything in a skirt and, although he’d never physically struck Toronto’s mother, had inflicted unimaginable mental anguish on the woman he refused to make his wife. Seems Felipe, at the time, had had this little problem of a wife and five children over in Queens.
    I was surprised a few years before when Toronto had told me he was going up to New York one weekend to visit his father. But by then his mother had already been dead for more than a decade, the old man wasn’t in the best of health, and maybe Toronto had wanted, if not to forgive him, at least to allow the remaining years of his father’s life to include some form of relationship with his estranged son.
    “No, no. Didn’t Jake tell you? I own a cabin maybe thirty, forty miles from here,” Felipe said. “A few of us got together and bought it to go hunting way back when I was still working the docks. Now I’m the only one left. We didn’t pay but a couple hundred dollars for it. Just a battered old place … like me, eh?” He chuckled to himself. “ ‘Course that was pretty good dough back then.”
    “You still come down here to hunt?” Marcia asked. She knew he meant deer hunting.
    “Nah.” He waved his hand. “I come down for a few weeks every now and then just to check on the place. That’s how I got to know Chester. Didn’t think I’d ever be attending his funeral though while I was here.”
    No one said anything for a few moments.
    “That was a nice touch with the release,” I said to Jake. “Whose idea was it?”
    “Mine,” he said. “I got Mark Bigelow and Lonnie Richards to set it up. They run that rehab operation and breeding facility down toward Beckley.”
    “I didn’t know Chester all that well, but from what I remember and what Frank has told me, it seems to me it’s exactly what he would have wanted,” Marcia said.
    Toronto nodded. “Still remember the day Chester called and asked me to be his sponsor … like I could teach him anything.”
    His father poked him in the arm. “Hey, I told him you were my son. He said he checked you out with all those other hawk people and they said you was the best.”
    “Hawk people” was how Felipe referred to anyone having anything to do with falconry. He said he couldn’t see why anyone would waste time chasing a bird around the woods when you could a lot more easily just grab a box of shells and a thirty-ought-six and go.
    A wiry man with dark red hair and a goatee came walking over to us. “Hey … Jake, Frank, you guys got a couple of seconds?”
    Toronto and I turned to look at him. Damon Farraday was a plumber from across the river in St. Albans who was a recent apprentice of Chester’s. He’d probably spent more time with the old guy in the past few months than anyone besides the new widow.
    “Geez, Frank, what happened to your mouth?”
    I repeated the pine tree story.
    “That’s too bad. Listen,” he said, “I’d really like to talk with you guys.”
    “Yeah?” Toronto said.
    I was afraid Farraday might want to talk about what would happen to Chester’s remaining two birds, which seemed a bit untimely given the fact that he wasn’t even cold