Frag Box Read Online Free Page A
Author: Richard A. Thompson
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
It had puzzled me when I said I knew the victim, and instead of getting interested, the cop got pissed. That’s not how cops are supposed to act. It should have set off my radar. And I should have also wondered how this guy just happened to get to the scene so fast.
Should have.
I didn’t go back toward the body, to tell a new set of cops who the victim was. For all I knew, the uniform I had talked to was really a cop, and if so, I wasn’t sure how I should play the scene. Whatever the guy was, I was sure he had at least witnessed the murder, if not had a hand in it. Sticky. You don’t hand off that kind of information unless you’re sure of the people you’re handing it to.
Instead, I headed back to Lefty’s to find Wilkie and see if he was carrying. Because if I was going to try to follow Officer Pissed Off and his shovel-toting friend, I definitely wanted a gun in my pocket.
***
Wilkie was gone when I got back to the pool hall, so I borrowed a piece from Lefty, despite his being not all that happy about the idea.
“I get held up while you’re off with that, I expect you to make good on my losses,” he said.
“You get held up a lot, do you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That’s what I thought.” I retrieved my leather coat from the rack by the door and stuffed the gun in the pocket. It was a short-barrel .38 revolver, and if Lefty could hit a robber with it from anything more than three feet away, he was a damn sight better shot than I was. But it was what he had. A street preacher I know called The Prophet would say the karma of the moment was structured that way, which was not so different from my Uncle Fred telling me to play the hand I was dealt. Either way, I went with it.
We don’t really have a part of town called Nighttown, but that’s how I always think of it. East of downtown and north of what’s left of the old Soo Line freight yards and the warehouses they used to service, the land falls away sharply to a low, weedy area that never quite knew what to do with itself except be a place for the Mississippi to flood into every spring. A bit north of there, the general slough forks into two distinct branches, Swede Hollow to the east and Connemara Gulch to the west. The high ground between those two is called Railroad Island. The buildings suddenly get a lot seedier and farther apart there than in downtown, mixed with scattered vacant lots and impromptu junkyards that are overgrown with weeds and favored by strange animals and stranger people. There are still a few shacky houses and apartments and some small industrial buildings, like plating factories and chop shops, but a lot of the area is just wilderness. The urban removal programs of the sixties wiped out most of the old slum housing and marginal businesses and replaced them with nothing. I guess somebody thought that was progress.
Neither of the gulches is a good place to go alone and after dark. The high ground may or may not be any better, depending on which alley you go down. A deputy sheriff friend of mine first got me calling it Nighttown because, she says, there are a lot of ways for your lights to go out there, ways that have nothing to do with the sun going down. Somewhere down there, “under the wye-duct,” Charlie may have had his cardboard box, the one that wasn’t warm enough. And that general direction was where the cop and the kid with the shovel seemed to be headed. And though I knew he was still lying on the sidewalk across from Lefty’s, I had the strong feeling that somewhere down there, Charlie was waiting for me. Waiting for me to set things right.
Chapter 3
Nighttown
The cop and the kid had a big head start on me by the time I got back from Lefty’s, but rush hour had been over for a long time and the snow continued to fall, so there weren’t a lot of competing footprints to confuse things. I followed them east for four or five blocks, then north and east, across a bridge over the
Should have.
I didn’t go back toward the body, to tell a new set of cops who the victim was. For all I knew, the uniform I had talked to was really a cop, and if so, I wasn’t sure how I should play the scene. Whatever the guy was, I was sure he had at least witnessed the murder, if not had a hand in it. Sticky. You don’t hand off that kind of information unless you’re sure of the people you’re handing it to.
Instead, I headed back to Lefty’s to find Wilkie and see if he was carrying. Because if I was going to try to follow Officer Pissed Off and his shovel-toting friend, I definitely wanted a gun in my pocket.
***
Wilkie was gone when I got back to the pool hall, so I borrowed a piece from Lefty, despite his being not all that happy about the idea.
“I get held up while you’re off with that, I expect you to make good on my losses,” he said.
“You get held up a lot, do you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That’s what I thought.” I retrieved my leather coat from the rack by the door and stuffed the gun in the pocket. It was a short-barrel .38 revolver, and if Lefty could hit a robber with it from anything more than three feet away, he was a damn sight better shot than I was. But it was what he had. A street preacher I know called The Prophet would say the karma of the moment was structured that way, which was not so different from my Uncle Fred telling me to play the hand I was dealt. Either way, I went with it.
We don’t really have a part of town called Nighttown, but that’s how I always think of it. East of downtown and north of what’s left of the old Soo Line freight yards and the warehouses they used to service, the land falls away sharply to a low, weedy area that never quite knew what to do with itself except be a place for the Mississippi to flood into every spring. A bit north of there, the general slough forks into two distinct branches, Swede Hollow to the east and Connemara Gulch to the west. The high ground between those two is called Railroad Island. The buildings suddenly get a lot seedier and farther apart there than in downtown, mixed with scattered vacant lots and impromptu junkyards that are overgrown with weeds and favored by strange animals and stranger people. There are still a few shacky houses and apartments and some small industrial buildings, like plating factories and chop shops, but a lot of the area is just wilderness. The urban removal programs of the sixties wiped out most of the old slum housing and marginal businesses and replaced them with nothing. I guess somebody thought that was progress.
Neither of the gulches is a good place to go alone and after dark. The high ground may or may not be any better, depending on which alley you go down. A deputy sheriff friend of mine first got me calling it Nighttown because, she says, there are a lot of ways for your lights to go out there, ways that have nothing to do with the sun going down. Somewhere down there, “under the wye-duct,” Charlie may have had his cardboard box, the one that wasn’t warm enough. And that general direction was where the cop and the kid with the shovel seemed to be headed. And though I knew he was still lying on the sidewalk across from Lefty’s, I had the strong feeling that somewhere down there, Charlie was waiting for me. Waiting for me to set things right.
Chapter 3
Nighttown
The cop and the kid had a big head start on me by the time I got back from Lefty’s, but rush hour had been over for a long time and the snow continued to fall, so there weren’t a lot of competing footprints to confuse things. I followed them east for four or five blocks, then north and east, across a bridge over the
Readers choose
Kurtis Scaletta
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Amber Bardan
Brian James
Simon R. Green
Neil Gaiman
Kathy Lyons
Charles Williams
Samantha Grace
Nelson Nye