Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) Read Online Free

I’ll—”
    “Fine. Whatever I want? I’m going to take you up on that, Deeanne. Where are you?”
    “We’re in a diner. At a pay phone.”
    “Hang up the pay phone, leave the diner, and go to school. That’s what I want.”
Get a little smarter. Maybe you’ll learn to avoid
the Royals of this world
. “You’ll only be a couple of hours late.”
    She hesitated for several seconds. “Okay. ’Bye. Don’t tell Artie I wasn’t in school, okay?” I grunted. “And I won’t hang up yet because Royal wants to talk to you again, okay?”
    I didn’t have time to answer. Royal was back on the line. “I’ll try to think about where you could start, and what all I need to tell you, and then I’ll call you this afternoon, okay?”
    “What time?”
    “When I was going to before. Two. Okay?”
    “Fine. You fill me in and we’ll do some real planning. Then I can think about getting started.”
    “Thanks, Mr. Samson.”
    I said something like “Gmph” and cradled the receiver.
    Rosie called me from the office to tell me she was glad I hadn’t taken the case.
    “Well, uh, I kind of decided that maybe we should.”
    “Oh, Jesus, Jake. Why don’t we have lunch and talk about it?”
    “Okay, pick you up at the office at, what—?”
    “Make it twelve-fifteen.”
    I had a couple of must-do chores that morning. First, I had to return a phone call from a client whose case I’d wrapped up the month before. He didn’t understand some of the expenses he’d been charged for. The man had had a hard time understanding a lot of things, including how his girlfriend managed to embezzle a hundred thousand dollars from his electrical business. His wife didn’t understand it either.
    I spent fifteen minutes on the phone going over the costs with him. The one he balked at was the fifty bucks I’d given a waiter to listen in on the girlfriend’s conversation with her accomplice, a guy who looked like he spent every waking hour working out. The client finally whined an agreement and said next time he’d hire a real PI. Yeah. Go with God.
    Then I sat down at my 486— listen, it works okay— to check my e-mail. That’s right, a computer. Blame Rosie for it. I personally am convinced that one of these days the airwaves or the circuits or whatever the hell are going to fill up and spontaneously combust and we’re all going to drown in a shower of cybershit. But people kept trying to e-mail me, and Rosie asked really nice, and I’m going to make up for giving in by refusing to upgrade for as long as I possibly can.
    So the e-mail. Not much of interest there. A friend of a friend had what sounded like a pretty sleazy divorce case. After the electrician, I didn’t want to touch it, but I’d run it by Rosie anyway.
    Then I went outside to try, for the seventeenth time, to fix my front gate. It sagged and scraped the ground, no matter what I did to it. Sometimes I thought the place hated me because it knew I wasn’t going to stay. The Oakland house had sold fast, and I’d had to hustle to find this one. It was in Fairfax, and that was good. But there was no cottage for Rosie, the lot wasn’t as big as the one I’d had in Oakland, and the house had carpeting and no fireplace. The droopy gate was just a bonus.
    I had an appointment with a realtor the next day, matter of fact.
    When I opened the office door at Sphinx Investigations, Rosie was on the phone, sitting in her executive swivel facing the window, only her short, dark hair visible above the chair’s high back. Her black standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, stood up to greet me with a bow, a squeaky yawn, and a wag. She, like Tigris and Euphrates, was getting on in years and had gone from unbridled enthusiasm to friendly dignity. Like me too, I guess.
    Rosie swung around and nodded to me, said a few more words to whoever was on the other end of the line, and hung up.
    “About this Nazi job, Jake…”
    “I think we should do it.” I told her about the pay.
    “I was