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

going to ask you to do this one—” she looked down at a letter on the desk and shoved it toward me “—divorce case, hourly cut or straight salary basis.”
    I laughed, and slid my own e-mail printout across to her. “I was going to give this one to you, in case you had some time.”
    She let it sit there, looking at me hard, her hazel eyes a little too motherly for my taste. She’s younger than I am.
    “I mean it, Jake.”
    “I’m a big boy. I think we should do it. You don’t have to help. I don’t want to risk your neck.” If she can be motherly, I can be fatherly.
    She was silent for a moment, fiddling with the e-mail. Then she pushed it aside.
    “What’s the next step?”
    I told her Royal was supposed to call that afternoon.
    “Get money up front, Jake, and make sure it doesn’t have a picture of Adolf on the hundred-dollar bill.”
    After which we went out for some healthy burritos— a contradiction in terms as far as I’m concerned— and argued about Nazis some more.

    I got home just before 2:00, and while I waited for Royal to call, I thumbed through that afternoons Marin
Independent Journal.
    There was a story on a new history curriculum in the local school system. The high school kids were going to get a bigger dose of the twentieth century, for one thing. That made me think of Royal. If my new client had ever heard or read anything about World War II, it had slipped his mind, buried under a mountain of adolescent fantasies. He had probably been too busy thinking about sex, or boot wax, or hangover remedies.
    I unrolled the San Francisco
Chronicle
that had been delivered that morning, skipped the front section, and went right to “Bay Area” to check out what was new over in the East Bay. Berkeley was enjoying the latest escapades of a far-left group called ThePeople, and their leader. Or maybe they called him a facilitator. Moderator? Chair? The
Chron
wasn’t clear. Anyway, his name was Cary Frasier. I’d been seeing him around Oakland and Berkeley for years, and he was always up to something political. Frasier believed in a lot of things I cared about— the environment, free speech, human rights— but he was such a pamphlet-mouth he embarrassed me, and he wasn’t very good at drawing a line between protest and violence. He was also not very good at picking a few causes and sticking with them. He attacked anything right of center, scattershot. He was always in some kind of war, and he was always on the side of the angels. The group was currently being investigated, the paper said, for involvement in some window-smashing. Which brought me full circle to World War II and the Nazis. The story didn’t say who the windows belonged to, but it could be almost anyone.
    Right about the time I was getting tired of the world as we know it, and dropping all the newspapers into the recycling box, the phone rang. Royal, I thought.
    As it turned out, though, the caller was Deeanne. He’d asked her to do it for him. Busy polishing his head, no doubt.
    “I expected to hear from Royal, Deeanne.”
    “Oh, he was all, maybe you’d change your mind again and maybe it would be better because you like me.”
    The message he was sending through her was that he would meet me that night at the Aryan Command’s hangout in northwest Berkeley, a bar called Thor’s.
    Thor’s. I’m a little light in the Norse god department. Thor, I thought, made thunder with a hammer and tossed lightning around. He didn’t have the status of Odin, who was, I thought, the Big Guy, the Zeus of the north, but he was loud.
    “Tell me about Thor’s.”
    “It’s just this, you know, like, sleazy bar. With hamburgers.”
    “Is it owned by the group?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess the bartender likes them okay.”
    “How do the people who go there dress?”
    “Dress?”
    “Dress.”
    “The usual stuff. Let’s see. Some of them are skins, and they wear flight jackets and Docs—”
    “Docs?”
    “Doc Martens.