Stagger Bay Read Online Free Page B

I’m truly out of luck. I’m on my own here all the way. You’re useless to me, what good are you to anyone?”
    There were so many things I could try to say to that, but instead buttoned my lip. He wouldn’t trust anything that came out my mouth. If I wanted him to hear me in future I’d have to snarl in resonance with him, choose only the words I knew he’d hear rather than the ones I wanted to say – but I suspected there wasn’t going to be much opportunity for that.
    “I’ll be getting out here,” I said.
    Someone hit their horn and leaned on it as Sam swooped the Lincoln to the curb. As I got out an immaculate candy-apple red Cougar hotrod tore around us, narrowly missing Sam’s rear bumper.
    I couldn’t get a good look at the big blond man driving the cherried-out Cougar as it roared past; the morning sun’s reflection obscured his features behind the window. But his face was pointed right at me through the glare, and I had a good idea what kind of expression was on it. I was surprised he didn’t give us the one-finger salute for punctuation.
    As I stood on the curb I looked back at Sam, but he stared straight ahead as though near collisions didn’t even get his attention.
    The situation didn’t seem to call for any heartfelt goodbyes. I started walking and Sam pulled back out, blended obnoxiously into the traffic flow, and was gone.

 
    Chapter Seven
     
    I was on Fourth Street, the one-way thoroughfare running south through the heart of Stagger Bay, turning into Highway 101 above and below town limits. This was the neighborhood folks called Old Town.
    Back when Stagger Bay was first founded, the second thing they did after massacring the local Indians was build Old Town, a rickety warren of wall-to-wall whore houses and bars conveniently adjacent the waterfront. By the time we’d moved up here from Oakland in the ‘90s, the original shacks and hovels of that frontier red-light district had mutated into it’s present day architecture, mainly brick multi-stories heavily retro-fitted to earthquake resistance.
    We’d come up here because the cost of living was cheap, and I thought I could finagle a job in one of the lumber mills or on a boat. Unfortunately the logging and fishing industries were already withering on the vine by that point, and Stagger Bay was pretty depressed – I’d been lucky to get the job at the soda distributor.
    Then, a few years before the Beardsleys were murdered, some bright boy decided to build the Mall on the south edge of town – half the local mom & pop businesses folded, unable to compete with those big box chain stores. That was a real stake through the heart for Stagger Bay.
    Driving through Old Town in back then was like sightseeing in a ghost town, what with all the darkened storefronts and whitewashed windows. There’d been trash in the gutters and newspapers spinning in updrafts; it was pretty run down.
    Old Town’s empty squats had been crowded with homeless transients, pan-handlers, drug addicts and other low-end would-be outlaws – up from the Bay Area chasing welfare checks. The Stagger Bay Police Department had a beat cop annex there but closed it down because there was ‘too much crime’ – that one had been laughed at on all the late night network talk shows.
    Our hookers were an especially sorry bunch, mainly speed freaks missing a few teeth and dressed in thrift-store chic. Angela always felt sorry for those working girls; she wanted to stop and do an emergency makeover whenever we passed one by.
    But Old Town had changed a lot since last time I’d seen it. Now it looked like someone had come through with a broom and swept all the wild life away. Walking down the street, all I saw was decent citizens, not a wannabe-an-outlaw in sight.
    It was also booming with new construction and renovation: Toward the waterfront the Andersen Mansion loomed above the smaller interposing buildings, sporting a new paint job. A work crew was power washing the side