Twenty-Seven Bones by Jonathan Nasaw Read Free Book Online

knight/damsel-in-distress relationships rarely lasted, the end of the affair had shaken him up. He hadn’t dated anyone else, much less got laid since the breakup—those eighteen months were the longest period of celibacy in Pender’s adult life, not counting the last few years of his marriage.
    But that might change, too. Wasn’t the Caribbean where everybody went to find romance?
    As Pender began rummaging through his closet looking for the Hawaiian shirts he’d also bought in Carmel, with Dorie, the phone rang. It was Julian Coffee, notifying him of a slight change of plans—a stopover in Miami.
    “My criminalist, who also happens to be my eldest daughter Layla, lifted and restored prints from the left hand of the male vic,” said Julian. “She ran them through AFIS yesterday, spent all night winnowing down the possibles, and came up with a twelve-point match with one William Wanger, Miami, Florida. No criminal record, but his military prints were on file. I know how you feel about interviewing at the source, so we got the address for you—I thought you might want to drop by and have a word with Mrs. Wanger.”
    “Does she know yet?” asked Pender, after jotting down the address and the new flight information.
    “I can’t see how—she filed a Missing Persons with the Miami PD a couple weeks ago, but we haven’t notified them yet.”
    “I have to tell you, Julian—I’m not exactly crazy about the idea of being the one who has to tell a woman that she’s now a widow.”
    “You’re right, Edgar—I should probably find someone who’d really, really enjoy it.”
    “I don’t mean—”
    “See you late this afternoon, then. And don’t forget to bring plenty of sunblock—our nude beaches are world famous.”
    “Nice change of subject there, Julian.”
    “Thank you, Edgar—we do what we can.”

2
    “How was that, Miss Brown? Are you feeling better?”
    “Heavenly.” The toothless ancient glanced over her shoulder at Holly, who had just finished deep-massaging her withered glutes, and gave her a blue-black, gummy grin. “Gyirl, nobody ain’ touch me like dot in go’ on forty year, y’know?”
    Holly’s Tuesday/Thursday morning gigs at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home were simultaneously her most rewarding and her least remunerative. It would take her three hours of hard work to earn what she could make in a single hour elsewhere, but the head nurse had told Holly privately that the incidence of decubitus ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, had decreased 25 percent since Holly had begun working there.
    Some of the improvement, of course, was the direct result of therapeutic massage bringing increased blood flow and muscle tone, but the most important benefits, Holly suspected, were indirect. When your body feels better, you move around more; when you move around more, you get fewer bedsores.
    After the rest home, Holly drove by Busy Hands, located in a sprawling single-story cinder-block building situated directly across the Circle Road from the Sunset Bar, to pick up her messages and maybe a little work—after paying her rent, she’d be closer to broke than she had been all year.
    The front room, which looked more like the waiting room of a seedy transmission repair shop, was empty. Mrs. Ishigawa was at her desk in the front office, behind the counter, cooking the books for lunch.
    “I just dropped by to see if there are any extra shifts available this week.”
    “Nope.” As always, Mrs. Ishigawa looked like the world’s oldest geisha, dressed in kimono, obi, split-toed ankle socks, and split-toed sandals, with a chopstick through her upswept, improbably black hair. As always, she was holding a lit cigarette between the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. “But you got two terephone corrs, one woman, one man,” added the old woman, in her mincing, West Indian-flavored Japanese accent. “Man was Apgard—I terr him, shoot, mon, you run terephone rine up to Core, you