Bad to the Bone by Stephen Solomita Read Free Book Online

of course. ‘Making the motherfuckers pay’ was at the core of his entire professional life. But it’s one thing to be an instrument of the New York Police Department and quite another to be a gun pointed by any citizen with the money to pay his fee. He wanted to be sure that Connie Alamare, consumed by hatred, was aware of his position.
    “Okay,” Connie’s eyes narrowed. “You gotta forgive me, because I’m used to speaking the way I grew up. In Canarsie, Brooklyn. The big shot detective, Goobe, said you were a cop for thirty-five years so I figured I could talk naturally. I figured you were used to dealing with people from the neighborhoods.”
    She was lying, but Moodrow didn’t mind. He leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs, allowing the case to sweep over him.
    “Look, when I say I want his heart, I’m not saying you should hold the knife. Don’t forget, I already know that Davis Craddock did this to my girl, so if I wanted him to have an accident some day, I wouldn’t be hiring you to find proof. I’ll settle for taking him off his perch. I’ll settle for seeing him in handcuffs. Your job is to get an indictment. Then you can step out.”
    “Ms. Alamare,” Moodrow interrupted the speech.
    “Connie, please.”
    “Connie, fine. Why don’t we start with the last time you saw your daughter.”
    “That was eight years ago.”
    “Eight?” Moodrow allowed the surprise in his voice to encourage her to open up.
    “You know what I do for a living?”
    “I don’t. No.”
    “I write books about slave girls who marry princes and live happily ever after on yachts in the Mediterranean. I started reading these kinds of books when I was twelve years old. It was my escape from Canarsie. From a papa with heavy hands. From a mama with a nasty tongue who prayed five hundred rosaries a week. From the gumbah who wanted to lift my skirts in the hallway of St. Agnes and who I eventually married and who had hands as heavy as my father’s.
    “I must’ve read five thousand romances, before I sat down and wrote one. Florence was eleven years old and my husband, he should rot in hell, was dead. I was back to living with my family. They were very old-fashioned, so it was expected that a daughter with no skills and no husband would move back into her parents’ house. I suppose that if they died, I would’ve been taken in by my sister, but I didn’t wait around that long.
    “It was a nightmare in that house. My parents didn’t talk to each other. They talked to me and to Florence. They screamed their complaints and they complained about everything and everyone in their miserable lives.
    “After a couple of years, I was desperate. I would’ve done almost anything, but I was an ex-housewife with a high school education and no kind of skills that would bring me enough money to live on my own. For most women in my class, the answer was remarriage, but I was different. I didn’t wanna lay underneath some drooling guinea just so I could call myself a wife. That’s exchanging one prison for another.
    “So I wrote a book describing all the things I could never be and all the things I could never have. Of course, I didn’t really believe that I’d be able to write a book that anyone else would want to read, so I added something that I never found in all the romances I’d read. I added sex. My heroine was a white girl who belonged to a Saudi sheik. The man is a beast, but what can she do? She has to put up with his perversions, until the sheik offers a visiting British viscount a night with his white slave. Naturally, the viscount and the slave fall in love and live happily ever after. It became the new thing in romance novels. I mean the sex, of course. Me, I took a fancy name—Roberta Chamberlain—and hired an accountant to add up the money.
    “If life was fair, me and Florence would’ve lived happily ever after, too. She would’ve used the money to get an education, married an artist, lived in France, had