Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht Read Free Book Online Page B

let's look you up. What's your handle, pardner?"
    "Bert. With an E. Bertram." He wondered if she was flirting with him. Probably it was just good bartending skills.
    She turned the book around, flipped forward and back. "Okay . . . English, Old German. 'Bright raven.' Wow. 'Bright raven.' That's intense."
    "What's that supposed to imply?" the girl asked.
    "Half of them don't make any sense," the guy told Bert. "We just looked me up, Lincoln, which means something about Romans at a pool or something. I mean, whatever, right?"
    "But it's a wonderful name," the girl told him. "Like Honest Abe. I love the name Lincoln." She gave her man a look so serious and suddenly private that Bert turned away in embarrassment. They kissed again, and then a guy from one of the other tables came up to ask for another round.
    Bert took his glass and dead cigarette back to his booth.
    Bright raven, he thought. An oxymoron. Ravens were black. You didn't think of them as bright in any way. They were dark birds, scavengers, scrappers. Bad luck birds, birds of ill omen.
    He drained his glass, signaled the bartender. After she brought beers to the other table, she swung by with another shot, but she didn't linger or give any indication she'd meant anything by asking his name. Catching sight of his own face in the bar mirror, he could see why not. He looked prehistoric: great big guy, old-fashioned haircut, suspicious face that was leathery and puffy at the same time and now had that slightly cockeyed look of someone who's starting to get a buzz on.
    He wouldn't know what to do if she had been flirting with him. He didn't remember anymore how to talk or act to make a woman feel good. Like tonight, with Cree. He'd barely remembered the basic courtesy of asking about her family. In the house, he'd gotten prickly with her, put off by her probing, and he'd managed to insult her—the "little lady" stuff was not what you'd call cutting-edge, where the hell had that come from? Maybe all the way from thirty-six years ago, when she was knee high and ran around in princess pajamas with feet in them.
    Cree was okay. She wasn't asking him anything unreasonable. He just wasn't ready with the answers yet.
    He'd acted like an asshole, making it so tense that afterward they hadn't known what to talk about. She'd tried all kinds of conversational gambits and he had never once hit the ball back over the net. Part of the problem was her believing in ghosts and so on. If anybody should have seen or "experienced" a ghost, Bert Marchetti should have; he'd spent time at maybe two hundred murder scenes, and all he'd ever felt was sorrow, disgust, disillusionment, and rage. He didn't believe anything survived the wreck of the body. And if people did have anything as noble as a soul, surely it would have more sense than to hang out in the vicinity of the sad, ugly remains of its former vehicle.
    The disparity in outlook made for a problem talking with Cree. What was he going to do, argue with her about her beliefs? People believed what they needed to. No matter how crazy it might be, it got them through the shit parts.
    Then, what was he thinking, he'd taken her to one of his regular places to eat. He'd sat down and looked around and suddenly realized, Jesus, what a dump, Ben Black's daughter comes to town and I don't have the class to take her to a nice place. He'd choked his dinner down, trying to hide his shame.
    The face staring back from the mirror was the sagging mug of an old, lonely fart who'd fucked up his whole life, exactly the kind of soon-to-be-ex cop he swore he'd never become.
    Fuck this, he told himself. This I don't need. He decided to skip the fourth whiskey for now. He put a couple of bills on the table for a tip, slipped his cigarettes and lighter back in his pocket, and went to the register to pay up.
    The bartender gave him his change. She turned back to the other end of the bar without saying anything, until just as he reached the door she called out,