City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance Read Free Book Online

around?”
    “All the time,” she said. “Chester usually swings by two, three nights a week. He’ll probably swagger in here in pretty soon. I take it you didn’t keep in contact with any of them after you left?” 
    “No, we kinda lost touch.”
    She mixed a Cosmo for a woman a couple stools down and said, “I asked about you a couple times after you left, but pretty much just got the cold shoulder. No one wanted to talk about it. It was like they were pissed at you or something.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe they were. But maybe if I smile and apologize real sweetly they’ll forgive me.”
    She laughed. “Oh, I just gotta see that. Crowe says he’s sorry. That’s a riot.”
    The P.A. system crackled energetically and then a staggeringly loud bass drum started throbbing like a thermonuclear pulse. The dance floor was mobbed almost instantly, and like clockwork, as soon as the music kicked in around the bass line everybody was moving, the lights were flaring and pulsing, the floors were shaking.
    Before prison, loud noise and mobs of people didn’t bother him much; things were different now. He’d spent too long in relative silence, had grown comfortable there. The sudden assault of noise sent his nerves crawling and his head pounding almost immediately.
    That’s when Chester decided to spring on him. There was a hand on his shoulder, and Crowe spun around on his stool, his fingers automatically going to grab the hand and break it off the arm it belonged to. “Whoa, whoa!” Chester said, barely audible above the techno music. “Easy, man, it’s just me!”
    It took a lot of effort to rein it in, but Crowe managed to relax. From the corner of his eye he saw Faith take note of his reaction, a brief flicker of uneasiness stiffening her body. But then he smiled and said, “Hello, Chester. Maybe you can tell me. What exactly was it we enjoyed about this place?”
    Chester nodded, said, “Yeah, right. I’m kinda surprised to see you here, Crowe.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    “What?”
    Crowe raised his voice a notch or two. “You’re not surprised!”
    “Right,” Chester said, smiling and nodding. “Hey, come on with me. Vitower’s in back, he’ll be happy to see you.”
    Crowe took a last sip of his drink and left it half-finished on the bar and stood up. They started to walk away when Faith called, “Hey, Crowe!”
    He stopped, and she said, “How you getting home tonight?”
    “A taxi, most likely.”
    “No,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
    “Thanks, but you don’t have to do that. It’s kind of a hike.”
    She grinned. “Not your home, dumb-ass. My home. I’m off at one tonight.”
    He shrugged and nodded, and he and Chester threaded their way through the crowds to the backroom where Marco Vitower waited for them.
     

He knew that Marco Vitower was running the show these days. That sort of info gets around, even in prison. He was surprised, though, when he first heard it. The Old Man was pretty firmly in charge when Crowe got sent up. When he died—congestive heart failure and who knew the old bastard even had a heart?—Crowe had assumed, as much as he’d even thought about it, that one of his closer advisors would take over.
    But Vitower?  Well, that had been a whallop, especially considering that he was—according to Crowe’s sources—still enraged over the murder of his wife.
    Marco Vitower, like a lot of the guys, had started strictly small-time. Everyone knew his legend. He was one of the first black guys to make a real mark, back in the days before the operations were almost entirely black, and lily-whites like Crowe and Chester Paine became the exceptions. Hired muscle before his eighteenth birthday, then bookmaking, and finally getting into the Old Man’s good graces by killing a district attorney’s assistant that had been snooping around. Whacked him, as they say in the gangster movies, gratis .
    In those last days before Crowe’s extended leave of absence,