Coyote by Linda Barnes Read Free Book Online

the two things she does best. Gloria operates G&W out of a wheelchair.
    â€œHow you doin’?” she asked in her silky voice between phone calls and bites of Milky Way. Gloria eats nonstop and has the bulk to prove it. I have never seen anything nutritious pass her lips.
    â€œOne of your cabs is off the road every moment we speak,” I reminded her with a grin. “So tell me, you give out my business card to any Hispanic ladies lately?”
    â€œWhy? Your ears been tingling or what?”
    â€œSimple question, simple answer, Gloria,” I said.
    The phone rang, and her hand swooped down on it like a bird of prey. While she soothed an irate customer who’d been waiting two minutes longer than promised, I eyed her desktop.
    There was an airmail envelope, addressed to Gloria in a familiar scrawl, lying in the center of the blotter. From Italy. I caught myself before my hand reached out and grabbed it. I glanced up, and Gloria was staring at me.
    If I ever blushed, I would have. The letter was from Sam Gianelli, half-owner of G&W. Gloria likes to keep tabs on my love life, and I didn’t want her to know how eagerly I awaited Sam’s return. Hell, she’d probably tell him all about it.
    â€œI ain’t blue, just a little bit lonely …” I hoped I’d brought the right tape along. I could hear Raitt’s high, fine voice singing in my head.
    Gloria hung up, her mellow voice having done its work. “So,” she said, carefully not mentioning the envelope, “what Spanish lady? I got a few Spanish-speaking guys working here. I don’t remember any of ’em needing a private eye.”
    â€œEver give one of them my card?”
    Gloria took another bite of Milky Way. “Nope,” she said finally. “What’s up? You got a paying job?”
    I wouldn’t have shaken free without a detailed cross-examination, except that the phones started going crazy. I grabbed some cab keys and left.
    A Dodge Aries practically clipped my fender as I drove off the lot.
    I ferried conventioneers from their Anthony’s Pier Four dinners to their Westin and Marriott hotels, earning enough cash to keep me going at a modest clip for a week. Then I cruised Jamaica Plain, one of Boston’s neighborhoods. J.P. has a high-density illegal population, both Irish and Hispanic, with a lot of landlords doing big business renting tiny two-bedroom apartments to ten or so aliens.
    I stopped at an all-night grocery store, a mom-and-pop place with Spanish signs in the window. I thought I’d describe my Manuela to the proprietor, but without a picture or a great command of the language, the project seemed silly, so I just bought a can of Pepsi and left, smiling at the guy behind the counter.
    A little after midnight that damn white Dodge Aries came by for the third time, parked up the street, and started tailing me. I toyed with him a little while, trying to lead him down one-way streets and into dead-end alleys, but whoever it was knew the city too well to let me backtrack and get behind him.
    â€œINS,” I said to myself, turning up the volume on Rory Block’s “Gypsy Boy” and helping her out with the scat-singing part. Jamieson, that goddamn INS agent, was trailing me, trying to get a line on Manuela Estefan.
    I let him tail me into the North End. It took me two minutes to lose him in its winding maze.

7
    By the time I got home—a little past two A . M .—it seemed like weeks had passed since Manuela Estefan’s visit. Part of me felt I’d already earned her advance. Hell, I’d earned it just listening to that INS jerk at lunch, not to mention paying for the ads in the Globe and the Herald , not to mention the gas I’d used traveling to places where I’d earned nothing but gringa insults.
    Five hundred bucks a day is what I charge my high-toned, Gucci-shoed lawyer clients. I don’t have a lot of those. The rest pay on a sliding