Don't Lose Her by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online Page B

“The SEALs do and it isn’t completely waterproof, but it’s phosphate-coated, and a hell of a lot better than that old thing you’ve got.”
    I dropped in the fifteen-round magazine and checked the ammunition, thumbing the first two out, looking for rust. Maine had also “gifted” me a box of 9-mm rounds that he’d sealed around the primer area with a diluted mix of clear nail polish.
    â€œWouldn’t want you to snap a wet load when some gator’s got you by the balls out there.”
    I worked the slide. Everything was clear.
    I do not like guns. I don’t like the trouble they can lead to, or the aftereffects they can leave behind. But I was going somewhere with a wad of cash in my pocket to meet a guy who knew some guys who knew everything there was to know about drug dealing in this area of South Florida, and that combination demanded backup I wasn’t going to get. I slipped the gun under my seat and started the Fury.
    Clarence Quarles—they called him CQ. And even though a cat can sometimes change some of his stripes, more often than not you’re still going to find him near the same litter box he grew up in.
    Clarence was a tall, skinny, chocolate-skinned athlete who had the gift of some combination of bone density and fast-twitch muscle that could catapult his six-foot-seven-inch frame to heights you could only gawk at. His splayed fingers seemed to do magical things on a leather-covered ball, making it move and spin and float in the air, giving it a radarlike attraction to an orange hoop just twice its circumference. He could run, inexhaustible, like a gazelle, and had a shooting range that made NBA scouts drool and defensive players cry.
    I had met him through a friend, a teacher in fact, who had a seemingly mystical effect over Clarence that had led the kid from a despicable neighborhood on Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach to a prep high school in New England to a scholarship at Boston University. There was something in CQ that had kept him from signing a pro contract as an undergrad, had kept him in school studying economics, and had kept him coming back to this place on spring break to see his family and shoot hoops like he’d never left.
    If you ever asked him why, he’d stretch out those impossibly long arms, turn his pale white palms to the sky, and quote Popeye the Sailor Man: “What? I yam what I yam.”
    It made people shake their heads. It made people wonder. It made me smile. Billy knew and loved the kid and would be appalled that I would bring him into this mess. But I knew CQ had connections. And I was going to use any and all means to find Diane.
    I parked the Fury in the street fronting the Dunbar Village housing project within eyeball distance of the basketball court. I knew CQ hung there—a mama’s boy come back to the roost. His mother’s home was thirty feet away from the rusted gate entrance to the court. From her porch, she had watched her boy from the time he learned to walk. And CQ knew she was watching: that fact may have saved him.
    When I closed the door of the Fury, the noise caused a dozen sets of eyes from the court to look over, while another untold number that I couldn’t see surely peeked out from gauzed curtains and dusty venetian blinds. A tall white man in an old-school police car didn’t just pull up to this neighborhood without being noticed.
    Knowing this, I headed directly to Mrs. Quarles’s front porch instead of the court where I had already spotted Clarence sitting idle on a bench, surrounded by four or five other players. Before I reached his mama’s front yard, her son got up, picked up a basketball with one hand as if he were snatching an errant cantaloupe from the ground, and started shooting free throws at the far basket.
    As usual, Clarence’s mother was sitting on her porch, a lap full of sewing in the folds of her day dress, her tapered and weathered fingers busy