Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online Page B

one’s in Alaska or someplace.” He whacked the shoulder of the man nodding off beside him. “This here’s the youngest.”
    Lenny’s son, a pale skinny guy with two brightly blackened eyes, said, “You’re fucking A ,” and dropped his head into his arms on the bar.
    “We already been through this with the cops,” Big Dave told us. “We told ’em, Yeah, Helene comes in here; no, she don’t bring the kid with her; yeah, she likes her beer; no, she didn’t sell the kid to pay off a drug debt.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Least not to anyone in here.”
    One of the pool players came to the bar. He was a skinny guy with a shaved head, cheap jailhouse tats on his arms, but none done with the attention to detail and fine aesthetic sense of Big Dave’s. He leaned in between Angie and me, even though there were a few car lengths of space to our right. He ordered two more beers from Dave and stared at Angie’s breasts.
    “You got a problem?” Angie said.
    “No problem,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”
    “He’s problem-free,” I said.
    The guy continued staring at Angie’s breasts with eyes that looked as if they’d been zapped with a lightning bolt and seared of life.
    Dave brought his beers, and the guy picked them up.
    “These two are asking about Helene,” Dave said.
    “Yeah?” The guy’s voice was so flat it was hard to tell if he had a pulse. He pulled his two beers in betweenour heads and tilted the mug in his left hand so that some beer spilled on my shoe.
    I looked down at my shoe, then back up into his eyes. His breath smelled like an athlete’s sock. He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he looked at the mugs in his hands and his fingers tightened around the handles. He looked back up at me, and those stunted eyes were black holes.
    “I don’t have a problem,” he said. “Maybe you do.”
    I shifted my weight slightly in my chair so that my elbow had more leverage on the bar in case I had to bob or weave suddenly and waited for the guy to make whatever move was floating through his head like a cancer cell.
    He looked down at his hands again. “Maybe you do,” he repeated loudly, and then stepped out from in between us.
    We watched him walk back to his friend by the pool table. His friend took his beer, and the guy with the shaved head gestured in our direction.
    “Did Helene have a big drug problem?” Angie asked Big Dave.
    “The fuck would I know?” Big Dave said. “You implying something?”
    “Dave,” I said.
    “Big Dave,” he corrected me.
    “Big Dave,” I said. “I don’t care if you keep kilos under the bar. And I don’t care if you sell them to Helene McCready on a daily basis. We just want to know if she had enough of a drug problem that she was in deep to somebody.”
    He held my gaze for about thirty seconds, long enough for me to see how much of a badass he was. Then he watched some more TV.
    “Big Dave,” Angie said.
    He turned his bison’s head.
    “Is Helene an addict?”
    “You know,” Big Dave said, “you’re pretty hot. You ever want to go a few rounds with a real man, give a call.”
    Angie said, “You know some?”
    Big Dave looked back up at the TV.
    Angie and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. I shrugged. The attention-deficit afflicting Helene and her friends was apparently widespread enough to fill a psych ward.
    “She didn’t have no big debts,” Big Dave said. “She’s into me for maybe sixty bucks. If she was into anybody else for…party favors, I’d have heard about it.”
    “Hey, Big Dave,” one of the men down the end of the bar called, “you ask her yet if she blows?”
    Big Dave held out his arms to them and shrugged. “Ask her yourself.”
    “Hey, honey,” the man called. “Hey, honey.”
    “What about guys?” Angie kept her eyes on Dave, her voice clear, as if whatever these assholes were talking about had nothing to do with her. “Was she seeing anybody who might be pissed off at