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

at the TV above him, intently focused on an episode of Gilligan’s Island . The Skipper was hitting Gilligan on the head with his cap. The Professor was trying to break it up. The Howells laughed. Maryann and Ginger were nowhere to be found. Maybe that had something to do with the plot.
    Angie and I took stools at the far corner of the bar, near the bartender, and waited for him to acknowledge us.
    The Skipper kept hitting Gilligan. He was apparently mad about something involving a monkey.
    “This is a great one,” I said to Angie. “They almost get off the island.”
    “Really?” Angie lit a cigarette. “Pray tell, what stops them?”
    “Skipper professes his love for his little buddy and they get all caught up in the wedding arrangements and the monkey steals the boat and all their coconuts.”
    “Right,” Angie said. “I remember this one now.”
    The bartender turned and looked down at us. “What?” he said.
    “A pint of your finest ale,” I said.
    “Two,” Angie said.
    “Fine,” the bartender said. “But then you shut up until the show’s over. Some of us haven’t seen this one.”
     
    After Gilligan , the bar TV was tuned to an episode of Public Enemies , a fact-based crime show in which the exploits of wanted felons were reenacted by actors so inept they made Van Damme and Seagal look like Olivier and Gielgud. This particular episode concerned a man who’d sexually molested and then carved up his children in Montana, shot a state trooper in North Dakota, and seemed to have spent his entire life making sure everyone he encountered had one bad fucking day.
    “You ask me,” Big Dave Strand said to Angie and me, as they flashed the felon’s face onscreen, “that’s the guy you should be talking to. Not bothering my people.”
    Big Dave Strand was the owner and chief bartender of the Filmore Tap. He was, true to his name, big—at least six four, with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew. Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips and dark green jailhouse tattoos on both biceps. The one on the left arm depicted a revolver and bore the word FUCK below it. The one on the right seemed to be of a bullet impacting with a skull and said YOU below it.
    Oddly, I’d never run into Big Dave in church.
    “Knew guys like him in the joint,” Big Dave said. He drew himself another pint of Piel’s from the tap. “Freaks. They’d keep ’em out of general population ’cause they knew what we’d do to them. They knew.” He downed half his pint, looked up at the TV again, and belched.
    The bar smelled of sour milk for some reason. And sweat. And beer. And buttered popcorn from the baskets spaced out along the bar at every fourth stool. The floor was rubber tile, and Big Dave kept a hose behind the bar. By the looks of the floor, it had been a few days since he’d used it. Cigarette butts and popcorn were ground into the rubber, and I was pretty sure the small movements I saw coming from the shadows under one of the tables were those of mice nibbling on something along the baseboard.
    We’d questioned all four men at the bar about Helene McCready, and none of them had been much help. They were older men, the youngest in his mid-thirties but looking a decade older. They all looked Angie up and down as if she were hanging naked in a butcher’s window. They weren’t particularly hostile, but they weren’t helpful either. They all knew Helene but didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her. They all knew her daughter was missing and didn’t seem to feel one way or another about that either. One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said, “The kid’s missing. So? She’ll turn up. They always do.”
    “You’ve misplaced children before?” Angie said.
    Lenny nodded. “They showed back up.”
    “Where are they now?” I said.
    “One’s in