Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

New York University at night, and get the job. She was going to get her own room. She was going to meet rich, smart people, see a real play, speak in a voice nothing like that of Sherry whose name she was already forgetting as she had forgotten what her father had done to her, what her mother had said. No, not her father. That Sherry’s father, that weak, whining Sherry’s father and mother. Laura Ordette’s parents were upstanding, supportive, there for her if she wanted to go back.
    When she hit State 70 she put the duffel bag down. It had D. Stephens stenciled on it in black. Laura would get rid of it when she got to her home in New York. About two blocks down she could see the sign for the bus station. She lifted the duffel bag again and waited till the traffic let her cross.
    She was happy. She was on her way. Then why was she crying?
    Two hours had passed and I was almost finished with the book. I stopped after the scene in which Laura dumps the fully clothed drunken high school English teacher into his bath of cold water.
    No one had come in or out of the Lonsberg fort. I headed for the nearest pay phone. That took me all the way back to a gas station on the Trail. I called the Texas Bar and Grille on Second Street. Big Ed Fairing answered the phone.
    “Ed, is Ames there?”
    “He’s here. I’ll call him.”
    I heard Ed bellow for Ames above the late-afternoon beer and burger crowd.
    “He’s coming,” said Ed. “You know they’re creeping up on me, Fonesca?”
    “Who?”
    “Developers,” he said. “This used to be a perfectly respectable run-down street with some character. Now, art galleries, Swedish tearooms, antique shops. They’re creeping up. The upscaling of downtown is taking away its character.We’ll be looking like St. Armand’s Circle in two years. People have no sense of history. You know what they’re putting in next door? I mean, right next door where the cigar store was?”
    “A tanning salon?” I guessed.
    “No, Vietnamese fingernail place,” he said. “That’ll bring in a lot of business. Here’s Ames.”
    “McKinney,” Ames said in his deep and slightly raspy western Sam Elliott drawl.
    Ames is tall, white-haired, grizzled, lean, brown, and almost seventy-five years old. Ames was not supposed to bear arms. It was a right he had lost after using an ancient Remington Model 1895 revolver to kill his expartner in a duel on the beach in the park at the far south end of Lido Key. Ames had hired me to find his expartner who had run away with all the money in the bank and everything he could sell from the company he and Ames owned, a company worth forty million dollars. Ames was ruined. The bank took the company. Ames with a few thousand dollars in his pocket had tracked the partner for more than a year on buses from Arizona to St. Louis and then to Sarasota. I had found the partner. I tried to stop the two old men from dueling. I failed but I was there when it happened and testified that the expartner had fired first. Ames got off with a few minor felony counts and two months in jail. He now believed that he owed me. He never got any money back but he felt that I had helped him regain his self-respect.
    Ames had a job at the Texas Bar and Grille, a room in back, and a motor scooter. He also had access to Ed Fairing’s considerable collection of old rifles and handguns that Ames kept in perfect working order.
    Ames considered me his responsibility. He was probably also the closest thing I had to a friend.
    “Ames, Adele is missing,” I said.
    “Run off?”
    Ames was with me all through the ordeal with Adele and her parents. Ames had gotten along particularly well with Adele’s mother Beryl. When Beryl died, Ames rode shotgun at my side, literally, when we got Adele back from her life on the North Trail. When Ames looked at Adele withdisapproval, Adele’s inventive foul language disappeared. There was something about the old man that made people want to earn his respect.
    “I