Shadow Roll by Ki Longfellow Read Free Book Online

turned.  Slowly.  No pretending I hadn’t heard the voice.  No use running.
    I didn’t even know the guy’s name.  But I knew his face.  It was that barely grown-up lug, the one with a comb-over, the tongue-depressor-moustache and boozer’s breath.
    Why would a Staten Island cop, the one guarding poor little Pamela’s crime scene, be in Saratoga when I was in Saratoga?  (Speaking of Lino’s latest case, I’d learned Pamela’s last name was Teager, that she’d been raped by her uncle, the wonderful Rudy Teager, and that her loving father took his brother in, but threw Pamela out.  After that, somehow she’d made her way to the Staten Island Home for Children, where Mister—acting for his merciful God—put her out of his misery.)  Here, in all his rooty toot zoot-suited glory stood the kewpie-doll cop.  I was exaggerating.  What he was wearing was not a Zoot suit.  But it could of been.  The bright green material was shiny enough and green enough and too big enough.
    I slipped off the glasses to check I was seeing what I was seeing.
    If he noticed me doing that, I couldn’t tell.  He had his hand out.  I was supposed to shake it—in public, where decently dressed citizens could see me doing it.  It was embarrassing.  So I put out my own hand hard enough to propel him into the nearest half private place—which happened to be a bar called The Finish Line .
    He minded getting shoved into a bar—with a name, I thought, that summed up drinking to a T—about as much as I minded sitting through a Bogart double feature.  Not that I minded drinking.  I liked drinking.  But not before noon.  Most people drew a line somewhere.  Seemed this guy didn’t know how to draw.  Now I was closer, I could smell his choice of poison: Old Crow.  He and his suit were “aged” in the stuff.  I’d noticed it back in Stapleton standing around Pamela and her crime scene.
    A smell strong enough to compete with all that was some smell.
     “You buying me a drink, Russo?”
    I didn’t have an answer to that one.  Dragging him into The Finish Line , I’d acted on instinct alone.  So I bought him a drink.  I asked for a glass of water.  On the rocks.  I got a glass of water without ice and a funny look from the barman.
    “Thanks,” said whoever this cop was, knocking back my gift with one quick bend of his wrist.  “Never thought I’d see you up here.  Figured you for a strictly Monmouth Park kind of guy.  You wanna know why I’m up here?”
    No.  Yes.  No.  Well actually yes.  “You came for the mineral waters?”
    “Hah!  Nah.  I came ‘cause your old pal Lino fired me.  So I’m not a flatfoot no more.  Boo hoo.  But about two hours later this other guy hired me.”
    The hair on the back of my neck crisped a little at that.  “Oh yeah?”  I wanted to ask why Lino fired him.  I wanted to ask why anyone else would hire him.  I wanted to know what he was hired for .  Did it have anything to do with dead jockeys?  I didn’t say a thing besides “Oh yeah?”
    “I’m standing there, looking at nothing, right?  And I mean nothing.  It’s out of the blue, what Lino done.  And I’m a vet like you and about a million other guys and I’ve just lost about the seventeenth job in a row, and this guy walks up and he says, you look like you could use a little work.  And I say, you ain’t just whistling Dixie.  And he says, well then, giddyap, pal, ‘cause you’re perfect for this job I got.  So I get into this car— ”
    “Hold on.  You just got into a car?”
    “Sure.  Who wouldn’t get into a brand new Cadillac?”
    “About everyone I can think of,” I said, “unless there’s a gun involved.”
    I don’t think he heard me.  He was still waxing lyrical.  He’d also ordered another Old Crow—on my dime.  And this was a guy I didn’t even know the name of, and didn’t hope to find out.  All I was doing by now was wondering if there was a back door to The Finish