Side by Side by John Ramsey Miller Read Free Book Online

cell phone. He was right about both things—Peanut was mad that the judge got away, but real interested in the woman and the bearded man.
    “I shoulda known better than to send a child to do a man’s job,” Peanut told Click several times to let him know he meant it. And don’t think Click didn’t know better than to mention the fact that he had told his daddy following somebody wasn’t a one-man job.
    Peanut agreed that, since the bearded man and the pretty woman were both staying at the same hotel on the same floor, but acting like they didn’t know each other, they were up to something. He said they needed watching more than the judge.
    “It’s the damned FBI,” Peanut said.
    “You sure?” Click said. “The man with the beard was goofy looking. He looked like he was supposed to be a college prof in some low-budget porn video.”
    “Feds,” his father told him. “Sure as caged chimps sling balls of monkey dung. All the agents aren’t in slick suits. I need to think on it some.”
    Click knew that the judge had screwed up by defying his father’s orders not to bring in the cops. Watching the judge was pointless now because the jurist was going to be punished exactly as he had been warned. Blood would have to flow or Peanut’s threats would be seen as less than certain.
    Click was ready to leave the hotel. What more could he do? He wanted to go by Best Buy and pick out a few CDs, get some more memory for his Dell laptop because it hung up on his favorite interactive game, Urban Plague, and that lag had gotten him killed the night before. His heart sank when he found out that wasn’t going to happen today.
    “Stick around there and keep your eyes open,” Peanut told him. “Call me if anything happens.”
    “What kind of anything?” Click asked.
    “You’ll know when you see it. Like more cop-looking people coming from and going to her floor.”
    “Daddy, I can’t very well park out on College Street and watch.”
    “Stay inside then. Blend in and keep a sharp eye out.”
    “What the hell do I do to blend in—get a job here?”
    Click snapped the phone shut before his daddy could ream him out and frowned. He looked at the tree growing in a giant pot and at the plants that took up a whole corner of the hotel lobby and imagined himself squatting in the prissy foliage wearing camouflage overalls. Of all the members of the Smoot clan, only Click didn’t hunt. He didn’t like being in the woods, especially after he’d gotten chiggers so bad he’d gone to the emergency room about it. He’d known the nurse was trying hard not to laugh because his privates were swollen up and itched so bad he was crying. He also didn’t like sitting still all day with frozen toes, and once he killed a deer, he had to get really nasty field-dressing it. And his siblings always smeared his face with deer blood even though it was only done when you killed the first buck of your whole life. Peanut, Click’s brothers Buck, Curt, and Burt, and his sister Dixie could have the damned woods all to themselves, as far as Click was concerned.
    Looking around at the ocean of open space punctuated with modern furniture, the polished marble and glass, he tried to figure out just how the hell he was going to manage an act of camouflage.

8
     

    With his perfect white hair, bushy brows, his neatly trimmed mustache and perfect nails, attorney Ross Laughlin looked like an actor playing a distinguished senator. He wore a three-thousand-dollar Brioni suit, a three-hundred-dollar custom-made silk dress shirt, an Armani tie and thousand-dollar British shoes sewn especially for his feet. A massive gold signet ring bearing his family crest encircled his ring finger, and a platinum Rolex President wrapped his wrist. The attorney sat on the chilled steel chair and placed his briefcase to his right side on the tabletop, which was marred with graffiti. Popping open the briefcase, he removed the crocodile-skin notebook and opened it.