Suitcase City by Sterling Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

Augustine Slave Market sit-ins, all of it.”
    For the third time in an hour, Teach’s knees liquefied, and his vision narrowed. “But what about him?” Nodding again at the men’s room door. “What’s he gonna do?”
    Delbert shrugged again. A cop’s response to a life lived in the vortex of Tampa’s troubles. The Big Shrug. Delbert said, “I don’t know what he’s gonna do. But I’ll tell you this: with Aimes it’s hard but it’s fair.”
    Aimes came out of the men’s room, and Teach watched the two cops leave. Then he turned to the bar for the bourbon he needed. For the mended view that would come with it. McLuster was already at the bar, getting a quick one for the road. Teach took a stool and said, “The same again, please.” Then to McLuster, “Christ, what a day. You walk into a bar and you—”
    Benny the bartender looked at Teach in a not very serving way. “Your money’s no good here, buddy. Why don’t you take your ass down the road. We got to make a living in this neighborhood.”
    Ah, Teach thought, ah yes . And his hand shook a little at the deferral of bourbon . Ah yes, indeed . So speaks this minion of the unseen Malone. Teach slid from the stool. Looked over at McLuster, who stared back at him from the bottom of the well of a fat man’s unhappiness.
    “Well . . .” Teach tapped his watch. The ballet recital, his daughter spinning in bright light, in impossibly unstable shoes, surrounded by a supporting cast of the young and eager, and sometimes the beautiful. His daughter a vision of gift and light and love. Teach said to McLuster, “Well . . . I’d like to stay for one more, but I’ve got to go.”
    The man’s chin trembled. “You ever,” McLuster said, his hand lifting a glass to his lips, spilling some of it, putting it down. “You ever tell anyone about this . . .”
    Teach raised his hands, let them fall, shook his head. Why would he? Who did he know that would . . . ? But now he could see himself telling the story. The pee stain a necessary piece of the bizarre puzzle of this afternoon.
    McLuster swiveled on the stool, his chin quivering, his eyes going moist. And then Teach felt for the man. He took a step forward, some notion of comfort gathering in his mind. A hand to rest on the man’s shoulder. A couple of pats.
    But McLuster leaned back, raised his hands, made fists. “Stay away from me, man. You got some serious aggression, you know that? You got some unresolved shit in there you need to work on. You need to see somebody.”
    McLuster tossed money on the bar and started toward the door. Teach watched him. This was not a day to let anyone get behind you. McLuster stopped at the door, his red face swollen, shaking. “You never were worth a damn in the pocket, Mr. Hot-Shit Quarterback. You had a noodle arm, and you never could pass the gut check.”
    The gut check? Teach thought, as McLuster opened the door, as the light, not so bright now at five thirty, shafted across the floor. The gut check. Check your guts at the door when you come to Malone’s Bar. Oh, how they piled on you here in Malone’s, Teach thought, and he would have laughed if his throat had not been too dry for even an exhausted croak. Benny the bartender wiped his shiny bald head with a towel and turned away.

SIX
    Detective Aimes stopped beside the unmarked Crown Vic and looked at La Teresita, Tampa’s best cheap Cuban restaurant. He had left a plate of trout à la rusa on the counter before crossing the street to Malone’s Bar. From the other side of the Crown Vic, Detective Dwayne Delbert was watching him carefully. Delbert’s eyes were full of that quiet redneck seriousness, that question: What now, boss?
    Aimes and Delbert had been eating, Aimes having his usual, and Delbert addressing himself to a pressed Cuban sandwich with so much Louisiana pepper sauce on it, he was hissing, “Haaa!” with every bite. Some old guy rushes in, so skinny and brown he looks like bones in a leather bag,