The Godless One by J. Clayton Rogers Read Free Book Online Page A

easily. But my kids…" He nodded at the departing
girl as though she was one of his brood.
    Ari grimaced as he stood. Had he pulled
a back muscle? After all the fights he had been in, the irony of
injuring himself while chasing a cat was not lost on
him.
    "Could you explain ‘funning’?" he
said.
    "Joshing, joking," Mangioni answered
amiably. "I guess it’s not proper grammar." He glanced at his
partner. "Is it?"
    "Not my department," said Jackson, who
was never quite free of surliness. Ari could not tell if this was
the result of a philosophical world view, or simply dyspepsia.
Jackson had a pouch in his hand. If he was here on some kind of
business, Ari did not want it conducted inside his house. The smell
embarrassed him and the gun on his refrigerator could get him
arrested.
    "You want to speak to me about
something?" he inquired politely. "Maybe we should talk outside.
I’ve had an accident in the kitchen."
    "You seem to have a lot of
those," Jackson smirked. They had once entered his house to find
the rooms filled with smoke. Ari had been attempting to cook masgouf , unaware that
the stove’s exhaust tube was blocked by Moria Riggins’ stash of
cocaine.
    As soon as he closed the door behind
him, Ari realized the impracticality of his suggestion. It would be
hard to hold a conversation if their teeth were
chattering.
    "You want to get a coat?" inquired
Jackson.
    "Or we can sit in the patrol car,"
Mangioni offered.
    Ari nodded towards the street and they
proceeded down the sidewalk. He glanced up Beach Court Lane to see
if Sphinx had made his escape, but Diane was already out of
sight.
    Jackson held open the back door of the
patrol car, handing Ari the pouch as he got in. "We’ll have to let
you out," he said as he closed the door. "There’s no handle
inside."
    The officers slid into their front
seats. The engine was running and the heater going full blast. Ari
noted the new flowers next to the mailbox. Jackson and Mangioni had
been placing these commemorative mementoes at the same spot for
just over a year now, in memory of the Riggins family. The man who
had instigated the practice was now dead. They must be doing this
out of habit. But when Ari looked more closely, he realized the
flowers were, for the first time, plastic. This made sense in the
winter, but he could not shrug off the sense that the bogus flowers
represented artificial sentiment. He was sure this was the last
bouquet, that Jackson and Mangioni were finished with tributes. Yet
they had been on the scene when the bodies were discovered. Not the
first ones, as it turned out, but early enough to catch a hint of
the truth.
    The two men up front did not appear to
know how to begin. Ari started to unzip the pouch.
    "You don’t have to open that," said
Mangioni nervously. "Not if you don’t want to."
    "I don’t understand. I had the
impression you wanted me to study the contents."
    "We do, but…" Mangioni had turned in
his seat and was studying Ari. "Are you all right, Mr. Ciminon? I
hope you don’t mind me saying, but you don’t look well."
    Ari bushed this off with a brusque wave
of the hand. "A little problem with adjusting to American
food."
    "What?" Mangioni grinned. "Are you
saying Italian isn’t American?"
    It was a major slip. For a
moment, Ari had forgotten that these men believed he was from
Sicily. Pizza was not as alien here as shakshouka . They wouldn’t know that
the gustatory leap was far greater than they had been led to
believe. However, the fact that the metropolitan police and U.S.
Marshals Service were not in sync with each other gave Ari some
measure of comfort. He was accustomed to a culture of secrecy and
thuggish bureaucratic infighting.
    "Let’s get on with it," Jackson said
impatiently.
    "I just want him to be prepared,"
Mangioni responded, frowning. "It’s pretty grisly, right? Not
everybody can stomach this sort of thing." He turned back to Ari.
"What’s in the pouch are pictures of Louis Carrington after he