Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) by Jesse Sublett Read Free Book Online

hang out, ask about things and about people around here. She’d usually buy a little something, but I never figured her out.”
“She said she was a detective,” I said.
“Well,” she laughed, “maybe so. Maybe she was investigating the thrift shop business.”
“She ask about your business, or about any of the other stores in town?”
    “Well, mostly about old Vick. She seemed pretty curious about him. I’d tell her what I know about Electric Ladyland, St. Vincent de Paul, Room Service, and Flashback, but she’d always come back to asking about Vick. I guess he does have the most interesting place in town.” She finished her drink and stood, smoothing out the folds of her hand-painted muslin china poblana skirt as headlights swooped over us through the front window. “Ransom’s here, and it looks like my husband’s letting him drive, too. Can you believe it? Nice talking to you, Martin. Buy something next time.”
     
     
    &&&
     
     
    I was starting to feel better and worse at the same time. Better, because my head was clearing and so was the situation. Worse, because it didn’t make me like the situation any better. Retha Thomas had asked me about Vick Travis and how he was supposed to be some kind of character. She also told me she was a detective. At the time, it all seemed like after-hours chatter, the kind of thing that someone says and you play along with it. If you had more important things to talk about, you’d probably do it somewhere else, during a different time of day.
    Lasko didn’t seem very interested in the detective angle. He had plenty of other angles to keep him busy. However, it was one of the few things I had to go on, and, besides, Vick’s muscle man, Ed the Head, had been at the party. Maybe he knew something.
    I sped down 12th Street east toward the Capitol building, admiring its hard pink granite double dome bathed in respectful lights on a lap of cool green grass and surrounded by pecan trees, memorial statues, and silent cannons. I swung right on Congress Avenue, a corridor of brassy postmodern pyramids that elbowed out the older nineteenth-century structures, hogged the sidewalks, mostly stood there vacant—Johnny-come-latelies in the ’80s boom that had gone bust. Downtown was quiet.
    As I waited at the light at East 1st Street, the green mossy smells of Town Lake drifted over, cool and clinging. From where I sat, you couldn’t see the litter and scum floating on the surface or hear the wicked undertow swirling below, and you might mistake the bats fluttering around the streetlights for sparrows. When the light changed I took the left and pulled over just past the Sheraton Crest. Vick’s Vintage sat in the shadow of the hotel parking garage, a two-story flat-roofed yellow brick shoe box on the rise off the north shore of the lake, with no other concession to style than a curved wall of glass brick on either side of the front door now gray with street grime. I parked behind an olive green late ’70s Plymouth with a blistered, peeling vinyl top and bondo spots on the trunk. There was a vaguely human shape in the doorway of the store, apparently locking up. I bounded out of the car and trotted up the sidewalk.
    It wasn’t Vick Travis, it was Ed. He always seemed to be at a doorway—working as a bouncer in a bar or working security at a concert. He worked cheap and was good at bouncing troublemakers, but he was scary looking and occasionally he bounced people too hard. Consequently, it was the sleazier bars and the more shakily financed concerts that employed him. He was shaking his head, using a mop handle to point to the “Closed” sign. I was tapping the glass with my keys, trying to shout through the glass that it was important, when a car engine suddenly roared to life and tires screeched. I looked back toward the street. Nothing remained of the Plymouth but a cloud of blue smoke. Someone had been in a hurry, someone who’d had his head down when I pulled up