Violent Spring by Gary Phillips Read Free Book Online

the hip pocket of the jeans.
    â€œSee you around.” He started to leave.
    â€œCould be,” she said, smiling.
    And Monk allowed his mind to wander as he drove to Continental Donuts on Vernon Avenue near Crenshaw.
    When Monk signed out as a merchant seaman, being single and having no children, he’d managed to save a tidy sum. He told his friends he wasn’t going to do any more bounty hunting, that he wanted to try something different. He thought about opening a car repair place but he’d had enough of engines, save working on his own. Dexter Grant, his ex-boss, told him about the donut shop.
    It belonged to a friend of Grant’s, an ex-cop like he was, and the guy was looking to sell. Getting up in years, and with a changing neighborhood, the place was more than he was willing to handle. Continental Donuts had been built in 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. It was an L-shaped affair done in Streamline Moderne with a counter, fixed stools and several booths of blood red leather. On the roof was a plaster donut twenty feet in diameter with the title of the establishment painted on its side.
    At least that’s how it had looked back then. When Monk saw it, stucco was falling from it like leaves off a tree in the fall. The donut on the roof was missing sections, and the booths bled their cotton stuffing. But Monk thought the joint had promise, so he hired Abe Carson to oversee the redoing of the place.
    Yet after eight months of deep frying dough and mastering the fine art of glazing cinnamon rolls, Monk the donut king was bored. He turned the running of the shop over to others, then went back to doing bounty hunting work with a vengeance, mainly working for two bail bondspeople, a man named Lasalle and a woman in a wheelchair named McLeash.
    He hunted bailjumping burglars with ache-scarred faces and fleeing gang members hefting Uzis with Reeboks on their feet that cost more than their weapons. He searched for runaway daughters, and sought to find what made them run. The detective, like Jesus, walked the walk of thieves and murderers, cheats and liars. But unlike Jesus, the detective had no forgiveness to dispense, no great truth to find, only the hand that pulled the trigger, or grabbed the money from the till, or sunk the blade below the third rib. And what it was that made them do it. After a fashion, Monk settled into investigative work and concluded that was his evolutionary niche. His reason for getting up in the morning.
    He parked on the lot the donut shop shared with the gas station. A couple of doors east of the lot were the burned out hulks of more stone victims of last Spring’s revolt. Monk smiled ruefully at the memory of him and Elrod, the manager of Continental Donuts, standing guard on the lot during that crazy time. Monk’s .45, Elrod’s Remington shotgun and signs stating “Black Owned” on the two structures were all they had against the torrent of frustration that swept through Los Angeles.
    He waved to Curtis, the co-owner of the gas station. Using his key, he entered the donut shop through the security screen in the rear.
    Instantly, a shape—was it Mount Kilimanjaro?—blotted out the light from the overhead fluorescents. A hand anviled from wrought iron emerged from the shape and clamped around Monk’s shoulder.
    â€œWhat up?” the voice rumbled.
    â€œNothin’ much, Elrod. Everything okay here?”
    The hand returned to its owner. “Same ol’, same ol’, chief.”
    Monk craned his neck upward at Elrod. A Cruise missile would have to hit the place directly to faze the six-foot-eight, 325 pounds of solid mass. “I gotta do a little computer work then I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
    â€œSure.” The big ex-con ambled off to further demonstrate the involved process of making donut holes to the teenager he’d been instructing when Monk arrived.
    Turning down a corridor in the ‘L’ shank