Wiseguys: Blast From the Past by Aaron Michaels Read Free Book Online Page A

poked around getting the pellets out. If the sheriff hadn't insisted on talking to Tony while he was still on the emergency room bed, a thin curtain all that separated him from the next bed over, he'd be home already.
    "Yeah," he told Carter. "I'll live."
    Carter didn't push it. There'd been too many times when Carter was the one with a bullet hole or knuckles so busted up he had to ice his hand just so he could make a fist. He knew what it took to get through the pain. He'd let Tony deal with it in his own way.
    Carter stopped for a red light three blocks from the deli. It was full night now. The sun had set while the pretty emergency room doctor had been digging out the pellets. The daytime tourists, the ones who spent their time sailing on the lake or lounging on shore, had gone back to their motel rooms to nurse their sunburns and watch cable TV. The retail shops on the main drag were closed for the night, their storefronts shuttered or closed off with heavy metal gates and padlocks.
    The people on the street now were the partiers. The bars were still open, lounges with karaoke machines and small raised stages and pubs with a baseball game on the television behind the bar and pretty bartenders to sling drinks and keep the customers happy. The people out on the streets now -- tourists and locals alike -- had a harder edge. They were out for booze or drugs or sex, and even behind their smiles, Tony could see the kind of need that had kept Uncle Sid's family in business for decades.
    A group of people crossed the street in front of the van. Most of them were the kind of party people Tony would have expected. Three of them weren't.
    "Think Sewell bought our story?" Tony asked.
    "What we told him?" Carter asked.
    "Or what he's been told."
    Tony watched the three guys. All were in their mid to late thirties, all trying very hard to blend in but not doing that great of a job. It was like watching a panther at the zoo trying to blend in with a bunch of flamingos.
    "Bess sticks to what she said, then yeah, the sheriff don't have a choice," Carter said. "Unless he comes up with something on his own, and not something from Frick and Frack back there."
    The Munroe brothers didn't strike Tony as the most reliable witnesses, but he wouldn't make the mistake of underestimating the sheriff. Clifford Sewell was far from a local yokel just barely doing his job. He knew Carter and Tony were more than they appeared, he just couldn't prove it. Both of them had been vigilant about keeping their noses clean. This was the first time they'd been compelled to do something that wasn't strictly legal. Tony hoped that the fact they actually rescued Bess would go a long ways toward making the sheriff focus his attention elsewhere, like on the idiots who kidnapped her.
    The three men had reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The one Tony pegged as the leader moved with a quiet kind of menace. He had dark hair that would have been slicked straight back from his forehead in Jersey, but here he'd parted it neatly on the side with just an attempt to comb it away from his face. He was clean shaven, his dark slacks pressed, and the silk tee-shirt he wore under his sports jacket was just a cut above high-class tourist. He didn't look directly at the van, but Tony was pretty sure the guy had seen them just the same.
    More importantly, Tony had seen him.
    The light turned green, and Carter made a left turn. They were about a half mile from their house. After a block, they left the bars and lounges of the main drag behind. Houses took the place of stores, most of them single family homes more than fifty years old. Thirty foot, forty foot pines crowded front yards strewn with bicycles and swing sets and abandoned dolls and soccer balls. The cars here had seen better days, just like the old guy sitting in a wife beater and shorts on his front porch, illuminated only by the pale light from a television in his living room. Ten years ago the old guy