A Firing Offense Read Online Free PDF Page A

but disappeared, and there was much more gray salted into his hair. He looked somewhat like a cinderblock with legs.
    “You lost, Youngblood?” he asked.
    “Could be,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’ll be working here for a couple of weeks. Management wants me to get back in touch with the business.”
    “You wouldn’t be spying on your old boss, would you, buddy?”
    I didn’t answer that but said, “I’ll stay out of your way, Louie.”
    “Whatever.” He threw up his arms in a gesture of surrender. “Listen, your boys are late as usual, and I got to get this place open. I’ll talk to you later, hear?”
    Louie returned to the television section. As the manager of the highest volume store, he knew what his priorities were: to put out fires and to protect his salesmen from the main office. In turn, he was covered by his employees during his daily afternoon visits to his girlfriend across the street in the Van Ness apartments, and on those mornings when his hangovers kept him paralyzed with his head on the desk in the “employee lounge” at the rear of the store.
    A small bell sounded as the front door opened, and I turned to see Andre Malone flowing towards me. He was tall, reedy, and elegant in his no-vent sportcoat, silk shirt and tie, reverse pleated trousers, and Italian loafers. Though he’d come out of one of the most hopelessly dangerous sections of the city, there was something of the aristocrat in his bearing and in the way he held his head. He saw me and widened his eyes in mock amazement.
    “What’s goin’ on, Country?” he said. I touched the sharp crease on his trousers and pulled my hand away quickly as if I had been cut.
    “You may be the prettiest person I’ve ever known.”
    He smiled and revealed a perfect row of teeth below his Wyatt Earp mustache. “I see you’re doin’ all right yourself. Finally wearin’ some cotton. Used to be I was afraid to light a match around your polyester ass.”
    “I’m on the fast track, Andre. I
had
to upgrade.”
    “What you doin’ here, man?” His forehead wrinkled as he found a Newport in his breast pocket and lit it in one fluid movement.
    “I’ll be working here for a while,” I said vaguely. “Whatever deals I write, I’ll throw to you or Johnny. I might need you to protect me every so often from the office, in case I’m not here.”
    “Uh-huh,” he said suspiciously, then jerked his head towards the door as the small bell rang. “Here comes your boy now.”
    Johnny McGinnes blew through the front door and goose-stepped towards the back. There was neither surprise nor delight on his face when he saw me. In acknowledgment he pulled two sixteen-ounce cans of Colt 45 from each of his stretched-out pockets and wiggled his eyebrows in my direction, then continued by.
    A young woman entered just behind him and hurried around the glass case, stowing her books and purse somewhere below the counter. I caught her eye and she straightened her posture.
    Malone was walking alongside Louie now, pleading with him to call an irate customer and iron things out. Louie would eventually do it, but at the moment was torturing Malone with silence. I made my way across the worn gold-and-red carpet squares of the Sound Explosion and entered the back room.
    I walked through a short hallway that contained Louie’sdesk. The hallway led to the “radio room,” the toilet, and the entrance to the stockroom in the basement. I stepped into the radio room. McGinnes was finishing a swallow of malt liquor and hiding the can behind some stock.
    He was not especially tall, though his perfect posture gave the illusion of presence. His clothing was invariably a polyester blend and always clean. He had lost more of his straight black hair since I had last seen him and had begun combing it forward, out and across his forehead in an almost Hitleresque fashion. His tiny nose was set on his flat Mick face like a blemish.
    I looked at the top of the Colt can showing from