A Killing Night Read Online Free PDF

in.
    “Hiya, hon. Coffee?”
    The waitress was sixty if she was a day and the red shade on her lips was the color of fire engines before they went to that fluorescent yellow green. She was already balancing the birdbath-sized cup and saucer in her hand. Few people stopped at Lester’s if they were afraid of caffeine.
    “Please,” I said.
    The ceramic setup clattered like two rocks when she put it down. She poured from the plastic pitcher in her other hand and the aroma was my heaven.
    “Ya knowwhatchawant, hon?” she said, like it was all one word.
    “I’m waiting for someone.”
    “Ain’t we all?” she said and slid a menu next to the coffee and winked before leaving.
    I sipped the coffee and watched the patrons over the rim. Guys on the counter stools with long-sleeved flannel shirts rolled up to the elbows, rumpled jeans and thick-soled boots. Two young women facing each other in a booth. The bleached blonde was facing me and I could see her red-rimmed eyes and she kept exhaling and shaking her hand in between low words. It was hard from a distance to tell if the dark smear on her cheekbone was a bruise or a swipe of running makeup. The back of her friend’s head just kept bobbing, listening. Two guys, medium height and build, slid out of another booth. They were clean-shaven and dressed in pleated slacks and polo shirts. The one with his back to me had a lump that was belt high under his shirt. When he leaned over to put a tip on the table the fabric pulled up over the clip-on holster, exposing the leather. When I looked up beyond him, his partner was checking out my eyes. Cops casing the customers, I thought. How typical.
    Richards came in ten minutes late. I caught the blonde top of her head bobbing just below the windows as she walked up from the parking lot. In heels she was taller than most men. She hesitated just inside the vestibule and I couldn’t tell if she was finishing a cell phone call or putting on a fresh layer of lipstick. She stepped in and turned the opposite way first. She was in a beige, silk-looking suit and her hair was longer than I remembered. It was pulled back into a thick braid that hung down her back like a wheat-colored rope. When she spun and spotted me she smiled. As she approached, I raised the big cup to my lips, uncertain what my face was showing.
    “Max, I’m really sorry I’m late.”
    I put the cup down and started to get up to greet her but she slid gracefully into the other side of the booth. There would be no quick embrace, kiss on the cheek or uncomfortable moment.
    “Not a problem,” I said. “You know my motto: Have coffee, will sit and muddle.”
    I wrapped my fingers around the cup.
    “Habits that never die,” she said.
    “Not until I do,” I said and watched her. “You look great. Still running?”
    My direct compliment, even if she got it a lot from others, brought a tiny flush of color to her cheeks.
    “Cycling, actually. A friend of mine got me into it. So we put in sixty or seventy miles a week. I’m enjoying it. It’s a lot less damaging on the knees. You’d like it.”
    I tried to imagine myself in some bold-colored, skin-tight jersey and wearing a helmet with a little mirror sticking out the side. I didn’t respond.
    “You look like you’re still canoeing,” she said, giving her own shoulders a hunch and closing her fists in a mock muscle pose. I had kept some upper body mass on my lean, six-foot-three-inch frame.
    “You do still have the Glades place, right?”
    “Yeah. In fact I’m heading out back out there today.”
    “OK.” She shifted her voice. “Let me tell you about this case, then.”
    I watched Richards’s eyes while I sipped coffee and listened to her words. She’d been working on the disappearance of three women. All of them had vanished over the last twenty months. Their only connection was that they had worked as bartenders at small, out-of-the-way taverns in Broward County, they had no local family connections and