Cold Bullets and Hot Babes: Dark Crime Stories Read Online Free PDF

iced the clerk at the Likkor Lokker. He got what he had coming to him.”
    “It wasn’t me,” I said. “I was kissing the asphalt in the parking lot. My partner dropped him with a single shot through the left eye. Came out the back of his head, clean as a whistle.”
    “You mean Deborah Moskawitz saved your sorry ass?”
    “That’s the one.”
    “She used to beat me up and steal my lunch in fifth grade. Turned me on.”
    As Pug poured a round of eye-openers, I pulled Rory’s purse and the cell phone from inside my raincoat and set them on the table. Rain hammered the roof above our heads and a tree of lightning bloomed on the horizon.
    “Vin’s got a dog in this fight too,” said Pug.
    Vin downed his shot. He sat quietly flexing the muscles in his jaw.
    “How so?” I said, detecting the shift in mood.
    “I had a cousin,” said Vin. “Angie Milano. Guess who she was involved with when she vanished off the face of the earth?”
    “Colby Stafford.” I lit a smoke and leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”
    “Angie and Stafford got into it over something. I never knew what. He hit her in the head so hard she went deaf in one ear. The day she threatened to file a complaint she disappeared. She was only sixteen years old for crissake.” He swallowed hard to loosen the tightness in his throat.
    “She’ll always be sixteen, if you know what I mean. That was seven years ago before you came on The Job. We never recovered so much as a tooth.” His eyes were sad and dark as Italian olives. “She ain’t the only girl dropped down the same black hole. You find so much as your sister’s fingernail, you’ll be the first who finds anything.”
    “I ran his name when Rory started seeing him. How come he comes up clean?”
    “He’s one of Supervisor Wright’s most loyal contributors. Wright makes sure that the missing girls go down as runaways. Stafford knows to pick them young and wild, so when they ain’t around no more, no one digs too deep. Angie gets buried in the cold case file with all them other missing girls.”
    Pug cracked his knuckles and lit a cigarette from the cinder of the one before it. We sat silently for a beat or two, rain ticking against the window.
    “We don’t close him down,” said Pug, “no one else will.”
    Even if I trusted the veracity of Vin’s account, I was apprehensive at being sucked into the dark vortex of his reality. I wanted to think that I was removed...if only by a hair’s breadth...from the world of thugs, gamblers and Italian gumbas with ‘connections.’
    I rubbed my tired eyes and shifted my knee to one more uncomfortable position.
    “Let’s slow down a minute,” I said. “This is serious shit we’re talking here. No need to go off half cocked.”
    “Slow down while he runs off to the Bahamas like he done when Angie went missing?”
    I took an inventory of what we had...the pregnancy...the blood...Vin’s cousin...my sister...Stafford’s political connections with a less than sterling public figure. Then I asked myself if the world would be better or worse off if Stafford wasn’t in it.
    “Stafford’s tough, or he wouldn’t still be around. He’ll have his guard up,” I said.
    Vin hunched forward, conspiratorially.
    “Just hear me out,” he said. “Every Saturday night at nine sharp, my nephew Gino picks Stafford up at the townhouse and drives him across the river to the Carnival Club. Let’s say tonight we put the limo at your disposal. Do whatcha gotta do, just don’t leave no evidence behind. Gino’s working his way through college and don’t need no complications in his life, like blood, hair, that kind of shit.”
    I downed my shot and took a Trappist moment to clear my head. Vin thumped back in his chair and threw his hands in the air.
    “Stop worrying for crissake! It’ll be dark and stormy. He’ll never see it coming.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Tonight.”
    Pug poured a second round of shots. I tossed mine back and felt it warm the