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

edges of my healing ulcer.
    Vin grew pensive.
    “I can’t believe Rory’s gone,” he said. “She was the life of the party in our senior year at Finney. The nuns never knew what to make of her. I used to follow her around like a puppy dog. I wonder why she never gave me a tumble.”
    Pug butted out his cigarette and shook his head.
    “Listen Vin, the kid had lousy taste in men. You were too good a guy to make her list of losers.”
    After a few more shots, Vin rolled out the door into the rain. When he pulled away from the curb in his 1948 pink Caddy, he had a smile wrapped around his fat cigar.
    Pug walked over and set an ashtray on the pool table where a leak had broken through.
    “We’re going to have our hands full with Stafford,” he said. “We’re going to need Mick behind the wheel.”
    I slowly stubbed out my smoke and limped over to where he was standing.
    “I hate to get a priest mixed up in this,” I said.
    Pug rested his elbows on the pool table, his blue eyes burning with intensity.
    “So, we should use Vin and he calls in the favor up the road? You really want to get in that deep with the gumbas?”
    “You have a point. I guess we clean up our own side of the street.”
    I made it to the phone behind the bar. The fluid was building up on my knee again and I felt slightly disoriented. I punched in Mick’s number and his housekeeper, Mrs. Healy, answered. I heard her slippers pad away from the phone.
    “Father McFeeney,” she called. “It’s trouble on the phone.”
    He moaned sleepily.
    “Pug or Joey?” he asked.
    * * * *
     
    By the time night fell, the streets were rushing with water. Shingles were blown from rooftops and broken branches littered the roadways. Mick looked the part of a proper limo driver in his priestly casuals and Gino’s shiny brimmed cap.
    Mick’s nose was as flat as a boxer’s from all the scrapes he’d been in growing up on the streets of Little Ireland, and his beefy face was as knuckly as his fists. There wasn’t a wife-beater or gang-banger he hadn’t dumped on his ass.
    Mick let me and Pug off a block up from Stafford’s townhouse, then circled back to make the pickup. I felt like a wreck, stumbling around on my cane, but without it I couldn’t even stand. My face burned with fever and I felt a vague disconnect with my surroundings, like I was walking in someone else’s dream.
    Pug peered down the block and watched the roof light go on in the limo.
    “The bastard fell for it,” he said.
    My face was so hot that rain steamed off of my skin. Water streamed from the visors of our caps.
    “Here they come,” said Pug.
    Mick splashed the limo to the curb, filling our shoes with water. I walked around the car, opened the back seat driver’s side door, plopped down on the seat and punched my revolver into Stafford’s ribs.
    Pug opened the opposite door and there sat the blonde, looking as hot as a pistol in a short sequined mini and blue fox jacket.
    Mick shot me a chastising look in the rear view.
    Okay, okay, so that small detail fell off my radar.
    Pug was fast on his feet, didn’t miss a beat. He reached into his wallet, pressed a crisp fifty in her hand and left her sputtering on the street corner outside Kelly’s Bar, rain dripping into her silver shoes.
    “Just what we need,” said Mick. “A fuckin’ witness to a kidnapping. That’ll be five Our Father’s and three Hail Mary’s.”
    “What the fuck!” said Stafford, looking first at me, then at Mick. “Where the hell is Gino?”
    “Just relax,” said Pug, his voice husky from smoking.
    “Hey, wait a minute. If this is about Rory, I already told you....”
    “We can make it about her,” I said, “or let’s see, we can make it about Angie Milano.”
    Bull’s-eye.
    Stafford turned a sallow shade of corpse gray. I knew then that everything Vin had told us was right on the button.
    “I didn’t think you micks hung with the wops,” he said. “They’re always talking shit, probably