Fearless Jones Read Online Free PDF

didn’t need to ask him any more questions. Wally went back to the store and brought me a Royal Crown cola and a ham sandwich.
     I sucked on the bottle and inhaled the odor of my life gone up in smoke.

5
    MILO SWEET’S bail bonds,Tax Filing, and Financial Advising office was on the fourth floor of a warehouse building on Avalon. At that time
     an illegal poultry distributor occupied the ground floor, so there was the general odor of chicken shit and grain feed throughout
     the upper rooms.
    Milo’s office had a frosted glass door with black letters stenciled at the top:
    OTTO RICKMAN
    LIFE INSURANCE AGT.
    &
    NOTARY PUBLIC
    I was never sure if that was the old sign or if Milo purposely had it printed to mislead creditors and others who might have
     held a grudge or a marker.
    The room was maybe twenty feet wide and ten deep. There were three windows across the back wall and a desk on either side
     of the room. Wooden filing cabinets filled in the spaces between the windows.
    “Hello, Mr. Minton,” Milo’s secretary, Loretta Kuroko, said from the desk on the right. She’d been Milo’s secretary since
     his lawyer days. She stayed with him after he’d been disbarred, imprisoned for three years, and then when he went through
     a series of professions. She was a hostess when he had been a restaurant owner, a bookkeeper when he’d tried car insurance
     sales. Even in Milo’s brief stint as a fence Loretta answered his phone and ran interference with the fiercest of clients.
    They had never been lovers as far as I knew, and that was odd because Loretta loved Milo and she had a kind of perpetual beauty,
     thin and elegant with no wrinkles or lines. She was Japanese-American, a victim of America’s little-publicized Japanese internment
     camps during World War Two.
    “Loretta,” I replied.
    “Hey hey, Paris,” Milo growled from his desk to the left. He sat in a haze of mentholated cigarette smoke, smiling like a
     king bug in a child’s nightmare.
    Milo was always the darkest man in the room, except when he was in the room with Fearless. He was taller than I but not six
     feet. He had big hands and long arms, bright white eyes and teeth and the complexion of polished charcoal. His short hair
     was always loaded with pomade and combed to the right. He knew the definition of every word in the dictionary and every once
     in a while managed to beat me at a game of chess.
    “Milo,” I hailed. “How’s it goin’?”
    “Must be good for somebody, somewhere. Must be. But don’t ask me where.”
    I sat down and submitted to the scrutiny of those bright eyes.
    “What’s wrong, Paris?”
    “Who said anything was wrong?”
    “Your eyes is red. Your head is hangin’. You don’t have a chessboard or a book under your arm, so you must be here on bidness.”
     Milo paused and looked a little harder. “And if it’s bidness you here for, it can’t be for you because if it was, you’d be
     in jail and callin’ me on the phone. It ain’t tax time, and you sure don’t make enough money to need financial advice. So
     if it ain’t you, then it must be Fearless.” Milo enjoyed reading between the lines. He was good at it, I had to admit that.
     “But you refused to come up with his fine before, so now something must have changed. That means I was right in the first
     place and you are in trouble. So, what’s wrong, Paris?”
    “Believe me, Mr. Sweet, you don’t wanna know. I got to get Fearless outta jail and I got to do it fast. Will you help me?”
    “I ain’t no bank.”
    “You’re not a German insurance salesman either.”
    Milo didn’t bother to answer that swipe. I put a stack of five one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and then placed a twenty
     crosswise on that.
    “It’s all I got,” I apologized.
    “You expect me to spring him for just twenty?”
    “I’ll pay the rest in four weeks’ time.”
    I had done work for Milo in the past. Asked a few questions, come up with an address or two on bail