Ghost of a Flea Read Online Free PDF Page A

jerks back, his feet slip and he goes down, but the piece goes off anyway. Then the six-pack hits him square in the face. That, the fall when he slams his head, and the store owner’s jumping the counter and doing some slamming of his own with a baseball bat puts this mook down for the count. The other one’s history by now. Long gone.
    “But then the store owner, a Mr. Chadras, looks over and sees Walsh lying there with his service revolver drawn and blood streaming out all around him. He’s having trouble breathing, too. But Mr. Chadras, it turns out, was a doctor back in his own country. He grabs a piece of gauze and some Vaseline off the shelf and slaps it over the hole in Walsh’s chest. Saved his life, the paramedics say.
    “Boy that did this looks all of nineteen. We tried running him, but the computer just started spitting out empties. Those weren’t all that got spit out last night, either.”
    Santos took a small box from his pocket, the kind jewelry comes in.
    “I ain’t saying this was right, Griffin—or how it came about. Crew that booked him sent it up late last night. Boy had this tooth he was proud of. You know how they used to have those gold caps? Well, somehow or another this kid had one of those.”
    Santos lifted the box top. The gold tooth lay on a nest of cotton batting. Blood still adhered to the upper edge. A few strands of the cotton were stained pink.
    Santos shrugged and put the box back in his pocket. “What can I say?”
    For some reason, wildly, I thought of Don telling me he’d become a detective mainly because he could write a complete sentence, which put him miles ahead of the competition. I also remembered another time, years later, when I’d come upon him in a spectacularly sleazy bar deep in what was then no-man’s land below the Quarter. “Out of your element, aren’t you?” I’d said. He sat for a moment peering into his glass. “Not really. I’m like you, Lew. I take my element with me.”
    Or another time, many years later, when my life had bottomed out. Some of his men had scraped me off the walls of a bar out on Jefferson Highway and taken me to Mercy. When I woke blank as a slate, no idea what had happened and more than a few days gone, Don was sitting beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “What are you gonna do, Lew: there’s nowhere to go but on.”
    “Appreciate your filling me in, Santos.”
    He nodded.
    “You think I can see him?”
    “Just family for now. Doctor says they’ll let us in tomorrow, assuming everything goes right. I figure we go in, there’s no problem with you coming along.”
    “Thanks.”
    “No problem.”
    “What about Jeanette? She with him?”
    “Sent her home to get some rest. Took some talking and fast footwork on my part.”
    “I expect it did. Guess I should go by, then, see what I can do.”
    “Yeah, she’d like that.”
    I stepped off our island and started for the door.
    “Hey, Griffin, you need a ride?” Santos called. I turned back to decline, but saying, “Sure you do,” Santos called out again: “Whitaker, you wanna give Griffin here a ride over to Captain Walsh’s?”
    The cop I didn’t know detached himself. We went down and out and across the alley to where his gray Crown Victoria was parked by a Dumpster. (“You wouldn’t believe what shows up in there,” he said.) Moments later we pulled into traffic. Whitaker’s radio had come on, turned low, when he hit the key, one of those stations that alternates its own trademark brand of news with talk shows about welfare abuse, the conspiracy of world government and the dangers of water fluoridation. Whitaker took two sticks of gum from a package the size of a paperback War and Peace jammed into where the ashtray had once been. He was, I figured, around thirty.
    Much of the drive uptown became a kind of down-and-out Grey Line tour.
    “That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building.