Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

named for my wife.
    Catherine was on her back, face turned toward me, eyes closed. She had a small crown of yellow hair, a round pink face. She looked vulnerable. I thought of the snake that had eaten Ann Horowitz’s pink mouse and I shuddered. The baby sensed something, fidgeted, and turned her head away.
    Flo took my arm and led me out of the room. When we were back in the living room, Flo pointed at a small white plastic box on the tree-stump coffee table.
    “Intercom,” she said, patting the box as if it were a pet dog. “She makes a peep, I hear her.”
    I worked on my Diet Coke.
    “So,” she said. “Take off your hat and sit a while.”
    Flo had the twang of New York in her voice and the grammar of Oklahoma picked up from more than half a century of listening to western music.
    I took off my cap, brushed what remained of my hair back with one hand, and said, “You’re getting your driver’s license back,” I said.
    “No shit,” she said, sitting upright.
    “None,” I said. “If you get another DUI, you, me, and an influential local politician will wind up on the front page of the paper.”
    “It’d have to be a slow news day,” she said.
    “No. He’s big enough to make the front page.”
    “I’m clean and sober, Lewis,” she said. “On my dead husband Gus’s grave, I swear. Don’t need it anymore. I’ve got Adele. I’ve got the baby.”
    “Adele is…?”
    “Straight arrow,” Flo said, gliding a flattened hand through the air. “Straight A’s. No boys. No men.”
    Adele had been a child prostitute, sold by her father to a pimp. She had straightened herself out and then let herself get involved with a married man, the son of a famous man. The married son of a famous man was Catherine’s father, who was serving life for a pair of murders.
    “Getting my license back,” Flo said with a grin, looking at her Diet Coke in a wineglass. “I was about to say ‘fucking license,’ but I’m working on my language. The baby. Adele’s heard everything I can say and more, but Catherine is something else.”
    “Gus was on the County Commission,” I said.
    “Till he joined the ghost riders,” she said, holding up her glass in a toast to her late husband.
    “You know William Trasker?”
    “Yep. Two terms on the council. Now he’s on the County Commission. I know Willie Trasker.”
    “His wife?”
    “Yep again. Known Roberta Trasker for more than twenty years.”
    “Friends?”
    “Have been. Sort of. Mostly when Gus was alive and he had business with Willie, but Roberta? Not for a while. Why?”
    “I’d like you to call her and ask her to let me talk to her.”
    “Why don’t you just call her yourself?”
    “She won’t see me.”
    “You tried?”
    “I tried.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Good-bye.”
    I explained why I wanted to talk to Roberta Trasker. Flo nodded her head as I spoke, finished her Diet Coke, and put the glass down.
    “I’ll call her now,” she said, getting up and moving to the phone on the wall of the kitchen. A thin, rectangular white board about the size of a small computer screen hung next to the phone with a black marker Velcroed to the top. There was a list on the board but I couldn’t make it out from where I sat.
    “Roberta? It’s Flo, Flo Zink. How the hell are you?”
    Flo looked at me as she listened. Flo made a face.
    “Is Billy okay?…Sure. How about coming over here sometime, the two of you, and see the baby…? No, not ‘sometime soon,’ sometime real…Okay, but you’ll call. Make that a promise…Good. One more thing. I’ve got a friend wants to talk to you, a good friend, name’s Lew Fonesca. I owe him big time, Bobby, big time…How busy can you be? Give him a few minutes…Right. I’ll send him right over. Remember, you’re calling me next week to set up a time to come over. I don’t hear from you and I call back with hell to pay. This is some special baby.”
    Flo hung up and turned toward me.
    “Something’s wrong,” she