Night Watchman (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 8) Read Online Free PDF

Laparouse two years ago.”
    “You’ve got a mortgage on it,” Raisin insisted.
    “I do,” Tubby admitted. “But, Janie, how did you end up on this side of the city?”
    “You remember Grits,” she began. Of course. Their old Uptown watering hole, where Janie had listened patiently to all sorts of troubles while mixing up passable Old Fashioneds. The storm closed it down for a while, and it also sent Janie fleeing for higher ground. She had bounced around for a couple of years taking care of her mother. Within the community of dispossessed imbibers she had met and married Bud Caragliano, ten years her senior, so she claimed.
    “Ever meet Bud?” she asked. Raisin and Tubby shook their heads.
    “He was a good guy, as long as he was drinking,” Janie said. “Well, anyway he used to own this little place. It took about three feet of water in Katrina. Then he got stage-four lung cancer and died. But he left this bar to me. I put together a few bucks and we got it all cleaned up. It was just a dive at first. But then the neighborhood changed.”
    “Downhill?” Tubby asked.
    “Hell, no!” she bawled out. “It’s a friggin’ gold mine now. This crowd you see here…” she waved at the half-a-dozen guys wearing grimy T-shirts and tool belts, “…they clear out by five, and later on tonight I get an unbelievable number of kids. They pack this joint, baby!”
    “Hmmm.” Tubby tried to imagine that. The bar did have a cool atmosphere. It was dark. There was a neon Dixie Beer sign on the wall. The TV over the bar was tuned to a baseball game, and the sound was turned off. He thought he saw grass growing out of the floor over by the jukebox. Certainly traditional.
    “Let me get you some lunch,” Janie offered. “How about a shrimp po-boy? We can make up other things if you’d rather. We got an eggplant mozzarella wrap, gluten free.”
    “What’s gluten?”
    “Yeah, well, I don’t know. But I recommend the shrimp. It’s our cook’s specialty.”
    “You even have a cook?” Tubby was impressed.
    “My daughter Sophia. I’ll introduce you.”
    Jack brought another round. Janie didn’t get down to business until the food arrived, mountains of golden crisp shrimp piled on French bread and spilling out of the plates. Pickles, tomatoes, Crystal hot sauce. As a lagniappe, the cook had sent each of them a bowl of rich brown steamy chicken and sausage gumbo.
    “What’s this in the gumbo? Potato salad?” Tubby exclaimed. Indeed the soup had been ladled over the homespun alternative to white rice. “It smells delicious,” he said, enraptured. It created the perfect moment to pitch a lawyer.
    “I’m having trouble with the city,” Janie explained. “They don’t like me having live music here every night.”
    “Why not?” Tubby asked, enjoying a loose shrimp. “What kind of music do you put on?” Tubby was having a hard time getting his hands around his sandwich, so he speared three errant shrimp with his fork and popped them into his mouth.
    “All kinds of music,” Janie said. “We had Paul Sanchez here. And Gal Holiday. We had the Luminescent Lizards. We get folk stuff. We get Indie. We got soft and we got loud. But that’s the problem.”
    “Loud?” Tubby repeated. He anticipated what was coming.
    “Yes, indeed. Loud! Which has got some of the neighbors upset. Worse than that, it’s got me dealing with the zoning flunkies and the quality of life cops. It ain’t pretty.”
    “They want you to turn it down?”
    “They want me to turn it off! And guess what, they want to jerk my license because they say St. Claude ain’t zoned for bars and music.”
    “You’re kidding me.” Tubby was incredulous. To his left Raisin glared and shook his head at such municipal stupidity. “What are we here?” Tubby continued. “The Ninth Ward? The birthplace of the brass band, the jazz funeral and the second line? The cradle of New Orleans music culture. The womb of…”
    “He’s getting it,” Raisin