No Good to Cry Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hell’s Kitchen where I’d blown away a piece of filth who’d just beat up some poor slob for a few dollars and then put a cocked gun to my own head.
    I still had nightmares about that night. That trauma propelled me to leave the force—and my marriage. A desire for calm led me to a life in placid Farmington, Connecticut, where my only real danger resulted from painful paper cuts as I painstakingly skimmed through personnel and audit records at Aetna Insurance.
    â€œYou’ve buffed up,” I told Hank now.
    He beamed. The physical rigors of training throughout the past year at the Academy had transformed the tall, slight Vietnamese boy who’d been a student of mine in a Criminology class at Farmington College. With his shaved head, his broad shoulders and wide chest, he was more competitive wrestler than the lithe young man I’d played tennis with. A handsome man with wide nut-brown eyes in narrow, slanted sockets, high cheekbones, and a rich mocha complexion, he was a charmer who bucked his family’s expectation that he wed a chosen Vietnamese girl—preferably some FOB, Fresh Off the Boat—and fashion a career in an office building in downtown Hartford. Computers, they suggested. The IT department at, say, Cigna.
    Our friendship had a rocky beginning because he’d harbored pureblood Vietnamese bias against mixed-blood mongrels as myself, but his warm heart and keen intelligence had defeated such provincialism. These days he was my buddy, though largely an absent one. Before his days at the Academy, he’d been my tag-along companion as I did my meager fraud investigations, which he found more interesting than I did.
    He walked to my refrigerator and took out a quart carton of orange juice, jiggled it, frowned, and then chugalugged the contents.
    â€œHey,” I said. “Manners?”
    â€œYou only had a little bit left.” He tossed the empty carton into the trash. “Never mind. Tell me what you’re gonna do about Jimmy? What we’re gonna do.”
    Flummoxed, I watched his eager face. When I didn’t answer immediately, he scratched his head and pointed a finger at me. “You are the PI here, you know.”
    I grinned. “I keep telling myself that.”
    â€œWell.” Impatience in his voice, an edge. “I got time now—the Academy is done.”
    I hesitated. “I don’t think Detective Ardolino wants my help.” I waited a moment. “Hank, a street mugging—a random attack. Anonymous thugs. Just where would I begin…?”
    He wasn’t listening. “Ardolino didn’t trust you last time either, and then you brought it all home.”
    â€œLightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.”
    â€œGod, you do love to speak in clichés.” He dropped into a chair, threw his legs up onto the coffee table.
    I squirmed. “You know, Gracie told me the same thing yesterday.”
    A sloppy grin. “Well, now you know how your friends view you. Sad, isn’t it?”
    I grabbed my jacket. “C’mon. I do plan to ask a few questions. Maybe I can’t track the muggers, but I’d like to see the scene in my own mind. This is Jimmy we’re talking about.”
    â€œNow we’re talking.” He jumped up.
    â€œBut let’s avoid Ardolino.”
    â€œHe casts a large shadow.”
    Now I grinned. “Bigger than you remember, I’m afraid.”
    Since the assault had taken place on the sidewalk near the new office of Gaddy Associates, I pulled into the rear parking lot. Hank and I trudged up the back stairs to the second floor. Although I did most of my insurance investigations out of my Farmington apartment with a modem and a phone, I checked in often at “fraud headquarters,” as Jimmy termed our cramped catacomb on Farmington Avenue. Jimmy lived in a tiny studio apartment on a tree-lined West End side street two blocks away, a cubbyhole