Rogue Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

pencil. Best I could tell, fourteen faces showed up at two or more fires. At first I was surprised there were so many, but when I thought about it, I was surprised there weren’t more. After all, the fires were all in the same neighborhood, all but the last one breaking out at night when most people were home.
    Jack’s face showed up at a record seven fires, and I’d bet a year’s pay that he’d directed traffic or handed out hot coffee at all of them. Another face showed up at six. It belonged to an Asian male, late twenties, wearing a black leather jacket. In two pictures, he was carrying a flashlight, and in one, his eyes were lifted to the roof of a burning building. On his face was a look of rapture.
    I knew exactly how he felt. I was a cub reporter when the old Capron Knitting Mill in Pawtucket burned down, and even though that was a long time ago, sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see it: firemen silhouetted against orange fireballs soaring hundreds of feet against the blackest of skies. It was so horrifyingly beautiful that for several long minutes, I forgot why I was there.
    Suddenly I remembered that two of the Mount Hope fires hadn’t been labeled suspicious origin. I flipped back through the pictures, tossing out those from a fire that had started from careless smoking and another caused by a faulty kerosene heater. When I was done, I still had a dozen faces to check out. I recognized three of them, but I’d need help identifying the others, including Mr. Rapture.
    The name made me think of Veronica, and my loins tingled a little. I picked up the phone and punched in the number for my doctor. Unless it was an emergency, his receptionist said, the first available appointment would be seven weeks from Tuesday.
    â€œIt is an emergency,” I said.
    â€œWhat is the nature of the emergency?”
    â€œIt is of a delicate nature.”
    â€œI’m very discreet,” she said.
    â€œMy girl won’t screw me until I have an AIDS test,” I said, and she hung up.
    I called the Rhode Island Department of Health’s VD clinic and learned they could draw my blood today, but the lab was so backed up that it would take five weeks to get the results.
    After I hung up, I logged on to my computer and found the message I expected from Lomax:
    W HERE’S THE GODDAMNED DOG STORY?
    I shot back a reply:
    I ’M WORKING ON IT.
    But first I needed to see my bookie.

9
    Dominic Zerilli had lived for seventy-four years, and every morning for the last forty-two of them, he would get up at 6:00 A.M ., put on a blue suit, a white dress shirt, and a silk necktie, and walk four blocks to his little corner market on Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope.
    Once inside, he would wish a cheery good morning to the skanky high school dropout manning the register. Then he would climb four steps to a little elevated room with a window that looked out over the grocery aisles. He would remove his suit jacket, put it on a wooden hanger, and hang it on a clothes rod he had rigged in back. Then he would do the same thing with his pants. He would sit there all day in his shirt, tie, and boxer shorts, chain-smoking unfiltered Luckies and taking sports and numbers bets through the window and over three telephones that were checked for bugs every week. He would write the bets down on slips of flash paper and deposit them in a gray metal washtub next to his chair. Whenever the cops came to bust him, which only happened when the Rhode Island Lottery Commission got worked up about lost revenue, he would remove the cigarette from his lips and toss it into the washtub.
    Whoosh!
    The officially sanctioned gangsters at the lottery commission, who pushed worthless scratch tickets and chump numbers games, resented Zerilli because he gave the suckers a legitimate chance to win. The Mafia always gives better odds than the state.
    Just about everybody in Mount Hope dropped by Zerilli’s store from time to