Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and his face looked like it was melting. The big man let go of him just long enough to get his body around and behind the bar. He led the bartender out to a chair.
    The old hippie, the man and woman, and the two drunks surrounded Wolf and his large nurse.
    “Hey, man,” the old hippie whined. “What’s goin’ on? What was that about Gracie?”
    “Drowned,” Henry said. “She was out at the spit and it looks like she got blown over or slipped or something. Down onto the rocks. Maybe a wave took her. That’s all I know. Listen, Wolf, you go along home.”
    Wolf shook his head. “Rather be here.”
    “I’m your boss. Do what I say. My place, I say who works the bar and who goes home.”
    “Fuck you.” Wolf continued to sit rigidly in his chair.
    “Okay.” Henry backed off. “But you just sit there.” He peeled off his still-dripping coat and squeezed back behind the bar. Rosie ordered another beer.
    Except for the bored couple, the other patrons of the bar drifted away from Wolf uneasily, the bearded time-warp back to his pinball, the drunks back to their drinks. The couple sat down with him, offering a kind of silent condolence. Wolf jumped to his feet. “I’m going to go find out what happened.”
    Henry opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. The couple, their first overture rejected, watched Wolf go without offering to go with him.
    Henry stared at the door. “Bad luck,” he sighed. “You’d think he’d have had enough of that.”
    “This hit him pretty hard,” Rosie said. “Who was Gracie to him, anyway?”
    “Girlfriend. They been dating for a couple years. Going to get married.”
    “Rough,” I said. “I guess she lived out there on the spit, then?”
    He shook his head. “No. I don’t know what the hell she was doing out there in this weather.”
    “So,” Rosie pursued, “he’s had a lot of bad luck?”
    Henry ignored the question and went down the bar to fill another order.
    I looked at my watch. It was 7:45. We were due at Nora’s at: 8:00.
    Alice was curled up on the backseat of the Chevy. She roused herself to greet us, then flopped back down again. She wasn’t even going to bother to look out the window as she rode. Smart dog. There was nothing to see. We checked Nora’s directions. Her house was in the hills overlooking the town.

– 6 –
    Class and social lines are drawn clearly in a town like Wheeler, as much now as in the past. Maybe more now, with its mix of urban immigrants and old residents. The lines are drawn by nature and by the way that people see it— literally.
    The very rich who were new to the town lived out on the spit, right out in the ocean, but above it. Close to its power but superior, like gods.
    I hadn’t seen much of the side streets yet, but I was willing to bet that most of them were made up of homes for lower- and middle-income people, many of whom had been there for static generations. On some of those side streets, I knew, old mansions still rested in their spacious gardens, built by Victorians who were more interested in creating their own splendor than in looking at the ocean from their living room windows. Some of those might still be occupied by old families. Some would have been converted to inns. Some would have been cut up into flats.
    The hills at the edge of town, on the other hand, held the newer construction of those who had some money, were priced out of the spit but wanted a view of the ocean. Successful people who could afford better than the viewless heart of town. People like Nora.
    The rain had evened off to a steady downpour, and the road we took up into the hills, narrow and winding, was hard to negotiate. Parts of it were half-buried in slide debris and slippery with mud. Her house was set snugly among shrubs and partly sheltered by a good-sized black locust tree. The size of the tree told me that the house was probably about twenty years old, an A-frame modification of redwood and glass. Small, but I was betting