Sticky Fingers Read Online Free PDF Page B

things. Gino deserves worse than what Roxy gave him. He should escort his daughter down the aisle with a black eye.”
    I couldn’t help grinning. “That’s pretty Old Testament, Sister Bob.”
    “Darn tootin’,” she replied. “If you need backup next time you decide to administer some street justice, you can count on me.”
    “Thanks.” Dirty Harry had nothing on Sister Bob.
    “I’m not listening,” Loretta said. “I’m an officer of the court. I’m not hearing a thing. Vigilantes simply get in the way of the judicial system.”
    Sister Bob winked at me. “Don’t listen to Loretta. If that man went after Sage, she’d be first in line with an ax and garbage bags.”
    “Yeow.” I dusted cookie crumbs from my hands into the sink. “Where is Sage, by the way?”
    “In the living room.” Loretta lifted her spoon again to judge whether the wax was ready, and she sent me a glance that said I’d better hightail it out of the kitchen before I got stuck helping with Sister Bob’s mustache. “Go make sure she isn’t doing something she shouldn’t be doing with That Boy.”
    “Zack Cleary is here?”
    “Yes,” Loretta said darkly.
    Sister Bob said, “He looks very sweet to me.”
    I snorted.
    A year ago, Loretta and I wouldn’t have worried about what Sage was doing, because she was either studying or playing basketball. But in the last several months, Sage had found love—or something like it—with Zack Cleary, a kid a few years older who was going to cop school.
    We’d already had one pregnancy scare, and none of us wanted to go through that again.
    So when I exited the kitchen and caught sight of Zack Cleary with his tongue in my daughter’s ear, I blew a fuse.

4
    I could have grabbed a table lamp and clonked my daughter’s boyfriend over his crewcut head. Or used the extension cord to strangle him.
    But at the last second I caught sight of the untouched Italian sub sitting on its waxed paper on the coffee table, and my heart did a happy dance.
    “Is that sandwich from Bruno’s?” I asked.
    Sage and Zack sprang apart, and Sage flushed the color of a pomegranate. Zack, the horndog, sat back, stretched his arms out on the back of the sofa, and smiled at me.
    “Yep,” he said. “Capicola and mozzarella. With hot peppers. You hungry, Mrs. A?”
    Zack Cleary had been a skinny, long-haired sneak a couple of years ago—the youngest of seven, who rebelled against his father, the city’s chief of police, by shoplifting cigarettes at convenience stores. But after two years of college, Zack must have drunk the family Kool-Aid, because he suddenly quit school, cut his hair short, put on some muscle, and got himself into the police academy, where he was working hard—to hear the neighborhood tell it—at getting into the Cleary family trade.
    The fact that my daughter was dating the chief of police’s kid had given me more than a few sleepless hours.
    Sage, on the other hand, seemed as happy as any teenage girl coming into her own. Instead of a T-shirt, basketball shorts, and sneakers, she was lounging around the house in black tights and a long shirt with a bunch of bracelets on one wrist. She wore hoop earrings, too, tangled in the curls of her glossy dark hair.
    I said, “You forgot your pants, Sage.”
    She rolled her eyes. “This is a dress, Mom.”
    “It’s too short for a dress.”
    “It’s fashion. As if you’d know anything about that.”
    “I know you need to go put on your jeans before your butt falls out of that outfit.”
    “At least I won’t be humiliated by my mother.”
    “Say, what?”
    Sage had a hard look in her eye. “Kiley Seranelli, that’s what. Mom, did you have to make a spectacle of her boyfriend?”
    “Boyfriend? Do you know who her so-called boyfriend is?”
    “No, but she said—”
    “He’s Gino Martinelli. Shelby’s dad.”
    “What?” The information shook the disdain out of Sage’s attitude.
    “Yes, and he’s old enough to be Kiley’s— Hell,