Suitcase City Read Online Free PDF

appreciating what he had said. “Gentlemen,” Teach whispered, including the bartender now, “it’s consistency that wins, not the brilliant thing you do only once. It’s doing the job day in and day out, and knowing you can do it.” It was what Teach had always had, the thing that got it done. The thing you called upon when the contagion of defeat crept into other men’s eyes.
    And suddenly it hurt, what Teach was saying. It hurt because he was forty-five and his best days were behind him. It hurt because he had used the words he had just whispered, the truest words he knew, to sell pills to physicians all over the state of Florida for so many years now that he couldn’t say them anymore without seeing himself in some family-practice doc’s waiting room with a display case on his knees.
    He swallowed the last of his bourbon and remembered that Dean’s ballet recital would start in two hours. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter turning and toeing and sweeping her flower-petal hands in gestures so gorgeous and graceful that they brought tears to his eyes. Well, the football stories had pushed the pills that earned the money that bought the toe shoes and the tutus. Teach caught his reflection in the mirror. It was time to pee and leave.
    The front door opened and sunlight slanted across the floor of Malone’s Bar and a black man stepped in. He was tall and moved with an easy, athletic grace, and this made Teach watch him sit at a table near the men’s room door.
    Teach pushed away from the bar and stretched. “Well,” he said, “time to point Percy at the pavement.” He glanced at his watch. “And then off I go to perform the duties of a father.” He looked at McLuster, inviting him into the age-old complicity of fathers. The man nodded, and it seemed to Teach like a good way to end this pleasant interlude.
    He knew, and he supposed McLuster did too, that he could never share Teach’s understanding of what it was to rise to the top of something. But any man could know the warm arms of a wife, the sweetness of a daughter’s kiss, and the two of them could part in that knowledge.
    As Teach started for the men’s room, McLuster said, “Hell, I guess I’ll bleed the monster too.”
    They were at the urinals when the black man came in. Teach had it out and flowing. His head thrown back, his knees flexed, he was thinking about pulling himself together for the ballet recital. He’d cinch up his tie, drive through rush-hour Tampa to the Women’s Club, get the old Minolta out of the trunk of the Buick. A mint for his breath. Lord, he’d forgotten to buy film. He’d have to find a drugstore.
    Paige’s society friends would all be there in pearls and boutique dresses. Their faces would be made up perfectly, which meant imperceptibly, and they’d smell delicately of Chanel, and their necks and shoulders would be flushed with worry for the girls about to dance. And they would watch Teach, the widower, enter. The man not quite of their station, whose wife had been one of them. Beautiful Paige who had died so suddenly and in such an ugly way.
    “Well, look at you nasty white motherfuckers.”
    The voice, its threat, its confidence, made Teach quickly holster his cock and turn to face the men’s room door. He heard McLuster at the next urinal mutter, “What the . . . ? Oh Jesus.”
    Teach could see now that the black man was no man. He was tall and filled out—Teach made him at least 220 and all of it muscle—but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. That Teach had taken him for a grown man said something for the confident way the boy moved. Teach remembered giving the boy a friendly nod on his way to the men’s room. And hadn’t the boy nodded back?
    The boy took another step into the room. There was no mistaking the threat of his stance, legs wide, arms ready at his sides.
    The boy wore black jeans and a white silk shirt. He pointed at them with his left hand. “Give it up, bitches.” The white