Tattoo Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked him up and down challengingly.
    ‘Find out about the tattoo.’
    Carvalho was on his way downstairs when Charo leaned out of her doorway.
    ‘Come tonight.’
    ‘So we can sleep in the toilet?’
    ‘Would you like me to come up to your place?’
    ‘Drop it. I’ll call by later.’
    Carvalho set off in a hurry for Queta’s hair salon. It was full of women and the buzz of conversation. Fat Nuria stopped combing through a client’s greying hair to trip surprisingly lightly up the stairs to the office. Carvalho and Queta eyed each other. She was shaking a bottle of shampoo, but her huge eyes were fully fixed on the casual, determined way Carvalho crossed the room and headed for the stairs at the back. By the time he reached the office, Fat Nuria had warned her boss he was on his way. Señor Ramón received him with a hasty smile on his lips and a quizzical look in his eye. Fat Nuria stayed in the room, like a tiny but tenacious bodyguard, until Ramón signalled for her to leave. By then Carvalho was already ensconced in the small green armchair. When the girl’s footsteps on the stairs had died away, he leaned forward and put a hand on the desk.
    ‘This is getting too complicated. Yesterday’s raids are linked to your dead man.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘That’s my business. Did you know this case had to do with drug trafficking?’
    ‘I don’t even have the faintest idea who the dead man was. Have you found out?’
    ‘If I don’t unearth anything definite in the next twenty-four hours, I’m going to have to go to Holland. There’s a lead in that country.’
    Señor Ramón’s prefabricated smile slipped a little.
    ‘I’ll send you the bill.’
    ‘Send me whatever you like, but don’t come here again until you know something for sure. I don’t want to get mixed up in this. Have they arrested your girlfriend? If not, they could at any moment. They’ve closed all the brothels. All except the really expensive ones. And the bars. Your friend is in danger.’
    ‘She works in her own place, and for herself. Just like your wife.’
    The two men stared at each other without blinking. Señor Ramón’s freckles looked almost yellow to Carvalho.
    ‘Listen. The cops are making a determined effort to clean things up. A determined prosecutor is involved, and it seems some important names have appeared linked to the drugs business. Very important. Do you get me? If those important people are rounded up, the smaller fry are done for. I’m paying you to run the risks, otherwise I would have gone and got the information myself. So get out of here, and don’t make life difficult for me.’
    ‘For now, I’ll send you the bill if I have to go to Holland.’
    The other man waved his arm in a way that was both an agreement and a dismissal. Carvalho went back down to the salon and stood in front of Fat Nuria.
    ‘You can move quickly for a fatty …’
    The anger gathered in her eyes. Tears of rage began to form. Queta watched them from her chair. Carvalho decided to leave his confrontation with her for some other occasion.As he passed by, he sized up her charms once more. All the way out into the street, he was imagining a complicated erotic scene in which Fat Nuria was with Señor Ramón while he took Queta up into a hayloft like the ones in his childhood house in Souto. He laughed at the way that hayloft kept coming back into his erotic fantasies. All of a sudden a very different image filled the strange cinema screen he carried inside his head. Señor Ramón was staring in terror while he, Pepe Carvalho, was hitting him as often as there were freckles on his bloated face.

 
    ‘W here’s Ginés?’
    ‘Which Ginés? There’s four of them.’
    ‘The cockiest.’
    ‘Then there’s only one. Go up to the fourth floor. And be careful, there’s scaffolding everywhere.’
    The building was nothing more than a concrete shell with metal girders. From a distance it looked as though it were peppered with the