Tropic of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

weepies he gives me a good one, and I make a lot of noise, more than necessary, to tell the truth, to alert the house that despite them I am happy.
    I am counting the days, I am so glad to be leaving this scene, the arty city, the family drama. That’s the truth, M.

THREE
    Jimmy Paz knew that it was going to be a bad one when he saw Bubba Singleton puking into the gutter, supporting his huge frame on the rear bumper of his patrol car. Bubba had been doing patrol in the Central District for over a dozen years and he had had ample opportunity to learn what the heat of a South Florida summer can do to a corpse in a remarkably short time, so this had to be something more than the usual leaking, reeking, bloated, livid, maggot-squirming foulness covered in giant roaches.
    Paz got out of his Impala and walked past two police cars and a crime-scene unit van to the front of the four-story concrete-block-stucco tenement. A couple of uniforms were holding the perimeter, looking uneasy, as cops always did in Overtown in the hot time, and beyond them a small crowd of the curious had gathered. Overtown is an area of Miami occupied by low-income African-Americans. If you are a tourist coming from the airport on your way to the sun and fun of Miami Beach and you mistakenly turn off the airport freeway and you realize your mistake and try to backtrack, then Overtown is the area you backtrack through. Every couple of seasons some tourist does this and comes to a bad end.
    Jimmy Paz, in fact, had recently been involved in one of these unhappy events, a Japanese couple yanked from their car, the woman raped and brutalized, the man shot. He had cleared the case in twenty-four hours, in the time-honored fashion of hanging around the ‘hood and asking questions and keeping his eyes open until the morons who did the thing tried to buy a set of speakers with Ishiguro Hideki’s Visa card. There was even a little shoot-out, although the mope had only been wounded and nobody got on Paz’s case because he, too, was black and so, under the peculiar rules of American police practice, he had a license to shoot down citizens of whatever color with only nonhysterical investigation to follow. Even more so, in his case, because he was also of Cuban extraction, which accounted for the wit of the bystanders here, shouting, “Yo, spigger!”
    Paz ignored this and kept his face neutral (a practiced skill) and made a show of checking his appearance in the car window. Paz was a stocky, muscular man of thirty-two, the color of coco matting, with a smooth round head, on which the hair had been cropped almost to the skin. His ears were small and neat and his eyes, set in lanceolate sockets, were large, intelligent, warm brown in color, but not warm at all. The roundness of his head and these eyes and the general flatness of his features gave him a feline look. This was intensified when he grinned, the bright small teeth startling against the tan of his skin.
    He wore a Hugo Boss linen jacket, black Ermenegildo Zegna slacks, a short-sleeved cotton shirt in tiny black checks, and a knit navy tie, open at the neck. On his feet he wore three-hundred-dollar Lorenzo Banfi suede shoes. Paz, in other words, dressed like a cop who took bribes. But he did not take bribes. He was unmarried and undivorced and lived rent-free in a building owned by his mother. By so dressing, however, he managed to piss off both the considerable number of his MPD confreres who did take bribes and those who remained straight; which was the point.
    Paz took a tube of Vicks VapoRub out of his jacket pocket as he entered the building and ran a bead around the interior of each nostril. This was an old cop trick designed to cover the stench of death, but it also helped with the background stink of the building. This had exterior stairways leading to narrow, open walks guarded by low concrete walls topped by a steel pipe. Painted a fecal brown, it had the architectural charm of a public lavatory,