Hair of the Dog by Gordon Carroll (reading strategies book TXT) 📗

this. You have given me absolutely no evidence. But some of my men have been known to be overly zealous in the past. Nothing like what you are suggesting, but enough that you have me thinking. I’ll do some checking. It would have to be someone high in my organization. Someone close.”

“Like Clyde?” I asked.

“Clyde is my most trusted friend, but as I said, Mr. Mason, I will check into it. You have my word.”

“And you, sir, have a great story about saving a little girl to help support your run for high office.”

“That’s not why I hired you.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll be watching you.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“That’s all I ask,” I said.

“Now I have to set up a press conference for some time in the next few days, thanks to your alerting them about our recovering little Keisha. In other words, another fire to put out in an already very busy schedule. If I have any further need of you, I’ll call. Understand that Mr. Mason, I’ll call you.” He hung up then.

The conversation helped to wake me up. I looked over to see Jerome staring at me. He was a mess. Blood caked his shirt and pants and he had bruises on his bruises and cuts on his cuts. He stretched his legs and I could tell the movement cost him some pain. I’d filled both him and Ziggy in on everything I knew, starting with Marsh showing up at my place and hiring me, down to him maybe running for president. Full disclosure.

“So what’s the play?” asked Jerome.

“Once we get into town, you see what you can find out. My friend Ziggy has some old contacts of his own.”

“What about you?”

“My job is to make sure Clair stays safe.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“I already started,” I said. “I called the news stations in Chicago and fed them the story about her rescue from you. I gave all the credit to the honorable Senator Marsh. They should be flooding his office with calls right about now.”

“How will that help?”

“Senator Marsh will have to put extra security on her and the press will have her picture everywhere. No one will dare to try and touch her; not the Bloods, not anyone working for Marsh, not anyone at all.”

“Maybe,” said Jerome still not sounding convinced. “At least for a while.”

“A while is what we’re working for,” I said. “Just long enough to figure out who it is that’s after her and why.”

“Don’t care about why,” said Jerome. “Just who. Then I’ll kill them.”

Couldn’t argue with that.

Ziggy yawned and stretched in the back seat. He turned his head and saw Max staring into his face from the back. He jumped.

Max didn’t.

“Ziggy says he needs to make pee,” he said.

Couldn’t argue with that either, so I pulled in at the next gas station and filled up the Escalade while Ziggy used the men’s room and Jerome got coffee for the three of us. I saw a woman give him a startled look as she passed him at the door to the station. She clutched her purse tight and hustled her kids quickly around him. Couldn’t blame her for that either, he looked a scary mess.

The day was already getting warm, even this early in the morning, and the traffic whooshed past like speeding missiles.

I opened the back hatch and let Max out. He walked over to a fire hydrant sitting in a patch of tall grass and lifted a leg.

“Cute,” I said. “A little cliché, but cute.”

Max looked up at me and kept peeing.

I saw a shadow come up behind me and turned to see a nerdy little guy with thick glasses and a short sleeve shirt with an alligator embroidered on the breast pocket. He popped a chin towards Max.

“That your dog, mister?”

“Depends on who you ask,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Well, I think of him as mine, but if you asked him, he might say it’s the other way around.”

“That’s funny,” he said not smiling at all. He pushed the center rim of his glasses up the bridge of his long skinny nose, just like the guy in the Steve Martin Movie, The Jerk. “But you should have him on a leash.”

“A leash?”

“Yes,” he said. “We have leash laws here. Also you have to clean up his mess if he poos.”

Poos.

I swiveled my head toward him.

“Excuse me, do you work here?”

“No,” he said, pushing his glasses up again. “I’m just getting gas. That’s my car over there. He pointed to a baby-blue Prius.

Figures.

“Are you a police officer or animal control?”

“No,” he said, “but I felt it my civic duty to inform you of the way we do things here, seeing that you had out-of-state plates and all.

Jerome, carrying a cardboard tray of coffee cups, suddenly towered over the man, looking down on him. I thought the civic-minded gentlemen might faint for a second.

“This dude messing with you?” he asked me, his voice sounding like grating boulders deep in the Earth’s crust.

The man with the alligator embroidery looked at Jerome, then at me, then back at Jerome. He scuttled back to his Prius like time was a-wasting, pushing his glasses with that same finger. Where was the Opti-Grab when you needed it?

Max was still peeing; it had been a long trip.

“Why you let guys like that mess with you?” asked Jerome.

“He wasn’t messing with me,” I said.

“Looked like he was messing with you.”

“We were just talking.”

He shook his head and walked back to the car.

I did a quick look around, making sure there wasn’t a sniper scoping me from a car that hated cans, then followed him.

The coffee smelled fresh and rich as I sat back in the driver’s seat. Jerome handed me mine and took a slug of his. It burned my lips, tongue and all the way down, but Jerome didn’t seem to notice. He drank it like I’d drink a cold soda. The guy hardly seemed real.

Ziggy got back in and took his coffee. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my mother