Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones by Levine, Paul (best fiction books to read TXT) 📗

into place. "I love you, but I don't want to kiss you."

I pushed him backward into the open restaurant until he was pressed against the bar. Then I leaned him over, putting some pressure on his lower spine.

"I'm feeling very loved, Rusty. You and Chrissy on the same day."

"Hey, you're hurting me. I got a bad disk. Remember, I missed a play-off game in Pittsburgh."

"You sat out the game because it was ten below zero and you had a hangover."

"Look, Jake, I don't know what you're so mad about. Are you nailing one of these honeys? Which one, Tracy? 'Cause it's just business with me. You say the word, and I'll keep it in my pants."

"Shut up, Rusty."

He shut up.

"Tell me about Guy Bernhardt," I ordered.

"What do you mean?"

"Was it his idea or yours to hire me?"

He didn't answer, so I bent him farther across the bar. His arms flailed and he knocked over an empty margarita glass, which shattered on the tile floor. Two waiters eyed me but didn't move in my direction.

"His idea. So what?"

"When did he call you?"

"The night it happened. Maybe two A.M. Said his old man croaked in the hospital. He knew I was Chrissy's agent, knew I was a witness. He's got some friends who are Miami Beach cops. Saw their reports before the homicide chief did. Anyway, he asked me if I knew you, the guy on barstool number three on the police reports. I told him we were like brothers."

I released my grip a little.

"He asked if you were a good lawyer," Rusty continued, "and I told him you were the best lawyer to ever play linebacker for the Dolphins, better than Buoniconti, though he was a helluva lot better on the field. So he said, 'Hire him.' He'd pay the tab, and that was it."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Guy said it would be better to keep it quiet for business and personal reasons. Like his wife wouldn't understand him helping his half sister or something."

I looked at my old teammate and let him go.

Like brothers?

No. Rusty was too self-absorbed to be anyone's brother. On the team, opinion had been divided. Half the guys disliked him; the other half hated him. Sure, Rusty and I had gotten drunk together and chased women together. We'd celebrated wins and bitched about losses, but we weren't really friends, much less brothers. We had been thrown into the same pit, like foxhole buddies. That war was over. This one was just beginning.

16

Desal

This is how I broke my hand.

The second time.

The first time, I took a wild swing at the head of a big-bellied Notre Dame offensive lineman, a head encased in a helmet. After the third crackback block of a bitterly cold, trash-talking, eye-gouging afternoon, he went for my knees, which were already held together with baling wire and spit. I lost it and launched a roundhouse right he never felt. I wound up with a cast on my hand, a fifteen-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness—a term I find quaintly amusing, given the sport—another fifteen for unsportsmanlike conduct for accusing the referee's mother of unnatural acts, and a seat so far down Joe Paterno's bench my feet were in Wilkes-Barre.

The second time, just an hour after leaving Rusty MacLean on Miami Beach, I was standing at the counter of the Dade County Building and Zoning Department, staring through a Plexiglas window. There are three windows, and if they're not bulletproof they should be, just to protect indolent, slothful clerks from irate, ignored taxpayers.

No one manned or even personed my window. Or the other two.

Three clerks sat at their desks, a dozen feet or so behind their little windows, doing their best to ignore the broad-shouldered taxpayer leaning on the counter who, luckily for them, was not armed. "Hey there," I cooed at the enormous black woman directly in line with my window, the middle of the three.

In her thirties, she was wearing an orange muumuu and had a telephone cradled on her shoulder. At the moment, she was loudly declaring that if Spike didn't get his raggedy-ass, lazy bones out of her house by six o'clock, she would haul his flea-bitten, egg-sucking worthless self halfway across the Everglades and feed him to the gators.

So I turned my attention to the window on the right. A middle-aged Hispanic man sat at his desk, drinking Cuban coffee from a thimble-sized paper cup. He had a beard that needed trimming and wore an off-white guayabera. Maybe there was paperwork on his desk, but I couldn't tell. A carton of pastries took up most of the surface. "Hola!" I called out.

"Estoy en mi hora de descanso," he said.

"Now? It's ten past nine. You just started work."

He took a bite of a pastelito, and guava filling oozed out onto his beard. "No hablo inglés," he said.

"Really? So I'd be wasting my time telling you how much you look like Fidel Castro."

"Fuck you," he said crisply.

I turned to my left and looked through the third window. An Anglo kid of maybe nineteen with an earring and ponytail sat at his desk, feet propped on a stack of cartons. His eyes were closed, a Sony Walkman was plugged into his ears, and his feet kept time with undoubtedly clamorous music.

"Hey, you!" I yelled.

He didn't hear me.

"You!" I tried again. "The brain-dead kid. Wake up!"

Still no luck.

I took heart that the utter indifference of our public servants was dispensed in an ethnically diverse, evenhanded manner. It also was a source of my civic pride that these well-paid, barely worked, juicy-pensioned paper shufflers were entitled to their birthdays off with pay, courtesy of property owners such as my very own taxpaying self.

Still, yearning for some attention, I punched the Plexiglas window. Hard.

A straight right hand.

Which made a hell of a racket.

Causing the Hispanic man to spill his coffee, the black woman to drop her phone, and the Anglo kid to pry open his eyes.

The window didn't crack, but my third metacarpal