Easy Street by Elizabeth Sims

Author:Elizabeth Sims [Sims, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780983663935
Publisher: Spruce Park Press
Published: 2011-07-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

After a while Lisette went back to the nursing home with a sixteen-ounce coffee-and-cream for Helen. I watched her walk carefully with the hot paper cup. Before we said goodbye she asked if I'd ever been in a support group for friends of drug dealers. I told her no, but it sounded like a helpful idea. Lisette Donovan was a good egg, and I felt sorry for her loneliness.

I spent an hour on one of the café's computer terminals surfing the Internet for information on Vic Toretti. Evidently, his drug bust had been run-of-the-mill and not made the papers. I looked for Michigan court records but found nothing online. This particular bust, a first offense, was unlikely to have been done by federal agents, but I checked some U.S. sites anyway. Nothing. Then I checked the Michigan Department of Corrections site and found him. It was a Victor Toretti at any rate, whose dates fit the time frame Lisette Donovan had given me. He'd been convicted for possession of less than twenty-five grams of cocaine, sentenced to a maximum of three years, ten months, and been paroled already. The parole date was in August of this year, barely two months ago.

There it was: Toretti could have been the one who came upon Drooly Rick with Jimmy Donovan's loot.

The prison Web site didn't show his address at the time of his arrest, so I'd need to check the court records in person to make sure this was the guy. Then I'd have to find him.

While it was certainly possible that others could know about—or suspect—Jimmy Donovan's private practice of stashing away a percentage of his drug-trafficking income, it wasn't bloody likely. Otherwise the entire house would've been leveled by now by cash-crazed drug crooks.

I supposed Jimmy Donovan was one of those guys who always intended to get out of the business. You squirrel away money. Maybe you cheat your contacts a little more than you used to; maybe you set up one last big transaction; or maybe you set up a big double-cross, where you keep a wheelbarrow of money or goods you were supposed to hand over to somebody else. In that case, you'd need to blow town immediately. Since Jimmy Donovan didn't do that, I had to figure he was a squirreler who maybe tried to do a big transaction that went wrong. Hell, maybe he'd met his end for a small transaction that went wrong.

If he was squirreling, he was thinking about the future. The older a drug dealer gets, the worse the paranoia becomes: You leap up at every car in the driveway; you shrivel at every tap on the shoulder. You never know. Yes, Jimmy Donovan would have been tiring of the racket by the time that knife found its way into his neck.

I purchased a wrapped-up ham sandwich and put it in my pocket, then discreetly changed the newspapers in Todd's carrier in a corner of the café, using a local free paper someone had left on a table, and gave him some water and timothy nuggets.

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