Million Dollar Baby by F. X. Toole

Author:F. X. Toole [Toole, F. X.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5398-4
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

Mac figured losing her was all part of growing up, but losing his two daughters nearly destroyed him. First he went on the sauce, but after a while whiskey stopped killing the pain and he needed something stronger. He passed on weed, because he didn’t like the stink, and moved on to the other stuff, using anything he could score that would disconnect his mind from his heart. In his arm, up his nose. The irony of being a doper cop hit him in the face like a slab of hog liver. All his police life he’d fought against enemies of decency, had busted dealers like they were rotten eggs. Then he became the enemy of himself. Friends avoided him on the street. It was his daughters’ love and his love for them that saved him finally, and now he’d been clean for fifteen years. Father Carey had been instrumental in bringing him back as well.

“How much money these backer mens give me, you suppose?” asked Puddin, scooping up rice and beans and salsa with a tortilla. Mac and Puddin were eating, as they regularly did, at Señora Cabrera’s seafood café, Mariscos Acapulco. She was a squat and square Mexican lady with a long, thick braid laced with bright ribbons down her back. She looked after Puddin as if he were her chick, made him special refried beans without lard to keep down the fat in his diet. Her grandfather had been the lightweight champion of the world during the forties, when you fought fifteen rounds for the title, when many a fight was won in the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth. On the wall above the cash register hung a twelve-by-eighteen tinted photograph of her grandfather, a handsome little guy, in his fighting togs. Next to it was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of Puddin when he won the regionals that took him to the nationals. The señora was a widow. Her gardener husband and her thirteen-year-old son were killed when a drunk driver ran a red light and plowed into their pickup on Central Avenue. Neither her husband nor the drunk had insurance. She opened a little stand that grew into the Acapulco and made it possible for her to raise and send her twin daughters to nursing school. Both were in their early twenties and still lived with her. Both were nurses at Los Angeles County USC Medical Center. All lived in a little house a few blocks from the café. The señora had been robbed once, by Mexicans, who came through a window of her house. Now her windows, like the windows in many of the houses in the neighborhood, had steel bars. Now she kept her grandfather’s .44 Mag pistola under her pillow. In two years she would be able to retire to her hometown, a village halfway down the west coast of Baja, Guerrero Negro, where whales frolicked and salt was made from the sea.

The spring air was clear of smog, and Mac and Puddin sat at the outdoor counter because the dining room was full.

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