Baltimore Noir by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Anthologies, ebook
ISBN: 9781936070190
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2006-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

ODE TO THE O’S

BY CHARLIE STELLA

Memorial Stadium

A light drizzle had just started to fall when the two men moved their conversation from the waterside tiki bar to an inside corner table still overlooking the Inner Harbor. James “Jilly” Cuomo brushed his thin gray hair back with both hands after sitting with his back to the windows. Tommy “Red” Dalton, a tall man with broad shoulders, positioned his chair so he could see the boats docked on the far side of the marina.

A short waitress with a big chest and a long ponytail had followed them with their drinks. “Anisette?” she asked.

Jilly pointed to a spot on the table directly in front of him. The waitress set a napkin down first, then his drink. She smiled at Tommy before placing his glass of water on a napkin in front of him.

“I guess this is yours,” she said.

Tommy winked at her.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Not right now,” Jilly told her.

She was still looking at Tommy.

“No thanks,” he said.

Jilly glanced at her ass when she left. “Nice rack, but she could use a little more meat, you ask me,” he said. He turned to Tommy and the conversation that had been interrupted by the rain. “He’s got you in the car, yeah, and …?”

Tommy said, “I says to him, I says, if you’re thinking she’s out there, she pro’bly is. There’s nothin not gut-check about it, what we’re talkin. A guy knows, same as a broad, it comes to that. You just do. Junior says to me, he says, ‘I’m pretty sure something is going on.’”

Jilly was mid-yawn. “The moron,” he tried to say.

“This is that day couple weeks after I first meet him at the party down here, this place. I figure he figures I’m around his age and all, he can talk to me, it won’t go nowheres. This is before I get sent for by the old man, of course, which, I gotta tell you, I first get that call, I’m thinking, uh-oh, the fuck I do to deserve this? Sometimes you get sent for, you get dead.”

Jilly nodded. “It’s a smart assumption. A guy should be prepared for whatever, especially these days.”

Tommy was enthusiastic. “Right, exactly, but at the time I get the call, I’m not thinking straight enough to figure that out. I’m just thinking I fucked up and now I gotta pay for it. Maybe get whacked for whatever the fuck and I got no clue what it is, it might be. Makes it even tougher to think, that happens, you get sent for out the blue like that.”

Jilly sipped at his anisette. “Yeah, so … back to Junior.”

Tommy said, “Right, so, Junior has me there in that old tank he drives, the Lincoln, he turns to me, he says, ‘Look at my eyes.’ I do and they’re all red, bloodshot from crying it looks like, or he didn’t sleep the last hundred years, maybe he’s a vampire or somethin. Anyway, I see they’re red and he says, right out there, just like this, ‘I think my wife is fucking around.

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