Broken by Don Winslow

Author:Don Winslow [Winslow, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Adult
ISBN: 9780062988904
Google: m6dmxwEACAAJ
Amazon: B07TZGTZ8W
Goodreads: 51195598
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

For Mr. Raymond Chandler

Sunset

Chewing on an unlit cigar, Duke Kasmajian sits on his deck and looks out at the beach where he never goes.

“Too much sand,” he answers when asked why not.

Sand is hard to walk on, especially if your five-ten frame has to carry 287, your knees are shot, your new heart valve has no warranty, and sixty-five is getting smaller in your rearview mirror. Add all that to the fact that Duke likes expensive shoes and doesn’t like them full of sand, and you got the reason he looks at the ocean mostly from the deck of his home in Bird Rock.

Even though his cardiologist tells him to walk.

Duke has a treadmill and a stair-stepper and doesn’t use either of them. They’re the world’s most expensive clothes hangers.

He has stopped smoking.

Also doctor’s orders.

Hence the unlit cigar.

A squat glass of scotch sits on a stool by his left hand. Duke’s not giving that up for anything—not for the doctor, not for his kids, all adults now, not even for the dozen employees he has in the largest bail-bonds outfit in San Diego, if not all of California.

The Duke is a San Diego legend.

His face is on highway billboards and local TV and radio ads.

“Need to juke? Call the Duke.”

He sponsors Little League teams (“Caught stealing? Call the Duke”), OTL tournaments for the wheelchaired (“Over the line? Call the Duke”), and a safe house for battered women that his tougher bounty hunters guard on his dime (no advertising on this; its existence and location are on a strict need-to-know basis).

Duke also doesn’t advertise the college tuitions he’s laid out for, the twenties he drops at kids’ lemonade stands, the Christmas boxes to the families of slain cops and firefighters, or the employees’ medical bills he’s hijacked at the hospital billing desk.

Nobody knows about those.

Nobody needs to.

All anyone needs to know is that if you have to make bail, phone Duke Kasmajian’s office and he’ll get you out. The Duke is an equal-opportunity bondsman who doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, relative degrees of guilt or innocence or criminal history. Duke, in fact, prefers recidivists, because they’re a steady income base, and he even offers discounts to “frequent fliers.”

“But don’t fly on the Duke,” he warns.

Don’t be fooled by the round, friendly face, or the soft, curly salt-and-pepper hair, or the curmudgeon’s smile twisted around the cigar. You run on Duke Kasmajian, he’ll hunt you down. Because you’re running with his money in your pocket. You take off on one of Duke’s bonds, he’ll track you until he finds you or one of you dies.

He’ll never give up.

Just like he’s not giving up his beloved scotch.

Or his vinyl.

Which, the younger people tell him, is coming back again.

Bullshit, Duke thinks as he listens to the Jack Montrose Sextet play “That Old Feeling” (Pacific Jazz Records, 1955)—vinyl records never went anywhere. Duke’s collection of the genre generally known as “West Coast jazz” takes up most of the second floor

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