Criminal Past by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-07T23:00:00+00:00

HALF A YEAR EARLIER, Somers and Hazard had come to Smithfield to meet with Detective Liz Swinney. Their meeting, in a vacant storefront deep in the worst part of the city, had revealed important facts about the case they were investigating. It had also shed light on Swinney’s knowledge that her partner, Al Lender, was crooked—and the dilemma Swinney faced with that knowledge. Since then, Swinney had worn thinner and thinner, stretched in two directions by loyalty to her partner and loyalty to the force. Somers didn’t envy her; his partner before Hazard had been a criminal, and the echoes of that lingered.

This street looked like any other in Smithfield: brown paper bags keeling over when the wind dropped; sunburnt weeds choking the storm drain; a name tag that read Tits McGee slapped onto a parking meter; and the shrinking brown light of a lone sodium lamp, struggling against the pink-and-blue neon of the stores along this block. A wing-and-seafood joint, a dollar store, a payday loan office. The Church of the Three-Day Nazarene had boarded up its windows since the last time Somers had been here, but Mystique, the beauty parlor next door, was still open, and a very tall drag queen sashayed into the street as Hazard parked the Aston Martin. The queen stopped long enough to give the car a long look, and then she cocked her hips and blew them a kiss. Hazard killed the engine, and the queen stayed in the middle of the street, watching until the Aston Martin’s lights turned off. Then, with an irritated swish of her hips, she plunged into the shrinking brown light, her wig gleaming.

“Never say I don’t take you anywhere interesting,” Somers said.

“We might as well shoot a signal flare,” Hazard said, thumping the Aston Martin’s wheel. “Driving this, we might as well light a bonfire and send smoke signals.”

“Lucky for us, nobody knows how to read smoke signals.” Somers unbuckled his belt and reached for the door.

“I’ll stay here. With the car.”

“Are you scared?”

“I’m not scared. But if somebody decides to boost—”

“If someone steals this damn thing, it’ll teach my father right for trusting you to drive it. I want you in there. Whatever Swinney has, you need to hear it from her.”

Hazard moaned and whined, but he left the Aston Martin and followed Somers. The storefront beyond the dollar market was abandoned; kraft paper blocked out the windows and the reinforced glass door, and someone had tagged the length of wall with the informational supplement: Goyo Sucks Ass. Apprehension tingled at the base of Somers’s neck; he remembered what Hazard had said the last time they’d met Swinney here.

“She chose a spot where she can put a bullet in our heads and nobody will find us for weeks.”

Hazard stopped. Behind them, the door of the wing-and-seafood joint jingled, and the night air blossomed with pepper and vinegar and Tabasco. A group of men emerged, laughing, shoving each other, their attention turned in the other direction as they headed away from Hazard and Somers.

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