The Friendship of Criminals by Robert Glinski

Author:Robert Glinski
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781250049964
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

18.

GUN BENEATH THE SEAT in case he got pulled over, Sonny turned right out of his building’s underground garage and accelerated with a heavy foot. The initial plan was to arrive first, prepare the sailboat for a quick launch, and cover the parking lot in the event uninvited guests followed his son.

The radio was playing a Coltrane set he’d heard a thousand times. While jazz had been Sonny’s thing since meeting the saxophonist during his Strawberry Mansion days, he didn’t like tarnishing the artist with the night’s black cloud. He tapped the row of preset stations for a different riff—one he didn’t mind getting dirty—and found enough ads and soul-killing oldies to make him punch the OFF button with a closed fist.

Minus tunes, Michael and Tatiana’s conversations replayed in his head, making him ache for two fingers of Scotch and five minutes to enjoy it. Without handy booze, his thoughts turned to the half-smoked joint hidden between Alabama and Alaska in his AAA map book. Might be just the thing to take the edge off. After a cop-peek left and right, he put the unlit roach between his lips, caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, called himself an asshole, and flicked it out the sunroof.

“Damn kid,” he muttered, “the things I do for you.” A lifetime of heartbreaking screw-ups and still Sonny was willing to stiff-arm a Russian beauty, speed around Boca Raton, and toss away perfectly good weed. When it came to motivating behavior, nothing ran on the same racecourse as Catholic guilt. Sonny often wondered if he’d experienced a more normal childhood, if his role models weren’t barflies from Bonnie’s Whiskey Room, if he hadn’t sailed away from so many wives, maybe he could have been a better father and his son a better man. Michael was the backyard rocket that began each flight with such promise and ended nose-down in the dirt, broken and battered. A friend once told Sonny he was missing the point. The issue was no longer who shot Michael. That was old news. The bigger deal was who was driving him to the hospital. That somebody was Sonny. Always had been.

Turning left into the marina’s entrance, Sonny looped through the crushed-shell parking lot on high alert. He’d once heard an old-timer say No coincidence, no story, a maxim he’d since heeded. Boring was best. Good jobs weren’t supposed to look like a game of pixie sticks.

The security shack was unoccupied after ten o’clock per the board of directors’ efforts to cut costs. With favorable weather conditions, the lot was sprinkled with three dozen cars left by sailors out for the night or living full-time in the marina. Illumination from the thin-cut moon and single light pole was too dim to make out a man’s face from twenty feet.

Sonny parked in the last row, a few spaces from the marina’s dumpster. His bumper was tight against a hedge of forsythias, giving him an unobstructed view of the entrance, the storage shed, and most of the parked cars.

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