Quinn Gets His Kicks

by L H Thomson

  Quinn Gets His Kicks

  By LH Thomson

  Edited by Jennifer C. Hall

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  This edition uses U.S spellings of common words.

  Copyright 2013 J.I. Loome. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the Kindle Store and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Also by LH Thomson:

  Quinn Checks In

  Quinn Goes West

  Quinn and the Vanishing Bride

  Quinn Gets The Blues

  Quinn & The Dead Man’s Daughter

  Buried in Benidorm

  Vendetta in Valencia

  Suicide in Salobrena

  Revenge in Ronda

  Maximum Max: The first three Max Castillo Stories

  Terrible People Doing Terrible Things

  The Antique Hunters

  The Process Server

  The Rough Side

  CHAPTER 1

  When Junior Flores was a fighter, he never tasted the canvass. He never even slipped and took a knee.

  Short, pugnacious and built like a wall even as a teenage silver gloves champion, he’d stride out of his corner in his plain white shorts and red boots, wispy man-child beard along his jawline under curly black hair. His granite-block fists would cut down lesser boys like they didn’t belong, crush them like peanuts in a compactor.

  Across the ring, under the sweat and the heat and the glaring lights, his opponents would stare right past the ref in his blue shirt and bow tie, fixated. They saw Junior’s dark, bottomless eyes and that emotionless scar of a mouth, those muscles like iron, shoulders broad as a car bumper. Their spirits were dashed, broken. They knew there was no hope, no chance to get out; that they were up against a remorseless machine, like a shark in a small pool. Their knees started to get weak before he’d even nailed them with body shot one.

  Junior was a frightening specimen, all right, with a will of iron. A few scant moments later, they were toppling over, unconscious – and whether they crashed to the worn grey canvas face up or face down, their minds were somewhere else, Junior standing over them with near-homicidal intensity as they lay helpless, only the ref’s firm hold preventing the young Mexican-American from finishing them off.

  Outside of the ring, he was a quiet, thoughtful boy, liked by everyone in the community – when he bothered to talk at all. In the ring, he was a menacing brick wall, and everyone figured he’d become a great boxer someday.

  But there was a reason Junior was so quiet the rest of the time; to his old man, he was an object of abuse and derision, a source of occasional income and a daily punching bag.

  Junior’s mom was a staunch Catholic, proud of her boy but aware of his troubles in school. When he claimed it was the old man leaving those broken ribs and bruises on his back around his kidneys, his mother threw him out of the house.

  On the street, a whole host of other demons caught up with him before he could make it, a tidal wave of personal crap that overwhelmed him, shot him full of hopelessness and junk.

  His potential as a fighter went even further south than mine; I just wound up in the joint. Junior wound up in the joint and with a needle in his arm, a meth and heroin addict who found the difficulty getting his fix inside just enough of a barrier to give him recovery time.

  He took advantage of it.

  I only kept track of him off and on for a few years, and didn’t know until a year ago that he’d cleaned up, got a job, helped his old lady clean up, too. They’d even rented a small house in the south side neighborhood near his work. It wasn’t exactly like landing a title fight, but in his way, Junior was back on top.

  The operative term being “was.”

  The medical examiner pulled back the sheet.

  “Yeah, that’s Junior,” I said. His eyes were open but lifeless, like an amazingly realistic mannequin, his mouth slightly agape, as if surprised, the fearsome gaze long gone. She saw the look on my face and quickly pushed down his lids and closed his mouth.

  I crossed myself reflexively. “Someone needs to call his wife.”

  Karen. Jeez. This was going to shatter her.

  The examiner looked puzzled, one hand leaning on the edge of the stainless steel morgue slab. “Your brother’s captain told us he had no next of kin,” she said.

  Made sense. My brother Davy was younger than us and didn’t know Junior well. He certainly didn’t know the Junior who’d gotten hitched to Karen, a junkie marriage that couldn’t last but somehow managed anyway, the couple in question both tougher and more hopeful than either knew.

  “No, he’s… he was married. What happened?”

  The examiner used her white-rubber gloved hands to carefully tilt his head to one side. A gash had opened up the back of his skull, the hair matted with dried red-black blood around the wound. I closed my eyes reflexively and winced at the now-permanent image. “Jeez…”

  She tilted his head back square then pulled the sheet back up and over Junior’s face. “They found him in an alley downtown. He had a bag of heroin in his pocket and a needle, but he hadn’t used recently, according to the tox screen.” She sighed wearily, sick of her job for the moment. “I guess whoever he was dealing with took exception to something.”

  The room’s sterility extended to the silence as I looked down at him, the only sound the vague, faint buzzing of the neon lights.

  Davy was working the six-hour overnight shift and had called me from the scene; he told me to meet him down at the morgue, never a message you want to hear from your younger brother the cop at one-thirty in the morning.

  “Liam, I think it’s Junior Flores,” he’d said. “Only, he’s older and thin, like a doper.”

  My brother was still in elementary school when Junior quit the ring -- and society in general. I was a year past boxing myself at the time, about to go to art college. Junior moved out of Fishtown, my family’s neighborhood, and I didn’t see him again for three years.

  The next time we ran into each other, he was panhandling from people outside Liberty Hall, his muscle tone gone, a pair of ragged shorts and a vest over scabby legs and worn apart sandals. He’d told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want my help. The language had been colorful and I knew enough Spanish to add vaguely sacrilegious in for the bargain. He glared at me like I’d stolen an heirloom.

  A few years after that, we bumped into each other again: he was checking out of the state pen as I was checking in, to serve my three-year stint for forgery. We waved at each other while in opposite directions at the intake/outtake, and he’d looked more surprised to see me than I ever could have been to see him.

  When I got out, he’d invited me to meet Karen and to have tea – they were both teetotalers by that point – at their little wood-framed house on the south side. He had a job working for a local painting company, and they’d adopted a bulldog that he’d named Salvador after his hero, the Mexican boxing legend Salvador Sanchez.

  A car crash had killed Sanchez at 23. Junior? Junior’s whole life was a car crash, with him dying a little more slowly every day … until he met Karen; She’d had a high school crush on him, and when they both
ended up broke, with drug problems, needing someone to lean on? It was like they were meant to be.

  Now it looked like Junior was about to crush her one last time.

  “I’ll call her once we’re done,” I said.

  A disinterested shrug. ‘We’re done, Mr. Quinn.”

  After pushing Junior’s slab back into its compartment and closing the door, she turned back to the room and pulled off her rubber gloves, tossing them in a nearby bin. “We just needed a positive identification. But certainly, if you can help someone claim him…”

  “Sure.” I’d said I’d call his wife, hadn’t I?

  “Well, when you’re ready to go, I’ve got a statement I need you to sign…”

  It was two-thirty in the morning. I’d been asleep when Davy had called, pretty sure he knew his victim personally, but needing my help to be certain. It was the first time we’d talked in two months, and he was waiting for me in the small atrium just outside the morgue, dressed in his uniform, in the middle of a brutal shift.

  “Well?”

  “Yeah, you were right. It’s Junior.”

  “Geez. He looked rough. I mean, aside from the head wound and all.”

  “Things hadn’t gone so good for him after school, but I heard he was doing better lately,” I said lamely. It was a hard statement to reconcile with the mess in the other room.

  “He had enough smack in his pocket to shoot up half of west Philly.”

  “And yet strangely...”

  Davy cut me off quickly, pushing back the brim of his patrolman’s hat briefly in an exhibition of tension. “I don’t like the sound of that. Look, I just needed you for the ID. Don’t go fucking things up by sticking your nose where it don’t belong. Jesus. You think you’d fucking learn.”

  “I told the coroner I’d inform his wife.”

  A look of irritation. “Why’d you tell me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well now I have to do it. I can’t let a civilian inform a next of kin. Nice going, Liam. Why do I even talk to you?”

  He didn’t really mean it.

  I think.

  Davy was still the only sibling who hadn’t really forgiven me for my prison stint.

  “So now what?” I tried to sound cool when I said it, like the night hadn’t shaken me. But I did a lousy job. I was bone tired and my nerves were shot, pondering the weight of the past.

  “So now you get to go home to your cushy little loft downtown while I get to talk to the late Mrs. Junior Fucking Flores, whoever the fuck that is.”

  He knew Junior and I had been casual friends as teenagers, when we were both boxing. But like I said, Davy and I hadn’t seen eye-to-eye for a long time. My recent and somewhat high-profile investigative successes had added to that tension, with several of Philly’s finest starting the rumor that I was deliberately trying to show them up. Davy knew that was bull, but it didn’t make his shifts any easier.

  “I don’t have the loft no more. Look, I know her. Maybe I should…”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, no civilians.”

  “I can help you find her.”

  “You think I need your help?” Davy had looked up to me before my conviction. The hurt ran deep.

  “I didn’t say that. But I sure could speed up your night.”

  “Give me her address.”

  “Davy, it’s better…”

  “Give me her address, Liam.”

  I sighed. “It’s better if I go with you. Then at least it’s from someone she knows.”

  He stopped for a moment and didn’t say anything then half rolled his eyes, irritated by the fact that I was right. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

  We climbed into his squad car. “Always figured you’d be in my car at some point, but I figured it would be the back seat,” he said.

  This is what I put up with.

  Davy drove us over to their small rented house in silence, and I only spoke to tell him when to turn. I hadn’t been there in over a year, but Philly is the kind of town where, once you know your way around, you know your way around. It was a small wooden home painted dark blue, with white and green trim. Davy parked his squad car across the street.

  The house was probably pre-World War Two, but they’d kept it immaculately, and Karen’s flower gardens, just an optimistic idea a year earlier, were in full bloom now, though shrouded by the shadows of the early morning and the odd street lamp nearby.

  “You sure you’re up to this?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Got to be done.”

  We walked up the grey concrete front steps and I rang the bell then knocked on the wine-colored door. It opened a few seconds later.

  Karen looked good, better than she had in years. But the second she saw me, and then Davy in uniform, she knew something bad had happened. She gasped inwardly, paralyzed, frozen in shock for a moment before collapsing forward into my arms, sobbing, the three of us barely lit by the porch light, on the border of the gathering darkness.

  We sat in her living room, two couches framing neighboring walls, the hardwood old and torn up, but brought up to a shine by some hard work. Davy was getting coffee in the adjoining kitchen while Karen leaned backwards against the couch, smoking a cigarette. She blew out a plume of blue-grey smoke that caught the dim light of the corner floor lamp, rising in a cloud and drifting past her straw-blonde hair.

  “Junior wanted me to quit. Said as long as I had an addiction I was relinquishing control over my life.”

  “He was always a smart kid,” I said.

  “Not always. Just lately.” She blew out more smoke and flicked the ash expertly into an ashtray. “But you knew that already. I thought he’d gotten things figured out. Gotten his shit together, you know? I was so fucking sure, Liam.”

  Karen sort of stared ahead vacantly as she talked. She pulled hard on the cigarette again, sucking back smoke and blowing it out in a thin jet as the ash crept south; then she stubbed out the tiny bit of tobacco left ahead of the filter in an old Puerto Vallarta hotel ashtray on the coffee table.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything, letting her vent off some pressure.

  “He’d been working a second job so we could afford a down-payment on our own place.” She sighed deeply again, abjectly sad, a broken spirit. “It meant another four or five hours of work most nights.

  “He’d been working for that guy Granger, the contractor, as a painter. When he finished a job for this little soccer club near Kennett Junction, in Chester County, he noticed they had a night custodian job open, four nights a week. I guess he figured we’d get to the down payment that much quicker. So he got my beat-up old Ford running again and he’d drive it out there, nearly an hour each way.”

  She butted out the cigarette then crossed her arms defensively, leaning forward and rocking a little, looking away, distant. “This ain’t how it was supposed to be, Liam. You know that. You know what we been through. Junior beat his demons. He was working hard....”

  It didn’t surprise me. I remembered his dedication in the gym and the ring, before he turned off and tuned out. We only ever fought once when we were boxers; he was two years my junior, and even at age fourteen was able to knock me around the ring for four rounds of sparring. If anyone had been scoring, he’d have outpointed the hell out of me. If we hadn’t been wearing headgear, he’d have knocked me out about four times.

  “Everyone respected him,” I told her. “I mean, as a fighter and all, and a good guy. I know he didn’t hang out too much in the old neighborhood, but everyone thought good of him for getting off the dope. And they knew his old man; they never held the tough life against him.”

  She took a tissue out of her purse and wiped her nose quickly, then balled up the tissue and threw it in the ashtray. “That would mean a lot to him. He always felt anxious going to Fishtown, you know? He didn’t say it, but it was like he worried that they’d be judging all his fuckups.”

  I knew the feeling, as Fishtown can be a real tight neighborhood. Tigh
t neighborhoods are swell when things are going great, and hell when they aren’t. But it wasn’t the time to get into that. Instead, I put a hand on her shoulder. “You need anything, you can get ahold of Davy or me. We’ll give you our numbers.”

  She took her cigarettes out of the purse on the table and retrieved another one, then lit it with a black plastic lighter, inhaling deeply, then exhaling smoke, then chewing on a hangnail. She asked, “What do I do now? I’m trying to think, but it’s like my brain is numb. I don’t know why, you know? I don’t know why I never expected something like this.”

  She pulled her feet up onto the couch so that she was practically sitting balled up in the corner.

  Davy said gently, “Did Junior have any insurance? Some way to take care of the funeral costs?” Junior’s father had been dead for years, and he didn’t speak with his mother, who’d gone home to Mexico.

  “Yeah, there was something. There was an insurance paper he signed when he took the night job. Just a second....” She got up and went over to a ratty roll-top desk at the end of the living room, rifling through documents on top for a few moments. “Here.”

  She handed me the page. Sure enough, it was a copy of a permission form to deduct a few bucks from each of his paychecks as a co-payment to the club’s insurer.

  Karen said, “Does that mean we’re covered?”

  “It could be,” Davy said. “But Liam’s going to go check that out for you, because he’s an insurance investigator now ... aren’t you, Liam?” He gave me a look of sickly sweetness.

  He didn’t need to volunteer me. I would’ve done it willingly. But when Davy could put me under the gun, he generally did. “Absolutely,” I said.

  He gestured towards Karen again. “Are you working?”

  She nodded then took another deep drag. “I got a cashier job at the Red-E-Mart down the street. Pay isn’t great but it’ll handle the bills. We… I split groceries with Mrs. Delvecchio next door.”

  “Can we help? I mean .....”