Early Graves
Page 21
Dave shed the blue robe, laid it over the loft railing, switched off the lamp, and lay down beside Cecil, who put an arm across him. “Tell me,” Dave said.
“He had a job at Hoang Pho, a waterfront restaurant down there—and about ten-thirty, when there was nobody left but four Vietnamese men in business suits at a rear table, all of a sudden, the door bursts open and in come these two little guys in black jeans and black T-shirts, right? Black handkerchiefs tied over their faces.”
“I remember reading about it,” Dave said. “They were armed with Uzis, weren’t they?”
“With which they massacred the four men at the table in two seconds flat and were out of there.”
“Never to be seen or heard of again,” Dave said.
“You got it,” Cecil said. “And Cotton was dishwasher there that night. Only person left. The men had paid their check. He didn’t have anything to do but wait till they got finished with their conference, and lock up after them. He was in the kitchen, reading Rolling Stone, when he heard the shooting. He ran out the back and buried himself in a trash module. Well, they came out the same way, ran right past him. He damn near died of fright. But he peeked out. Getting into their car, they pulled off those handkerchiefs. Light was bad back there, but he saw their faces. And it took him a long time to get over the idea that they’d seen his. The police questioned him, of course, but he didn’t tell them.”
Miles Davis played a comic riff—“put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right out.” Dave said, “And then he came home night before last, and here were these same two little men in black shirts and jeans again, running away from the Old Fleet dock, right?”
“Uh-huh—you guessed it.”
“Asians, right?” Dave said.
“‘Tough little doll-boys,’ he calls them,” Cecil said. “‘Pretty as poison.’” Cecil lay quiet while “Full Nelson” thumped and tooted jokily around them. When the tune had pranced off into silence, he said, “What’s going to happen to Cotton when this comes out?”
“I’ll try not to let it come out,” Dave said.
“How can you help it? I know you. You think it was a Vietnamese thing, now. Nothing to do with Andy Flanagan. You’ll go after the doll-boys, and they’ll figure out it was Cotton who tipped you. And he’ll be black and white and dead all over. You were going to quit. Why didn’t you?”
“I’ll protect Cotton,” Dave said. “Do you have contacts inside the Vietnamese community?”
“Nobody has contacts inside the Vietnamese community. It can’t be done or the police would have done it, wouldn’t they?”
“It can be done,” Dave said.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Joseph Hansen
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-1682-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE DAVE BRANDSTETTER MYSTERIES
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