Oddly, given all the cordite misting the air like cheap champagne, the customers didn’t get shot; it was the owner’s aquarium, situated between the bar and the dining area, that exploded. Big glass panels slid and slipped more like icebergs calving than glass breaking, the thirty- or forty-odd fish within pouring forth on their little tsunami of water and flopping around in the puddles on the floor. A third of them were clown fish.
All of that took four seconds.
In the next four seconds, Candy and Karl had their weapons drawn—Karl from his shoulder holster, Candy from his belt, Candy down on one knee, Karl standing. Gunfire was exchanged before the two George Rafts backed toward the door and, still firing, finally turned and hoofed it fast into the dark.
Candy and Karl stared at each other. “Fuck was that?” exclaimed Candy, rising from his kneeling position.
They holstered their weapons as efficiently as if they’d drawn them like the cops they were not. They checked out the customers with their usual mercurial shrewdness, labeling them for future reference (if need be); a far table, the two suits with cells now clamped to their busy ears, calling 911 or their stockbrokers; an elderly couple, she weeping, he patting her, stood nearby; two tables shoved together that had been surrounded by a party of nuts probably from Brooklyn or Jersey, hyena-like in their braying laughter, had been sitting at two tables pulled together but now all still were under the table; a couple of other business-types with Bluetooth devices stationed over their ears talked to each other or their Tokyo counterparts. A blond woman or girl, sitting alone eating spaghetti and reading something, book or magazine; a dark-haired woman with a LeSportsac slung over the back of her chair, who’d been talking on her Droid all the while she ate; and a party of four on a girls’ night out, though they’d never see girlhood again. Twenty tables, all in all, a few empty.
All of that ruin in less than a minute.
* *
The Clown Fish Café was nothing special, a dark little place in a narrow street off Lexington Avenue, its cavelike look the effect of bad lighting, rather than the owner’s artistic flair. A few wall sconces were set in the stone walls, meant apparently to simulate a coral reef. Candles, squat and fat, seeming to begrudge the room their light, were set in little iron cages with wire mesh over their tops, flames hardly flickering, as if light were a treasure they refused to give up. They might as well have been at the bottom of the sea.
Now these brightly colored fish—clown fish, tangs, angelfish of neon blue and sun-bright yellow—were drawing last breaths on the floor until one of the customers, the blond girl or woman who had been eating spaghetti, tossed the remnants of red wine from her glass, scooped up water and added one of the fish to her wineglass.
Seeing this, Candy grabbed up a water pitcher, dipped up what he could of water, and bullied a clown fish into the pitcher.
The other customers watched, liked it, and, with the camaraderie you see only in the face of life-threatening danger, were taking up their water glasses or flinging their wineglasses free of the cheap house plonk and refilling them from water pitchers sitting at the waiters’ stations. The waiters themselves ran about, unhelpfully; the bartender, though, catapulted over the bar with his bar hose to slosh water around the fish.
Wading through glass shards at some risk to their own skin, customers and staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in glasses and pitchers.
It was some sight when they finished.
On every table, an array of pitchers and glasses, one or two or three, tall or short, thin or thick, and in every glass swam a fish, its color brightened from beneath by a stubby candle that seemed at last to have found a purpose in life.
Even Frankie, the owner, was transfixed. Then he announced he had called the emergency aquarium people and that they were coming with a tank.
* *
So who the fuck you think they were?” Karl said, as he and Candy made their way along the dark pavement of Lexington.
I’m betting Joey G-C hired those guys because he didn’t like the way we were taking our time.”
“As we made clear as angel’s piss to him that’s the way we work. So those two spot Hess in there or they get the tip-off he’s there and go in with fucking assault weapons, thinkin’ he’s at that table on the other side of the fish tank, and that’s the reason they shoot up the tank?”
“Call him,” said Candy.
Karl pulled out his cell, tapped a number from his list of contacts, and was immediately answered, as if Joey G-C expected a call.
“Fuck’s wrong with you, Joey? You hire us, then you send your two goons to pull off a job in the middle of a crowded restaurant? No class, no style these guys got. Walk in with Uzis and fired around the room, you’d think they were blind. And did they get the mark? No, they did not; they just shot the place up, including a big aquarium the least you can do is pay for. Yeah . . .”
Candy was elbowing him in the ribs, saying, “Tell him all the fish suffocated and died.”
“And there was all these endangered fish flopping on the floor, some of them you could say were nearly extinct, like you will be, Joey, you pull this shit on us again. Yeah. The job’ll get done when the job gets done. Goodbye.” Karl stowed his cell in his inside coat pocket.
“We saw Hess leave through the side door. You’d think he knew they were coming.”
“Jesus, I’m tellin’ you, C, the book business is like rolling around fuckin’ Afghanistan on skateboards. You could get killed.”
“You got that right.”
They walked on, Karl clapping Candy on the shoulder, jostling the water pitcher as they walked along the street. “Good thinking, C. I got to hand it to you, you got everyone in the place rushing to save the fish.”
The water was sliding down Candy’s Hugo Boss–jacketed-arm. “Don’t give me the credit; it was that blond dame, that girl, who did that. She was the first one to ditch her wine. You see her?”
“The blonde? I guess. What’d she look like?”
Candy shrugged; a little wave of water spilled onto Lexington. “I couldn’t see her face good. She had a barrette in her hair. Funny.”
“You didn’t see her face but you saw a hair barrette?” Karl laughed. “Crazy, man.”
They walked on.
* *
There are those girls with golden hair you half-notice in a crowd. You see one in the outer edges of your vision amid the people flooding toward you along Lex or Park or Seventh Avenues, blond head, uncovered, weaving through the dark ones, the caps and hats, your eye catching the blondness, but registering nothing else. Then you find when she’s passed it’s too late.
A girl you wish you’d paid attention to: a girl you wish you’d paid attention to.
A girl you knew you should have seen head-on, not disappearing around a corner.
Such a girl was Cindy Sella.
* *
Some of them would talk about it later, and for a long time. The businessmen climbing into a cab, the girl with the LeSportsac, her Droid lost inside it.
As if there’d been an eclipse of Apple, a sundering of Microsoft, a sirocco of swirling iPhones, Blackberrys, Thunderbolts, Gravities, Galaxies and all the other smartphones into the sweet hereafter; yes, as if all that had never been, nobody, nobody reached for his cell once the fish were saved and swimming. They were too taken up with watching the fish swimming, dizzy-like, in the wineglasses.
Nobody had e-mailed or texted.
Nobody had sent a tweet to Twitter.
Nobody had posted on Facebook.
Nobody had taken a picture.
They were shipwrecked on the shores of their own poor powers of description, a few of them actually getting out old diaries and writing the incident down.
Yes, they talked about that incident in the Clown Fish Café the night they hadn’t gotten shot, told their friends, coworkers, pastors, and waiters at their clubs, not to mention their partners, wives, husbands, and their kids.
Their
kids.
Way cool. So where’s the photos?
Remarkably, nobody took one.
Wow. Neanderthal.
But see, there were these neon-bright blue and orange and green and yellow fish, see, that we all scooped up and dropped in water glasses, and, just imagine, imagine those colors, the water, the candlelight. Look, you can see it. . . .
But the seer, seeing nothing, walked away.
ALSO BY MARTHA GRIMES
The Man with a Load of Mischief
The Old Fox Deceived
The Anodyne Necklace
The Dirty Duck
Jerusalem Inn
Help the Poor Struggler
The Deer Leap
I Am the Only Running Footman
The Five Bells and Bladebone
The Old Silent
The Old Contemptibles
The End of the Pier
The Horse You Came In On
Rainbow’s End
Hotel Paradise
The Case Has Altered
The Stargazey
POETRY
Send Bygones
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DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.
* * *
THE WAY OF ALL FISH is a wickedly funny sequel to Grimes’s bestselling novel, Foul Matter, “a satire of the venal, not to say murderous practices of the New York publishing industry” (The New York Times Book Review).
Martha Grimes eBooks available from Scribner
First in the Richard Jury Mystery Series
The Man with a Load of Mischief
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A bizarre murder disturbs a sleepy Yorkshire fishing village.
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
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Murder makes the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place.
The Anodyne Necklace
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In Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, takes her last drink.
The Dirty Duck
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Jury has himself a mysterious little Christmas set in a chilly English landscape and Gothic estate.
Jerusalem Inn
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Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered.
Help the Poor Struggler
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In Ashdown Dean, a little English village, animals are dying in a series of seemingly innocuous accidents.
The Deer Leap
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In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found dead. Almost a year later, on another rainy night, another murder.
I Am the Only Running Footman
* * *
A dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique writing bureau.
The Five Bells and Bladebone
* * *
Jury witnesses a killing in West Yorkshire inn The Old Silent.
The Old Silent
* * *
Jury finds himself a suspect, detained in London, while his friend Melrose Plant investigates in the Lake District.
The Old Contemptibles
* * *
Jury is called to Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, Edgar Allen Poe, and a murderer.
The Horse You Came In On
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Three women die of “natural causes” in London and the West Country, and Jury winds up in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Rainbow’s End
* * *
The Lincolnshire fenlands are the perfect setting for Richard Jury’s latest case, a mystifying double murder.
The Case Has Altered
* * *
Jury and Melrose Plant follow a complex case from the depths of London's East End to the heights of Mayfair's art scene.
The Stargazey
* * *
First in the Emma Graham Series
Hotel Paradise
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Featuring Maud Chadwick from the Emma Graham Series
The End of the Pier
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A Mystery in Poetry Form
Send Bygraves
* * *
ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by Martha Grimes
Previously published in 1999 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-4767-3302-9 (ebook)
Biting the Moon Page 33