Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

I shook my head. “No, Am, I don’t think you need to worry about that. Are you at home now?”

“I will be in about three minutes, maybe two. No, I think maybe three…”

“Stay there when you get home. We’ll be right over.”

I hung up and Dehan said, “Am?”

“It’s a long story and not a very interesting one. Americano, milk with a dash of coffee. His father’s idea.”

“Nice.”

I stood and grabbed my coat. “I think it’s a waste of time, but he thinks he might have something. Let’s go talk to him.”

Am’s apartment was the ground floor of an ugly, yellow brick house at the top of Bryant Avenue. By the time we got there, the afternoon was growing old and the temperatures were turning from icy to glacial. A nasty gray light hung over everything and a wind had started to pick up off the water that was damp and frigid and found its way into every nook and cranny of your clothing. I hammered on the door while Dehan stamped and billowed big clouds of condensation.

The door opened after a moment and a big guy of about twenty-three or -four stood looking down at us. He must have been six three in his bare feet. His complexion was dark, but he had blond hair and blue eyes.

“Are you Am?”

“I am,” he said, apparently unaware that it could be amusing. “Are you the cops?”

“We are. This is Detective Dehan and I am John Stone. Can we come in?”

“Yeah, man, you can come in. I’m making hot soup. Do you want some hot soup?”

“No, thank you.” I waited. “But we would like to come in. It is very cold.”

He grinned and stood back. “Yeah, sure, man!”

We stepped into a short, narrow hallway with a door on the left and a door at the end that stood open. Light filtered out, along with a smell of chicken soup. It smelled good. He scratched his head, looked embarrassed and pointed at that door.

“I’m cooking… I’m making soup. I don’t know if I should leave it on the stove…”

I smiled, wondering how many more nuts I was going to meet that day. “Why don’t we all go into the kitchen? Then you can go ahead and cook, and we can talk there.”

“Yeah, man, that’s the plan.” He walked ahead, muttering, “…man’s got a plan.”

The kitchen, like the hall, was small and narrow, but it was clean and well ordered. There was a table against the wall with two plastic chairs. A window over the sink looked out to a backyard, where inky silhouettes of winter trees stood stark against a darkening, gray sky. Am went to his pot of soup, Dehan went and rested her backside against the sink and I leaned against the door.

“What have you got to tell us about Jose Robles, Am?”

“He was takin’ an interest in me, man. They was goin’ to reject my application at the university, you know? But he told them, no way, man. He could see I had ideas. So he said he wanted me. Now he’s dead.”

We were all quiet for a moment while he stirred his soup. Eventually I sighed and said, “I am really sorry about that, Am, but I don’t see how that can help us with our investigation…”

“I don’t know, but I figure, if me an’ him had a kind of special bond, you know what I’m sayin’? If you talk to me, then maybe you can, like, deduce why they wanted to kill him.”

I glanced at Dehan. She closed her eyes and shook her head. I looked back at him and was going to thank him for his time and tell him it didn’t work that way, but instead I heard myself asking him, “You live alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Dad’s in Colorado. Don’t know where my mom is. She left when I was born.” He looked at me and grinned. “She was colored, and he didn’t like colored folk much. So he told her to git. Then he called me Americano ’cause he said I come out on the right side of brown.”

I frowned, vaguely aware his voice was changing. “You grew up in Colorado?”

He took the pot off the heat and poured some soup into a mug. He glanced at Dehan. “You sure you don’t want any?”

She smiled and nodded. “I’d love some actually. It smells great.”

So he poured us a mug of soup each and said, “We can go to the living room. It’s warm in there.”

I glanced at my watch. “We can spare half an hour.”

He had a fire burning in the grate and a couple of old, collapsed sofas that had been bolstered with blankets and cushions. He picked a corner opposite an old TV and smiled at us as we sat.

I sipped the soup. It was as good as it smelled. He watched me carefully and I nodded. “It’s good. How long have you been in New York?”

“Since I turned sixteen. That’s six years. It’s why I talk funny. I kind of pick things up and mix it all together. Jose said it was a survival mechanism. I integrate to survive.”

Dehan put her mug on the floor by her feet. “Your daddy teach you to make soup?”

“Uh-huh. He taught me everything. He taught me to survive.”

“So what are the ideas that Jose was going to help you with?”

He stared at his soup for a while, then at the fire. “You heard about the Tesla. And there are dudes out in Texas makin’ ’lectric motors from lithium ion batteries. They’ll go naught to sixty in one and a half seconds, man. And they will go two hundred MPH no problem. Problem those cars got though, is the battery loses its charge