Unknown Victim by Kay Hadashi (classic books for 11 year olds .TXT) 📕

body odor. A small feather was tucked into the ribbon that circled his hat. The loose sleeves of his shirt hid his upper arms, something Gina still wanted to see.

After a third sip of his old fashioned, he gave her a glance, barely turning his head. “Howzit.”

“Hi.” She took a sip from her bottle, not even noticing it was beer.

“Never seen you here before.”

“First time I’ve been here.”

“The bar should be honored for it.”

Feeling a bead of sweat break loose from her hair on the back of her neck, she ignored it. When she reached for her bottle, she almost knocked it over. She’d swallowed two gulps before the tang of the bitter taste brought her back to her barstool.

Chuck the bartender made a show of wiping the bar in front of them, probably waiting for drink orders. When he didn’t get them, he wandered off again.

“What are you doing here, Santoro?” Kona asked quietly.

The conversation had suddenly changed from crappy pickup lines to something else, she didn’t know what. “Ringin’ in the New Year with a drink.”

“Some new year you’re expecting to have, if it’s starting in this dump.” His lips barely moved when he spoke.

“It’s my year, and no one else’s to tell me what to do with it.”

“Touché. How’s the Tuyo?”

“I’m looking forward to pregnancy morning sickness more than I want to finish this.”

“Personally, I’ve never wanted either.”

When the bartender made a sweep of glasses and bottles on the bar, Gina kept her Tuyo tight between her fingers. Kona asked for a glass of water.

The bartender nodded at the bottle Gina clung to. “Looks empty.”

She smiled at him. “I guess I’m a little odd. I collect these things.”

“Beer bottles?”

Her answer even drew Kona’s attention.

“Yeah. You know how women like to scrapbook things? I take the label off all the beers I’ve ever had.”

The bartender gave her a shrug and poured a water on the rocks for Kona.

“Nice comeback,” Detective Kona said once they were alone again. “What’s the bottle for?”

“Prints.”

“Of?”

“Him,” she said. “To see if they’re a match to anything you collected from the vic.”

“And that’ll prove?”

“That maybe the vic had been in here.”

“Which means what?” he asked.

“Maybe nothing, but at least you’d have someone to lean on for finding out who he was.”

Kona played with his glass of water, clinking the ice on the sides. “I thought you were a gardener?”

“A gardener that found a dead body on the front porch. There’s more to that guy than meets the eye, and you know it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in a dive that serves Tuyo on New Year’s Eve dressed like that.”

“What’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?” he asked, looking insulted by her comment.

“Nothing, if you’re planning on going home alone.”

“Pretty harsh, Santoro,” he mumbled. “I suppose you have a fingerprint set at your house, and a way of running it through law enforcement data bases?”

“No, but I know a police detective who does. I was planning on turning it over to him next time I saw him.”

“Without chain of custody, it wouldn’t be evidence of anything except that you have bad taste in beers.”

“Too bad for me.” When Chuck strolled back, Gina asked for the ladies’ room. He pointed her down the narrow hall. While she was down there, she made quick work of looking for the stock of beers, just to see how much Tuyo they might have on hand. There was a single case stacked on top of more expensive stuff. Flipping the flap up, she found that only two bottles were missing.

By the time she got back to the bar, Detective Kona was gone, and so was her bottle. Their stools had been filled by two young women with fluorescent-colored drinks.

When the bartender looked at her, Gina pointed at the counter where she’d left her bottle.

He shrugged. “I don’t have it. Your boyfriend paid your tab, though.”

Going out to the parking lot, she didn’t see Kona or his sedan anywhere. She did see someone having a smoke near the back door of the building, not far from the garbage dumpsters. She went there to talk with the other bartender that was on his break. He was a suntanned Asian guy with spiked hair and chubby cheeks. He had a couple of tattoos on his arms and neck.

He did the chin lift-reverse head nod thing that everybody seemed to do in Hawaii. “You’re the one who had the Tuyo. What’d you think of it?”

“It’s giving my liver something to do.” She got to the point of talking to him by showing him the picture of the dead man on her phone. “This dude look familiar to you?”

He looked for a moment. “Chuck thinks you’re a cop.”

“Good for him. I’m not. What about the guy in the picture?”

“What’s so important about him?”

“He’s dead and I’d like to know who he was.”

He flicked his cigarette away and looked at the image on her phone again. “Why are you asking around here about him?”

She brought up the image of the Tuyo bottle cap. “This was found in his pocket.”

“A man with discerning taste. So?”

“Bunzo’s is the only place I’ve found that serves the stuff. I also noticed only two bottles were missing from the case of Tuyo in the hallway near the restrooms, maybe the one I had, and this one.” She tapped her fingernail on the image of the bottle cap.

When he stood, he wasn’t much taller than Gina, and his waist was as chubby as his cheeks. “The only reason I believe you’re not a cop is that you’re not from around here. But you’re investigating his death, and that makes you no more popular than the cops.”

“Look, when I found the guy, he was dead on my front porch. When the cops came to get the body, there were no matches for his fingerprints in their system. That made me curious of why some no-name homeless dude decided to die on my doorstep, okay? You know him or not?”

“I’ve never seen that guy