States of Grace by Mandy Miller (top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT) 📕

“She tell you anything?”

“No, but she sure as sh— Let’s just say she really wanted to get rid of me, though, so I must be on to something.”

“Nice save, sweetheart. You, too, can learn new tricks.” He glances at Miranda. “But not anywhere near as fast as you.”

“Zoe’s trial’s around the corner, so I better learn a lot more soon or she’s going down, along with my chances for a big payday.”

“I thought the blonde paid you.”

“She only gave me a retainer. We agreed I’ll get the rest for the trial. Or more when it pleads out—more likely given the evidence. There’s always the risk they’ll stiff me, but given all the attention the case is getting, it’s one worth taking.”

“The bloodsucker who had my case made me pay him everything up front.”

“It’s never easy to collect from someone on the inside. Maybe he thought you were going down.”

“And I did. At least until you came along,” he says, his hands flexing and unflexing on the steering wheel.

I count off the street numbers, in search of 6555 NE 6th Avenue, regretful for my failed attempt at humor.

“Coming up, stop number two on our whirlwind tour of the pill mills of South Florida. If I’m not mistaken, this next place was one of the places we raided when I was working with Marcus on the task force for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Feds.”

“Way too many cops in this world,” Vinnie says, a renewed twinkle in his eyes to remind me, while he may owe me his life, he reserves the right to rag on me for having once been a military cop and a prosecutor.

“Wise ass.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. But why’s this place still open if it was raided?”

“We closed it down, but another owner stepped in and picked up right where the old one left off. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Didn’t even change the name. Sunshine Pain. Sinclair was arrested here by the same task force Marcus and I worked on together. They caught Sinclair red-handed with a boat load of Oxy. He was going down for a long time.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. That’s the point. The case mysteriously disappeared.”

“Don’t tell me. He ratted again?”

“Seems that way. Maybe the task force didn’t even know about his other bust by Lauderdale PD at FCP. Or simply didn’t care. Who knows? The only thing for sure is if St. Paul’s had found out about the arrests, they would have fired him.”

He turns right onto NE 6th Avenue and rolls to a stop in front of 6555, an old Florida-style house, yellow striped awnings shading jalousie windows. Carport. A hand-lettered sign on the front porch reads Sunshine Pain.

I double check the list the FCP attendant gave me to make sure Sunshine Pain isn’t part of the FCP pain clinic industrial complex. It isn’t. Looks like Sinclair went doctor shopping to lay in inventory.

“Wait here. We’ll be back.” I clip on Miranda’s leash and she leaps down in a single, fluid motion.

“Walk time, pretty girl. And no biting, okay?” I say, thankful she’s not a drug sniffer dog, or she’d be alerting to every vehicle and person in sight.

The street’s a junkyard. Cars, trucks, vans, and even a battered old yellow school bus, all squeezed in nose-to-tail. We walk down the block, checking license plates undisturbed because everyone moves out of the way when they see Miranda. Maybe they’ve seen one too many police dogs in their lives.

When we get back, Vinnie’s leaning against the hood of the car, arms crossed across his favorite Guy Harvey T-shirt, a picture of a blue marlin in full flight. He’s only wearing it because I gave it to him for his birthday. Vinnie hates to fish. Despite his prior occupation as an enforcer, he can’t bring himself to kill an innocent creature. He once told me a story of how back in the day, when he was the superintendent of an apartment building in Chinatown, a Chink—Vinnie’s words not mine—kicked an orphaned kitten he’d been bottle feeding. “I taught that piece a shit a lesson he’d never forget. Never did come back for his security deposit.”

I jerk my chin at the line of shifty people spilling out the clinic’s front door onto what had once been a lawn, a space long ago given over to weeds and ant hills.

He shakes his head. “Same caca, different place.”

“Bet you can’t guess what I saw back there?”

He gives me a self-satisfied smile. “A guy getting a blow job.”

I stamp my foot like a willful child. “How’d you guess?”

“Because I saw the same thing over here.”

He motions with his head to an ancient Cadillac with purple neon rims which are spinning even though the car is parked. Inside, a woman is hunched over a guy in the driver’s seat, head bobbing up and down like the drinking bird toy I won at a carnival when I seven.

“Now we’ve confirmed Sinclair was a scumbag, what next?”

“We? Taking this investigator role seriously, are we?”

He gives me a crooked salute. “At your service, ma’am.”

I plop the Marlins cap on Vinnie’s balding head and settle in to observe the macabre, hypnotic rhythm of the scene. The living dead shuffling in and out, faces full of anxiety on the way in and vain hope on the way out.

Before he sits down beside me, I notice a bulge in the small of Vinnie’s back, the place where a person might stash a gun. If one were in need of protection. If one were not a convicted felon and, as such, prohibited from carrying a weapon.

When a woman stumbles on her way down the steps, landing on her knees, several customers step over her. She closes her eyes, face raised to the sun in supplication.

It’s Beth from the NA meeting.

I resist the urge to run over and help her. “Only you can save you now, sweet Beth.”

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things