Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) by Chris Bauer (i want to read a book TXT) 📕

Frank blew into his hands for the full minute it took to walk the darkness between Water and Front streets, emerging at the traffic light. One fifteen a.m. give or take. Little car traffic at street level in the blizzard. Foot traffic was nonexistent, would stay that way until bartenders served their last-call drinks then shoved drunk patrons out the door into this god-forsaken, wintry white night.

A nervous pat of his coat’s breast pockets. He felt the edge of the notepad inside. In bad weather he knew to keep the paper in zip-locked plastic. Its blue-lined pages and his scribbles on them were in soft No. 2 pencil lead, and they would smear if they got wet.

“Smart zebras don’t change their spots,” he mumbled, coughed once, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

He’d heard that somewhere, or something like it, used it as a pep talk for himself. Maybe he’d fractured it a bit, but he’d kept it to heart a full eight years now, ever since he’d retired from the Teamsters front office and began working for Dizzy and the family. Collections work. Transportation for high end escorts. Old school illegal numbers rackets; bets on horse and dog racing results, taken from blue-collar city folks with some high rollers layered in, all recorded with a nubby pencil in rice paper notepads, and the product of miles of shoe leather, day and night. This record-keeping method had worked fine for numbers runners spanning multiple decades, and it worked fine for Frank Tisha during the current one.

Frank owned a cell phone but he didn’t trust using it for this business. He’d burned each two-buck notepad after it filled up. If someone ever dropped a dime on him and sent the cops to his house, he could toss the one he was using in the bucket of water he kept next to his bed, and the water would dissolve the rice paper. But putting that shit on his phone, taking pictures of the bets, then texting them to his handler—in his mind, the internet let all that evidence float out there in the clouds forever, where the Feds and local constabularies could find it. Old school was best.

One more block past Front Street, Danny Boy’s corner saloon loomed, its green and white shamrock lights blazing its marquee at the intersection, lighting up the night.

A woman leaned over a second-floor railing of a covered balcony, opposite side of the street, a pair of French doors open behind her. Her cigarette glowed through the curtain of falling snow. He could hear the low music the open doors offered—saxophones, trumpets, banjos, plus a juke box, all of it edging into the wee hours. It was less than a month to New Year’s day, when peppy tunes from Philly’s string bands would overtake the city’s downtown streets.

He watched her watching him as he approached the corner. The carriage wall lamps below her lit up large black letters painted under the balcony, across the width of two stucco rowhomes. “Downtowners,” the letters boasted, a social club for an entry in the parade’s string band division.

“Nancy,” Frank called to her, a street full of parked cars blanketed with snow between them, a greeting suffixed with a hand wave. He got after his coat collar, shaking off the snow again, pulling it closed around his neck.

“Otherway,” Nancy said, addressing him by his street nickname. “Stay warm, honey.”

She exhaled a plume of smoke, their greetings deadened by the curtain of snow that made them each no more than silhouettes to the other. A ritual for them, three, maybe four nights a week, unless he’d stop to chat with her. Too cold to do that tonight. No time for him to chat at the bars, either, whenever he got there. He wanted to get home.

At the end of the block, after a hard pull at a carved wooden door, Frank entered Danny Boy’s Pub on the street’s other side. This time of night the drunks might be passed out and draped over the bar or on the floor, or were maybe two to three deep in the booths. But tonight, Danny Boy’s was dead. Chalk it up to the snow day.

“Line one up for me, Oakie, will you, please,” Frank said to the bartender.

Early thirties and clean-shaven, Oakie was a bright-eyed kid even at one twenty-five a.m. His white face and blond hair reminded Frank of his primary care doctor, a mick; not an Italian bone in his body.

“You bet, Mr. Otherway.” Oakie slapped a shot glass onto the mahogany bar, tipped some Dewar’s into it.

Sometimes Frank, sometimes “Otherway,” sometimes simply “O.” But at home, all the time, he was Frankie to his wife. All of it worked.

“I don’t see Michael,” Frank said.

“There,” Oakie said, chin-pointing at the far end of the paneled taproom, at a two-person booth with one beefy occupant only. Frank barely turned his head, the booth already within his peripheral vision. In this respect, and in this respect only, Frank “Otherway” Tisha’s lazy eye was his superpower.

Frank downed the shot, headed back to the booth and sat across from Michael, sixties, cherry cheeks and no neck. The bar’s teetotaling owner, and Oakie’s uncle. Majorly overweight, Michael fed his ruddy face with leftover jalapeno poppers, overwhelming his mouth like a hoarding chipmunk.

“Want some?” he asked Frank, chewing through the question.

Frank waved him off. “No sleep if I eat shit like that this late. Gotta finish up, head home, do some Christmas shopping tomorrow. Whaddaya got for me tonight, Michael?”

“The snow put a dent in it, Frank. Here.”

One sheet of paper, fourteen one-word names on it, fourteen three-digit numbers alongside them, fourteen dollar amounts, all the info handwritten. Frank took out his notepad and rewrote the entire list, left Michael to dispose of his piece of paper. No money changed hands.

“Settlement day tomorrow, Michael. You ready?”

“I will be. We had a good week, no accounting for tonight, but we’re good.”

“You did