Coldwater Revenge James Ross (best fantasy books to read TXT) 📖

white collar criminal lawyer telling him to get his ass back to Dodge.

Joe’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Does this mean you might end up living like a normal person?”

“Only if I can keep my ass out of jail.”

“Are they serious?”

“They’re acting like it. In the meantime, you’re laying here worthless and whoever killed Billy is out covering his tracks. I need to get back to New York and you need to hand this over to the state troopers before whoever killed Billy gets too big a lead.”

Joe lifted his head and wheezed, “Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Tommy. I let a pack of strange dogs in here and they’ll go sniffing down every trail they find—not just the ones that might lead to Billy’s killer.”

“They’ll sort it out.”

“Don’t be a Boy Scout.”

“What are you worried about, brother?”

Joe pressed his forearms into the bed. “I thought maybe you and I could do this together, now that the gods have cut you loose.”

“I have to get back, Joe. The state troopers will be here sooner or later, regardless of what you want. As soon as they find out that Coldwater’s only cop has been lying in a hospital bed for two days with a murderer running loose, they’ll swarm you. Snarling and pissing on the high bushes wont’ scare them off, either. Not with you lying there in just a paper nightgown.”

Joe glared. “Then we have to act fast, don’t we?” He waved a hand at the stack of papers, as if the matter were decided. “There should be an address in one of those files for the lab in Montreal that Sharp mentioned. I want you to drive up there, find this Dr. Hassad and find out if there’s a connection between him and Billy.”

Tom riffled the stack of papers. Halfway down were copies of the letters he had seen in the boathouse, and beneath those, an autopsy report. He started to read it.

“Hey! Not that one! Put it down.”

Tom dropped the folder onto the bed. “You want to do this alone?”

Joe looked like he was about to say something rude, but thought better of it. “I want you to be objective when you talk to this Hassad character, keep your ears open and stick to the script. The more you know the harder that will be.” Joe sank into the pillows. “I need your help, Tommy. Hell, I can’t do anything without it now. But letting you do this without direction makes about as much sense as you letting me do the same on one of your gazillion dollar business deals.”

“You just sounded a bit too much like the old man for a second. That was never my favorite tone.”

Joe lowered his chin. “Point taken. Look, if you’re feeling ambitious, remember the three lovelies who were sitting at the back of the church at Billy’s funeral?”

“Hard to forget them.”

“They drove down from Montreal in a rented car. There’s a copy of a driver’s license they used to rent it at the bottom of that stack and a business card with the same name as the license. How’s your French? Other than ‘je t’aime.’”

Tom suppressed a salacious image of French co-counsel. “Making us work summers in Québec was one of the old man’s better ideas.”

“If you get a chance, you might also stop by and see if Billy’s friends along the rue La Fontaine have any idea who might have been angry enough to want to stuff him in a sleeping bag and dump him in the lake.”

“La Fontaine?”

“Just south of l’Université de Quebec near that place where you waited tables that summer. Le Village. Can’t miss it. Biggest gay neighborhood in North America.”

“You’re full of surprises, brother.”

Joe gestured toward the door as his head slumped into the pillow. “Watch their eyes.”

CHAPTER 18

Though Tom regularly enjoyed the hospitality of the world’s financial capitols, the city where he had spent the young-man-loose-in-the-city-summers of his late teens and early twenties was the place that still made his heart weightless. Youthful memories of summertime Montreal were his emotional touchstones: waiting tables in le Quartier Latin, sweating buckets in a third floor walk-up off the l’boulevard St-Laurent, and practicing French with a friendly mademoiselle when the opportunity arose. The corporate mega-deals and dollars that followed came a distant second.

Map Quest located the address Joe had provided somewhere in the rat’s nest of side streets off l’boulevard St-Laurent—the main route north from the harbor and the de facto dividing line between Anglophone and Francophone Montreal. Tom tucked the rental car behind a construction dumpster, stuffed Joe’s scribbled address in his jacket pocket and began to walk a pattern of expanding polygons from the last cross-street on the Map Quest directions.

Two long loops through a handful of neighborhoods killed a quick thirty minutes. One brought him to the environs of l’Université du Québec à Montréal. The other pushed into a neighborhood of head scarves, beards and covered limbs, as if the plunging temperatures soon to come had arrived there early. Signs in Roman script were at a premium. Friendly faces did not exist.

A few unmarked streets south of l’rue Coloniale, he stopped at a table piled with dried fruits and nuts, and shaded by a green and white awning that might have been new when Pierre Trudeau last campaigned through the neighborhood. The number above the door behind the table, and the name carved in stone forty feet above the street, matched the address Joe had given him.

Light behind the door seemed to promise that the shop was open for business; though there was no activity inside. Patrons wandered in and out of a coin laundry next door. A lone customer waited outside the Curry-in-A-Hurry shop on the corner. Tom picked up something that looked like a dried apple and looked around for a scoop or a produce bag. But no one came out of the shop to close the sale. He put the fruit back and tried the door.

He’d