Read Online Bank Robbers by C. Clark Criscuolo - Free Book Online Page B

to Florida, “Sunshine Capital of the World,” and two, if he was eighty-eight or ninety, he would not be worried about skin cancer, for Christ’s sake, he’d be happy just breathing.
    Arthur looked at his watch.
    Ten-eighteen.
    Yup, his life was just whizzing by.
    *   *   *
    A LL RIGHT , Dottie thought, so he has a braid and green hair. So what? Look at how she’d mistaken the kid in the park. She couldn’t go around prejudging people.
    No.
    She couldn’t.
    And besides, the sign on the door read “Haircuts $10.” That was her price range.
    She had temporarily given up on clothing, since none of the stores seemed open at this hour of the day in Greenwich Village.
    She forced her eyes to look back up into the mirror at the young man standing behind the barber’s chair. She smiled as broadly as she could at him.
    He was picking up strands of hair and frowning and shaking his head. He put both hands, one of them holding a pair of scissors, on his hips. He shook his head so his braid swung out from side to side and the light bounced off the ten small hoop earrings which adorned one ear lobe, and Dottie wondered if there was an actual name for that part of the outer ear.
    â€œI really prefer, um, a conservative cut and color…” she said shakily.
    â€œWell, I ain’t gonna give you a Mohawk.” His voice had a heavy workingman’s Queens accent.
    â€œOh, that’s good, I’m more of a page-boy type,” Dottie said half-sarcastically. “Can you do something to make it soft, and color it?”
    He stepped back, frowned, moving his head from side to side.
    â€œNot for ten bucks … fifty.”
    Dottie stared hard at him in the mirror. Every time she turned around it cost her fifty dollars. She watched his face looking at her hair. He was just so scary-looking.
    â€œYou do know what a page boy is?”
    He grimaced at her, and put his hands on his hips.
    â€œI am a professional.”
    Professional what? was what was going through Dottie’s mind.
    â€œSo?” he said, after a moment.
    She closed her eyes, exhaled loudly and said, “Okay, do it.” She felt as if she were about to be operated on.
    *   *   *
    E LEVEN-TWELVE .
    Too early to have lunch. Arthur sighed, shifted in his chair, stretched one leg and lifted it onto the corner of his desk, swung his other leg up and crossed it over the first one. He took his unlit cigar out of the ashtray and held it between his teeth. He opened the book and leafed through it until he got to the first page.
    â€œChapter One, I Am Born,” he read.
    Aw, Jeez, he thought, and placed the book back down onto his lap. His eyes scanned the bookcase and the piles of books on the floor. If only he had something exciting to read.
    He supposed he could reread Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the fourth time this month, but it made him so … lonely.
    Eleven-thirteen.
    *   *   *
    T ERESA stared over at the nurse, and took the lid off her cup of coffee. She sipped and winced. Coffee-shop coffee was the worst, but it was the only thing between her and falling asleep in the damn waiting room.
    She still didn’t understand why they made these appointments so early in the morning. Jeez, eleven was the crack of dawn as far as Teresa was concerned. She’d never been an early riser; hell, there were some years she and Fred didn’t make it to bed until almost eleven in the morning.
    And, it seemed to her, that once they saw you coming, and you were over a certain age, they tried to get you up earlier and earlier. Some jedrool actually told her that all old people are up early.
    Hah! Fred would’ve belted him.
    She took another sip of the terrible coffee.
    This was the second time in two weeks they wanted her in for tests.
    She felt a flutter of nervousness go through her, and then dismissed it. Tracy and that jerk of a husband,