Read Online Fat Man Blues: A Hard-Boiled and Humorous Mystery (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 9) by Tony Dunbar - Free Book Online

days of the Cuban Revolution with the heroes who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs. The patriots would have reclaimed the homeland but for the betrayal of their crusade by John F. Kennedy and the rest of his worthless administration.
    With an unspent cache of weapons and money, and propaganda and blood, the older generation had continued the fight against the relentless cancer of creeping worldwide socialism. Their mission had passed to their children. Now it was supposed to be the grandchildren’s turn.
    It was a cause you were born into, not one you could join. But it was hard, Cisco knew, to get the boys motivated.
    Most of the grandkids, “the guys,” as Cisco, referred to them, had kids of their own. While they all greatly admired their heritage, the fact was that school, dads’ clubs, and sports kept getting in the way of world revolution and so many other things. Generally speaking, their wives got along well, so they all often managed to get together for barbeques, Saints games, and birthday parties. But politics? Not so much.
    But if they did want to talk seriously, it was easy enough to meet at their kids’ soccer matches, which seemed to occur two or three times a week and could eat up entire weekends.
    This Saturday, by the river in Audubon Park, Cisco’s eight-year-old was playing along with José’s godchild for the St. Germaine Sentinels against the Pius School Princes, on which two of the other guys’ boys were “all stars.” The Princes had just raised the score to 2 to 0, thanks to a spectacular header by José’s little nephew. Cisco rose from his lawn chair to stretch his legs.
    “How about some fries?” he asked his wife, who shook her head.
    “I’m watching my waist, honey,” she said.
    Cisco beckoned to José, and together they walked to the Princes’s cheering section where they collected the other guys.
    “Your kid’s a fucking monster,” José commented to Cisco as they drifted out of the lights and away from the field.
    When they were assembled, Cisco huddled them up and said he had another message from their priest.
    “Father wants us to get serious,” he explained.
    José was big as an NFL lineman, ex-Army and divorced. He liked things that went boom and was usually game for just about anything that gave him a rush. “What does our good priest have in mind?” he asked eagerly.
    The others listened warily. They all had kids and dull jobs and had to be more cautious in their commitments.
    “That’s just the problem,” Cisco said. “Father Escobar wants us to show some initiative. He thinks we need to bring the movement forward, with something relevant to today, you know?”
    “What’s he mean by that?” one of the dads asked. “Boosting the Papal Scrolls wasn’t serious? We had to steal a van. We had to turn off the alarms. We had to break into the Tulane University library. What’s not serious?”
    “That was such a blast!” José shouted and pumped his fist. They all bumped knuckles in agreement.
    “But there are still real threats,” Cisco reminded them, “and a bigger movement to think about. We probably do lack the vision thing. Father wants to know if we’re serious about the overall mission.”
    “Does he still want to reclaim Cuba?” one of the group asked. He was anxious to get back to the game. “I think we did our thing recovering those papers. Wouldn’t it make sense to cool it for a while? You know, I got the wife. I got the…”
    “Well, yes,” Cisco cut him off. “But we also have our obligations to the cause. For example, Father is seriously pissed off about Oliver Prima for planning to write a book about him and our parents, as if they were some ancient history. Believe me, Prima won’t portray our families as politically correct trailblazers either.”
    “We could easily knock off Prima,” José suggested. “I know where he lives.” José favored T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. He spent a lot of time at the gym working on