Read Online Hurt Machine by Reed Farrel Coleman - Free Book Online

Boss.” Brian had never gotten out of the habit of calling me that. “So what can I do you for?”
    “Can you meet me tomorrow? I got a job for you and Devo.”
    “Where and when?”
    “Lunch at noon,” I said. “You pick the place.”
    “O’Hearn’s on Church Street. I’m in a corned beef and cabbage kinda mood.”
    “See you tomorrow.”
    Click.
    I realized I hadn’t called Pam or Sarah in a few days. I’d call Sarah in the morning. Although Pam was still a PI, she wasn’t Brian Doyle’s type of PI. She wasn’t big on late-night surveillance, but she did kick the occasional ass. I wasn’t going to risk waking her, not at this hour. So I looked out my front window at Sheepshead Bay and thought back to when I was a kid and crossing the Ocean Avenue footbridge over the bay to Manhattan Beach seemed like a walk into another world. I was thinking about that kind of walk a lot lately, a walk into another world.

TWELVE
     
    Whereas Sarah was thrilled to hear from me and excited about the wedding, the edge to Pam’s voice was about as subtle as a chainsaw. I didn’t need to scratch too far below the surface to understand why. The edge was there when she first saw Carmella in my arms. Although Pam had done a good job of sheathing it during the party on Sunday, the edge was there again in our goodbyes that night. Funny how this woman, who never seemed threatened by anything or anyone, was so thrown off her game. It was worse now than on Sunday night because she’d been alone for a few days with time to think. That was the worst thing of all, time to think. Time to think is life’s Petri dish. It’s the medium in which a random twinge of anxiety morphs into debilitating self-doubt, where a passing regret grows into paralytic guilt. Since walking out of my oncologist’s office, I’d become very familiar with the dangers of time to think. That’s why Carmella’s reappearance was saving me from eating myself alive before the cancer could. Problem was, until after the wedding, Pam couldn’t know that the more immediate threat to the two years we’d spent together wasn’t Carmella at all.
    “Hey, how’s the case going?” I asked, ignoring the edginess.
    “Fine.”
    “Fine?”
    “What do you want me to say? It’s a case.”
    “Specificity, that’s what I always loved about you.”
    “Loved?”
    Shit!
I’d been trying to walk on eggshells when it was actually a minefield I was walking through.
    “Come on, Pam, cut it out.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding like she meant it. “I’m just feeling off is all. Listen, I should be wrapping this job up by next Monday latest. You have off, right? Why not come up here a few days early and we can spend time drinking in bed? Besides, you’ve looked pretty stressed out lately and you haven’t taken good care of yourself. Let me take care of you.”
    Talk about a minefield. Jesus! “As incredible as that sounds, I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m working a case.”
    “A case? You haven’t worked a case in two years and you’re working one now, a few weeks before your daughter’s wedding.”
    “That’s about it, yeah.”
    “It’s for
her
, isn’t it? That’s why she was there Sunday.”
    I decided that lying would only make things worse. “For Carmella? Yes, for her. It’s complicated.”
    “No, it’s not, Moe. It’s not complicated at all.”
    “But it is.”
    “Then explain it to me.”
    “You know the EMT who let that guy die in the restaurant and then got stabbed to death in Brooklyn? Her name was Alta Conseco. She was Carmella’s older sister.”
    “Christ! I never thought to put the names together.”
    Pam knew the whole story about Carmella and me, about how Carmella had changed her name from Marina Conseco, even about how Carmella had added the extra l in her new first name as a
fuck you
to her mother for the way she treated Carmella after being molested.
    “So what are you supposed to do?” Pam asked.
    “Like I