Read Online Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 by The Loud Adios - Free Book Online Page B

water. He felt the sun on his back and he watched it flash on the harbor. He stared hard and soon Wendy’s face came back like it was when they sat in the Paris Club two weeks ago. She was naked, right there beside him in a chair, and a hundred men leered at them. She had stopped in the middle of her dance and come down off the stage. She had sat beside him and touched his knee. The first thing she said was, “You are far away, my Clifford.”
    He gave her his coat. She laid it neatly on the table. He sat trembling with shame. “Put it on, Sis, and we’ll leave, right now.”
    “Oh, oh,” she whispered. “No, because George is dead.”
    “Well then, that’s the only thing’ll save him from me. You don’t got some other rat keeping you here, do you?”
    “My Clifford,” she said patiently, “you forget—when George is dead somebody has to get punished. Don’t you know—somebody stabbed George.” Clifford shook his head, bewildered. She stroked his hand with one finger. “If you kill somebody, you have to stay in hell for—two years.”
    He jumped out of the chair, leaned up to her face. “Put on my coat, please, Sis.”
    He ordered her and begged. Her eyes just kept drooping sadder. She said, “The devil hates me, my Clifford. I can feel. Do you hate me?” Her eyes wandered up and she whispered, “There is a war, you know.”
    Finally he screamed, “What’re you talking about?”
    She moaned, sprang up, ran to the stage and away through the curtains. The moment he started after her, a stick whacked his gut, then his head, and the room started floating away. He kept yelling, “Sis! Wendy!” while the Mexicans belted him harder.
    Then came days in the infirmary. But he still couldn’t figure what held her there, and he sure didn’t believe she’d killed the rat. Whoever killed George must’ve tricked her somehow. Taught her to lie and be secret like she never knew how before. Clifford wouldn’t have a speck of mercy for the man that had deformed his sister—this Wendy onstage, who all these men got crazy for, she wasn’t half as beautiful as she used to be. They must’ve loosed a new part of her brain and it came out bad, he thought. She’d never be like before. Clifford wouldn’t either. For a minute he tried to raise the guts to drown in the oily water. But that was wrong. He couldn’t die until they got her free.

Chapter Nine
    Hickey liked to walk, hard, early mornings, to burn the poison out of him. He strode three miles inland and rested on a bus bench at the top of C Street where 25th crossed, on the outskirts of downtown.
    From there he gazed east across the brown hills, canyons, rolling mountains, and valleys that looked like Hollywood when he was a boy, when they moved there after his old man lost a fortune on cattle, and disappeared, to kill himself in the last big war, when his mother was a seamstress to stars like Mary Pickford—before she started preaching Christian Science and ran her patrons off.
    He thought about Wendy Rose and knew the Mexicans had more at stake than the few hundred a night the Club de Paris could make off her. Down there you had everything or nothing, and guys like del Monte had it all. Maybe she knew too much about something. Or del Monte planned to keep her for his own.
    He considered going straight to the top. Lázaro Cárdenas. An ex-Presidente, hero of the revolution, now general of the army of the frontera—if Cárdenas ordered del Monte or anybody to set the girl free, the man would jump like a kangaroo. But Leo said Cárdenas was pals with del Monte. He might give a different order, and Hickey would disappear. Cárdenas had to be the last resort.
    The air had gotten crisp, dry, and sparkling without a particle of fog or haze. Beyond the city, across the bay, sat the dock where Hickey and Leo once dropped their life savings into a dealership for new and used sailboats, the business that brought them to San Diego when Leo retired and Hickey quit