Read Online Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) by Richard Aleas - Free Book Online Page B

that you could see a lot of it, since his hairline had receded halfway up his scalp. The skin of his face showed the ravages of old acne scars, but otherwise he was a reasonably good-looking guy. “That’s who you need to talk to.”
    He looked normal enough, and as Zen walked me over to him I found myself wondering what crimes he had committed. I imagine everyone else in the place was wondering the same thing about me.
    When we got there, he looked from Zen to me and back again. “Yes?”
    “This man’s a friend of the house,” Zen said. “He doesn’t need to know your name, and you don’t need to know his. I thought you could help each other out.”
    “What sort of help does he need?”
    “I’m trying—”
    “He’s got a beef with Big Murco,” Zen said. The man’s eyebrows rose. “You see why I thought of you.”
    “What’d Murco do to you?” he asked me.
    I lifted my shirt to show the bruise. “That, and killed a friend of mine.”
    “Let’s talk,” he said.
    Zen brought over my glass and refilled his, but otherwise left us alone. The tables on either side of us were empty, and the noise from the pool table and the TV set and the bar masked our conversation pretty well, but he kept his voice low and so did I.
    “What did Khachadurian do to you?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Let’s talk about you.”
    How many times had I told the story? I was starting to feel like the Ancient Mariner, buttonholing everyone with my tale of woe.
    But what other way was there? I told him, told him about seeing Miranda in the paper, about going to the Sin Factory and getting thrown out, I told him about the bouncer and about what Miranda had said to Susan about Murco. I left Susan’s name out of it — both her names. But the rest I told him.
    “Your girlfriend was right,” he said. “Murco does use the girls to move drugs. Not dime bags to the customers, nothing like that. He’s a middleman, he’ll take a few kilos and spread it out to three small dealers, maybe four, take a cut off the top. They’re the ones who sell it to the street, and by then he’s out of the picture.” I knew better than to ask how he knew this. My money was on his being one of the three or four dealers — or more likely he had been one once and now Murco had cut him out. “A ditch in Jersey City I don’t know about, but he certainly wouldn’t let one of the girls get too talkative. Your girlfriend had a mouth on her?”
    Did she? When I’d known her, she’d been pretty shy. But people change. I shrugged.
    “Murco’s certainly got a temper, and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.”
    I rubbed my side. “Tell me about it,” I said.
    “That? That’s nothing. You heard about the burglary, right?”
    “No.”
    “You should have been here last week.”
    “What happened last week?”
    “Got to go back to the beginning. Maybe six weeks ago, these two guys break into Murco’s house. The man lives in Scarsdale. A house that’s like two mansions side by side, and he lives out there by himself — no staff, nothing, not since the son moved out and his wife died. So, these two punks are going through the neighborhood, and they come to this enormous place, and they figure, this guy’s got to have some good stuff. So they break in through the garage, go room to room, filling up their bags. And God knows he’s got plenty to take any night of the week — but just as it happens, this particular night is the night before Murco is going to be making a buy, so he has a suitcase full of cash waiting to be handed over to the gentlemen from Colombia. The punks go into his bedroom, and there he is, counting the money. They must’ve thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
    “They pull guns on him, tie him up, smack him around some, take the money, and they leave. A million dollars in cash, plus whatever else they picked up along the way. It’s a better score than they could’ve imagined. There’s just one