Read Online Night Work by David C. Taylor - Free Book Online Page A

all colors hung from the wrought-iron balconies and got on a bus and rode ten blocks with the people headed home from work. At a corner where the bus turned, two gray police cars nosed together into the curb. Four young men, college age, stood facing a white wall, their hands high, their legs spread, as the cops patted them down. The people on that side of the bus turned away from the windows. Cassidy and Dylan got out at the next stop and he followed her down narrow streets that smelled of grilling meats, flowers, the sea, and open drains. Music played from radios near open windows, drums and guitars, brass and maracas, a heavy tropical beat. She walked with purpose, and he followed without comment. He was in her world now, the covert, the clandestine, and she would lead them where they had to go.
    She stopped at a wide arched gateway on a narrow street near the port and reached in through the slats and fiddled with something until she got it right and half the gate swung open and he followed her into a courtyard. It was paved with worn cobblestones and surrounded on three sides by a two-story building and on the fourth by a high wall and the gate they had entered. The building was old, the stucco discolored and broken in places. The ground floor under the two wings had been built as stables, but now they were crowded with cars in various states of repair. Pieces of car bodies, fenders, doors, bumpers were piled in corners of the yard.
    Someone beat on metal with a hammer in one of the stalls.
    *   *   *
    â€œYour descriptions have been on the radio. Very accurate because, of course, your hair is easy. We should do something about that. And him too. Very accurate. Hair, height, weight, everything. Someone was paying attention. Who is he?”
    â€œAn old friend.”
    He waited for more but Dylan gave him nothing.
    â€œWe must do something about your hair, Selena. I’ll ask Veronica. She works at a hair place for women.”
    Selena, the cover name she was using.
    The man’s name was Tomas. He was broad and thick and bowlegged, and his dark face was cheerful until you got to his eyes. His English was good, learned, he explained, during six years he worked as a mechanic for a Ford dealer in Fort Lauderdale. He carried a shotgun up from the garage and put it behind the door where it would be easy to reach. His hands were ingrained with oil and dirt even after scrubbing in the stone sink in the kitchen on the second floor. There was no sign of a woman here. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. The towel he used to dry his hands was gray. The windows were opaque with years of stove smoke. One of the counters was littered with bits stripped from cars, radio tubes and knobs, a gearshift, unidentifiable pieces of metal, a wind wing in its frame. The wood table where they sat was scarred on the edges from where people had rested cigarettes.
    Tomas lit a Chesterfield and blew smoke at Cassidy. “You’re sure of him?”
    â€œYes.”
    He shrugged. “Okay, then. On your head if it goes wrong.” He took a long barreled .38 revolver from his waistband and put it under a cloth at his elbow and got up and found an unlabeled bottle in a cabinet above the old kerosene range and poured rum into mismatched tumblers. He served them bread and plates of olives and hard cheese and small grilled fish. Dylan ate as if she had not seen food in days. Tomas ate the fish with his fingers, crunching heads and all and washing them down with rum.
    â€œTwo more got out, they say. But no names yet. If they’re ours, we’ll soon know.”
    â€œAnd the rest?” Cassidy asked.
    Tomas shrugged. Dead or recaptured. What else was there? The phone rang and Tomas answered it. “¿ Si? ” He listened for a while and then hung up and came back to the table. “Big search. SIM, soldiers, police. It’s too dangerous to move you now. So tonight we hide you here. Tomorrow we get