Read Online Racked (A Lt. Jack Daniels / Nicholas Colt mystery) by J.A. Konrath, Jude Hardin - Free Book Online Page B

worked for the Chicago Police Department. He’d been my partner for a while. He was private now, and mostly a thorn in my side. Rude, crude, unkempt, misogynistic, thought he was funny. He was an ass, and he had an annoying habit of helping me even when I didn’t ask for help.
    “You get McGlade’s name from CNN, too?” I said.
    “No. That TV show about him. The one where you’re the overweight cop who wets the bed.”
    “So that’s your game. Charming me into playing pool with you. Don’t bother chalking up. You can load your replica stick right back into its replica case.”
    “Apologies. Didn’t know it was such a sore spot with you. Obviously you’re not overweight, and I’d be willing to bet that you don’t suffer from enuresis. You’re an attractive woman, Jack. After we shoot a game of pool, maybe we could ride over to my place on the lake. You like to fish? I’ll let you bait my hook.”
    I rolled my eyes. It was the first time anyone had ever hit on me with the unlikely combinations of angling and bed wetting.
    “Sure,” I said. “Could I make you breakfast in the morning, too?”
    “We could play a game of nine ball for who makes breakfast.”
    “Or you could go somewhere else and play with yourself.”
    He laughed. It was an easy laugh, deep and genuine.
    “How about we start over?” he said. “All I’m interested in is a game. Really. No bets. No come-ons.”
    “Listen, Colt, I don’t have a lot of time, and I’d really rather just—”
    A loud noise from downstairs cut me off in mid-sentence.
    I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but it sounded an awful lot like a shotgun blast.



THE BAD GUY
    2:19 P.M.
    T he best time to knock off a restaurant is between two and three in the afternoon. The lunch crowd is gone by then, and the dinner crowd hasn’t started trickling in yet. With a little luck, you can be in and out in less than five minutes, and nobody gets hurt.
    I’d walked into Kelly’s with a heavy canvas sack, a sawed-off twelve gauge pump, and a cheap plastic Bugs Bunny mask I’d found at a discount store. The mask was made for a kid, so it didn’t really fit my face. I had to cut the eyeholes bigger with a pocketknife.
    When the cute little redhead behind the bar saw me, she put her hands in the air and told me to take anything I wanted.
    I told her to open the register and stack all the money on the bar. She complied, and I stuffed the bills into my bag. It looked like several hundred dollars. Not a bad score for the afternoon, but I was greedy by nature. My mother always said I should have been an attorney.
    “Where’s the safe?” I said.
    “In the manager’s office.”
    Her upper lip quivered when she spoke. She was about to cry. It was the appropriate reaction, the one I expected. What I didn’t expect was the wild-eyed dude in an apron who came running around the corner with a butcher knife in his hand.
    I dropped the moneybag and swiveled toward him, and the gun just kind of went off. Now he was on the floor, writhing, the bottom part of his jeans shredded and soaked with blood.
    Red fell to her knees, buried her face in her hands.
    “Please don’t kill me,” she said.
    There were some other businesses nearby, and I was afraid someone might have heard the gunshot. I needed to get out of there before the cops showed up.
    Then again, it would only take a couple of minutes to empty the safe.
    “Take me to the office,” I said.
    “He needs a doctor.”
    “He’ll be all right.”
    She got up and started shuffling toward the back of the bar, sobbing as she went.



THE COP
    2:20 P.M.
    C olt walked over to the window, glanced down toward the street.
    “Could have been a car backfiring,” he said.
    “Could have been,” I said, going for my purse. “If the car was parked downstairs in the bar.”
    “Maybe it was the tennis equipment factory down the road. They’re always making a racket.”
    I looked at him with my best you didn’t just say that