Read Online The Long Fall by Lynn Kostoff - Free Book Online Page B

and work together. Everyone’s making money, but still they’re suspicious of each other—of me, too. It’s the nature of things. Something like trust, it’s very fragile and complicated. That’s where image comes in. You got to make people believe what they think they see. Otherwise you’re tomorrow’s lunch.” Ray pauses again and looks at Jimmy over the top of his beer. “I don’t intend to be on anyone’s menu, Jimmy.”
    Jimmy reassures Ray that he’s not interested in becoming an entree either.
    A couple seconds later, Jimmy realizes they’re on Dobbins Road. He starts waving his arms. “Ray, up there in a little bit, on your right, that’s what I was telling you about, my grandfather’s property. Twenty acres. I don’t have to point out the development potential to you. Like I said, the city’s moving south. It doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
    The farmhouse is a faded brown stucco a couple hundred yards off the road. It sits on a flattened crest of a long, irregularly inclined slope dense with overgrown interlocking thickets of mesquite and brush. There’s no other house for a half mile on either side of it.
    Jimmy yells, “Hey, I said slow down, okay?” He glances up and catches the driver’s eyes in the rearview.
    Oh shit,
Jimmy thinks.
    No one who’s ever met Aaron Limbe forgets the eyes. They’re the palest of gray and empty, absolutely empty. No life in them at all. None. Zombie peepers.
    “Heard about your old man,” Limbe says, waiting a couple beats before adding, “I’m glad he’s dead.”
    “Aaron’s two-fisted when it comes to holding a grudge,” Ray says. “He wanted to kill you the first tick past the repayment deadline.”
    Again, the blank eyes in the rearview. Jimmy looks away, at the back of Limbe’s head, the sharp square lines of his haircut, the tendons on either side of his neck corded like twin stalks of broccoli.
    Aaron Limbe’s grudge came down to this: He blamed Jimmy for getting him kicked off the Phoenix police force. That might have been technically true, but it hadn’t been personal on Jimmy’s part. Expedient, yes, since Jimmy had been in some tight circumstances at the time.
    He’d just been nicked for grand theft auto and ended up making a deal with the police commissioner to get the charges dropped in exchange for info that directly implicated Limbe in a politically charged case involving the murder of a prominent Mexican American attorney and twelve illegal aliens.
    It wasn’t like Aaron Limbe didn’t deserve what happened to him. As far as Jimmy was concerned, Limbe was the worst breed of cop. Not corrupt, but bent, badly bent.
    The thing Jimmy had never counted on was Aaron Limbe finding out that it had been Jimmy who snitched him out. In addition to dropping the grand theft charges, the commissioner had promised Jimmy anonymity for anything he brought to the table.
    Somehow Aaron Limbe had found him out. It had taken awhile, but he had.
    By that time, Jimmy had been popped for the black-market saguaros.
    Limbe had shown up twice at Perryville Correctional during visiting hours. Jimmy had been afraid he was going to go Jack Ruby on him, but he made no reference to the case involving Ramon Delgado or the twelve dead Mexican Americans. All Limbe did was watch him with those dead eyes and utter a single sentence each time before he left.
    No mercy,
he’d said.
    That’s it. Nothing more.
    Then Aaron Limbe dropped out of sight.
    Jimmy had heard rumors he’d left the state and hooked up with one of those fringe militia groups. He hadn’t expected Limbe turning up working for Ray Harp.
    The woman gathers her instruments and folds up the tray, her hair falling away when she sits back in the jumpseat and takes the beer Ray offers her.
    Her green plastic skirt crackles when she crosses her legs. Jimmy gets his first look at her. She’s not the biker chick he’d earlier assumed. She’s a Native American. More than likely a Paiute.
    “Is