Read Online The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy by Jeremiah Healy - Free Book Online Page B

said, handing me a tall, expensive-looking glass. "Pull up a
pillow.”
    She collapsed naturally into one near a table with a
tumbler of amber liquid on it. I sat down a little less gracefully.
    She scooped up her tumbler and mock-toasted. "Welcome
to my parlor."
    "Said the spider to the f1y," I finished.
She smiled and sipped.
    "It's nice . . . comfortable," I said.
"Even with the security."
    She tilted her head in question.
    "Drew," I said. "On the landing, short
for Andrew, as in 'A. Lynch?"
    She laughed. "Drew's a cop. He and his wife live
on the second floor. She's expecting, and he's just sort of
protective. His parents—this is their house—they live on the
first floor. Do you want to take your jacket off? The Lynches have to
keep the heat up because of her mother. She's pushing eighty and
needs to have it warm." She ran her nondrink hand down her
T-shirt, neck to navel. "That's why I lounge around like this,
even in February."
    Her nipples were subtly more defined for a moment
under the shirt as her hand moved. She took another sip. I downed
half my ice water.
    "Under the towel," I said, "revolver
or automatic?"
    Broad smile but sad eyes. "I knew the assistant
DA who was shot in his car in Cambridge last year. He was a class
ahead of me at New England." She clenched and unclenched her
fist. "But, to answer your question, revolver."
    I shook my head. "Revo1ver is a more reliable
weapon, but the hammer could get caught in the towel. You should
switch to an automatic or change camouflage?
    This time she shook her head. "It's a five-shot
Bodyguard. With the shrouded hammer. Drew helped me pick it out."
    I pictured a revolver with high, thin steel walls
enclosing the hammer and a small, scored steel button on top that
could be thumbed back but wouldn't get caught on clothing. Or towels.
I finished my ice water.
    "Where are you off to?" she asked.
    I gave her three sentences about Al.
    "Boy," she said in a low voice after
condolences, "this is not how I was hoping our next meeting
would go."
    "The next one after this won't," I said.
    She wanted to smile but didn't. "Are you here
about your friend?"
    "No, the Coopers." I summarized the phone
calls, both Marco's and mine, and my visit to the D'Arnicos. I dug
out and handed her the envelope containing the tape.
    Nancy swirled her drink but didn't put the glass to
her lips. She laid the envelope carefully on the table next to her.
If she wore any make up, it didn't show.
    "Joey comes up for sentencing in two weeks,"
she said. "Smolina may not be telling the parents, but I'm sure
Joey'll get life. I bet Marco knows it, too." She sipped now.
"Any chance of getting the Coopers out of town for a bit?"
    "I don't think so. No family they mentioned. Or
friends. Or money to do it with either."
    Nancy sighed. "A year ago, I might have told you
I'd see they were watched over. But not after Teresa Alou." She
clenched her fist again. "You remember the case?"
    "Yes." Tough one to forget after the Globe
series. The DA had a squeeze on Alou, a young Hispanic who lived in
the South End and knew a lot about the drug trade from her brother.
The squeeze was her brother, who wouldn't talk and would go to a bad
prison if he didn't. Teresa talked for him. To save him. The brother
went to a good prison, a farm, a safe one. He lasted three days.
First they'd blinded him with some barbed-wire goggles. Then they
beat him to death. With rolled up newspapers. It would have taken a
long time.
    The DA put Teresa under witness protection in a
hotel. Just before the permanent relocation funding was approved by
the appropriate bureaucracy, somebody slipped down a rope and into
the hotel room. The somebody bashed the female operative and did
Teresa. By the time the guys outside in the hall realized the inside
operative should have answered their knock, the somebody was gone.
Along with Teresa's eyes, ears, and tongue. He left the rest. Alive,
sort of.
    "Sixteen," Nancy said, bringing me back.
"She was