Read Online Vengeance by Stuart M. Kaminsky - Free Book Online

are you telling this to me, Mr. Fonesca?”
    “You think I’m crazy,” I said.
    “That depends on the answer to my question,” she said.
    “I want to know if you’d go to dinner with me tonight, tomorrow, night, any night.”
    “You do this a lot?”
    “I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said.
    “Never?”
    “I swear,” I said. “I’m not completely sure why I’m doing it now. Say no and that’s it, back to business. I’ve got references who will swear under oath that I don’t do things like this.”
    She looked up at me for what seemed like a very long time.
    “You seem harmless, but … we can talk about it after you bring Adele’s mother to see me,” she said. “I really have work to do.”
    I wanted to keep listening to her voice and looking at her. I thought she was probably right if she thought I had gone crazy. Maybe my session with Ann Horowitz had pushed me over the top.
    She swiveled around to face her computer again and I headed for the elevator.
    “All done?” asked John Detchon, who was still stuffing envelopes.
    “For now,” I said. “I’ll be back at four-thirty.”
    “I’ll call out the color guard,” he said.
    I pushed through the door to the street and wondered why I had done what I had just done. Was I trying to please Ann Horowitz? Maybe. Did Sally Porovsky remind me of my wife? No. Maybe a little. Of my mother? No. Was it her voice? Partly. Was I coming back to life? Hardly. I’d return with Beryl and act as if I had never gone mad in front of Sally Porovsky. I’d walk away and forget the moment of insanity and she would adjust her glasses and, I hoped, do the same.
    When I got to the Best Western hotel and found Beryl Tree’s room, I knocked.
    “Who is it?”
    “Lew Fonesca,” I said.
    The door opened. A man stood before me with a gun in his hand.

4
    THE MAN WITH the gun was Ames McKinney. I’ve already told you about Ames. Tall, long white hair, grizzled, lean, brown and seventy-four years old. Ames was not supposed to bear arms. It was a right he had lost after using an ancient Remington Model 1895 revolver to kill his ex-partner in a duel.
    The first time I met Ames was an hour after he called me the first week I moved into town. His Sam Elliott gruff voice had simply said, “You know a place called The Round-up. On 301, just up from Fruitville.”
    “Yes,” I had said.
    “Be there in half hour?”
    “Yes.”
    “Names McKinney. Lean, old, can’t miss me.”
    The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants, and there is a hell of a lot of variety, including
the Round-Up, which boasted on a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.
    The Round-Up is gone now. Owner Round Harry was carrying too much weight. He died and the place was boarded up. Six months later it was and still is a shoe-repair and tailor shop run by a couple from Colombia who speak almost no English.
    Restaurants come and go fast in this town. So does money.
    Sarasota is rich, but even the rich need maids, supermarkets, police, firemen, tailor shops and shoes-tores. There is a middle class and a lower class in Sarasota and everyone, even the snowbirds, the well-to-do who came down only in the winter from as far north as Canada and as far east as Germany, knew it.
    Parking was not rough in front of the Round-Up, not in the summer. Parking isn’t rough anywhere in Sarasota in the summer. There’s plenty of parking and no lines at the restaurants or movies.
    The Round-Up wasn’t packed but it wasn’t empty and there was good reason. The food was cheap and spicy, the service fast, and no one hurried you out. You could nurse a beer or even an iced tea with a pitcher in front of you while you