Read Online Violent Spring by Gary Phillips - Free Book Online

him.
    The older man sat in the chair reading a current issue of Popular Science , his feet propped up on the semi-circular desk. His long legs were clothed in dungarees, and his barrel chest covered in a plaid flannel shirt. A pair of threadbare chukkas shod his feet. On his head was one of those formless fishing hats with a brim like the undulating body of a jellyfish. Beneath the hat, the platinum hair curled past the shirt’s collar.
    The office wasn’t open yet, it was eight-twenty, and Monk entered, deactivating the alarm after throwing the two dead bolts that allowed him into the rotunda.
    â€œâ€™Bout time you got here,” the older man said, not lifting his head from the article he was reading in the magazine. “Back on the farm, half of the day would already be wasted.”
    â€œWhy don’t I just give you a key to the place, Dex?”
    â€œI like to keep in practice, youngster.”
    Monk crossed to the coffee machine and started it to brewing.
    â€œSays here,” Dexter Grant began, pointing at the Popular Science , “engineers are working on the fusion angle, using deuterium-tritium to produce energy.”
    â€œThat’s nice,” Monk said. He unlocked the door to his office.
    Grant rose, stretched and put the magazine back on the small table in the center of the chairs for waiting clents. “They figure it won’t be until 2030 when there’s an online fusion plant though. Assuming this particular energy source holds up.”
    â€œThat’s fucking fascinating.”
    â€œGoddamn, you and Jill go at it this morning?”
    The two entered the dark office. Grant flipped the lights on and slouched down in one of the Eastlakes.
    Monk angled behind his desk. “How do you know I was with Jill?”
    â€œâ€™Cause I went by your pad before I came over here and the Ford wasn’t there. Barring the notion that it had been stolen, and I would have heard about the bodies lying along the avenues if that would have happened, I am left with the irrefutable fact that you were over at Jill’s. You don’t sleep around, you don’t have the temperament for it like some cops I knew.”
    â€œGet us some coffee, will you, smart guy.”
    In a dead perfect imitation of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Grant said, “Sure, boss, comin’ right up.” He left and returned with two cups and set one down on the massive desk. “So what’s up?” His body poured back into the chair.
    Monk sipped, and regarded the man sitting before him. Dexter Grant was built like an over-the-hill fullback from the era of Red Grange, leather helmets and footballs made of pigskin. He’d been a kid off an Oklahoma oil lease who found himself in World War II. Big shouldered and raw-boned, the young Grant had only made it to the ninth grade when his folks had to pull him out of school to help out on the land. But that hadn’t stopped him from reading everything he could get his hands on nor listening to the tales of his uncle Logan when he came to town.
    The uncle, through marriage to one of his mother’s sisters, had been an organizer for the Wobblies. The Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, had been organized in 1905 by progressives in the labor and socialist movements for the purpose of joining all workers regardless of job type, color or sex.
    Uncle Logan had tales to tell a wide-eyed lad who’d never seen more than the rear end of a mule and a pressed shirt for Sunday-go-to-meetin’s. True tales of his imprisonment in Folsom on trumped-up charges, and the brawls against the guards he and other Wobblie organizers had to win to survive. Of bloody Ludlow and John D. Rockefeller’s goons cutting down striking miners with machine-gun fire.
    At seventeen, Grant had been signed into duty by his father. It wasn’t the elder’s idea, but they’d lost the lease, and the younger Grant saw the Army as a way