Free The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman Page A

an elitist asshole so that he and his friends could laugh at the great unwashed masses who innocently wandered in for a burger and a beer. My bet was that Kid Charlemagne’s owner, a C-list artist and A-list junkie named Nathan Martyr, would be well acquainted with the likes of the Hollow Girl and Millicent McCumber.
    I’d walked about a block when I noticed I was being followed, and not very skillfully so. My tail, a nondescript white guy in his mid-thirties wearing a pristine motorcycle jacket, Ralph Lauren jeans, and two hundred buck Nikes, had gotten a little too close when I left Grogan’s. Then, instead of just walking on by me, as he should have, he abruptly changed course and rushed to cross the street. I could see him paralleling me up Avenue C, and when I turned left to head west, he did the same, keeping to the other side of the street. He wasn’t a threat. His incompetence didn’t exactly breed fear in me. Still, I was wary all the same. He wasn’t a cop, that was for shit sure. The question was, if he wasn’t a cop, who was he and why the hell was he following me around the Lower East Side?
    I ducked into a busy restaurant, allowing me to make sure I was in fact being followed and not simply succumbing to a bout of paranoia. My view out the eatery’s darkly tinted plate glass window reassured me that I wasn’t being paranoid. To say my tail wasn’t much of a pro was an understatement. When I entered the restaurant, he should have kept on going, then doubled back and hidden himself out of my line of sight. But no, there he was, directly across the street, pacing a rut in the sidewalk.
    I waited for a group of people to leave the restaurant. When a party of five headed out, I tucked in behind them, kneeling below car top level—no easy task for an old man with bad knees—as I went through the front door. Working my way about ten car lengths back east, I popped my head up and looked through a car windshield.
Oy!
I almost felt sorry for this schmuck with the expensive jeans, because he was still across the street from the restaurant, craning his neck, waiting for me to exit. Confident of my tail’s inexperience, I crossed to his side of the street, hid in a doorway, and waited him out.
    Ten minutes later, it must have clicked that he’d lost me. He went into the eatery to make certain. When he came out, he was so pissed he kicked a parking meter machine. If it hadn’t already been easy enough to follow him, his self-inflicted limp made it cake. Eventually, he worked his way back down toward Houston Street. He got into a sleek, metallic maroon BMW coupe with idiotic vanity plates that read P EYE 7. This clown was almost too much to bear. At least I now had a good sense of who he might be. I was confident he must have been Julian Cantor’s lead investigator.
    The thing is that there are all kinds of PIs for all kinds of jobs. Some require a police background and some don’t. Some require a deep level of high-tech skill. Some require a bit of acting craft, while others require nothing more than patience and a strong bladder. When Carmella and I owned our security firm, we tried to have a mix of all kinds of skilled people. But when you were an investigator who worked almost exclusively on personal injury and malpractice suits, you basically had to be good at three things: taking photos of cracked sidewalks, taking statements, and understanding medical terminology. When you did it for a big firm like Cantor, Schreck, it also meant you could afford to be incompetent at street skills and could also afford a fancy BMW with vanity plates. At least now I wouldn’t feel conflicted about not calling Julian Cantor. He would find out about the late Millicent McCumber soon enough.
    As I waited for P EYE 7 to pull out of his parking spot, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I’d gotten the texts from Anthony Rizzo with Giorgio’s info. I thought about forgetting Kid Charlemagne’s and heading to Hell’s Kitchen to