Free Big Goodbye, The by Michael Lister

by halves, do you, soldier?” she said.
    I smiled at her, but only a moment, as I quickly scanned the article.
    “Does Ray know what you’re involved in?”
    Nodding to the paper on my desk, I said, “It looks like all of Panama City does now.”
    “Anything in it?”
    “You asking if I killed Margie Lehane?”
    “No,” she said. “You didn’t, did you?”
    “Has Ray made it in yet?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “He may be going straight to the courthouse. I’m not sure. You know how he is. What’s that word you used?”
    “Taciturn.”
    “You gotta get a girl, fella,” she said. “That ain’t even the word you used last time.”
    I smiled.
    “He never tells anybody much,” she said. “Tells me even less.”
    “Why you think?” I asked, though I knew. I just wondered if she did.
    “Because I’m not a . . . a . . . peer—not that Ray really has any of those. I’m more a project. Speaking of . . . he had an old file open on his desk yesterday.”
    “Dorothy Powell?”
    She nodded. “She haunts him, but good, don’t she?”
    “If you’re a savior, the ones you don’t save always do.”
    “You two aren’t alike in a lot of ways, but in that you are.”
    I wondered what she meant, but I didn’t ask her. I didn’t have to. She went on to tell me.
    “Someone needs savin’—especially a woman, you two are the first guys to step forward, and you feel completely responsible for her the rest of your lives. It’s the way Ray is with me, and you are with Lauren Lewis.”
    It wasn’t quite the same with Lauren, but before I could say so, two men walked through my door without knocking.
    The first man was small and thin, probably nearing middle age, well dressed and smooth. The man who followed him was his muscle—big, bulky, powerful. I had seen and dealt with enough men like them to know the sort of men they were. They were here to deliver a threat, issue an ultimatum, give a warning. They were the kind of men who if you saw a second time meant someone was getting hurt or dead.
    The big man would have no problem tossing me around the room with one hand, snapping me in two with so little effort it wouldn’t raise his heart rate, but the little one was by far the more dangerous of the two. I knew it before he opened his mouth, before he delivered a single threat or made good on it. I could see it in his eyes. It wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t. Behind his gray eyes there was no conscience, no empathy, no pity, no mercy, no remorse.
    The smaller man sat down in one of the chairs in front of my desk.
    “Excuse us a minute, doll,” he said to July.
    She started to protest, but I shook my head, and she walked out quietly and closed my door.
    “That was smart, soldier, you got brains,” the small man said. His voice was low and flat, with only occasional inflection. “No need to get the pretty girl mixed up in any of this.”
    The small man had a grayish tint to him. Perhaps it was that his gray pinstripe suit and gray felt fedora matched his eyes. Maybe it was the faint gray stubble on his face, but it seemed to be more than that, as if his little body put off the color of his core somehow.
    “Any of what?” I asked.
    The big man, who wore a slightly too-small black suit, remained standing and had yet to make a sound or an expression.
    “Complicated things like politics, medical treatment, and romance,” he said. “Things guys like us should stay out of.”
    “Brother, I’m about as far out of those things as a body can be,” I said. “Got no political interests—let alone aspirations, got no use for women, and not undergoing any medical treatment.”
    “Not yet,” the big man said.
    He sounded like a slow, mean kid, and I wondered how the little man put up with him.
    “Must be tough havin’ only one arm,” the little man said.
    “There’re worse things,” I said.
    “Sure, soldier, but you’re in the tough-guy business,” he said. “Hard to be tough with only