Free A Week In Hel by Pro Se Press Page B

get sympathetic, somebody either busted her chops or
jammed a gun in my face.
    “ Is this really the way you
are, all Brutus all the time? How does anyone ever get close to
you? I’m hard because I have to be, because those guys are after
me, but it’s like you get off on being a hard ass.”
    She was on the verge of
tears again, but I think it was for real this time. It was
different, Her throat was tight when she spoke, and she was having
real trouble keeping it together.
    “ You want to get to me doll,
you gotta ante up with the truth. I’m a cop. I’m not some face, or
some drone, so into you being the queen bee that he hasn’t found a
way to get honey someplace else. I think the boys from The Outfit
rousted your joint for their money, and poor old Bull McCaffery was
trying to help you when they gave him the business. You called the
cops and they either decided to scram, or they were in the back of
the joint icing down Bull when I showed up. Up to that point you
are either innocent—which I doubt, or complicit, which makes you
responsible if Bull McCaffrey calls it in dead
tomorrow.”
    She was giving me those
brown eyes again. This time they were hot, scared, but hot, “So how
am I responsible for them putting the kibosh on Bull? He was just
too stupid to mind his own business.”
    “ So they killed him?” It
sure felt like she was admitting it.
    “ I didn’t say that, and why
do you think I had anything to do with it if they did?”
    Yep, she was hot all right.
“Well aside from what I might suspect, you have, by your own
admission, taken four million dollars. It really doesn’t make a lot
of difference whether it was from a criminal. Felony theft is
felony theft.
    She was looking a little
green. “I’m just taking what belongs to my family. The racket
killed anything that amounted to shit in my life. Two large a week
for 30 years, with a little pension tacked on, is nothing compared
to what I’d like to do.”
    I didn’t want to admit it,
but her logic wasn’t that far off from my own. I mean if I was
putting my big size 14 foot in her dainty little glass slipper—too
bad for Candi that her coach was gonna turn into a hearse.
Especially if that glass slipper turned out to be concrete
shoes.
    “ Y’know, maybe if you
leveled with me and told me the whole truth, I might be able to
help you,” I offered. I was really trying to be genuine. In life
you gotta decide which parts of right and wrong are the parts you
can live with—I figgered that I’d rather help somebody who had been
wronged, than somebody strong-arming the same.
    She shrugged me off, “What
d’you want to help me for?”
    “ I gotta admit I’m a sucker
for a damsel in distress. I got cleaned up and came to your place
because I saw a pretty girl that needed rescued. I didn’t know what
was going on, but I had hoped this might have gone down more like a
date than a Chinese fire drill.”
    She smiled up at me with
those big brown eyes, and it was almost enough. “You’d want to date
me?”
    I would. I mean I don’t
usually go for the sexy, but deadly type, and felons are definitely
out; but charged ain’t necessarily convicted, and she was smoking
hot.
    “ Sure, why wouldn’t I want
to date you?” I was trying to soothe her.
    “ Cause now you think I’m a
crook and you want to charge me with a felony. Regardless of how
you dress it up, you want to screw me to get to the top.” The sound
of it was harsh, and even though it crashed on my ears, it was not
inaccurate.
    “ I gotta admit you are more
than half right about the way my cop brain works in the regular
sense.” What? Hell, right is right.
    “ What about in the irregular
sense?”
    “ How do you
mean?”
    She batted those eyes at me
again, “In the sexual sense is how I mean.”
    I turned into the lot at the
Shawnee Hotel and backed into a space.
    “ Shawnee Hotel Security,”
she said, aghast. “I thought you were a real cop.”
    “ I am a real cop. I’ve