Free Vintage by David Baker

minutes ago. Didn’t look too happy. You say anything to piss him off?”
    â€œEvidently.”
    â€œHey, you want me to call you a cab or something?”
    Bruno shook his head and plunged into the afternoon sunlight.
    *      *      *
    Morton Cohen had various talents, chief among them being his mental catalog of wine labels and vintages as well as his abilityto patch cuts with alacrity in the corner of a boxing ring. Bruno was in need of both of these skills at the moment, so he caught the Pink Line out to Fifty-fourth and Cermak in Cicero, where Morty had a small, cluttered shop that was hard to define. In addition to random antiques, coins and stamps, he also bought and sold rare wines and cigars, both authentic as well as quality fakes.
    When Bruno stumbled into the store, Morty leapt from his stool at the end of the counter, where he was in the process of applying forged labels to bare Burgundy bottles that were likely filled by wines he’d made in his garage from grape concentrate that he ordered from the Lodi Valley in California. Morty spotted the bloody welt in Bruno’s hairline, as he was accustomed to searching for such things. He was a sort of cut-rate surgeon, willing to give free stitches in exchange for some tidbit of information he could use in the seedier levels of the pawn trade.
    â€œJesus, what happened to you?” Morty asked around the stump of an unlit cigar as he proffered his stool and slipped into the back room for his first-aid kit.
    â€œI fell.”
    Morty returned to attend to Bruno. He was a short gnome of a man who had to look up as he worked on Bruno sitting on the stool. He had large white eyebrows and glasses propped up on a spotted, bald scalp that gleamed in the dim light. He wore a strange and permanent grin through which he was able to talk without losing his grip on the cigar stump.
    â€œBullshit. Somebody conked you on the head.” Morty fished a cotton swab and some alcohol out of the kit, dabbing Bruno’s brow and making the writer wince. “At least it looks like you won’t need stitches.”
    Though Bruno’s head was aching, his ears ringing, hemanaged to shift gears now from medical services to gathering intelligence. He knew that to get the information he wanted without giving away his hand, he had to play his cards right. His aim was to validate the authenticity of the cork in his pocket and also get a read on anyone who might be looking to pawn some of the missing bottles. Bruno suspected the cork was either extremely valuable or a good fake. Either way, it was a clue to a bigger story. The assailant had been looking for something special in that locker, and Bruno had been in the way.
    But he had to be careful. Morty was coy with the truth, and getting information from him was always a game.
    â€œListen, Morty, what could I get for a ’63 d’Yquem?”
    â€œDepending on the condition . . . if I could authenticate the label . . . four to seven hundred a bottle.”
    Bruno moaned.
    â€œWhere would you get a d’Yquem?”
    â€œI had it in my hands . . .”
    â€œYou’re trying to tell me someone knocked you on your head and took your d’Yquem?”
    â€œIt was a vertical. Six, maybe seven bottles. I was at a friend’s locker . . .”
    â€œI’d slug somebody on the head for that kind of stash.”
    â€œBut something tells me that’s not what he was after. The bottles were there for the taking, but when I woke up, the place was tossed,” Bruno mused. He felt Morty’s attention fixing on the scenario as he applied an adhesive bandage. It was time to up the ante. He reached into his inside breast pocket and pulled out the cork. “What do you make of this?”
    Morty seized it and held it up to the light, squinting. “Hmmm. Burgundy. It’s old. Wax. Probably thirties . . . or a