Free Godchild by Vincent Zandri Page B

for my bankroll in my left-hand pocket. I peeled off a five and slipped the bill under the empty white plate.
    On my way out, while I was zipping up my leather, I spotted her across the glass case, where she was in the process of filling a pink box with some muffins.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “Don’t forget your coffee,” she reminded me.
    I stopped and made my way back to me glass case. She handed the cup to me.
    “Forget your head…wouldn’t you, sugar?”
    “Exactly,” I said, turning for the door.
    Sugar. How sweet it is.

Chapter 13

    “I never said I didn’t believe you, paisan. It’s just that I agree with Detective Ryan when he attests that you’ve been under a lot of strain.” Tony, talking from behind his mahogany desk. “It’s easy to let your imagination run wild.”
    I had just shown him the newspaper clipping of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, just pointed out the image of the Bald Man. Or a bald man anyway. Now Tony was removing the plastic lid from the Styrofoam cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee I brought him. At the same time he was trying to talk me out of believing that the man in the photo could be anything other than a man with no hair and that the battered black Buick I saw driving in and out of the Albany Rural Cemetery on Saturday was anything other than a figment of my over-stressed imagination.
    But then something different happened.
    Something I never expected.
    Tony let out a breath while the color of his complexion went from tan to red to white. Not an easy task for a paisan.
    He sat up straight in his swivel chair, planted his elbows firmly on the desk, stared down at his fingers, locked together at the knuckles. “Okay, let’s cut the bullshit,” he said, his voice just one, great big resigned sigh. “I’ve known about the Buick for a while now. A few weeks in fact. So has Ryan.”
    I set the article down on the desk.
    There was the inevitable adrenaline head rush. The slight dizziness. The anger that started at the tip of your brain stem and didn’t stop until it fried your brain.
    “And you never fucking … ” An outburst. I breathed. “And you never told me.” Controlled now. Whispering. Swallowing the anger.
    “I didn’t want to alarm you.”
    “You didn’t want to alarm me.” I kept whispering.
    He nodded. “I was afraid you’d do something stupid.”
    “So Ryan tries to convince me I’m imagining things. And you do the same.”
    He nodded. “It was for your own good,” he said, by way of explanation. “But then, you can only go on pretending for so long. Then it gets serious.”
    “More serious than this?” I asked. “For Christ’s sakes. I missed my own goddamned wedding.”
    We sat there silent for a few seconds while Tony sipped the coffee.
    My head was spinning, trying to keep up with itself.
    “I don’t get it,” I said. “On one hand you’re willing to send me to Mexico on this suicide mission, and on the other you don’t let me in on the Buick until now.”
    Tony stared at the steam rising up out of the coffee cup. He rolled up the sleeves on his pressed white shirt, neatly, to the elbows, as if to give him something to concentrate on other than me. My problems with the past and present.
    “Okay,” he said. “Just suppose the Buick is your Buick. Just suppose the man in the photo is your Bald Man, and just suppose Barnes is somehow connected to him.”
    “Just suppose,” I said, “that the Bald Man has shown up with the intent to finish the job he started. To see me dead.”
    More thinking on Tony’s part. And then: “Let me ask you a simple question: Who, in your opinion, would like to see you dead, Keeper?”
    The answer, of course, was so obvious it took me a few seconds to come up with it. “I was a warden, for Christ’s sakes. Who the hell doesn’t want to see me dead?”
    “Exactly,” he said. “Without going over the lists of inmates who’ve been paroled during the past three years or inmates who presently have major