Free Michael Lister - Soldier 02 - The Big Beyond by Michael Lister Page B

shops, standing, smoking, walking, moving, talking.
    Leaving the Ritz, I disappeared into the din, following the flow downstream, heading to Ruth Ann’s car.
    Rounding the corner at Fourth, I continued on toward Grace.
    As I neared the car, I glanced down Fourth and saw a man angling onto Oak who I could’ve sworn was Cliff Walton.
    He was a good distance away so I couldn’t be certain, but his build and the way he walked were a perfect match for the man, except now he walked with a limp—a limp I had given him when I shot him in the leg the night I left town with Lauren.
    Walt, as he was most often called, had been Harry Lewis’s head of security, both for the bank and the campaign. He was a large man with a thick neck who wore suits a size or two too small for him. He was the type of man who entered a room a few minutes after his chest did.
    On the night I shot him, I had not only discovered that he was actually working for Frank Howell as a plant pretending to work for Harry all the while blackmailing Lauren, but that he had killed a few people in the process.
    He, Howell, Ann Everett, and Payton Rainer had been working together to use Lauren to get Harry to drop out of the race.
    I hurried down Fourth then turned onto Oak hoping it was him and that he’d lead me to them, but Oak was empty and there was no sign of the figure I had seen limping down Fourth.
    I stood there a moment trying to decide what to do.
    About two blocks down, lights from a car parked on the side of the street came on and it pulled out onto Oak heading my direction.
    I stepped back a bit and waited, and was glad I did.
    As the car whisked past me, I could see that it was in fact who I thought it was. Cliff Walton, who helped killed Lauren, was not only still drawing breath, he was doing so right here in my little town.
    So as the vehicle passed by, I stepped out into the street and carefully studied the tag so I could do something about it.
    I walked back up Fourth toward Ruth Ann’s car, salivating at the thought of seeing Walt again soon, savoring the unmitigated misery I was going to unleash onto his life.
    Out in the bay, the Liberty ship still burned. Adrift. Aflame. Abandoned. Soon it would sink to the bottom and become a ghost ship—like me, a casualty of a war it never got to fight in.
    As I turned from Fourth onto Grace and started to cross the street, the pristine Presidential Studebaker pulled up beside me.
    Bunko Matsumoto’s brother was in the backseat again, the same little driver in the front behind the wheel.
    The door opened, I got in, and the driver pulled up and parked near the curb.
    “Sister say ah you were ah interrupteda.”
    I nodded.
    “How ah many boys you and my nephews save?”
    “A few.”
    He nodded.
    We were silent a moment, then he said, “Boat still ah burn out there ah right nowa. Beautiful in moonright.”
    “I went to the morgue this morning,” I said. “Your niece is not one of the four girls cut up by the killer.”
    The release of stress and the relief that replaced it were palpable. His shoulders relaxed beneath his black suit coat and his breathing became more peaceful, less labored.
    He rolled down his window a few inches, withdrew a red pack of Pall Mall that said WHEREVER PARTICULAR PEOPLE CONGREGATE, shook one out, and lit up without offering me one.
    “So,” he said, returning the pack to his pocket, “where is my niece then?”
    “The only thing I know for sure is that she’s not one of the madman’s four victims in the morgue.”
    The smoke filling the car was strong and I decided to roll down my window—an awkward task accomplished by reaching over my body with my left hand and turning the knob at an odd angle the wrong way at first.
    “You find her now.”
    “Right now?” I asked.
    “Yes. Ah righta nowa.”
    “I don’t know enough to even start. You want me to look for the girl, I’ll look for her. And you don’t have to threaten me to get me to do it. But you
do
have to