Free Sweetheart by Andrew Coburn Page A

must’ve known this was coming.”
    “Yet he did me a favor.”
    “In a way we did him one. We got rid of two crazies for him.”
    Gardella was quiet for a moment. “Two ways to figure him. He’s a regular guy. Or he’s cute. What do you think?”
    “I’m like you, Anthony. I always think the worst and work from there.”
    There were two leather chairs in the room, and Gardella was in the larger one. On a side table was a bag of Italian cookies bought fresh that morning from the bakery next door. Gardella ate one. “You don’t like him.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “This new job of his, Victor, it could mean heat for us.”
    “What can he do to us? Nothing.”
    “He can come on strong, or he can do it easy. I’d rather have him do it easy, wouldn’t you? What do we know about him?”
    “He’s got wife trouble, I know that. He was in one of our joints bleeding on one of the hookers.”
    “Let’s check on it, see if it’s true,” Gardella said, interested. “Wrong woman can mess up a guy.”
    Scandura nodded. He was once married to a woman who allowed him his pleasure only on Fridays. Now he no longer felt the need. He crossed his legs, extending a shoe foxed along the sides and perforated on the toe. He said, “You’ve been quiet since you got back from Miami. Anything wrong?”
    “I don’t know.” Gardella was pensive. “I got bad feelings down there. My cousin Sal. I think he wants to make a move. I could be wrong, since I got nothing staring me in the face that says I’m right.”
    Scandura said ominously, “You’re seldom wrong, Anthony.”
    “I’ll tell you what it was,” Gardella said, reaching for another cookie. “Remember when my sister turned sixteen, and Sal, my age, had a hard-on for her?”
    “I remember you telling me about it.”
    “I was so mad I was going to clip him. Anyway, there we are sitting in his house in Biscayne, and he mentions how he used to like her. Can you imagine? He reminds me of it, like he’s not scared anymore.”
    “Maybe he forgot you were going to clip him over it.”
    “No. A guy
never
forgets something like that.”
    “That’s true,” Scandura agreed.
    “Nose around, Victor. I need to know.”
    • • •
    Christopher Wade’s new apartment was on the third floor of a venerable brick building on Commonwealth Avenue. It had a kitchenette, a bedroom, a good-sized bathroom, and an extra-large sitting room that opened onto a small balcony overlooking the tree-lined mall. The weather was mild, almost springlike, and Wade, perched on the balcony, imagined the trees exploding into leaf and birds winging to the balcony for the feed he’d provide, though the thought came to him that he’d only attract pigeons. When he stepped back into the sitting room he heard the person in the apartment above walk across the floor.
    He checked the telephone to see whether it was working. Boston University was in the vicinity, and he considered calling his daughters on the remote possibility of reaching one of them for lunch. Both lived in the same dormitory, Warren Towers, though in different rooms. He tried the older daughter’s number, no response, and then the younger daughter’s, same result. In his mind’s eye he tended to see them still as little girls in braids, which was the reason he was always jolted when they appeared in person as willowy young women with hard touches of sophistication, the older one majoring in child psychology, the younger in journalism. The telephone shrilled as he drifted away from it.
    He wheeled around fast and snatched it up, wondering if they had divined his wishes and even his unlisted number.
    Russell Thurston said, “Hello, Sweetheart. Let’s meet.”
    They met north of Boston at a rest stop on Route 93. Thurston climbed out of a nondescript Dodge and slipped into Wade’s five-year-old Chevy Camaro, his small conceit, purchased at the time he promised both daughters he’d teach them to drive but never did. Thurston