Free A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane Page A

felt Angie beside me, her gun steady, her breathing shallow. She said, “Jenna, Simone, I want you to get in your car and drive to the house in Wickham. We’ll be right behind you and if you try to take off, believe me, our car’s a lot faster than yours and we’ll end up talking in a ditch somewhere.”
    I looked at Simone. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be dead now.”
    Simone gave off some sort of body language that only a sister would recognize, because Jenna put a hand on her arm. “We do what they say, Simone.”
    Angie opened the door behind me. Jenna and Simone passed by and walked out. I looked at Football Player, then pushed his face back with the gun. I felt the weight of it in my arm, the muscles beginning to ache, my hand stiffening and sweat popping out of the glands all over my body.
    Football Player met my eyes and I could see he was thinking about being a hero again.
    I waited. I leveled the gun and said, “Come on.”
    Angie said, “Not here. Let’s go.” She took my elbow, and we backed out of the bar into the night.

9
    â€œSit down, Simone. Please.” Everything Jenna said came out as a weary plea.
    We’d been back at the house for ten minutes and had spent all our time dealing with Simone’s ego. So far, she’d tried to push past me twice, and now she was walking toward the phone.
    â€œMan don’t come into my house, tell me how to act,” she told Jenna, then looked at Angie. “And the man ain’t going to shoot me with the neighbors awake upstairs.” She’d started to believe that by the time she reached the phone.
    I said, “Simone, who’re you going to call? The police? Fine.”
    Jenna said, “Put the phone down, Simone. Please.”
    Angie looked bored and antsy. Patience is not one of her prime virtues. She walked over and pulled the phone cord out of the wall.
    I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Jenna, I’m a private investigator, and before any of us decides to do anything else, I have to talk to you.”
    Simone looked at the phone, then at Angie and me, finally at her sister. She said, “Your bed, girl, lie in it,” and sat down on the couch.
    Angie sat beside her. “You have a very nice place here.”
    This was true. It was small, and the outside was nothing to look at, and it wasn’t like there was a baby grand by the window, but Simone definitely had an eye. The floor hadbeen stripped, the blonde wood underneath polished to a high gloss. The couch where Simone and Angie sat was a light cream color with an oversize throw pillow that Angie was itching to hug to her chest. Jenna sat in a mahogany shell chair to the right of the couch and I leaned on its twin across from her. Four feet from the windows the floor rose eight inches and a small alcove had been created around the two windows facing the street, cushions on the window seats, a small wooden magazine rack, a hanging plant overhead, and the wooden telephone desk. A bookcase ran the length of the half wall behind Jenna and I saw poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Amiri Baraka, plus novels by Baldwin and Wright as well as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Pete Dexter, Walker Percy, and Charles Johnson.
    I looked at Simone. “Where’d you go to school?”
    She said, “Tuskegee,” a little surprised.
    â€œGood school.” A friend of mine played ball there for a year before he found out he wasn’t good enough. I said, “Nice book collection.”
    â€œYou just surprised the nigger knows how to read.”
    I sighed. “Right. That’s it, Simone.” I said to Jenna, “Why’d you quit your job?”
    Jenna said, “People quit their jobs every day.”
    â€œThis is true,” I said, “but why’d you quit yours?”
    She said, “I didn’t want to work for them no more. Plain and