Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

wearing a military field jacket over his sweatshirt and jeans. There were no insignia or patches on the jacket, just the name Hartsell stenciled over the left top pocket. His pickup truck was an old Ford that had seen better days well before I was born. There were holes in the rusted floorboard that I had to cover with the sole of my boot to keep the water from the flooded roads splashing up at me. The rubber boot around the gear shift had cracked and all but broken off, and the paint on the metal dashboard was faded from nearly four decades of sun.
    As I climbed into his truck back in town, I had caught a glimpse of the Colt .45 that Augie wore under his jacket. It was holstered to his belt, just below his right kidney. It was concealed from my sight now, wedged between him and the seat covered with cracked black vinyl. But I knew it was there. I couldn’t help but wonder if Augie was the kind of man who carried his weapon at all times, even at home.
    A fairly modern radio was mounted under the old style dashboard, tuned to a jazz program on the college station. The volume was low but I could hear well enough Charlie Haden singing “Wayfaring Stranger.” I listened and felt almost good to be alive. It was a hard song for any man to ignore, and I wondered if Augie was listening. But I couldn’t tell. Anyway, when it was done another, lesser song came on and I stopped paying attention so closely and looked down Main Street toward the bar at the corner where the upstart kid we had come to give a message worked slinging drinks.
    The bar was called the Dead Horse. It sat across from Long Wharf, where twenty foot sailboats and luxury yachts moored for the summer months. I knew this bar well. It had two large storefront windows and a front door between them that opened onto the corner of Main and Bay streets. Inside there was a short bar, two ceiling fans, two tiny restrooms, and a dozen tables, nothing more. On weekends ensembles set up in a corner and played, mostly Irish music but sometimes jazz, and the hard wood floors brought the music right to the bottom of your feet. One night, years ago, I had seen a quartet play radical jazz covers of Jimi Hendrix tunes. I drank dark beer with bourbon backs long after the band broke and stayed there with them and a few other regulars till the sun came up and the street lights went off one by one down the length of Main Street. To this day I can remember that night vividly—the bass solo during “Little Wing,” the joy, the pretty girlfriend of the drummer and how I couldn’t take my eyes off her. In those days, I was as ruled by women as George. But I have no memory whatsoever of how I got back to the Hansom House. Even my memory of the days that followed are hazy, full of jagged holes. It was lost time, a span of hours during which, for all intents and purposes, I was not part of this world.
    The upstart kid’s name was Vogler. I had looked through the folder Frank had given us and studied his photograph. That folder was thinner than the one I had seen on Frank’s desk, and almost half the text had been blacked out with a Magic Marker. No names, no addresses, nothing but what we needed to know about the target.
    Vogler was in his early twenties and didn’t look all that much like trouble to me. He had short brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a narrow face that didn’t seem to me the kind of face that made people run with fear. There was no mention of the name of Frank’s client, or the man’s daughter, anywhere in the file. But I wasn’t surprised by this. It was, I was certain, the least of what was being withheld from me.
    Streams of rain water ran down both sides of Main Street and collected in a puddle the size of two car lengths. Bay Street was pretty much underwater, like it usually was when it rained. The bridge to North Haven, a left-hand turn at the end of Main, was half lost to a bank of mist that shifted in from the harbor. There were halos around the street lamps and circular pools of grainy light around their bases with stretches of darkness in between. I turned my head and glanced toward the south end of the tiny village, and all I could see was a wall of gray in which the stores that lined Main Street began but did not end. Everything looked unfinished, like a movie set or tumbling-down ghost town.
    With the motor off, the heater wasn’t running, so the air inside grew chill and damp quickly. My hair had only just begun to dry. I started to