Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

outside the storefront window that overlooked Main Street.
    A smaller window in the back of that long room overlooked the parking lot behind the Village Hall, where the police patrol cars were parked. Frank could watch the shift change from there and know, if he wanted, which cops were out on any given night. Everyone in town knew this about him. And Frank made a point of letting everyone know.
    He glanced up from his reading and looked at me over his half-frame glasses. “Thanks for being on time, MacManus.”
    The only light on in the room was the desktop reading lamp by his right elbow, but I could see him well enough by it. He was fifty-five or so, not very tall but thick through the torso, built like a keg. He wore his black hair slicked back and his dark mustache thick but trimmed just above his upper lip.
    “What do you want, Frank?”
    He closed the folder, then removed his reading glasses and dropped them on the desktop. He leaned back in his chair, the springs protesting under his weight, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. He seemed genuinely tired, but I really didn’t care.
    “Augie’s coming back to work for me, starting tomorrow night. Did you know about that?”
    “Augie’s a grown man.”
    “Grown up more than most people I know. Always has been. See, I don’t like to turn friends down when they come to me for help, especially a friend like Augie. They don’t come any better than him. And I know how much he wants to get back to work and put the ‘accident’ and the past six months behind him. But the truth of it is, he isn’t one hundred percent yet. If he wants to work, he’s got to pair-up with a partner at first. But of course he’ll only partner with one person.”
    “He’d know I was there to baby-sit him. He’d see through the both of us in a second.”
    “Not if we told him you were tired of driving around without car insurance and you broke down and came to me for some work.”
    I wanted to ask Frank how he knew that my insurance had lapsed, but I didn’t bother.
    “It’s simple, Mac. You didn’t know he was coming back to work for me, right? So when you came to me tonight it was because you didn’t think it was wise driving around without coverage anymore, what with things being the way they are between you and the Chief. You needed money, and I was the only place you could turn. He’ll buy it because he has no choice otherwise.”
    Last May a kid from the high school where Augie’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Tina, was a student died from a heroin overdose. The kid had bought the drugs on school grounds, and when he heard this, Augie waged a one-man war against the pusher. It ended with Augie almost being beaten to death in his own house after taking surveillance photographs of a major player in the local heroin trade. That man was dead now, and the man he had hired to beat Augie, an ugly ex-boxer named Searls, was in prison and blind. I had taken out both eyes in a fight when he had come after Tina.
    Augie had spent three months in the hospital and another four pushing himself toward a full recovery. He had retired from the DEA a few years ago and returned to the East End to live a quiet life. It had been anything but that.
    We had met during my brief stint with Frank and had been friends since. Augie was the only man, outside of Eddie, whom I trusted. I wouldn’t let anything happen to him, no matter what the cost, to me or anyone else. And Frank knew this, knew this well.
    “What’s the job?”
    “A father wants his son-in-law tailed, thinks the young man has something on the side. Simple documentation. Easy.”
    “You need two men for that?”
    “One to drive, one to take pretty pictures,” he said. “The client has very deep pockets, and he wants results. No bullshit, MacManus. I’m telling you exactly how it is, take it or leave it.”
    “Except, of course, I can’t leave it.”
    Frank sighed and looked down at his hands folded now over his stomach. His fingers were thick, his hands probably twice the mass of mine. “You know, when Augie walked in here with that cane, I wondered, ‘Who the hell is this cripple?’ To be honest, I don’t think he’s going to cut it. I think he’s setting himself up for a hard fall. But I owe him a shot, if that’s what he wants.”
    The sound of a car door slamming shut echoed up from just below the front window. Frank looked toward it curiously but didn’t get up to check. He