Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

device police use to blow out the tires of cars. Back at our homes, Augie and I are sacked, told to mind our own business. Augie shoots a man who was armed but no weapon is found by the police. Frank suspects the Chief is up to something and coerces me into finding the man who had sacked me so he might lead us to a man who might clear Augie of manslaughter charges and might give Frank something to use against the Chief. I enter the girl’s home and find her room ransacked but priceless artwork and top-of-the-line appliances untouched. The door to the house had been broken into but the alarm wasn’t triggered.
    This was what I knew, this was all I had. It was noon and all my leads were exhausted. All but one.
    I left the phone booth and walked out of the bar without making eye contact with George. It wasn’t long after I got outside that Eddie’s cab came down Elm and stopped. I opened the door and got in.
    I told Eddie what I needed. A dark late model LTD, a man with a limp. I told him where I’d be. He nodded and listened, watching me in the rear view mirror. The conversation only took a minute, and then I got out again into the cold and closed the heavy door. Eddie drove away, and I went to my car and got in and drove back to the hospital to wait.
    I sat in my LeMans in the parking lot and thought of Gale close to the end of her shift inside. A little after two I saw her come out and get into her Jeep Cherokee and drive off. She didn’t see me. I thought about the envy I felt, how maybe life would be better if she was mine. But that’s not the way things were. At some point after she drove off I fell asleep sitting up. When I awoke it was dark and I was disoriented for a few long seconds. The parking lot lights were on but there was no LTD to be seen. It was cold in my car, so I started the engine and turned on the heat. It didn’t take long for me to convince myself that this was a waste of time.
    When I got home my apartment was empty. There was a note from Tina telling me that Augie was home and to call when I got in. But I didn’t call. I guess I just wanted to be free of it for a while. I made something to eat and then got into bed with my clothes on.
    I awoke sometime later to the phone ringing. It felt like the middle of the night. I felt disappointment at my return to consciousness. I let the phone ring three times, lingering in what was left of my slumber, then got up and staggered into the living room and picked up the receiver in the middle of the fifth ring.
    “Yeah,” I muttered. I expected Augie’s voice, or Tina’s, but instead I heard the musical accent of my Jamaican-born friend.
    “I got him,” he said.
    “What?”
    “I got him. I found him. The man you wanted. Old LDT, limp. I got him.”
    “Jesus, Eddie,” I said. “Where are you?”

Chapter Four

    Bars in New York close at four in the morning, and that always seemed to me a particularly soulless time of night. When I worked as a bartender for a few years in Sag Harbor, it was, in the summertime, dawn by the time I got back to the Hansom House. I drove west on the back roads, along the rim of Peconic Bay, and watched the sky fill with light shades of gray and blue till it was finally light. I quit the bar business because I grew tired of getting people drunk and taking money for it. I grew tired of the knowledge that people I had gotten drunk were on the roads of my town. In the wintertime, when my ride home was through darkness that spread out around me without a hint of an end, I would think of kids waiting for school buses and my customers, reeling as they left, virtually handicapped, out on the roads.
    Now it was November, and as black as ever outside my windshield. I could barely see the bare branches of the trees that flickered past my driver’s door window. I was alone on the long road to Sag Harbor. During my entire ride out there I didn’t pass one car. I saw nothing at all that resembled human activity or life till I turned onto a side street on the backside of town and saw Murph’s Backstreet Tavern through my windshield.
    It was a small tavern, like something out of the American Revolution, painted green and falling apart. Beams sagged, the stone foundation was crumbled out in places on one side, gnarled trees surrounded it as close as framework. I remembered Murph’s well from my drinking days. It was known to some as an after-hours bar, sometimes serving drunks like me till seven in the morning.
    I saw