Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

have been Americans. A smile was forming on his lips. They had two children, an elementary-school-age boy and a smaller girl. She had blond curly hair and looked like she might have been in kindergarten.
    That was enough.
    Right in the middle of “Les Rues de Paris,” I put down the trumpet and rose from my stool. I walked through the ranks of astonished tourists, parting them with my hands and breaking through to the back of the crowd. I stood in front of him.
    He tried to push by me, but I moved sideways and he stopped, the river on his other side.
    I opened my mouth. Breathed in. Made a little cough; breathed again.
    “M . . . M . . . Monsieur.” My voice rasped. “I . . . I have some information that I think you need to hear about the little g-girl in the white coat.”
    If I had had any doubt, his expression dispelled it.
    “I don’t know what you mean.” The tourists were staring at us as intently as if I were playing my trombone from the bell end. I said nothing. Stared at him. He shifted on his feet. “The suspect died in prison. The case is closed.”
    I lowered my voice.
    “Monsieur, I think it would be better if you heard what I have to say. Better that I tell it to you than . . .”
    “All right, what do you want?” No smile now. His arms were folded, his head cocked, but his body was rigid with tension.
    “Return tonight, at midnight. I will be here.”

    H E CAME NOT across the bridge but from the quay, skulking past the long line of moored houseboats, one behind another, the tables and flowerpots on their decks ghostly in the moonlight. I stood with my back to my instruments.
    “I’ve seen men like you before,” I said. “I know what you did.”
    “Is it money you want?”
    “I want to know the truth.”
    “Truth? I don’t know what that is. I loved her. Maybe a little too much — is that what you’re asking? I only wanted to touch her for a second. Nothing bad. But if she’d told her mother . . . Anyway, what will it take for you not to squeal?”
    He put his hand into the pocket of the loose jacket he was wearing. As he looked down, I made my move, even before I saw that he was pulling out a knife, not money.
    And if someday a body surfaces far downriver from where I still ply my trade, or if the police drag the river for some poor drowned child or missing teenager and turn up the corpse of a young man instead, I hope they notice that the victim is not just another casualty of the muddy waters.
    I hope they see on the left side of his head, just above his ear, a deep, slanted wound made with a blow of such force that it sliced, rather than cracked, his skull. A blow struck with the force of love, and pain, and decades of pent-up silence.
    I hope whoever finds him will know what went into that blow.
    And every day now, the tourists who gather around to see me play and bow and bob can witness the other consequence of that force. My polka renditions are a little tinny, a little off-key. The music just doesn’t sound the same now that the bell end of my trombone is bent so badly.
    But the notes that come out are still haunting.

HOT SUGAR BLUES
    BY STEVE LISKOW
    B ish Underwood hasn’t told the girl on the couch a single lie yet, which is a very good sign. Of course, she’s only been here ten minutes.
    Bish has just done three encores to top off a two-hour set in Trenton — our thirty-fifth concert in forty-one days — and he’s left them twitching in the aisles. The LP, which came out two days after we left home, has been in
Billboard’
s top five ever since, the last three weeks at number one. Bish is in full wind-down-at-the-end-of-the-tour mode, and he’s already ordered champagne and bourbon and fruit and ice and God knows what else from room service.
    He’s ready to celebrate, and the girl looks like she can probably help him. The whole suite — 928, because it’s his lucky number — is thick with sweat and hormones.
    But she insists that business comes first.
    No, not like that. Bishop Underwood has six platinum LPs under his belt, so he never has to pay for it. But this chick’s a freelancer with the green light for an interview from
Rolling Stone,
and that means they talk on the couch before they talk on the pillows.
    I want to go to bed with someone too, and plenty of women have slipped by security and are patrolling the halls ready to help me do just that, but I’m Bishop’s manager and he’s never been good at editing his mouth, so I don’t go away