Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page B

waitress to pack up the pad thai and rice I hadn’t touched and put it in a little white carton for me to take home.
    I do remember being in the parking lot where Sally told the kids to go to her car and she walked me to my rental and handed me the brown bag of rice and pad thai.
    “What is it?” she asked as we stood in the parking lot.
    Some kids came running out yelling and laughing from the 7-Eleven at the end of the small mall. I looked at them and back at Sally.
    I had been seeing Sally for a few months. We were friends. Well, maybe we were more than friends, but nothing intimate, not yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for the memory of my dead wife. I didn’t know if I ever would even with Ann Horowitz’s help.
    And Sally had been a widow for more than four years, too busy for men, not interested in becoming involved, not really being pursued. We were friends. She was also a family therapist and at the Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele had been and officially still was one of her cases.
    “Adele,” I said.
    I looked over at Michael and Susan quarreling over something in the backseat of her decade-old Honda.
    “What happened?” Sally asked calmly.
    “You know about her and Lonsberg?” I asked.
    “What she told me. What Flo told me,” she said.
    “Adele’s missing,” I said. “It looks as if she ran away with a kid named Mickey Merrymen. You know the name?”
    “No,” she said. “What does this have to do with Lonsberg?”
    “Adele and Mickey may have stolen a roomful of Lonsberg’s unpublished manuscripts.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But it gets worse. I’m not sure you want to know the rest.”
    “I’ve got to find Adele,” she said. “I need to know whatever there is to know.”
    “You don’t have much free time to search for missing girls,” I said. “Not with your caseload.”
    “I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.
    “And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”
    “Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”
    “Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”
    “No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.
    “They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.
    “Not tonight. Can you forget?”
    “No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”
    She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.
    I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.
    It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for
Mildred Pierce
, but tonight I’d go for
Woman on
the Beach
. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.
    The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.
    I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “ FONESCA.”
    I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on the lights,