The Snake Tattoo by Linda Barnes Page B

voice say she’ll pick ’em up in five minutes.
    A light flickered on in the building I was watching. I counted windows. It was one apartment over from Renney the pimp’s place. No luck.
    After Leroy had to leave for his club bouncer job, I flopped in Gloria’s orange plastic guest chair, after checking it for roaches. I always catch little streaks of movement in that place. Small mice or big roaches, I’m not sure which. They banquet on the crumbs from Gloria’s Twinkies.
    â€œWhat do you hear, Glory?” I’d asked.
    â€œNothing,” she’d said, feeling real conversational. She took a couple calls, moving cabs around the city. She can do five things at once, punch buttons on the phone console, relay addresses, play solitaire, eat Milky Ways. I spent some time admiring her outfit, which looked like a purple pup tent, to tell the truth.
    â€œYou working?” she’d asked after a while.
    â€œTwo cases,” I’d replied.
    â€œWho-ee,” she’d said. “Money pourin’ in.”
    â€œYeah, I’m gonna have to hire a Brink’s truck.” I didn’t feel like telling her one of my clients was under age and the other was a freebie.
    â€œYou seein’ that cop?” she’d asked.
    â€œMooney?” I’d answered cautiously. “Sometimes. Why?”
    â€œYou and he, uh, you dating or what?”
    Dating is such a quaint word. “Nope,” I’d said. I think Gloria likes to keep tabs on my love life, because of Sam. Maybe she reports to him.
    â€œI hear he’s gonna testify.”
    â€œTestify?” I’d repeated.
    â€œAt those hearings. You know,” she’d said.
    â€œWhat hearings?”
    â€œCops earning overtime for no-shows. Goosin’ the bars that aren’t connected. Givin’ zero protection and takin’ big bucks.”
    My stomach had contracted. If Mooney was going to testify, he must be involved.
    The light in the flat next to Renney’s died. I put my gloves back on and sat on my hands to warm them up.
    My dad was a cop. Even now, hours after leaving Gloria, my stomach felt the way it used to when he and Mom had one of their roaring fights, way back before the divorce, when I was too small to remember much. I recalled one of their fighting words: “pad.” “Pad,” “on the pad,” and its variations were unerring advance signals of pitched battles with pots and jars and ugly words hurtling through the air. I’d sit on the porch with my hands over my ears till the storm passed. I didn’t find out what the words meant for years.
    By then my dad was dead. I couldn’t ask him.
    A red Chevy Camaro, the car most likely to be ticketed by a cop or boosted by a thief, passed within inches of my fender, flying low, and brought me back to the present. It left a contrail of blaring acid rock.
    I consulted Valerie’s expressionless eyes. Was that her kind of music?
    Fourteen and a half years old. I tried to remember fourteen, more than half a life ago. The quality of time had been so different. Everything, every single tiny want or need, had been urgent, immediate, absolutely wonderful, devastatingly awful. What would have made the fourteen-year-old me run from the Emerson School?
    My mind balked. I couldn’t picture myself there. What would make a kid from the suburbs run to the Zone? Had she run here? If not, why the hell had Jerry Toland followed? Why hadn’t he reported his stolen wallet? Maybe he’d given it to Valerie. Maybe she’d lifted it while they argued.
    I shifted position and started the engine, grateful for the rush of hot air. I decided to switch focus, forget Renney’s place for the night, search for Valerie instead of Janine. Every cop in the city was probably keeping an eye out for bleached-blonde prostitutes, trying to get Mooney off the hook. As far as I knew, I was the only one looking for Valerie.
    Maybe,