All I Did Was Shoot My Man Read Free Page B

the right shoulder, left ankle, and hip. She never denied it; she just didn’t remember it.

    The DA wasn’t hell-bent against her. Public opinion was, she should have killed the bastard. After all, Harry and Minnie had apartments of their own. Many wondered why she hadn’t shot Minnie too.

    Two weeks later Gert called me.

    She had procured, from Stumpy, a picture of Zella, the key to her storage unit, and the money wrapped in Rutgers bands. One stack had a drop of the dead guard’s blood on it.

    “It’s the perfect frame,” Gert said. “And she’s going to prison anyway.”

    Even back then, before I’d developed a conscience, I had qualms. It had been discovered that Zella’s nausea came from an unexpected pregnancy. Framing a pregnant woman felt wrong.

    But there was a lot of money involved, enough to pay many months’ rent and children’s doctor bills. On top of that, Gert had asked for my help and I still had hopes that she might forgive me one day.

    But still, I hesitated. I remember the exact moment, sitting there in Gert’s apartment, looking down on the quaint SoHo street.

    And then Gert touched my left hand.

    “Do this for me, LT,” she said.

    And so I disguised myself as well as I could, took a storage unit on Zella’s floor, and cut off her lock, placing a trunk inside her space. I altered the evidence somewhat because there seemed to be something wrong about the whole deal. I hadn’t talked to Stumpy, nor had Gert told him that I was her operative. The money was good, but I felt that I needed, and that Gert needed, some protection.

    After that I made an anonymous phone call to the police, telling them Zella Grisham had a journal in her storage unit where she detailed the assault on Harry Tangelo. They cracked the space and found the evidence linking her with the robbery.

    THE DA, who might have let the shooting slide on diminished capacity, came down on Zella with everything but the Patriot Act. He demanded that she give up her confederates.

    There was a brief window of time where I might have been able to get back with Gert but I felt bad at what I’d done—even way back then when backstabbing was a way of life for me.

    ALL THESE YEARS later I got a windfall from a grateful client. I took the money and rolled a story for Breland Lewis about padlocks and faulty police work, about false money wrappers and blood that didn’t belong to Clay Thorn, the slaughtered guard.

    And now I was standing in the lower level of the Port Authority at Forty-second Street still feeling like a louse.

    “EXCUSE ME?” a man said.

    I ignored it. People were always asking for handouts at the station. I’d given all that I could for one day.

    Zella, if she knew the truth, would have hated me. Knowing that, I harbored a little hatred for myself—and my fellow man.

    “Sir?” The voice was more assertive than the usual denizen.

    I turned to see that it was a policeman, a white guy maybe five-ten—four and a half inches taller than I.

    “Yes?” I said.

    “Do I know you?”

    “Is that a trick question or are you hitting on me?”

    “ What?”

    I angled myself toward the escalator and walked away before the cop could figure out the ordinance that I’d broken.

    4

    I TOOK THE STAIRS up to the main floor of the transportation hub. The station was alive with activity. Hundreds of travelers were coming in and going out, waiting patiently for their time to leave or talking on cell phones. Some were conversing with their travel companions. Tourists and homeless persons, businessmen and businesswomen, prostitutes and policemen, all there together, proving that the melting pot was not only a reality but sometimes a nightmare.

    It was Monday, late morning, and now that Zella had cut me loose I had things to do.

    My blood son, Dimitri, was moving out of our apartment that day. And I had a fever to assuage.

    At a news kiosk I bought a little packet that contained two aspirin for fifty cents and