Clint Faraday Mysteries Collection B :This Job is Murder Collector's Edition Read Free Page B

one, so get out. Clint
called out that he could return with a police boat or he could talk
to Quiroz now. His choice.
    He said to come on in, but make it damned
brief. He didn’t have time to waste with anything to do with Bocas
del Toro and its cheap tourist-trap atmosphere.
    Clint said he doubted very much that Xavier
Quiroz had time for much of anything to with anyone else.
    “ I’ll say what my close Indigeno
friends said about the last person I talked to about this. If you
don’t like Bocas go the hell back where you came from – or are you
in the same situation? Where he COULDN’T go back there because he
was even more unpopular where he knew people than he was here where
he made it a point not to know anyone.”
    “ I resent your attitude!” Quiroz
snapped.
    “ Oh? Am I supposed to care or simply
say I’m matching your own?”
    “ Say what you have to say, then get
out! I’m much to busy to spend time chatting with
riff-raff!”
    “ I see. A real legend in your own
mind,” Clint countered. “You want it short, so that’s how you get
it.
    “ What’s your connection to the drug
shipment deterred yesterday in the bay?”
    Quiroz sputtered and stared a minute, yelled
that he didn’t have anything to do with it. He wasn’t in any way
ever even suspected of having anything to do with drugs. He deeply
resented the implication.
    “ Better get used to it. You place
yourself under suspicion with your attitude. Do you think we don’t
know you don’t have anything to keep you so, as you claimed, busy
you don’t have time to waste on riff-raff like me?”
    He looked like he would explode. He sputtered
a bit more, then turned around and stormed toward the house,
yelling for Clint to get off his property and to stay off.
    He was up to something, but it wasn’t to do
with drugs. Clint would damned well see that he was investigated
carefully. Clint suspected he was only a deluded idiot who was
being used by someone else as a distraction.
    Which made it interesting. A distraction from
what?
    That would have to wait.
    Larienze tried to be polite, but couldn’t
pull it off. He had a very grating personality. He was another
self-absorbed type who tried to act like one of the boys, but was
condescending in almost everything he said. He didn’t have a clue
to what other people were thinking. He wouldn’t be involved. He
pictured himself as some kind of genius. He wouldn’t fall for any
line from anyone in this backwater. He kept within his regular
group of friends. He was sure he was way ahead of the game.
    Clint looked around at his location and the
house he had built and grinned to himself. He had probably paid at
least three times what it was worth when he was told about the
super-great deal available by one of those “friends.”
    Trouble now was that Clint was out of
suspects. He went out toward the end of the island where it was
pretty isolated to talk with some of his friends there. They didn’t
know much about any of it. They might have seen the dead guy around
somewhere, but how would they know? They didn’t even know what he
looked like. The police had asked them about it, but didn’t have a
picture or even a good description. “Have you ever seen the dead
guy we found?” and not even be able to say what he looked like,
whether he was a black, Indio, gringo, or what? How old was he? 17
or 70?
    Clint had to agree that would be pointless,
but he knew Sergio’s methods. That stuff would be covered later. If
he got anyone to say the wrong thing he would know that one knew
more than he was telling. It could save weeks of investigating to
have someone make that one little slip.
    The eight or nine year old kids saw things
that would open other things up a bit. He did learn that a boat had
come to sit in a little cove when the police boats went in. It
stayed there until the watcher boat at the mouth of the bay went to
search more back inside, then left. That led to the father saying
he saw it, but