High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) Read Free Page A

do what we agreed. Remember my crazy ideas.”
    “Hot dogs,” I said.
    “You got it,” he grinned, releasing my shoulder. “I hope I don’t see you again, Mr. Peters.”
    What do you say to that kind of parting line? I turned, brown paper bag in my hand. Marco and Costello took their places at my side and walked me toward the door. Behind us I could hear Lombardi’s voice getting back to business, talking kosher-style bologna and expansion into the West Coast lox box market.
    The rain had stopped. It was still dark, but the black clouds were drifting inland fast.
    “Did you hear what he said?” Marco groaned. “He wants us to stay around here and sell salami.”
    “Salami, beer,” Costello said with a shrug to show it was all the same to him, all the while prodding me into the backseat of the car. Marco got into the driver’s seat, grumbling.
    “Where you want us to take you?” Costello said. His gun remained in his shoulder holster. For him, the whole thing was over. He had only a few more lines to deliver.
    I told them to take me back to the Ocean Palms. This time I gave directions right away, and we were back there in twenty minutes.
    As I got out, still clutching my now grease stained brown bag, Costello delivered his line. “You want to keep breathing this wet air, you do what you were told. We’re gonna keep an eye on you. Right, Marco?”
    Marco neither turned nor responded. His mind was filled with images of Japanese soldiers on banzai charges down La Cienega or cracks suddenly opening in the ground on Sunset. I went into the Ocean Palms and was greeted by the manager, James R. Schwoch, a thin guy with bug eyes, nervous hands and a frequent glance over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. He wore the same brown suit and tie he had worn since I met him.
    “Where have you been?” he demanded.
    “I was kidnapped by the new cold cut king of Santa Monica,” I explained.
    Schwoch sneered.
    “Get up to 212. Someone tried to commit suicide.”
    The someone was an eighteen-year-old girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, whose money had run out with her new boyfriend. She didn’t want any of my pastrami, but I got her to accept twenty bucks, almost a week’s pay, for a bus ticket back home. She thanked me and I told her that no one had ever really killed herself on eighteen aspirin. She said that was all she could afford. She had considered cutting her wrists or jumping out the window, but her imagination was too good. When I got her packed, I used the phone in her room to call Jack Ellis.
    “How’s the leg?” I asked.
    “Cast up to my ass, but I can walk,” he said. “Goddamn thing is driving me nuts. I can’t read, can’t listen to the radio. All I can do is think about how much it itches.”
    “Can you come back to work?”
    “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’d take my mind off the itching. What’s up?”
    I sketched it out and told him it would only take me a few days, but if he couldn’t make it back I’d get someone else to fil in.
    “No,” Ellis said. “Maybe I can get a chance to kick a few sailors with this cast.”
    “That’s unpatriotic. There’s a war going on.”
    “Right,” he said. “Between me and the US armed forces. I’ll get my wife to drive me down. You can take off.”
    I tried to get the twenty bucks back from Schwoch but he wasn’t having any. It had been my idea to give the girl the money, not his. I told him Ellis was coming back, and he liked the idea. I wondered if he would give Ellis the hotel manager’s equivalent of the purple heart, but I didn’t wait around to see. I didn’t know how long my brown paper bag would hold up, and I had some thinking to do.
    My ’34 Buick had recently been painted a straight dark blue by No-neck Arnie, the mechanic on Eleventh. The paint was already bubbling. I had sixty bucks and a problem. The immediate problem was the stain on the seat next to me being made by the Lombardi kosher-style cold cuts. The next problem