Serpents in the Cold Read Free Page A

police get a complaint of something smelling foul, so they come and break down the doors and find him still in bed with her.”
    “You kiddin’ me?”
    “Nope.”
    “No, sleeping with your dead wife, that ain’t right.”
    “Nothing right about it at all.”
    Ski looked down at Dante on the floor. A look of sympathy briefly flickered in his gray face, hard with thickly knit scars, but then a scowl of disgust pulled at his mouth and he grunted loudly, drew back his leg, and brought another heavy boot to Dante’s chest.

4
    _________________________
    CAL PULLED HIS battered Chevy Fleetline into a plowed space opposite Epstein’s Drug and sat for a moment watching the bundled shapes of pedestrians passing along the sidewalk. The radio was tuned to the news and the news reporter was asking Richard Nixon, congressman and investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, about his thoughts on the upcoming trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage and on charges that they passed information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
    Cal turned off the engine and glanced at himself in the rearview. His face, still youthful and quick to flush, was lined around startling blue eyes. Black hair shining as if oiled, close back and sides, high and flat on top. He looked better than he felt, and smiled without humor. A wind was howling down the avenue and it whistled in the wheel wells, shook the car, so that Cal had to put his shoulder into the door to open it as he climbed out. His joints ached and the tendons in his legs seemed to be talking to one another, sending sharp pains through him with each step, and he wished he’d taken another slug of whiskey.
    He looked down the crooked alleyways stretching toward the cobblestone and crowded tenements of the West End, where tavern signs glowed in bright red and green neon, and farther, where vagrants shifted beneath makeshift shelters—cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and ragged, hole-worn army blankets they’d thawed over subway grates from which tendrils of steam twined. The sun was somewhere above the rooftops, but he’d be damned if he knew where.
    He hadn’t been to the office in over a week. Their last customer looking for bonded security watchmen had been G. J. Fergusson on Washington Street. Cal had done the walk-through of the six-floor garment factory himself: sixty thousand square feet of overheated, poorly vented space that looked out on the elevated tracks where trolley cars rumbled, groaned, and squealed from dawn to night and where, at rows upon rows of ancient sewing machines, hundreds of Chinese women labored away.
    The building was a footsore if ever he’d seen one, but an easy job for a night watchman. Three key stations on each floor; you could pass the night doing whatever the hell you liked as long as you kept an ear out for the property owners making an impromptu drop-by. All property owners did it now and again to check in on their investments, to make sure the guards were where they were supposed to be, that the number of guards they’d requested and paid for were actually on the premises. He liked to hire retired cops, ex-soldiers, and, now and again, cons who he knew had been sent down for misdemeanors, judge bias, or crooked police work and who he knew could, at times, provide him with valuable information the others could not. But the Fergusson Company was out of business now, and others like the Anvil Building had been gutted after the city designated it for the wrecking ball and urban renewal. Pilgrim Security had had contracts with Sears in the Fenway, Woolworth’s, Gillette, Necco, the Custom House Tower, the Copley Hotel, and the Eliot, but those days were gone, and now he could count their clients on the fingers of one hand: a tool and die factory on Old Colony Ave in Southie, three package stores in Mattapan, and a bank in Uphams Corner by the Strand Theatre, a couple of warehouses down on Atlantic Ave