Shadow of a Tiger Read Free Page A

his parents—they had no power, so no rights. Parents who had never escaped the same streets—uneducated, unskilled, without hope of a human joy beyond the bottle, the needle, the bookie, the street woman, and some joyless job with nowhere to go except down. No today, no tomorrow, beyond what they could steal, for a moment, from each other’s flesh.
    He had no weapon. “Okay, Charlie. What’s up?”
    He showed no resentment to being searched. Abstract anger and pride was a luxury street kids don’t have. Kids put down and ignored forever because they were young, and poor, and powerless. Lost to disease and drugs, but lost mostly to defeat. There are few fair ways out of the defeat of the slums, so they learn early to lie, cheat, steal, mug and scheme every minute. An angle, a scheme of profit, that is what they live with, and that was what was on Charlie Burgos’s mind.
    â€œYou on a job, Fortune? Stake out? Buck an hour, I’ll help, okay?”
    â€œWhat’s your business with Claude Marais, Charlie?”
    â€œNothin’. It’s hot, take a break. I’ll spell you.”
    â€œNever mind, Charlie.”
    â€œI’ll go for a beer. Buck for goin’ to the store.”
    I went back to my chair behind the rubber plant. The third beer was hot, damn! At the elevator, Charlie Burgos was gone. The wife, Li Marais, had said others might be involved, but Charlie wasn’t armed, and if he had anything on his mind he wasn’t going to tell me without more pressure.
    I got my answer anyway. At ten-forty, my last beer gone, Charlie Burgos came out of the elevator—with Danielle Marais. The ripe pawn-shop owner’s daughter held the tall, skinny street kid’s arm. In his dark-eyed animal way, Charlie Burgos was handsome enough. He gave me a wink as they passed—“Look what I’m going to get, mister. I howl tonight!” the wink said. It’s the only relation to a woman a street kid knows.
    He came into the lobby at 11:02 P.M. Taller than I had expected, the limp barely noticeable, but the scars clear on his left cheek.
    He walked straight through the lobby to the desk, seemed to look at nothing and no one. Yet he saw everything and everyone. He seemed to look straight ahead, intent on where he was going, yet I saw his eyes on me. German eyes under thin blond hair—pale blue, smooth, self-contained.
    Forty-plus, I guessed, but the stride of an athlete in shape. Not furtive, but calling no attention, either. Polite and reserved in a brown tropical suit he wasn’t quite at home in. He wore the suit casually, but somehow seemed restricted by it. He belonged in safari clothes in some jungle, or running guns in a fast boat. The kind of man who would sell both sides if he could, and would be wanted in many countries for a little official talk. A man who would live high, hard and well, until he ended in front of a firing squad in some remote capital, or, worse, slowly ran out of countries where he could go, people he could live off.
    The clerk gave me the high sign, but I was already on my way to the elevator. When he came, I was in his path. I could see the gun under his right arm. He stopped. Surprised to see me in his path, but not scared.
    â€œYou’re looking for Claude Marais?” I said.
    He thought about it. “Yes, I visit Claude.”
    â€œFor what reason?”
    He thought about me. He considered my one arm. I sounded tough, and he had no way of knowing if I was or wasn’t.
    â€œIt is your affair?”
    â€œIt is now,” I said, and flashed an old private guard badge.
    His blond eyebrows went up an inch. He looked at my arm.
    â€œSpecial detective,” I said, before he could ask about a cop with one arm. “You’re an alien, you have a permit for that gun you’re carrying?”
    His left hand moved to his thin blond hair, combed through. A mannerism. I imagined him doing that when deciding if