Vengeance Read Free Page B

There are others who carry guns and push through doors and face a knife or a rifle to get the job done. Pride, not money, for these people.
    I carried no gun. If things looked really bad on a job, I turned the papers back in and said I couldn’t find the person I was looking for. That didn’t happen much.
    The money was running out and I needed Beryl Tree’s fifty or a hundred dollars, and there was a good chance I was on my way to another job.
    I knew Sarasota and Bradenton reasonably well now. They were still small towns where a pretty young girl might be remembered. There was also that chance that Adele had used a phone near where she was staying.
    I put Adele’s photo and the phone-booth number in my wallet and changed into a clean white shirt and my only sport jacket, a solid navy blue a little too heavy for Florida. My gray jeans didn’t look too bad with the shirt and jacket. This was a casual town. I went down to the Dairy Queen with my bike.
    It was a few minutes before noon. I was hungry. I bought a large chocolate-covered-cherry Blizzard and a deluxe burger and thanked Dave for sending me a client.
    “Lady needs help,” he said. “Kid running away like that. I see a lot of those kids.”
    Dave was probably around my age, but years in the sun working on boats in the bay had tanned his skin dark. His body was hard and strong, but his face had gone to sun-fried hell.
    “I think I can find her,” I said while he prepared the burger and shake.
    “Kids,” Dave said with a shake of the head.
    When my order came up I showed Adele’s photograph
to Dave. He looked at it for a while and squinted in thought.
    “Yeah, the lady showed it to me. I don’t think I’ve seen her,” he said, “but who knows? She cuts her hair, maybe dyes it, puts on a lot of makeup, orders a Dilly Bar and off she goes. I could have her picture right in front of me and not recognize her. Who knows?”
    “Thanks, Dave,” I said, taking my Blizzard and burger.
    “Who knows?” he repeated. “You know what I mean?”
    • “I know,” I said. “You know anything about a guy named Carl Sebastian?”
    “Know of him,” said Dave. “Big money, property, real estate, all over the Herald-Tribune society pages, always in Marjorie North’s column with his wife, a real looker.”
    “You read the society pages?”
    Dave shrugged.
    “What can I say? I’m a reader. I read the Wheaties box in the morning. Read an article in some magazine this morning about the history of cod fishing. You know the Basques used to be great cod fishermen. Read the label on the jar of Dundee marmalade while I was having breakfast this morning. You know, the white jar?”
    “Yeah.”
    “History of the company right there on the little jar. I read.”
    I ate fast and figured that if I took some shortcuts I could pedal the mile or so to the high-rise, high-priced condominium on a quiet street a few hundred yards from Sarasota Bay and maybe be there on time.
    I made it with about three minutes to spare. A woman with white hair and a white dog looked at me while I chained my bike to a tree. She looked and then turned her attention back to the dog, who watched me
as I walked past and then, assured that he was safe, lifted one leg and aimed for a thin tree with round green fruit that might be oranges.
    I stepped into the blue polished granite-floored lobby, pressed the button next to Carl Sebastian’s name and was buzzed in almost instantly. A quiet elevator with well-polished dark-wood panels brought me up seventeen floors, to the penthouse.
    The door to the only apartment on the floor was wide open. I stepped in and a man’s voice called, “Out here.”
    The living room was big, light but tasteful, with neutral, luxuriously textured furniture as a foil for colorful abstract paintings on the walls. I crossed the room and headed for the man standing at the railing of the balcony beyond. He turned to me.
    “How old would you say I am?”
    I looked at the dark