TURTLE DOVE (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 7) (17 page)

“Business picking up?”

“I’m being optimistic.”

Reaching behind the register, Roscoe pulled out a beat-up marble notebook of the type your mother bought for your first day of school. He laid it on the bar, flipped some pages, picked up a pencil and crossed something out. He took $420 from the pile and put it in the cash drawer. At the same time he reached down into a cooler, lifted out a bottle of Sam Adams Light, twisted off the cap with one hand and slid it down to me. Ex-handball champs don’t lack for manual dexterity. He put the notebook away. I knew that dozens, maybe hundreds, of similar notebooks had served the same purpose since the Red Lantern, one of the oldest taverns in the city, opened its doors back when the Kings Rifles garrisoned Staten Island.

Roscoe put some bar nuts in front of me and said, “Glass? Lunch?”

“No, and yes,” I said through a mouthful of nuts. “Two eggplant heroes to go.”

I took a long draw on my beer. It was ice cold. Not too many people drank Sam Adams in the Red, let alone Sam Adams Light, but Roscoe kept in a stash for me. It was the only light beer I’d ever had that didn’t taste light.  

I said, “Is it true that the Algonquins ran a tab in here?”

“Never. Bastards stiffed us.”

“Yeah,” one of the regulars at the bar snorted, “and this place hasn’t bought back a drink since.”

As I sipped my beer, I turned to scan the opposite wall, which was covered floor to ceiling with tally sheets for the 1,400 people in the football pool. The alphabetically-listed entrants were a democratic cross section of the populace, including just about every elected and appointed official, several judges, a smattering of assistant district attorneys, college professors, scores of cops and half the hoods in the borough. The sheets were taken down after the Monday night games and updated by the three elderly Italian ladies who also ran the kitchen. No one questioned their cooking or their accuracy. 

I felt a blast of chilly air. The bar’s cheerful hubbub eased a bit and one of the other bartenders said “shit” under his breath. I turned as Arman Rahm and a fire hydrant entered the bar. The fire hydrant’s name was Maks Kalugin and had more bullet holes in him than Emperor Maximilian.

If you would like to read all of CAPRIATI’S BLOOD, you can use this link:

CAPRIATI’S BLOOD

Again, we hope you will try all the author’s books available on
Amazon
. He can be contacted at
[email protected]
and welcomes your comments.

ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES

JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS

COLE SUDDEN CIA THRILLERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer
The New York Times
, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the
Times
, De Maria became an Executive Director at
Forbes.
Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the
Naples Sun Times
, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where, when he’s not killing people in his novels, he writes features, reviews and a column:

THE WRITE STUFF (MY BLOG)

***

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