A Better Goodbye Read Online Free

carpet. Unemployment was only supposed to last six months, but he got a three-month extension, and then another. After that, the law ordered him off the public tit.
    So here he was, driving toward a score that would help him make his rent—$825 for another month in a dump that was all wrong for the Westside, where everybody was supposed to be a movie star and every car was supposed to be a Mercedes. His pickup was a fourteen-year-old Chevy S-10 with a transmission that slipped and an odometer that had gone around the clock. It said 17,000 miles, but 217,000 would have been closer to the truth. The only thing on the truck he didn’t worry about was the burned-out catalytic converter that used to light up the CHECK ENGINE sign. He had pounded the dash until the light bulb broke.
    There were lots of trucks like Nick’s in Highland Park, a neighborhood of people who knew from necessity how to make do. The fact that they all seemed to be Hispanic barely registered on his consciousness when he got off the Pasadena Freeway at Avenue 43 and rolled north on Figueroa. The city didn’t belong to the gringos anymore, and the proof could be found in one sign after another, from Lazaro Bateria de Serviço to Clínica Médica y Dentista to El Pescador , where he’d had seafood tacos the last time he’d traveled this far east. Up ahead he could see the marquee for the Highland Theatre. Across the street, there was an old-time bowling alley. Coyle had said he’d be waiting in the parking lot behind it.
    Nick turned left onto Avenue 56 and started looking for the entrance to the lot. What he saw first was a guy crouched beside a beat-to-shit Pontiac, using a sander to finish a Mexican patch. The guy had probably told the owner he could fix a dent, then plugged it with Bondo without bothering to pull the dent or grind down the metal. First time the owner hit a bump, the Bondo would fall out. It happened all the time. But people kept getting Mexican patches.
    The parking lot’s entrance wasn’t quite halfway down the block. As Nick hung a right into it, a hooded figure in black caught his eye and he instinctively slowed down. It was a gangbanger who wanted to make sure everybody knew it. He was going up the steps of an old Victorian with a ragged front lawn and drooping window shutters. Even if he’d been in his underwear, his walk would have told the world he was trouble, shoulders hunched, legs wide, stride filled with slow-motion menace. Take that hooded sweatshirt off him and you’d undoubtedly find a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, back, and chest. He probably had them on his legs, too. Nick was getting the picture in his mind when the banger caught him staring. No big whirling gotcha or anything like that, just a subtle turn of the head, the banger peering around the corner of his hood and meeting Nick’s stare with one of his own, his eyes like black ice.
    The challenge was unspoken: What you lookin’ at, motherfucker? Once it had been a staple of Nick’s existence, whether he was asking or answering; now he could barely summon the enthusiasm to do either. It was only habit that made him return the banger’s stare for a beat longer. Then he looked back into the lot and saw Coyle standing beside his beer truck, radiating impatience. Time to move on, but Nick could feel the banger watching him all the way into the parking space next to Coyle’s. When he climbed out of his pickup, he looked back toward the Victorian. The banger was nowhere to be seen.
    â€œSomething the matter?” Coyle said.
    â€œNah, just some guy.”
    â€œSomebody you know?”
    â€œForget it.” Nick nodded at Coyle’s truck. “This what I’m driving?”
    â€œYeah, if my afternoon punch shows up.”
    â€œA smooth operator like you, how could she resist?”
    â€œHey, fuck you,” Coyle said.
    Nick liked yanking the man’s chain. Some days it was