How I Spent My Summer Vacation Read Online Free Page B

skull.
    “Don’t make any rash decisions. Let’s talk this through.” Tommy interrupted his pleas to wave at a beefy bald man. The man’s companion, a creature with straight black hair and a red dress laminated to her flesh, flicked a glance our way. The man did not. “I was just telling Big Julius there about you, Lala,” Tommy said.
    “That’s Big Julius? Isn’t he…oh, my, I’ve heard about him. The garbage business, isn’t it?” She looked at me and hissed, “See what I mean? Big Julius! And what did you tell Big Julius about me?” she asked in her normal voice.
    “That I was crazy about you, of course.” He elbowed me. “I’m crazy about this lady,” he said. Then he looked back at his love object. “Big Julius is a nice man, despite his reputation.”
    “It’s been a treat, but I have to run now,” I said.
    “She’s leaving you stranded, Lala,” Tommy said. “All mine again. That means you’re not running off with this Sherwin person. I’ll wine and dine you and we will ride off into the sunset together at the back of the bus. Look, over there. It’s McDog. The one whose business partner blew himself up, or so the official story goes. And over there…”
    Watching them was mildly fascinating, a game of ego Ping-Pong. Tommy served hyped inside dope on mobsters he pretended to have known, and Lala returned the serve with ever-escalating tales of the imaginary Sherwin’s generosity and lust.
    “They all love me,” Tommy said with some desperation. “Every single one of them. They tell me everything. They call me the Safe Deposit, get it? I keep their secrets. See him?” he said of a respectable gray-haired business type in conversation with the bartender. “He has three days left to pay off his loan or die. He’s not lucky at the tables the way I am.”
    “You didn’t seem so lucky today,” Lala said.
    “Not yet, maybe,” Tommy answered. “But I was out of the game for a while, after all.”
    “He was hit by a roulette ball that jumped,” Lala explained.
    Tommy rubbed the back of his hand. I could see a dark bruise on the leathery skin. “My luck’s changing,” he said. “I feel it in my bones—long as you’re with me, Lala.”
    “But Sherwin—”
    “See her?” Tommy pointed at a woman with yellow-white big hair. “Sinatra used to be very fond of her. You catch my drift? Very. But she is reputed to have killed her husband and eaten the corpse so there was no evidence.”
    “Sherwin says every woman deserves a—”
    “See him?” Tommy said of a redhead who had just entered the cocktail lounge. “Supposedly an antique dealer, but really Jersey’s number one hit man.”
    Lala shuddered with delight.
    “Aren’t drinks free in the casinos?” I asked. “Why are all these men coming into the bar?”
    “A change of scene,” Tommy said.
    “A little socializing,” Lala added. “A little schmoozing.”
    “A little business,” Tommy said, sotto voce.
    I thought about the vacation plans I had abandoned. At this point, cleaning closets sounded like keen fun.
    “I broke her grandfather’s heart when I turned him down,” Lala said.
    “Turned him down for what?” Tommy asked.
    Closets sounded irresistible.
    “Turned him down for marriage ,” Lala said. “Despite his money.”
    Tommy is not one of my responsibilities, I told myself. I do not have to warn him. If he’d reached this age without realizing when a scam was being pulled on him—and a shaggy, preposterous, clichéd scam at that—then he deserved Lala.
    Tommy was nearly hyperventilating. “You see that woman? A Mafia princess raised in total seclusion, they were so afraid somebody would take her hostage, but she and Ralph the Scar…”
    I obediently swiveled once again. It seemed the polite thing to do. And I did a double take. The Mafia princess was none other than Sasha, who now stood resplendently at the bar in peacock silk and high-button boots. Gee, and I’d always thought that her father