Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read Online Free Page A

Saturday afternoon,” I said.
    “Taking it on the road?” asked Fred with a grin. “Get away. Over to Fort Lauderdale, down to Key West?”
    “Orlando,” I said.
    Alan shook his head as if I had given him the wrong answer.
    “Got a good road car,” said Fred. “Olds Cutlass Sierra, ’ninety-five. Special rate, two hundred. You get a full tank of gas.”
    “Something newer,” I said.
    “The man’s talking serious business here, Alan,” Fred said, moving away from the desk. Alan was still leaning against it.
    “The Nissan,” Alan said.
    Fred clapped his hands and said, “The Nissan,” as if his partner had just discovered a new moon around Jupiter. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
    Fred told me it was a ’ninety-eight with mileage too good to be real.
    “One hundred and forty-five,” Alan said.
    Fred looked sadly at me and shrugged a what-can-I-do-with him shrug.
    “One hundred,” I said.
    Fred looked at Alan hopefully.
    “One-twenty-five,” Alan said. “You return it full of gas.”
    “Deal,” I said. “Bill it to him.”
    I handed Fred Wilkens’s card. He passed it to Alan, who said, “Moving up in the world, Fonesca.”
    “We’ll need a credit card,” Fred said apologetically.
    “Call him,” I said. “He’ll give you one.”
    “Not our policy,” said Alan.
    “Alan, this is Lew Fonesca, a regular client,” Fred pleaded. “He’s good for it. We know where to find him.”
    Alan folded his arms across his chest. I tried not to look at my watch.
    “All right,” he finally said.
    “Great,” said Fred. “Let’s fill out the papers.”
    “We’ve got some coffee,” Alan said, while his partner moved out of earshot to the rear of the small store, which had once been a gas station.
    “How is he?” I asked softly.
    Fred had had a heart attack the year before. It ranged, according to Alan, somewhere between medium and not too good. In the time Fred had been gone, Alan had been a different person. He had played Fred’s good-guy role, holding the job open for him when he returned a month after his attack and bypass surgery.
    “Doing good,” said Alan. “I watch what he eats when he’s here. His wife, Dotty, watches him at home. He takes his pills. Likes to stay busy. Business has been slow. When Fred retires, I’m selling out. The land is worth more than we bring in in four years. Fred will have a cushion and I can move back to Dayton.”
    Fred came hurrying back with the papers and the car keys. I signed and initialed in all the right places.
    “Rides like a dream,” Fred said, a hand on my shoulder. “A dream.”
    Car rides in my dreams were not something I thought of as selling points. My dreams were usually bumpy, lost, and dark with basements, which don’t exist in Florida, and ghosts who wouldn’t accept that they were ghosts.
    I was thinking about my wife. There was a reason. I was about to deal with it.

2
    TWENTY-TWO MINUTES LATER, I parked in an open space right in front of Sarasota News & Books on Main Street. I went in, picked up two coffees and two chocolate croissants, and walked the short block to Gulfstream Avenue.
    Traffic whooshed both ways down Tamiami Trail in front of me, and beyond the traffic I could see the narrow Bayfront Park with little anchored pleasure and recreational fishing boats gently bobbing in the water.
    Two homeless men made their home in the park across the street. One was an alcoholic, red-faced man with a battered cowboy hat and a guitar. He slept under a bench regardless of the weather and spent the hour or so every night that he wasn’t too drunk playing and singing sad country-and-western songs on Palm Avenue or Main Street with his hat on the sidewalk accumulating coins and an occasional dollar bill until a police car pulled up and a cop leaned out. The cowboy didn’t have to be told to amble on. He would nod to the policeman and move on. I had talked to the singing cowboy a few times because he had a look in his eyes I