The Dying Crapshooter's Blues Read Online Free Page A

his Irish father or Greek mother. The planes of his face, round and oddly cherubic for a grown man, could have come from anywhere. Philadelphia was full of immigrants and had its share of Indians, so he could be anything. The nuns at the orphanage hadn’t provided any clues, instead weaving a tale about how he’d been delivered to the doorstep like a gift from the angels. They weren’t very good liars, and he suspected something bleaker. He never found out the true story. He had left out of that place at thirteen and had been on his own ever since, making his way by work and wits.
    Those same wits had served him well. For the past seven years, he had been by profession a thief of goods that were worth the risk of stealing. That meant jewels, bonds, cash, and like prizes. He stole from rich people, because they had the nicest belongings and were often easy marks; also because he took pleasure in it.

The work was not too hard for a careful fellow, and the rewards could be ample.
    He fenced the goods and used the money to keep him moving from place to place, spending modestly until his funds got low. Then he’d go looking for the next opportunity, some trinkets just waiting for him to pick up and carry off. Thus he cut an erratic trail from Philadelphia to Baltimore to New York, then from Atlanta to New Orleans to Memphis. Every burglary cop on the eastern seaboard knew his name, and yet not one of them could hang much of anything on him.
    It wasn’t a cakewalk, though. Get caught filching from a hobo, no one cared. Steal from a citizen of means and they’d move heaven and earth to find and punish you so you’d never forget.
    Joe had known a slick sport in Philadelphia named Jack Johnson. “Just like the prizefighter,” he’d say. “But I ain’t him.” As if it wasn’t obvious; this Jack Johnson was rosy white. Poor Jack got caught with one hand up the skirt of a certain well-to-do businessman’s wife and the other in a box of her jewelry, and you’d have thought he’d committed capital murder on a child. They took care of Jack, all right. Afterward, they said he hung himself in his cell. Joe claimed the body, because Jack had no one else.
    There were other risks. A second-story man who went by “Red” for his bright orange hair had climbed a trellis of a Baltimore mansion on his way to cracking an upstairs window when some coot came out of nowhere and snapped a derringer in his face. It took away half his jaw, and the fall off the ladder broke his back. After that, Red lost his mind and children screamed in terror at the sight of him. He drank himself into regular stupors and was found frozen to death in an alley in the brutal winter of 1916.
    So there were dangers, which Joe accepted as the risks of his illicit trade. For all the crimes he’d committed, his jail time had been limited to a three-month stretch in Radford. Along the way, he had spent a year as a policeman in Philadelphia and a shorter
stint as a Pinkerton detective in Baltimore. It just turned out that he made a better criminal than he did a cop.
    He did not suffer pangs of conscience over his crimes, and never had qualms about stripping some rich citizen’s home of anything that wasn’t red hot or nailed to the floor. It could be truly said that here the nuns had failed. The one other place he displayed no guilt was with women. He had a long and tangled history of loving and then leaving them behind. If they didn’t get wise and drop him first, that is. Women out for a thrill were dismayed when they realized he wasn’t Robin Hood or Jesse James, just a common burglar. Only one of them understood that at all, and only because she’d done her own share of thieving.
    From behind him, he heard the rustle of bedsheets, then a yawn.
    â€œWell, good morning,” Adeline purred sleepily. Joe glanced into the corner of the mirror and saw her reflection as she threw