“Do you know Graves did the Jalisco job for sure?” the Stick asked Dutch.
“Absolutely. That was the Mufalatta Kid on the horn,” Dutch said. “Seems we did something right for
a change. The Kid was shagging Graves and watched the whole thing happen.”
He gathered up our checks. “I?ll let the city pay for these,” he said. “Let?s go have a talk with the
Kid.”
“Where is he?” asked the Stick.
“Baby-sitting on Longnose Graves? doorstep,” Dutch said, and his Kraut face broadened into the
biggest smile I had seen since I got to Doomstown.
65
LONGNOSE GRAVES
The usual twenty-minute drive across Dunetown to Back O?Town took the Stick less than fifteen. He
turned off the siren six or seven blocks from the scene and flew dead-stick the rest of the way in.
Dutch smoked two cigarettes, back to back, without taking them out of his mouth once they were lit.
He didn?t say anything, just sat stiff-legged, puffing.
“Go a block past the club and pull in behind the drugstore across the street,” Dutch told Stick as we
neared the end of the journey. “Kid doesn?t want we should turn him up to Graves? bunch.”
“Gotcha,” Stick said. He wheeled in behind the drugstore, stopped, braked, turned the car off, and was
outside on his feet before I could pull mine out of the floorboards. All Dutch said was “Phew. He
never drove like that with me before.”
“He never drove any other way with me,” I said. “You?re damn lucky.”
The drugstore was an antique, like the ones I remember from childhood, like Bucky?s was, in
downtown Dunetown, before it became Doomstown. It had a marble fountain top and wire-rung
chairs and smelled of maraschino cherries and chocolate instead of vitamin pills and hair spray. A
gray-haired black man behind the counter sized us up and nodded toward the Kid, who was sitting
back from the front window, sipping something pink that looked medicinal. He was watching a twostory row house, which stood alone in the middle of the block. A vertical neon sign over the front
door of the place said that it was the Saint Andrew?s African Baptist Church.
“I didn?t know he was the Reverend Graves,” I said.
“Used to be the church,” Mufalatta said. “When they moved to their new place, the sign ran the wrong
way, so Nose bought it. He calls the place the Church.”
“Doesn?t that upset the Saint Andrew?s African Baptist congregation?” I asked.
“Naw, he?s head of the choir,” the Kid said, and left it at that.
“Who?s around?” the Stick asked.
“Two carloads of „em just went inside,” Mufalatta said. “Man, are they feelin? high. You never saw
