Dutch
UNCLE
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-012)
Miami Beach, 1996
Strolling Ocean Drive on his third day of parole, Harry Healy ran into Leo, whose last name he didn’t learn the weekend they threw Leo into his cell, at a sidewalk cafe sipping espresso.
Harry started out just Drunk and Disorderly, but when he landed a left on the chin of arresting officer Kenneth Simms, a pack of O’Learys fell on him and dealt him the beating of his life. They knocked out two teeth and fractured the fourth rib on his left side, and one cop bent his arm so sharply behind his back it separated from his shoulder, still popping out from time to time so that Harry had to realign it himself. That didn’t bother him too much, and neither did the rib after the first eight weeks or so, but he was still pissed about the teeth, holes where an incisor and a bicuspid used to be, making him look exactly like the ex-con he now was.
Leo was Drunk and Disorderly too, and he spent the weekend getting orderly while his father’s attorneys tracked down the connections who got him undone.
Leo was twenty-five or thirty. He had a wiry build that was going soft, a superstar jock who got hurt and had his shot at baseball glory ruined. To hear him tell it, anyway. Leo knew a lot of baseball, good memory for stats, and kept Harry entertained talking about great stars Harry had never heard of. He was an okay guy to spend a weekend in jail with.
Harry squinted into the sun. He asked Leo for a Marlboro.
Leo said, “Why don’t you sit down?”
“Because I don’t have any money I wanna spend here, and I hate those faggy little cups of coffee, and I ain’t all that fond of broiling on the concrete, either.”
Leo looked at him from behind his sunglasses and his mouth got tight. He waved his Marlboro and shrugged one shoulder. He said, “Hang out, man.”
A brunette sashayed past the table. She was carrying a portfolio and switching her hips, wearing patterned hose over a g-string. Or, possibly, no panties at all. Peering at life through lenses tinted brown.
In the sun-bleached afternoon, Harry missed his shades, the spanking new Ray Bans that were among his personal effects when he went inside, but weren’t when they let him go.
Harry made his hand into a visor. He followed the brunette with his eyes. “She’s probably a model,” he said.
“You think so? What tipped you off?”
“Look at how tall she is and look at her clothes. And her face, well, you can’t see it now, but she was beautiful.”
“C’mon, Flash, of course she’s a model. They’re all models down here. It’s the number one industry in this town. I’m thinking of taking a shot at it myself, soon as I get my book together.”
Leo was over six feet tall. He had smooth skin and a pointy chin and a nose that had never been broken, and Harry supposed he was good looking, but no more so than a dozen other guys he’d seen that afternoon alone. Besides, the modeling racket meant getting up when the sun was right and wearing make-up and having somebody blow air at you so your hair went flopping in a certain direction. Not a job for a man, he thought, but he didn’t say anything.
“Harry, what’re you doing?”
“Right now? I’m trying to get back to New York.”
“Is that right,” Leo said. “How much money you got?”
“I don’t know, I got a few bucks.” He knew the amount to the penny, $12.97, but there was no reason Leo had to know it, too.
