Read Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) for Free Online Page B

Why did you leap the chasm of thought from being angry with me and identifying with seagulls to Adele and Lonsberg?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Next time,” she said, rising. “Think about it. Come with an answer.”
    “I’ll try.”
    “It’s an assignment,” she said. “Like college. You fail to answer, you get an F and I make you do it again.”
    I fished out two tens, Marvin Uliaks’s tens, and handed them to her.
    “You should read
Fool’s Love,”
she said as I moved toward the door.
    “I did.”
    “When?”
    “A long time ago,” I said.
    “You read it as a boy. Read it as a man. You think it’s hot in here?”
    “Maybe, a little.”
    “Monday?”
    “Monday, same time?”
    “Yes,” she said, moving to the thermostat.
    In the small reception office, a woman—slim, long blond hair, well dressed, eyes down and covered with thick sunglasses—looked down. I walked past her and out into the sunshine.

3
    I STOPPED AT BRANTS Book Shop on Brown Street, a short street with Bee Ridge on the north end and the shopping mall with Barnes & Noble on the south. Brant’s is a one-story used-book institution that looks as if a good wind would blow off the roof or an NFL lineman would step through the creaking wooden floor. But there wasn’t much you couldn’t find there.
    I picked up a copy of
Fool’s Love
for a dollar and a quarter and walked over to Rico’s, great prices, good food, terrific calamari, nearly perfect lasagna, just like my mother didn’t make. I had a Gorgonzola sandwich on a roll with a diet Coke and watched a court show on the big-screen television. A stern-looking wizened woman in a black robe was calling a stupidly grinning teenager a liar. He seemed like a liar to me too. She ruled against him. I don’t know what he did, kicked a dog, stole a CD player. The girl he had to pay a hundred thirty-four dollars to looked about Adele’s age—thin, dark, pretty, a ring through her eyebrow. I figured she had done some lying too before I startedwatching. Almost everybody lies. Everybody lies. Everybody dies.
    “I read that,” said the young woman who waited on me, pointing at
Fool’s Love
. She was dark, looked a little like my cousin’s daughter Angela, and smiled.
    I didn’t know her name but I had seen her in Rico’s before. At this hour of the afternoon, business was slow. I was the only customer.
    “You like it?” she asked, nodding at the book.
    “Read it a long time ago,” I said. “I’m thinking of reading it again. You like it?”
    “Great book,” she said. “I don’t read books, and that one, they made us read that one in school, Mr. Gliddings at Riverview. You know Pee Wee Herman went to River-view?”
    “I heard,” I said.
    “Only book they made me read that I liked, you know?”
    “Must be good. You know he lives here?”
    “Who?”
    “Conrad Lonsberg, the guy who wrote the book,” I said.
    She stood up straight and her smile broadened.
    “He’d have to be a couple hundred years old,” she said.
    “No, it’s true. He’s alive. He’s here.”
    “I believe you,” she said. “That’s interesting. Want another diet Coke?”
    I declined, paid my bill, left her a twenty-percent tip, and got back in the white Cutlass. The drive down Tamiami Trail to Blackburn Point Road took me less than fifteen minutes. I turned right on Blackburn Point, crossed the small bridge over Little Sarasota Bay, turned right again, and kept going on Casey Key Road past houses great and small, many hidden by trees and bushes.
    Flo’s directions had been perfect. The walled-in fortress of Conrad Lonsberg was down a paved culde-sac. There was a gate. I parked just past it and walked back. There was no name on the door, not even an address, but there was a bell semihidden in the stone wall on my left. I pushed it, heard nothing, and waited. Nothing. I pushed it again. Nothing. Then I saw the camera. It was on the right at thetop of the wall, its lens pointing straight down at me,