by Thomson, Lh
Quinn Checks In
By L.H. Thomson
Amazon Kindle Edition
This edition uses U.S spellings of common words.
Copyright 2012 J.I. Loome. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This book may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the Kindle Store and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Also by LH Thomson:
Quinn Gets His Kicks
Quinn Goes West
Quinn and the Vanishing Bride
Quinn Gets the Blues
Quinn & The Dead Man’s Daughter
Buried in Benidorm
Vendetta in Valencia
Suicide in Salobrena
Revenge in Ronda
Maximum Max: The first three Max Castillo Stories
Terrible People Doing Terrible Things
The Antique Hunters
The Process Server
The Rough Side
Chapter One
In art, the arc of a curve can be a beautiful and important thing. In Art Deco, for example, the consistency of its curves gives each design a sense of cleanliness and function, of uniformity.
When I was an art forger, a perfect curve was one of my best friends.
So believe me when I say that the arc of the pool cue slicing through the air towards my head was a thing of beauty, a mighty cut that, in that split second, with Boston’s classic rocker “Smoking” cranking on the jukebox in the corner, made me wonder why the giant biker swinging it had opted for a life of vice and violence, instead of baseball.
My name is Liam Quinn, and I’ve been a fighter most of my life. One of the blessings of two decades of boxing has been a sort of athletic sixth sense. Some pros call it being “in the zone”, that split second where your adrenalin peaks, your instincts take over, and everything just seems to slow…
Right.
Down.
I ducked, dropping between the two tree-trunk arms around my chest, and the pool cue continued its arc. If he’d swung with a tighter reach, instead of stepping into it so directly, he’d have come up short and gone over my head while still missing his enormous bald-and-goateed companion.
But then it wouldn’t have been perfect.
Instead, the cue smashed into his buddy’s temple with a hollow clack, like a brick dropped on hard cement.
The big one behind me went down in a pile of sleeveless denim and biker boots. The immediate shock of the mistake froze his friend in front of me for a moment, a look of surprise under his greasy red Viking hair and poor facial grooming.
I was already crouched, so it made sense to throw the uppercut. It’s never been my strongest punch – I’m more a stick-and-move guy, despite being close to a heavyweight, so I favor my hook. But I had a substantial tactical advantage, and I came up hard, nailing him with my right hand pretty much flush on the button, that helpful cluster of nerves at the end of the chin.
His knees buckled, his eyes rolled backwards, and he crumpled like a pup tent in heavy wind, the pool cue clattering to the ground and rolling away.
It hadn’t taken more than about fifteen seconds for the whole fight, including the time it had taken me to tap the cue swinger on the shoulder. But everyone in the dingy pool hall had stopped to stare, and the only sound was the blaring tune. Light streamed into the room from the wall of windows overlooking the strip mall’s parking lot, cutting through the haze of illegal smoke and the frozen action on row after row of green-felt tables.
It was the kind of place where you could smell the urinals ten feet before the bathroom door and half the customers even sooner. I wondered how many of less-than-reputable locals knew the bikers.
But it didn’t seem too likely; neither was supposed to be on the north side. The big guy swinging the cue was Abel Larsson. He and his bear-hugging buddy were Devil Deacons, bikers from the south side, and they were avoiding their home turf because Abel was legally dead … at least according to the state of Pennsylvania.
My employer – the Philadelphia Mutual Insurance Co. – was not convinced, and before paying out to the charmingly gold-toothed Mrs. Larsson, my boss had sent me to look into it. I’d started at the trailer park where most of them hung out. The good citizens had informed me that Abel was persona non grata before his passing.
“If he wasn’t fuckin’ dead, he’d be fuckin’ dead for makin’ us think he was fuckin’ dead,” was the way he’d put it. Of course, Larsson’s less-than-professional death certificate couldn’t have fooled Stevie Wonder.
“Hey!” The pockmarked, ratty-looking guy behind the pockmarked, ratty-looking bar was pissed.
“What?”
“This ain’t that kind of place.”
I looked around at the collected decades of jailhouse experience: big, small, hairy, hairless, covered in almost as many scars as tats, more denim and leather than a cow in a Levis factory.
“Seriously? That’s your objection?”
There was a low murmur of laughter around the room and most people went back to their games.
A fat guy sitting at the end of the bar interrupted, getting the barman’s attention. “Hey Walt, how come youse almonds taste like bacon?”
“What? Shuddup, will ya, I’m talking to this guy.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m just saying.”
“Saying what?”
“That almonds shouldn’t taste like bacon. That’s just weird, man.”
The barman shook his head. “They’re smoked, ya idjit.” Then he turned back to me.
I said, “So?”
“Yeah, well, maybe it is that kind of joint. But take it outside. I already get enough of that crap and I got a license to worry about.”
I looked down at the two prone men. “You want to carry them out for me?”
“Very funny.”
“I try.”
He plopped a sawed-off shotgun onto the bar. “Still funny?”
“Not so much.”
“Smart. Somebody owes me fifteen-fifty for the pool and twelve bucks for the pitcher of beer.”
I pulled out my smartphone and took pictures of the two prone men as they snoozed by the pool table then went over to the bar and threw down two twenties. “Keep the change and sorry for the trouble.”
“You stay that generous, you can come back and punch out guys whenever.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, before heading down the stairs – with a couple of glances back over my shoulder, for safety’s sake – and out the front door, into the afternoon sun and the crowded little parking lot.
I didn’t mind picking up the tab. As a freelance insurance investigator, I’d get a 2.5% recovery fee, and Larsson’s policy had been worth a hundred grand. That was a twenty-five-hundred dollar pay day, my best single paycheck in a year on the job. My boss, the ever-cheerless Ramon Garcia de Soria, would be as close as he got to happy. Every time I saved the company money, it made it a little easier for him to justify his little experiment in hiring me to the rest of middle management.
My gold ‘81 Firebird – an old project of my father’s, complete with original motor and equally original rust primer patches – was next to a couple of Harleys. I moment
arily pondered kicking them over. But I couldn’t be sure they belonged to my two guys; and besides, they had enough problems ahead of them: aside from the fraud charges and the inevitable civil suit from PMI, they’d have to explain to the Devil Deacons why they’d skipped out on their brethren.
You hang around bad people, bad things happen. This is something I’ve learned from way too much personal experience.
I got in and fired up the big motor, listening to it rattle like a shelf full of milk jugs.
The sun cut warmly through the windshield. One day, the bearings were going to give out and the whole damn block was going to drop out the bottom, and I could finally tell my father her day was done. But on this occasion, after a few more frightening rattles and me holding the ignition key in the start position for a few seconds, it roared into … Ok, “roared” is generous … it kicked to life. I grabbed my aviators from under the radio and slipped them on to cut the glare, before pulling the car out onto the quiet city street, shocks giving a little too much as she rode over the ridge of asphalt at the exit.
I love driving through the city in the day, feeling the energy of it, the vibrancy. Plus, concentrating on traffic takes my mind off other garbage.
As I said earlier, I used to be a forger. My love of art and creativity had taken me down a strange road. I never figured I had the talent to make it myself in the art world – or the patience to work with people in the art community, who can be as emotionally fragile and unstable as any creative type. But I’d spent years learning to paint and draw in a variety of styles, and when you get out of college, you need to make a buck more than just about anything. My father, a tough, old-school policeman, had helped pay for my education, through the nose. So I felt almost obliged to make something of my training, pay the old man back somehow.
Forgery wouldn’t have been his first choice… but it wouldn’t have been mine, either.
I was great at it. It had started innocently enough, selling a few reproductions of famous paintings, honest about the fact that they weren’t the real thing. The crime part – hanging out with criminals, working for criminals, selling forgeries to the pretentious and distracted – was where things went south. It’s funny how you get caught up: one day you’re worrying about paying bills, about whether you’ll be able to keep that first apartment or have to move back in with Ma and Pa. The next, some guy is telling you how much talent you have and slipping you an envelope with ten grand in it. Then you’re hanging around rich folks, big parties, making a name in the world as a “legitimate businessman”, wearing nice suits and dating pretty, vacuous sleeve holders.
And then it all comes crashing down, and you have to start thinking about the real price.
I’d gotten pinched at age twenty-seven, while running a “gallery” as a front for moving copies of Asian masters. Then I’d done three-and-a-half years in the pen, much to the embarrassment of my family and everyone I knew.
Ah, hell. I deserved it. They knew it, I knew it, and everybody knew it.
When I was released, a condition of my parole was that I wasn’t allowed to pick up a brush until I’d been out for a year and found a suitably less-tempting occupation. Ramon, whose brother had done time and had worked in a prison placement program, took pity on my lousy job prospects. He figured an ex-boxer with an art history degree, some experience grifting and two cops in his immediate family would make a good investigator.
He’d pulled a bunch of strings to get me a license, so I owed him. And by keeping me as a freelancer – a condition of my remaining on the straight-and-narrow – he didn’t have to pay me a salary, just the commission. So I worked cheap.
There was only so much art fraud or theft to investigate, of course, and I’d had to adapt to the likes of Larsson and company.
Traffic was light on the northwest side of town, and I turned on 97.5, The Fanatic, to get a score in the Phillies game, an early start against Florida. They were arguing about whether pro athletes earn their ridiculous contracts, with the debate focussing on owners making even more.
The inevitable point about teams cooking the books to show losses ensued, and after five minutes, no one had bothered to suggest maybe the profits or revenue base were too high, and season ticket holders were the ones being hosed. I wasn’t any closer to knowing how the boys had done, so I switched over to the talk station and let the voices drift into the background as I maneuvered through the congestion.
As grimy as that pool hall had been most of the cases I handled weren’t even that interesting – staking out a compensation cheat, or getting video of a so-called whiplash victim who could still swing a golf club, maybe checking into some HMO double-billing.
But when a forgery or art theft came up, they had the right guy on staff.
I drove quickly and nimbly, patient with slowdowns after years of dealing with Philly’s one-way streets, the city’s odd mix of centuries of history blending with a modern glass-and-steel feel.
The pay for the Larsson case was good, but the work wasn’t exactly what you’d call fulfilling. Abel had left a trail so obvious it might as well have been sprayed in fluorescent paint; and, like most goons, his idea of laying low until he got his settlement didn’t extend to the common sense of getting out of town for a while, or even not spending money he hadn’t yet been given, which is why he was risking a roll on the green felt. He was no Einstein.
There were plenty of spots in the parking lot of the company’s downtown offices and I pulled in between a green Volkswagen and a Honda street bike. The investigative division was on an anonymous floor of a twenty-three-story tinted glass building. Past the front door was a reception desk and beyond that, a series of cubicles.
Ramon was standing by Mike McPhee’s, the first in the room, trying to convince Mike to add a case to his backlog.
The firm’s ten investigators all had files of five or six investigations at any one time, as PMI is one of the largest insurers in the state. But at fifty-three, Mike was the office veteran, an overweight, jowly ex-cop with a silver-grey crew-cut. His backlog was particularly heavy, perhaps twice the norm, and in the world of the supposedly paperless office, his Formica cubicle was generally covered in the stuff, the piles obscuring the notes and pictures he’d pinned to its back wall
Ramon looked tired, leaning one arm on Mike’s desk, his pale yellow tie pulled down and collar undone, sleeves rolled up, grey suit vest hanging open, no jacket.
“Come on Mike. This is right up your alley. You love soccer, right?”
“I love the New York Red Bulls. The Red Bulls. Not the fucking Union. Worst part about living in this damn city.”
“You might get season tickets out of it.”
“So? What, to go to three Red Bulls games a year I got to do a stakeout with the Sons of Ben? Forget it. I’d rather have a root canal. Send junior there.” He gestured vaguely in my direction.
I kind of hoped Ramon would take him up on it. The Union’s fan club were one heck of a party, before and after kickoff.
No such luck.
“I got an art case for Quinn. Besides, you should be honored to watch a real club play instead of those over-hyped fools from Jersey.”
“So he gets the money case, I get the shaft? Where does the part where I’m the senior guy come into play?”
“Mikey, it’s just a booze theft, a dozen missing kegs of cheap draft. Chances are you look at the security tape, you figure there’s no way to ID the guys who broke in, we write it off.” He was talking with his hands, which usually meant he wanted the conversation to wrap up. “So go to a few games, see if you can shake something loose. Speaking of which…” He turned to me. “What you got, kid? That tip on Abel Larsson work out?”
I filled him in and showed him the pictures. He slapped me on the back, “Good job, Quinn, good job.” Then he shot a look of irritation at Mike and at Paul Forman, a thin, bespectacled guy who’d just entered from the corridor at the other end of the room.
Forman had a file fol
der in one hand and a coffee in the other, and held both up as he shrugged. “What? What’d I do?”
Ramon shook his head. “Never mind. But you could both learn a little about work ethic from the jailbird.”
Like my dad, Ramon was another ex-cop, so he was still wary that I’d return to the dark side and do something stupid. I think that he figured reminding everyone would force me to prove him wrong.
He shouldn’t have worried. I figured some things out while inside, important things about not ignoring that angel on your shoulder, and not trying to take the easy way. When I was a fighter, I was a stick-and-move guy, so I should’ve learned to rack up the points. Instead, I went for the knockout and it sometimes cost me big time. But learning from that was nothing like the patience you learn doing hard time.
True, my forgery victims had been the kind of rich people who deserved to be in jail themselves, not the philanthropic, charitable types, and most of my take had gone to help other people, because I come from a tough neighborhood, where people need a hand. But wrong was wrong, and karma had taught me a hard lesson about taking the easy way out.
And I wasn’t Robin Hood. I robbed from the rich and gave to myself, as well.
I said, “What’s the case?”
Ramon walked towards his small corner office and motioned for me to follow. Once we were both inside he closed the door. “This one’s kind of personal.”
I got the implication, that I didn’t need the other malooks in the office knowing I was doing the boss a favor. But I did need the case – I was still paying back my court-ordered restitution, with a quarter-million dollars to go.
He handed me a photo of a young woman. She was tall and beautiful: dark almond eyes, tanned skin, her wavy brown hair streaked with color. “Alison Pace. She’s the manager of a small gallery on Chestnut, the DeGoey. She’s also a friend of Nora’s from college.”
I looked down at the small photo of his daughter on his desk. She had dark red hair, from her Irish mother’s side, and olive skin from Ramon. I’d known Nora since we were kids. She’d gone on to great success and was now an associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – that’s the big building behind the statue of Rocky Balboa, by the way, although it could be a fireworks display if Nora was nearby, and I still wouldn’t see it.
