Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

button up my denim jacket against the damp. The metal buttons felt cold to my fingertips. The third button from the top was missing. I had no idea how it came off or where it was.
    “You’ll need a different kind of coat,” Augie said.
    These were the first word either of us had spoken. I had to look past him to see out the driver’s door window, which was my only view of the bar. I had done all I could up till then to pretend he wasn’t there.
    “You need a particular kind of coat for this work,” he added. He didn’t look at me, simply kept his head turned and his eye on the bar at the end of the street.
    “I have an overcoat at home. The seams are torn but it works for the most part.”
    He shook his head. “No, an overcoat’s no good. Try to find something that doesn’t go past your mid-thigh. Field jackets work best. Pea coats, too. Long coats and dusters just get in the way, and besides, if you walk into a place wearing a coat like that, you’ll get noticed. That’s a fact. When I see anyone with a long coat I immediately think he’s hiding a shotgun or baseball bat or something. I don’t take my eyes off him.”
    I nodded and put my hands in my pockets for warmth.
    Augie said, “You can probably get a liner to wear under that jacket, or a down vest to wear over it, something like that. Pocket warmers hunters use are good for long stakeouts like these.”
    I looked at him. He was still looking to his left, toward the bar. I saw a thin scar on the back of his head, interrupting the hairline near the base of his skull.
    “Frank mentioned that you worked for him once before,” Augie said.
    “Yeah. Sort of.”
    “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
    “I did a job but didn’t get paid.”
    “Frank stiffed you?”
    “No. He referred me to someone who had a job that he couldn’t take. That person ended up stiffing me.”
    “And that’s how you got the scratches on your face?”
    “Yeah.”
    “They’re from a woman, that much I can tell.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “The width of the cuts, and the depth. They’re like cat scratches. Men don’t generally do that. Men gouge, woman claw. So, a woman, right?”
    These scratches had been left by a woman. Her name was Callie Weber, a college student who had turned heroin addict and hooker. Frank had come to me and offered me quick money if I found her for an interested third party he wanted to impress. That was all I needed to do—that and let him know where she was hiding. But of course in the end that wasn’t the whole story. I’d learned too late that she had enemies—wealthy men who were former clients of hers, whose lives she could too easily ruin—and when I found her and she figured out what I wanted, she panicked and ran. Like a fool I’d tried to stop her, and that was when she clawed at my face.
    The act of someone fighting for her very life.
    The next day her body was found floating in Peconic Bay.
    Augie said, “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
    “No.”
    “Frank withheld information from you, didn’t he?”
    I nodded.
    Augie waited a moment, then said, “You can’t let this work get to you. You’re not supposed to like it. The minute you start to, that’s when it’s time to get out.”
    “So why do it?”
    “Let’s just say it’s part of the order of things. A necessary evil.”
    “What does that mean?”
    Augie shrugged off the question. “Just don’t believe for a moment that because I take Frank’s money that I’m anything like him.”
    “Then why work for him?”
    Augie looked back out the driver’s door window, toward the bar on the corner. “It’s personal,” he said. “Look, no offense, kid, but I’ve got to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable with the idea of you being the guy to watch my back if the shit comes down. I don’t know the first thing about you, I want you to understand something very important right now. You are to just sit here and watch. You don’t get out of this truck for anything, you stay put and don’t do a thing, no matter what happens. When this is over, I’ll tell Frank you did fine and that you’re ready to work on your own, that you’re a natural and he’s lucky to have you. If he wants to keep hiring you, that’s between you and him. But I don’t want to work with you. Again, it’s nothing personal. You just get cautious at my age. Do you understand?”
    I told him that I did.
    “Good,” he said.
    Our silence resumed, but not for