the heavens. “Dacy’s, that was it. Had a Sinclair gas station over there on the corner.” He jabbed an index finger to indicate the direction.
At the mention of the steakhouse, Risa felt a spark of interest. “I noticed your sign out front. Is it original?”
“Naw.” The man did a visual check on the waiting customers again. “My nephew talked me into replacing it a few years back. Nothing wrong with the old one, if you ask me.”
“Was the original sign neon, by any chance?”
The suggestion garnered Zeke’s full attention. “Neon?” He glared at Risa. “Does this look like the kind of place that advertises in neon? You know what neon signage says?” Obviously the topic got him worked up. “It’s says cheap. Fly by night. Neon says booze and women. You don’t put neon on a family grocery store. My old sign was hand painted. Liked it a lot better than the one up now, to tell you the truth. ’Scuse me.” He stomped away to bless the waiting customers with his sunny disposition.
“What do you want to guess that his nephew got a similar earful when they were discussing new signs for the business?” she said as they strolled toward the front of the store. She stopped by the checker again on the way by. “You don’t sell hot coffee by any chance, do you?”
The woman never lost a beat in the items she was scanning. “Got cans and bags in aisle five.”
Risa sighed and followed Nate out the door. The day wasn’t starting out very promising. At the risk of mirroring Zeke’s attitude, she had a feeling it’d get worse before it improved.
Several hours later she was ready to wrestle McGuire’s cell phone away from him and toss it into oncoming traffic. He regularly used it to check in with the detectives on the task force, and with the station house. Shroot occasionally called with updates whenever he found another business name that might fit the letters they’d given him. As a result, even though they’d made five stops so far, their list had actually grown longer.
Nate reached over and took the notepad out of her hand, studying the addresses. “Let’s try this one next.”
She looked at the one he’d tapped and frowned. “That’s nowhere close to here. I thought we were working in enlarging circles to avoid crisscrossing all over the city.”
He’d already backed out of the lot they’d been parked in and was waiting for a break in traffic so he could turn onto the street. “If I don’t miss my guess, that address puts us in the vicinity of the one Randolph gave us for Juicy. Since he hasn’t seen fit to grace us with his presence yet, I thought I’d stop by and extend a personal invitation.”
“None of the men you’ve put on it have been able to locate him,” she pointed out. It didn’t much matter to her one way or another. The stops they’d been making had taken on a mind-numbing sameness. “What makes you think you’ll have better luck?”
“Probably won’t,” he admitted, making a quick turn onto the street when he saw his chance. “But like I say, his address is close to that name on the list. We can kill two birds with one stone. I have orders from Morales to go easy on him if and when he does surface.”
“Because of Vice’s plans for him?”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, he did a deft lane switch. “They’re definitely interested in what Crowley might be able to give them on him, yeah. I don’t envy them trying to hold Crowley in check, though. The first sign of trouble and he’s likely to shift loyalties.”
Again he got off the more congested street and began taking side streets to his destination. She had a vague sense of where the next address was. Unless city renovation had recently made its mark, the area was crime ridden, with dilapidated project housing and tired tenements hemming weary storefront vendors. “Used to be a great gym in the area of this address,” she recalled aloud. “A bit closer to Temple University, maybe. A bunch of us from the force used to work out there when I was a rookie.”
“The Ironhouse Gym. Yeah, I knew that place. I had a membership for a while. Got tired of having my hubcaps missing every time I got back to my car, though.”
Oddly, the remark made her nostalgic. “Yeah, we used to lay bets on whose car would get hit. I