The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly Page A

counter to guide me on warm and sweet. I came back with a maple latte and a couple of muffins. I wasn’t too hungry, but Shaky probably was. I picked at mine to be polite while Shaky went back to the counter and loaded up his latte with sugar. He tore into the muffin as soon as he resumed his seat, then seemed to realize that he was in company, and nobody was likely to try and steal the snack from him, so he slowed down.
    “It’s good,” he said. “The coffee as well.”
    “You sure there’s enough sugar in there for you?” The stirrer was pretty much standing up by itself in the coffee.
    He grinned. His teeth weren’t great, but the smile somehow was.
    “I always did have a sweet tooth. I guess it’s still in there somewhere. I done lost most of the rest.”
    He chewed some more muffin, holding it in his mouth for as long as he could to savor the taste.
    “Saw you at the cemetery,” he said, “when they put Jude in the ground. You’re the detective, right?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “You knew Jude?”
    “A little.”
    “What I heard. Jude told me that he did some detecting for you, couple of times.”
    I smiled. Jude always did get a kick out of being asked to help. I could hear some skepticism in Shaky’s voice, just a hint of doubt, but I think he wanted it to be true. He kept his head down as he stared up at me, one eyebrow raised in anticipation.
    “Yes, he did,” I said. “Jude had a good eye, and he knew how to listen.”
    Shaky almost sagged with relief. Jude hadn’t lied to him. This wasn’t a wasted errand.
    “Yeah, Jude was smart,” he said. “Wasn’t nothing happened on the streets that Jude didn’t know about. He was kind too. Kind to everyone. Kind to me.”
    He stopped eating, and for an instant he looked terribly lonely. His mouth moved soundlessly as he tried to express emotions that he had never shared aloud before: his feelings for Jude, and about himself now that Jude was gone. He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence, and will always defy expression. In the end, Shaky just gave up and slurped noisily at his latte to cover his pain.
    “You were friends?”
    He nodded over the cup.
    “Did he have many friends?”
    Shaky stopped drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    “No. He kept most people at a distance.”
    “But not you.”
    “No.”
    I didn’t pursue it. It was none of my business.
    “When did you last see him alive?”
    “Couple of days before he was found in that basement. I was helping him to collect.”
    “Collect?”
    “Money. He was calling in the debts he was owed, and he asked me to help. Everyone knew that me and him was close, and if I said I was working on his behalf then it was no word of a lie. He put it all down on paper for me. As I’d find someone I’d cross the name off the list and record how much they’d given me.”
    He reached into one of his pockets and produced a sheet of paper, which he carefully unfolded and placed before me. On it was a list of names written neatly in pencil. Beside most of them, in a considerably messier hand, figures were scrawled: a dollar or so, usually, and no sum more than two bucks.
    “Sometimes I’d get to a person after he did, and maybe they’d already have paid up, and maybe they wouldn’t have. Jude was soft, though. He believed every hard-luck story, because it was his way. Me, I knew some of them was lying. As long as they was breathing, they was lying. I made sure that, if they could, they paid.”
    I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn’t come to much: a hundred dollars and change. Then I realized that, while it wasn’t much to me, that kind of sum could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.
    “What did he want the money for?” I said.
    “He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie but she was straightening out.