The Burning Day (Roland Longville, #6) by Timothy C. Phillips

Description:

Two rival gangs stare each other down across Birmingham. In the growing heat of an Alabama summer, the rival crime bosses prepare to go to war. Private Eye Roland Longville finds himself caught in the crossfire as he starts out on the trail of a wandering wife, and ends up dodging bullets in a feud that threatens to boil over in the sweltering heat of a Birmingham July. Roland teams with his old partner, Lester Broom, to save the city from the heat of The Burning Day.

Excerpt:

Prologue

It was about noon when they shot Little Tony. It was a Tuesday. It had been raining, but it was clearing up when it all went down. The water vapor hissed off the streets and made the early spring day muggy and humid.

There he was, hanging around the entrance to some run-down old building that everybody called a barber shop, although they all knew that no one had gotten their hair cut there in a very long time.

Here’s the way it happened: Little Tony was out there on the corner, talking animatedly on his cell phone. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that he was the nephew of Don Ganato, the local mob boss, and that he was there to sell drugs. Since he was who he was, nobody said or did anything about it. Little Tony, just hanging out and selling his wares on the block. It was best not to notice.

Cars came by and slowed and people talked to Little Tony through their lowered windows. He preferred to do business this way, people in the neighborhood whispered, because it showed people he wasn’t afraid of anything. It showed everyone that he was able to do business for himself, and he didn’t need his uncle’s say-so, or his help. It also showed what an idiot he was, because Don Ganato had run the family business in Birmingham for over thirty years and never gone to jail. He had managed to do this supremely difficult thing because he kept a low profile. Don Ganato did not approve of his nephew’s flamboyance, and had tried to counsel him and bring him into the fold repeatedly, always without success. The old ways of secrecy and keeping a low profile were lost on Little Tony. He was part of the new world and its new ways. “You gotta front, get your name out there,” he had told the Don. This contradicted everything the Don stood for, but still he tried.

Only a month before, on Little Tony’s twenty-first birthday, Don Ganato had attempted to counsel the youth one final time. He had taken his nephew aside for a few moments of quiet reflection. Turn it down a notch, Don Ganato had advised Little Tony, before you come to grief. Little Tony had nodded but smiled slyly to his uncle. Don’t worry, he had told his uncle, it’s a brand new scene out there and I got it covered. I’m The Man. People know I’m The Man. He had spoken with such bravado and conviction that there had been a moment’s self-doubt flicker in the old Don’s eyes.

Maybe he’s right, that flicker in the Don’s dark eyes seemed to say; the world has changed so much, and Little Tony is young . . . but it was only a flicker. After that, Don Ganato had simply shrugged and moved on. He had not spoken with Little Tony again about such matters.

That was last month, but now it was a certain rainy Tuesday, and the grief his uncle had prophesied for Little Tony was bearing down hard upon him, though he had no way of knowing that. Little Tony was on the corner, where he was in his element and on top of his game—a game that was all about drugs and dough and hot cars and hot girls—and things were moving fast, really fast. The rain didn’t slow Little Tony’s business, because nothing slowed the drug trade. Morning, noon and night, monkeys needed feeding all over town, and Little Tony’s cell phone never stopped ringing.

Little Tony had just dropped a quarter of pink ice on two Latina honeys in a cherry-red 1978 Grand Prix with chrome spinner rims, a classic from the ground up, and the girls had just pulled away from the curb when a brand-ass new, banana-yellow Chrysler 300 rolled slowly toward him, directional tires hissing on the still-wet pavement. The windows were tinted to a near black-out shade.

Little Tony smiled to himself. Man, it looks like hot wheels all day today, he thought. Probably brothers, he figured, which would mean they were most likely looking for herb. That was fine because he had some kind bud in his rain slicker that would stone the most hard-core gangsta wannabe on the North Side to the point of drooling.

The Chrysler 300 pulled up to the curb and the window cranked down. Little Tony looked up and down the street, just for show, really, since even if cops patrolled this block, which they didn’t, none of them would dare mess with him. He stepped out to the curb like a man who owned the world.

“What’s up?” Little Tony said with practiced bravado.

“Got a message for you, you dirty little wop,” a rough voice from inside the car growled. There was a ripping burst of gunfire. Little Anthony went down on his back, eyes staring at the sky. But after a few seconds, he didn’t see anything, and he didn’t even hear the sexy hum of the Chrysler 300’s Hemi as it roared away down the street.