Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool sm-5
Page 20
“But if I really made my mind up-”
“It’d be putting a lot of pressure on you-”
“I’ve got the shower standing close by.”
She grinned. “That’d be a help. You have any handcuffs?”
“Sorry, all out. Just leg irons.”
“Well, that could be interesting.”
“I could loan you my gun. You could pistol whip me.”
Half seriously, she said, “Well, it was a stupid idea, I guess.”
“Aw, let’s give it a try.”
“You won’t try-”
“We’ll do whatever you want. Or don’t want.”
“We have to have strict rules, though.”
“How strict? Is kissing allowed?”
“I suppose kissing would be all right.”
“Sort of pressing against each other. Would that be all right?”
“I suppose sort of pressing against each other would be all right, too, if it was just sort of.”
“Saying that I’ve missed you and I don’t know where this is going but I sure do like you? Would that be all right?”
“That’d be best of all, Sam.”
“Well, how about if we start the kissing part just standing right here in the middle of the floor?”
“Sometimes that’s the best place of all, Sam.
Right here in the middle of the floor.”
“The good old middle of the floor,” I said.
“The good old middle of the floor.”
Twenty-six
The call came at 3cccg A.M. according to the glowing face of my nightstand clock.
Judge Whitney. Not only sober.
Alarmed.
“Did Cliffie just call you?”
“No.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie. The phone had rung. I just decided not to answer it. I didn’t want to go down and bail somebody out. But this time the phone woke Linda first and she said, ever the responsible nurse, “You’d better get it, Sam. It could be important this hour of the night.”
So I’d lifted the receiver and put it to my ear and listened to the judge and said, “So what did Cliffie want?”
“Then you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
And then she said it: “Emma Kelly killed her sister tonight. And then killed herself. I imagine she didn’t have a hard time finding a weapon. Her father was a gunsmith, you know.”
I must have made some kind of startled sound, because Linda sat up in bed and turned on the reading lamp.
All I could think of was sad, lost Amy in the doorway of their kitchen saying, I want to go where you go. I wondered if she’d begged Emma to kill her, too. A mortal sin, to be sure, but Amy would likely commit it to be with her sister.
“Did you hear what I said, McCain?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I heard all right.”
I sat silent on the edge of the bed for a long, long time, smoking one cigarette after another.
Linda knew not to ask me about it.
After a while she came over and sat down on the bed next to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “Maybe I’d better go, Sam.”
I came out of my silence and looked at her and said, “I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll stay.”
She smiled. “How about two dollars?”
She was kind enough and smart enough to take me in her arms and just hold me for a long and silent time.
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