Shallow Graves
speaking.
Janine was lounging back. Pellam found he was staring at her breasts. She noticed his eyes and he said quickly, “Nice pin. You make it?” He pointed to a round moon face necklace made of sterling silver. It had a coy feminine face.
She leaned forward and held it out to him. He tried to focus on it. “It’s a bestseller at my store.” Then she frowned.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, here I bring you brownies and tea, and you don’t even ask me to get comfortable.”
He clicked the bedside light out. The moonlight came in through the blinds and the cold illumination was almost as bright as the lamp. “Sorry. What can I do to make amends?”
“You can start by helping me off with my boots.”
She lifted her leg, and he took her calf, taut in the tight denim, in his left hand and gripped the heel of her boot. He looked down.
They were cowboy boots.
Chapter 7
“ HOW MANY YOU want?” Billy asked the boy.
Before he could answer, Bobby said, “Have four.”
“What’s your name again?” Billy asked.
“Ned. And sure, I’ll have four.”
The pancake somersaulted through the air like the bone in the movie 2001, the bone that became a space station. What the pancake became, after Bobby maneuvered the plasticized Grand Union paper plate underneath it, adjusting for the trajectory, was just more of the boy’s breakfast—flapjacks, sausage, eggs and buttered toast.
“That was, you know, totally fresh,” the boy said, his eyes whipping up and down, replaying the flip. Billy nodded toward his brother and said, “Nobody flips ’em like Bobby.”
Another flip. Ned, a strapping high school senior, was having five pancakes, it turned out, not four.
Bobby looked shy and pleased about the good review of his talent. He didn’t say anything. He wiped his hands on his Kiwanis-supplied apron.
Billy and Bobby were twins. They were about the same size as the boy, a little under six feet and maybe a hundred eighty pounds. But less of them was musclethan in the kid. They were thirty-five. They wore their dark hair similarly, Carnaby look: with long bangs. A fringe came over their ears in a slight curl. They shampooed with coal tar soap and always had a medicinal smell about them. Today, they wore brown. Bobby had on a white shirt because he’d volunteered to cook at the Kiwanis Breakfast. Billy, just hanging around and helping whoever needed help, wore a beige short-sleeved shirt printed with designs that looked like chain links.
“Whatsa time?” he asked the boy, who looked at a big, gleaming watch (birthday present, Billy thought).
“Almost eleven.”
“Near quitting time for us,” Bobby said. He scanned the site of the breakfast—the basement of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleary—and motioned to a nearby paper-tablecloth-covered card table. “Why don’t you sit over there. We’ll join you.”
“Well, sure,” Ned said, turning his round, red-scrubbed face to where they pointed.
Bobby made himself and his brother plates of pancakes and sausage, then plastered the stacks with smears of Parkay. He added a couple extra sausages to his and poured syrup on both plates.
He called across the room to Earl Gibson, the manager of Cleary Bank & Trust and president of the Kiwanis, and asked if it was okay for them to quit and have something to eat. And Earl came by, pumped their damp hands and said, “You bet.” Then he thanked them both for doing such a good job. “Whatsyer secret, Robert?”
Bobby winked at the boy and said, “What it is, they get aerated when I send ’em up.”
“He makes ’em good, Mr. Gibson,” Ned told Earl.
Billy said, “Aunt Gee-mima, watch yo black butt. My bro Bobby’s in town.”
They all laughed and the twins sat down with the boy.
The twins loved to volunteer. They were Little League coaches and they worked regularly at the Cleary Boys’ Club and the Future Farmers of America. Their favorite volunteering was for this, the Fall Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast, and the Jay-Cees summer barbecue and, though they weren’t married and had no children, the PTA’s regular potluck suppers (nothing beat the combo of food and volunteer work).
Ned was one of those teenagers that could talk easily with adults, especially adults like the twins, who knew sports and weren’t too geekish to tell an occasional Polack joke or one about girls’ periods or boobs. The boy’s rambling monologue was up and running by the time Billy and Bobby focused on
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher