Cash Burn Read Free

bathroom, he put his mouth under the faucet to wash down the cookies, wiped his chin with the back of his hand, and got his tie nearly off on the way to the closet. His fingers worked each shirt button loose with deliberation. The shirt went into the hamper together with his socks, the suit into the bag for the dry cleaner. Still in his underwear, he threw back the bedspread and crashed onto the sheets.
    The cotton, taut and firm, pressed cool against his body. He settled into it like fluid seeking a lowest point. Thoughts about work flitted in his mind but couldn’t find purchase, and they surrendered to the vacancy of oncoming sleep.
    Sometime later, he heard Serena’s voice. Groggy, he mumbled, “What?”
    “I said, hi, handsome.”
    That voice, like silky jazz. It brought a smile. Eyes closed, he heard her move through the room shedding jewelry, jacket, kicking her heels off into the closet, where he knew her shoes lay in heaps, their heel marks like scattered dark moons on the wall. When she emerged from the closet, she would be clothed in her short satin robe. The sink faucet going now. She would be leaned over the sink, legs bent at the knee, her back tipped forward.
    When the water closed off, she would rise to press a towel to her face and dab the water off, coming away with a few strands of auburn-colored hair pasted to her cheek and forehead. A pinch by fingertips to remove the hair, and she would blink away the droplets clinging to her lashes.
    Fear and sorrow tugged at his groggy mind. His eyes were still closed. He wanted to move to her.
    She rubbed lotion into her hands, their backs, between the fingers, on the supple knuckles as she came to the edge of the bed. Her hands together, passing over one another, lotion soaking into her tight skin the color of creamed caramel.
    He struggled against his own body, trying to move toward her but too tired. He sensed her unsmiling lips, but he knew her brown eyes held a glint of amusement.
    Sorrow swelled deep inside him, burned. Longing for her was like a cord threaded through his chest. But he felt pinned to the bed.
    Red fingernails pulled apart the edges of the robe. She slid out of it and draped it over the covers. She wore thin garments to bed this time of year. She leaned over the bed and peeled the covers back. One knee came onto the sheets first, and then she was in with him, moving toward him. And just before the warmth of her body reached him, he woke.
    Alone.
    The emptiness of the house was a vacuum, sucking the breath out of him.
    She was not there.
    She had not been there for weeks.
    He rolled onto his back, his teeth grinding.
    In the glow of a night light Serena had plugged in long ago, the shapes in the ceiling texture took on forms. He used to lie in the dimness with her, and they would point the shapes out to one another like kids on a hilltop imagining forms in passing clouds.
    He pressed his eyelids closed. Now what he saw was the look on her face when he’d confronted her. After resisting his suspicions so long, trying to excuse her a thousand times, he had no choice when the final proof made its way to him.
    Another man. Her lips on his. Her hands in his. Her arms, the ones he longed for now, encircling another.
    She was gone.

4
    Senior Probation Officer Tom Cole lowered himself out of his Explorer gingerly to avoid straining his knees. The pressure of the bones rubbing together felt like needles digging deep in the joints.
    He slammed the door and hitched his pants, making sure the tail of his shirt hid the Glock 23 holstered at his kidney.
    Traffic whizzed past him on Melrose, so he held tight to the side of the vehicle. The sun warmed his shaved scalp like a heat lamp. Stepping up to the sidewalk, he ran his palm over the smoothness from his shave an hour ago, back toward his clean crown, and then forward over the ridge above his forehead. The Fu Manchu mustache that framed his mouth was the only hair left on his head other than his