Crave Read Free Page A

shook my head with a small smile, “not at all. But let’s not fight until we know what the situation is.”
    â€œOkay, I guess I can live with that, but only for a while. And we’d better hurry, I’d hate to keep Mr. Lange waiting.”
    Â 
    We made it home, and were almost through with our packing when I finally asked, “Why do you hate Victor so much?”
    Mitch looked up at me from his suitcase. “It’s not really Victor, you know; I could almost like him if it weren’t for . . .” He paused for a minute, staring at me. Then he looked away. “It’s the whole hierarchy of the Cadre. They sit in their underground warren, spinning their devious little webs, meting out their arbitrary justice.” He folded his last pair of jeans, crammed them on the top of the suitcase and snapped it shut. “They almost succeeded in making me crazy. They would’ve left me in that institution for the rest of my life and not thought a thing about it. They could very easily have doomed you to a hundred years of starvation and never once bothered to ascertain the fairness of the sentence. They’re immoral, inhuman parasites, living off of innocent people and I wouldn’t care if the entire lot died tomorrow.”
    Well, I told myself, as I watched him stack our cases by the bedroom door, you asked for it. But I said nothing, and walked across the room, picked up the phone and dialed Pete’s home number.
    â€œPete,” I said when he answered, “it’s Dorothy. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
    â€œLeaving again, are you?” He sounded more amused than angry.
    â€œYes, I’m sorry.”
    â€œAnd didn’t I know it when that Vincent chap turned up asking for you. I suppose you’ll be taking your husband with you too, leaving me with no help at all?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDottie, darlin’, you know if you didn’t own half the pub, I’d be firing you right now.”
    â€œI’m sure you would, Pete. I’ll call you when we get there.”
    â€œI’d appreciate that. But don’t you worry, I’ll do fine.”
    â€œThank you, Pete. You take care now.”
    â€œAnd the same to you, my girl. Godspeed.”
    I hung up the phone, stood for a minute with my back to Mitch and wiped away a few tears. A horn beeped on the street and still I didn’t move until Mitch came up behind me and wrapped an arm around my neck, kissing me softly on the ear. “We’d better get moving, Deirdre, the taxi’s here. Are you ready?”
    I nodded and we went downstairs. We locked the house, loaded the boot of the taxi and made it to the airport with five minutes to spare.
    The plane Victor had chartered was a small, sleek Gulfstream; Mitch and I were the only passengers evident. The seats were plush and comfortable and I settled in by one of the windows. Mitch sat next to me with a grim smile, outwardly relaxed and at ease, but I could feel the keyed-up tenseness of his muscles as he stretched his legs out. Even though Victor was nowhere in sight, the plane began its acceleration down the runway almost immediately and made a smooth leap from the ground into the night sky.
    My sigh from the window was easily audible; Mitch reached over and took my hand. “Nervous?”
    â€œNo,” I said softly, turning to him, “not at all. I love to fly. But I was just wondering what it would feel like without the plane, how it would feel to just be picked up by the wind and carried away.” I gave a small laugh to compensate for the emotional outburst. “I guess we would find out soon enough if we were to crash.”
    â€œDo you think we’d survive?”
    â€œYou know, I have no idea.”
    Mitch was silent for a while. “My guess is we would. Unless,” and he chuckled a little, “we happened to land on a picket fence somewhere.”
    I studied the view from