Crying Wolf Read Free Page A

sound of a car door closing, a car driving off. Had to be hubbie off to work in the Porsche; the Benz didn’t make that throaty sound.
    â€œNice to meet you too, Bliss.” But Sherman? That was nothing like Goldberg or Goldstein. Freedy dug the schedule out of his pocket: Goldman, 9:00 A.M. He glanced around, noticed a familiar-looking pool house on the next hilltop, about a ten-minute drive away. The Goldmans. He’d come to the wrong house. These Shermans weren’t on the sheet at all. Had he ever been here before? He didn’t think so. They weren’t even clients. Some kind of mistake.
    â€œHow long will it take?”
    â€œTake?”
    She gave him a closer look; saw the body at last. Now was the moment to hit her with the sensitivity. Freedy checked the pool for more dead rodents, found none.
    â€œTo finish up,” said Bliss.
    â€œThe pool?”
    â€œExactly.”
    He shrugged, a nice slow shrug to show her those delts, in case she’d missed them. “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
    â€œI suppose I’ll have to wait till you’re done.” She turned and went back into the house, closing the slider. Freedy watched until she was out of sight: how could you not watch a woman like that in a bathing suit like that? Then he went to work, skimming, checking the pH, adding chlorine, oiling the pump. The whole time, his mind toyed with the image of her butt as she walked away; not quite the whole time—once or twice it occupied itself with the furry thing, spinning over the ridge. He didn’t like that
exactly,
didn’t like that
I suppose I’ll have to wait.
    Freedy gathered up the vacuum, skimmer, supply box, knocked on the slider. “All set,” he called. He listened for a reply, heard nothing. He knocked again, called, “Finito,” and walked around to the front of the house.
Finito
, being some other language, went with the sensitivity.
    The van was parked beside the Benz in the driveway. He opened the side door, stowed the gear. While he was doing that, he glanced into the Benz and happened to see some money lying on the seat. That was them. He’d be the same way one day, with his intelligence. He’d own A-1 Pool Design, Maintenance, and Engineering himself. Or maybe a whole chain of pool companies, up and down the coast. Pools and California, they went together. Back where he came from, he didn’t remember a single pool in the whole town—excepting the one up at the college, which didn’t count. What opportunity was there for a person like him in a place like that? None. He knew that oh so well.
    But here. Another story. He slammed the van door shut, took out the andro, popped one dry. He was going to be rich, so rich he’d never settle for a lousy 300-series Benz like this one. Was it unlocked? He tried the door. Yup. Unbelievable.
    And these Shermans weren’t even on the sheet. He’d cleaned their goddamn pool for nothing, even finishing after he’d figured it out, like some kind of saint, or Martin Luther King Jr. Cleaned their pool like Martin Luther King Jr., while that bare-assed bitch had said
exactly.
Not even on the sheet. In a funny way, that meant none of this was really happening. What an awesome thought: it reminded him of
The X-Files
. None of this was really happening. That meant it was like a free play in football, where they throw a flag against the defense while the quarterback’s still dropping back, giving him a chance to throw the bomb with no risk. A free play. He wasn’t even there. The Shermans didn’t even exist, not in terms of A-1. Freedy reached into the Benz and grabbed the money.
    Throw the bomb. It was that easy. He felt better than he had in months, better maybe than any time since the first few days after he’d come to California. Here on this hilltop under a huge blue sky, he felt huge too, the way he’d felt back then, before his crummy walk-up on