Crying Wolf Read Free Page B

Lincoln, the clunker that wouldn’t fucking start half the time, the rent he owed, the advances on his pay he’d already got, all the way to Thanksgiving. On the hilltop with the Valley on one side and the ocean on the other, he knew what it was like to have been one of those conquistadors who’d discovered the place; Spaniards—not the spics he had to work with, even work for, now.
    As for the money, he’d earned it, if you wanted to be technical; he’d done the work. Freedy shoved it into the pocket of his cutoffs, down there with the andro. He took a deep breath, felt great. Sober, unstoned, and great. When was the last time that combo had turned up? And how sharp his senses were all of a sudden, even sharper than usual. He smelled a nice plant smell he couldn’t identify, saw a high-flying bird of some kind, heard a distant splash.
    Maybe not so distant. Maybe from the other side of the house, where someone might be swimming her laps, back and forth, in a zone and possibly daydreaming about the so-called pool boy the whole time.
    The so-called pool boy crept back around the house.
    This was what was going to happen. He would take off his work boots, his socks, his cutoffs, cross the patio while she was swimming the other way, lower himself in the pool, and just stand there in the shallow end, waiting for her to bump into him on her way back. Surprise. But a nice surprise. She’d look up, eyes wide, mouth opening, then see who it was. The expression on her face would change in some exciting way, and she’d say, “I was just thinking about you,” or maybe something subtler, like “What a coincidence.” Yeah, that would be it: she was subtle, educated, rich. Freedy remembered the money in his pocket and felt a little badly. No reason he couldn’t toss it back in the Benz later.
    Freedy reached the corner of the house and stopped. He heard rhythmic splashing sounds, and one soft, female grunt. He peeked around the edge of the wall. Just as he’d imagined. Bliss—right name, in terms of what was going to happen . . . not
psychic
but some word about the future like that—naked in the pool, swimming her laps, tan all over. This was happening. It was just like porn, except he was in it. Freedy started to get hard right away, really hard, andro hard. He had an important thought: this is going to be the best experience of my life, so far. That meant he should make it last, appreciate it, savor it.
Savor:
what a perfect word, a word most people wouldn’t have come up with at a time like this, but he knew it well, from the cooking channel. He was intelligent. He had eyes like whatever his name was who had played Sherlock Holmes, according to his mother.
    His mother would be five or ten years older than Bliss Sherman. Had she ever had a body like that? Not even on her best day. But enough about her. What the hell was he doing thinking about his mother right now? His mother’s face, Bliss Sherman’s butt, the spinning furry thing: he shook his head to clear away all that confusion and moved silently across the patio. Silent, not to scare her or anything; he just didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
    Freedy slipped into the shallow end. The water was cool and clean, made him tingle all over. Of course it was clean: he’d cleaned it himself. He’d made his bed, in other words, and now he got to lie in it—an expression one of his high-school teachers had liked using on him.
Look at me now, teach.
    He stood in the shallow end, up to his waist, eyes on Bliss Sherman’s ass, curving up out of the water as she touched the far end, turned. He saw she was wearing goggles; he hadn’t imagined goggles, but they made it better somehow, like high heels on a stripper. Another sign of his intelligence, to make that connection. And now, with Bliss almost upon him, just two or three strokes away, he recalled a fragment of a strange cartoon