Fox Evil Read Free

entity that he didn't understand. One time his mother had said, if God was a woman she'd help us. Another time: God's a policeman. If you obey the rules he's nice, if you don't he sends you to hell.
    The only absolute truth that Wolfie understood was that there was no escape from the misery of his life.
     
    Fox fascinated Bella Preston in a way that few other men had. He was older than he looked, she guessed, putting him somewhere in his forties, with a peculiarly inexpressive face that suggested a tight rein on his emotions. He spoke little, preferring to cloak himself in silence, but when he did his speech betrayed his class and education.
    It wasn't unheard of for a "toff' to take to the road-it had happened down the centuries when a black sheep was kicked out of the family fold-but she would have expected Fox to have an expensive habit. Crackheads were the black sheep of the twenty-first century, never mind what class they were born into. This guy wouldn't even take a spliff, and that was weird.
    A woman with less confidence might have asked herself why he kept singling her out for attention. Big and fat with cropped peroxided hair, Bella wasn't an obvious choice for this lean, charismatic man with pale eyes and shaven tracks across his skull. He never answered questions. Who he was, where he came from, and why he hadn't been seen on the circuit before were no one's business but his own. Bella, who had witnessed it all before, took his right to a hidden past for granted-
didn't they all have secrets?
-and allowed him to haunt her bus with the same freedom that everyone else did.
    Bella hadn't traveled the country with three young daughters and an H-addict husband, now dead, without learning to keep her eyes open. She knew there were a woman and two children in Fox's bus, but he never acknowledged them. They looked like spares, chucked out along the way by someone else and taken on board in a moment of charity, but Bella saw how the two kids cowered behind their mother's skirts whenever Fox drew near. It told her something about the man. However attractive he might be to strangers-
and he was attractive
-Bella would bet her last cent that he showed a different character behind closed doors.
    It didn't surprise her. What man wouldn't be bored by a spaced-out zombie and her by-blows? But it made her wary.
    The children were timid little clones of their mother, blond and blue-eyed, who sat in the dirt under Fox's bus and watched while she wandered aimlessly from vehicle to vehicle, hand held out for anything that would put her to sleep. Bella wondered how often she gave happy pills to the kids to keep them quiet. Too often, she suspected. Their lethargy wasn't normal.
    Of course she felt sorry for them. She dubbed herself a "social worker" because she and her daughters attracted waifs wherever they camped. Their battery-operated television had something to do with it, also Bella's generous nature, which made her a comfortable person to be around. But when she sent her girls to make friends with the two boys, they slithered under Fox's bus and ran away.
    She made an attempt to engage the woman in conversation by offering to share a smoke with her, but it was a fruitless exercise. All questions were greeted with silence or incomprehension, except for wistful agreement when Bella said the hardest part about being on the road was educating the kids. "Wolfie likes libraries," the skinny creature said, as if Bella should know what she was talking about.
    "Which one's Wolfie?" asked Bella.
    "The one that takes after his father… the clever one," she said, before wandering away to look for more handouts.
    The subject of education came up again on the Monday night when prone bodies littered the ground in front of Bella's purple and pink bus. "I'd chuck it all in tomorrow," she said dreamily, staring at the star-studded sky and the moon across the water. "All I need is for someone to give me a house with a garden that ain't on a