Gourdfellas Read Free Page A

poking each other in the chest as though that would make their point, made forward progress impossible. I felt like Sisyphus, only instead of rolling a rock up the hill I was trying to roll myself.
    “Hey, Lili, take a lesson from the martial arts. Resistance doesn’t work.” Seth Selinsky pressed his hand against the small of my back, turning me the way a tug turns a loaded ship. The swell of people pushed us toward the stage. Elbows and fingers and, once, a sharp-cornered pocketbook worthy of the Queen, jabbed various soft places on my body. When the crowd thinned, Seth took my hand and drew me past four laughing teens up the steps to the stage. Before I knew it, we were pushing through a heavy metal door and into the quiet of the parking lot.
    “Go with the flow—isn’t that a karate principle? Anyway, it worked this time. Thanks, Seth.” Even in the dark, his eyes seemed to gleam, but I couldn’t tell whether it was pleasure, mischief, or a simple biological reaction to the absence of light.
    “You going with the flow on the casino?” He sounded curious. We’d been to dinner the Saturday before but we hadn’t talked about the casino. As we walked through the ranks of parked cars, his shoulder brushed against mine. I moved away, still on edge after being in the middle of an unpredictable crowd. He was a single man who made a better than good living as a mortgage broker, and his livelihood depended on city people wanting to move to the southern half of Columbia County. It seemed a fair guess that he’d oppose the casino. We’d gone out at least a dozen times, but hormones and politics didn’t seem like a good mix.
    “I’m a NIMBY on this one. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find that I gave up the energy and diversity of Brooklyn for a garish, late-night, traffic-generating magnet for sleazebags and desperados.”
    His laugh was one of the things I liked best about Seth. “Not In Marino’s Back Yard, eh? Listen, I’ve got to go to Philadelphia next weekend to a mortgage products seminar. Deadly dull but there’s a Picasso exhibit at the museum that I plan to see even if I have to play hooky to do it. If you’d like to join me, I’d love the company.”
    “Thanks, but I’ve got a gallery opening in New Hampshire.” Saying yes would have been a nice but problematic complication, ushering in a new era of weekends away, which might lead to shared vacations and who knew what else. I wasn’t ready for maybe never either, so I was relieved to have a valid reason to decline.
    Seth’s smile might have been a dodged-the-bullet expression that mirrored my own relief, or simple cordiality. He took two steps toward me with The Look on his face, but before he could take me into his arms, shouts churned the warm spring night. I looked over my shoulder to see several dozen people in the rectangle of light spilling from the open doorway. Had the meeting ended already? They were only up to the eighth speaker, with ten more on the list and scores more who would try to get their sixty seconds of airtime before the mandatory ten o’clock end of the session.
    “Something’s wrong,” Seth said, as the wail of a siren got louder and the twin high beams of a county emergency vehicle split the darkness. He started toward the building at a lope and picked up speed. I ran behind him.
    The ambulance screeched to a halt at the open doorway. A tall man carrying a large plastic box and a shorter guy wielding a walkie-talkie hopped down and waded into the noisy crowd. When the cluster of onlookers stepped aside to let the two men pass, I saw Susan Clemants, sitting on the curb and holding a bloodstained handkerchief to her forehead.
    Glad for my subway rush hour training, I pushed past several people to get closer to Susan. Except for the dark streak of blood that trickled toward her eye and the vacant, glazed look on her pale face, she appeared to be unhurt. Kneeling, I restrained my impulse to touch her shoulder