Peril Read Free Page A

sat long enough, a woman would finally approach him.
    Marisol.
    For years he’d tried to tell himself that she was just a woman, that if she’d lived and they’d remained together, they would have grown apart, their passion faded. But she had died horribly and thus became Helen still on the walls of Troy, and he had never been able to bring her down from that mythic height. He’d tried to find another woman, fall in love again, but the ghost of Marisol lingered in the air around him. She slithered between himself and any woman he caressed. Her breath stained every kiss.
    And so for the last few years he’d pursued only sex, sex without affection, and except for Kiko, always with strangers. He could sense that this was just another detour from the road he truly sought and which he now imagined leading off into the shadowy and impossible distance, Marisol at the end of it, perfect and unchanged, her arms opening to receive him. He could almost hear her sensuous whisper,
Welcome home
.
    MORTIMER
    Sitting in Dr. Langton’s office, he felt small and uneducated, both of which he knew he was, a dull, pudgy little man with a mind that had precious little in it, at least precious little of the stuff educated people had in their minds—dates and names and bits of poetry. If he had it all to do over, he thought, he’d have gone to college, even if nothing more than Bunker Hill Community College, gotten a little polish, a little class, so that he could look a doctor in the eye and not feel the way he did now, two pegs up from a bug.
    â€œGood afternoon,” Dr. Langton said as he came into the office.
    Mortimer nodded.
    Dr. Langton sat down behind his desk, a wall of diplomas arrayed behind him. He placed the folder he’d brought with him on his desk and opened it. For a moment he flipped through the pages, then he lifted his eyes and Mortimer saw just how bad it was. His stomach emptied in the way it had during the war when someone yelled “Incoming!”
    â€œI have the test results,” Dr. Langton said. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid.”
    â€œHow long?” Mortimer didn’t want to be curt, but he didn’t want to string it out either, because he knew that if he didn’t get it quick and straight, he’d end up feeling even worse than he already did.
    â€œThat’s always a guess,” Dr. Langton answered. “But I’d say we’re probably looking at around three months.”
    To his surprise, Mortimer felt a screwy sense that it couldn’t be true, that a man couldn’t sit in an office, feeling more or less okay, and hear a death sentence like that, three lousy months. My God, he was only fifty-six. “You’re sure?” he asked.
    â€œI wish I had a treatment for you. But in this case . . .”
    â€œOkay,” Mortimer said. The incoming round exploded somewhere deep inside him and he suddenly felt already dead. Then his mind shifted to the living, to Dottie, the wife he’d leave behind . . . with nothing.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Dr. Langton said.
    â€œMe too,” Mortimer said, though it was not for himself he felt sorry now, but for how little he’d accumulated. Nothing in the bank. Nothing in the market. Not even a little row house in Brooklyn or Queens. All of that had galloped away from him one horse at a time, galloped away on the back of some nag that finished fifth on the track at Belmont. Leaving him with nothing. No. Worse than nothing. In hock fifteen grand to a guy Caruso claimed was capable of anything. Breaking thumbs. Cutting out your tongue. And if Mortimer were, so to speak, beyond reach? What would Labriola do then? Was it really unthinkable that a guy like that, a crazy, brutal thug, might go after Dottie just to get even?
    â€œIs there anything else?”
    Mortimer looked at Dr. Langton. “What?”
    â€œIs there anything else I can do for you?” the doctor