Streets on Fire Read Free Page B

her, don’t get too disturbed. She fell down moving boxes or something at church and hit her face. She got a bad shiner.”
    “Were you with her?”
    “Naw, Catholic’s still good enough for me.”
    “Thanks.”
    Marlena had taken to going to a big fundamentalist temple in Hawthorne called the Church of the Open Barn Door. It didn’t make him very happy, but it seemed to soothe something needy in her. He found her hanging laundry on the lines out back over the scruffy lawn, and the tight black skirt stretched over her ample rump set his libido thrumming right away.
    She cupped a hand over the side of her face when she turned. “Oh, Jackie, I done a stupid thing.”
    “Rocky warned me.”
    “I was moving some rummage boxes down in the basement of the church and slipped on a rotten old grape down there. My face hit a old blender in the box.”
    She opened her palm like a door to show a mouse under the eye the size of a plum. It all seemed too pat. She was too quick at volunteering all the details.
    He hugged her and there was something stiff in her response. He wondered if there was trouble at the church. “Who’s minding your shop?”
    “Anna. Maeve was supposed to, but she didn’t make it. Remember? Maeve was gonna do Mondays for the summer. But Anna needs the work.”
    He didn’t remember any plans like that at all, and he was surprised one of them hadn’t told him. Maeve got on well with Marlena, though she lived most of the time with his ex-wife, Kathy, and her new husband. The shop was Marlena’s Mailboxes-R-Us franchise, which had been directly beneath the office he had once kept in a minimall. His office now was a letter drop at her shop, a retrenchment to get him through a long dry spell in his finances.
    They were interrupted for a moment when his dog sidled up and growled for attention. Loco must have spooked her horrible little Chihuahua into a back bedroom. Loco was a scruffy medium-sized, whitish dog with flat yellow eyes, at least half coyote, and generally did his best to shun anything that could be construed as pet behavior. Lately Loco had taken to being more affectionate, so Jack Liffey bent over to hug the dog for a moment. He’d better not pass up any devotion he could get.
    “Hey, boy, how’s tricks?”
    The dog gave another little growl and then broke free and wandered away.
    “Be sure you don’t overdo it. I might get to wanting my slippers fetched.”
    Marlena chuckled. Loco glanced back once disdainfully, like a being who’d been marooned on an inferior planet.
    Jack Liffey thought about it and decided his own species was best, after all. He stood up and kissed Marlena’s cheek softly. “Um, you tender here?”
    “No. Feels good.”
    “How about here?”
    “Ooooh. Try here, Jackie.” She directed his hand, and before long they were in the bedroom, trying a lot of places.

TWO
It’s Not Our Way
    The driver of the van had a Marine buzz-cut and a white line across the edge of one lip that suggested one of the dueling scars Prussians had once given themselves in order to look fierce and brutish. It sure did the job for him. He was big, too, wide through the shoulders like somebody who had been built to fill up a doorway. When he smiled, though, a lot of the ferocity evaporated to leave an earthy ruggedness, the look of a guy you’d like to see in charge of the Scout troop when the blizzard hit.
    The man with the salt-and-pepper beard beside him drummed a little nervous tattoo on the dash. “K, tell me again what in Satan’s crappy name we’re doing here.”
    “We’re doing just what I said.”
    “Uh-huh, yeah. But, you know, we’re super-de-duper out of place.”
    “No kidding.”
    It was well after midnight and they waited for some signal, known only to the driver, parked smack in the middle of the black community. A third man crouched in the back of the van with the wood beams and kerosene. “I’ve never done this before,” the bearded man offered.
    “Not many