The Night Gardener Read Free Page B

drift.”
    “Here we go,” said West.
    Holiday grinned and squared his shoulders. He was as rail thin as he had been in his twenties. The only indicator of his forty-one years was the small belly he had acquired from years of drinking. His acquaintances called it “the Holiday Hump.”
    “Tell us a bedtime story, Daddy,” said Bonano.
    “Okay,” said Holiday. “I had a job yesterday, a client from NYC. Some big-shot investor looking at a company about to go public. I drove him out to an office building in the Dulles corridor, waited around a few hours, and drove him back downtown to the Ritz. So I’m goin back to my place last night, I’m feeling thirsty, I stop in to the Royal Mile in Wheaton for a short one. Soon as I walk in, I notice this brunette sitting with a couple other women. She had some mileage on the odometer, but she was attractive. We made eye contact, and her eyes spoke a million words.”
    “What did her eyes say, Doc?” said West tiredly.
    “They said, I’m hungry for Johnny Johnson.”
    This drew head shakes.
    “I didn’t make my move right away. I waited till she had to get up and take a piss. I needed to get a look at her bottom half, see, to make sure I wasn’t settin myself up for some horror show later on. Anyway, I checked her out and she was all right. She’d had babies, obviously, but there wasn’t any severe damage to speak of.”
    “C’mon, man,” said Bonano.
    “Be patient. Soon as she gets back from the head, I cut her from the herd real quick. It only cost me two Miller Lites. She didn’t even finish her beer before she tells me she’s ready to go.” Holiday tapped ash off his smoke. “I figured I’d take her out to the parking lot across the street, let her blow me or somethin.”
    “And they say romance is dead,” said West.
    “But she wasn’t having any of that,” said Holiday, missing West’s tone or ignoring it. “ ‘I’m not doing it in a car,’ she says. ‘I’m not seventeen anymore.’ No shit, I’m thinkin, but hey, I wasn’t gonna turn down some ass.”
    “Even if she wasn’t seventeen,” said Jerry Fink.
    “We go back to her house; she’s got a couple of kids, a teenage boy and his younger sister, they barely turn their heads away from the television when we come in.”
    “What were they watching?” said Bonano.
    “What difference does that make?” said Holiday.
    “Makes the story better. Makes me see it, like, in my head.”
    “It was one of those
Law and Order
shows,” said Holiday. “I know ’cause I heard that
duh-duh
thing they do.”
    “Keep goin,” said Fink.
    “Okay,” said Holiday. “She tells the kids not to stay up too late, ’cause they got school the next day, and then she takes me by the hand and we go up to her room.”
    The cell phone set on the bar, before Bob Bonano, “the kitchen and bath expert,” rang. He checked the display number and did not move to answer it. If it was new business, he would take the call. If it was a customer he had already screwed, he would not. Most of the time he did not take the call. Bonano’s business was called Home Masters. Jerry Fink called it “Home Bastards” and sometimes “Home Butchers” when he was feeling expansive.
    “You fucked her while her kids were downstairs, watching TV?” said Bonano, still looking at the cell phone, its ringer playing
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
theme. Bonano, dark with big features and hands, fancied himself a cowboy but looked Italian as salami on a string.
    “I put my hand over her mouth when she started to make noise,” said Holiday with a shrug. “She almost bit through my paw.”
    “Quit braggin,” said Fink.
    “I’m just stating a fact,” said Holiday. “This broad was an animal.”
    The bartender, Leo Vazoulis, wide and balding, with thin gray hair and a black mustache, served them their drinks. Leo’s father had bought the building, cash, forty years earlier, and operated it as a lunch counter until he was