Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Read Free

effectively than anything you could say to them. And silence can never be misquoted.
    He pushed his way through the door and out into the wind. He had been right about the snow: it was starting to tumble across the highway thicker and faster. Halfway back to his car, he looked back. The cashier was still standing at the window, staring at him with such beady-eyed hostility that he couldn’t help smiling in private triumph. Silence, that’s the answer. Don’t give the bastards a chance to talk back .
    It was then that he was hit in the right side of the forehead with a .308 bullet traveling at more than 2,500 feet per second. His brains geysered out of his brown wooly hat and he was thrown sideways and backward, hitting his left shoulder against the concrete. His legs and his right arm flew up into the air and then he lay still.
    There was a very long silence. The snow prickled onto his coat, and immediately melted. His blood, made more gelid by the cold, crept along the cracks between the concrete forms, southward, and then began to slide westward.
    The Explorer’s passenger door opened, and Sylvia screamed out, ‘Howard! Howard! ’

Feely Heads North
     
    F eely had only $21.76 left which meant that his options were now limited to three.
    1) Buy a bus ticket home.
    2) Buy something to eat and try to hitch a ride home.
    3) Save his money and stand on this corner until he froze into a municipal statue.
    It was snowing so furiously that he could hardly see the other side of the street. He was sheltering under the awning of Billy Bean’s Diner in his thin brown windbreaker, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. It was 3:47 in the afternoon but it could just as well have been the middle of the night. Snow-covered automobiles rolled past like traveling igloos.
    Feely was three days past his nineteenth birthday—a thin, sallow-skinned boy with the big liquid eyes of a Latin romeo, with lashes to match, and a broken nose. His curly black hair was covered by a purple knitted cap, with ear-flaps, the kind worn by Peruvian peasants. He had no travel-bag with him, only a battered green cardboard folder tucked under his arm, and no gloves.
    Without him hearing it, a police car drew into the slush-filled gutter beside him. As soon as he saw it, he did a little defensive dance sideways. But the police car’s window came down and he heard a penetrating whistle.
    ‘Hey, you! Yes, you! Baron von Richthofen!’
    Feely looked around but of course there was nobody else standing outside the diner, only him.
    ‘Me?’
    ‘C’mere, kid.’
    Feely approached the squad car and bent down, shivering. He could feel the warmth pouring out of the window. In the passenger seat sat a bulky police sergeant with prickly white hair and a bright pink face like a canned ham. Next to him, the driver looked creepy and boggle-eyed and smirky, a distant cousin of the Addams family.
    ‘What you doing, kid?’ the sergeant demanded.
    ‘I was, like, reading the menu.’
    ‘No, you weren’t, kid. Not unless you have eyes in the back of that stupid hat.’
    ‘What I mean is I read it already, and I was cogitating.’
    ‘Cogitating, huh? You hear that, Dean? He was cogitating . Didn’t you know that cogitating in public is a misdemeanor here, in Danbury?’
    ‘No, sir, I wasn’t aware of that.’ Feely knew better than to get smart with cops.
    ‘Let me see some ID.’
    Feely reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced his library card. The sergeant took it and turned it over and even, for some reason, sniffed it, as if it might have traces of cocaine on it.
    ‘This all the ID you got?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Thirteen-thirteen, East 111th Street, New York City. You’re a long way from home, kid.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Mind telling me what you’re doing here?’
    Feely’s eyes darted from side to side. The sergeant had asked him a legitimate question, no doubt about that, but he couldn’t immediately think of an answer that wouldn’t