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"Who knows?"
He watched the way I was looking at him. He wiped the beer off his lips with his hand. "Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the icebox."
"I don't want one," I said.
"What's bugging you?" he said.
"Nothing," I replied.
He picked up a pint bottle of whiskey from inside the open top of his Caddy. It was wrapped inside a brown paper bag, a shaft of sunlight flashing on the broken seal affixed to the cap. He took a hit from the neck and chased it with beer from his Budweiser can. He lit a cigarette and drank again from the whiskey, then ground the cigarette out in the gravel, his cheeks blooming with color. Unconsciously I wet my bottom lip. His eyes wandered over my face and I saw a great sadness in them.
"I'm a bad example. You stop having the thoughts you're having," he said.
"I'm not having any thoughts. I worry about you," I lied.
"Right," he said.
I headed for my truck.
"I'll put the booze up. I'll drive you to a meeting. Dave, come back here. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" he said.
I put on my running shorts and lifted weights in the backyard, did three sets of push-ups, with my feet propped on a picnic bench — thirty reps to each set — and jogged two miles through City Park, then hit it hard back across the drawbridge to home. But I could not rid myself of the restlessness that seemed to invade my metabolism without cause, nor the thoughts and images that kept drifting before my eyes.
There was no question about their nature. They had to do with the smell of perf
ume, the amber splash that sour mash makes when it's first poured on ice, a woman's face framed softly inside the thickness of her hair, the shine of bar light on the tops of her breasts, perhaps a cherry held between her teeth, her hand curved on the neck of a freshly opened bottle of champagne, bursting with white foam.
I opened a bottle of Talking Rain and drank it empty, then showered, put on my pajama bottoms, and tried to read, my shield, handcuffs, slapjack, and .45 on the nightstand beside me. The last of the summer light had gone out of the sky, and in the yard I could hear the bamboo rattling in the breeze and the first patter of rain on the trees. Sometime just before midnight I fell asleep with my hand over my eyes. I had not locked the front door.
When I woke, the room was black. I went to the bathroom and got back in bed. Outside, dry lightning flickered on the trees. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed I was inside a cave, my arm twisted behind me. That's when I heard the rocking chair moving back and forth in the corner.
I opened my eyes and saw a silhouette seated in the chair. When I tried to sit up, my right wrist came tight against the handcuffs that were clipped around it and the brass bedstead. I reached with my left hand for the nightstand, where my .45 should have been. It was gone, along with my slapjack. The figure in the chair stopped rocking.
"I was watching you sleep," a woman's voice said.
"Honoria?" I said.
"Your front door was unlocked. That's a dangerous thing to do," she said.
"What are you doing here?"
"I came in to see you."
My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, but I could see her face now, a pale orb wrapped in shadow. "Where's my piece?" I said.
"Your what?"
"My forty-five, where is it?"
She stood up from the chair and walked to the side of the bed. She wore Mexican-style jeans, gold sandals, hoop earrings, and a white blouse that was fluffy with lace. She sat down beside me, her rump pressing deep into the mattress. "I hid it," she said.
I couldn't smell alcohol on her, nor even cigarette smoke, which meant she had probably not been in a bar. "My handcuff key is in my pants. You need to unhook me, Honoria," I said.
"Why?"
"Because friends don't do this to one another," I replied.
She looked into my face and brushed back my hair, then leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. "You like me, don't you?" she said.
