Act of Fear by Dennis Lynds Read Free Book Online Page A

beating for fifty bucks?’
    ‘Maybe Jo-Jo’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Damn it, Marty, I can’t even buy that. All he had to do was go to the cops. They’d have had a cop mugger so fast no one would have noticed Jo-Jo.’
    ‘So what are you going to do? You decided to be a private cop.’
    ‘I decided to eat,’ I said. ‘A private cop was the only experience I had to sell around here. If I went back to sea, who would take care of you?’
    ‘The way you take care of me you could have picked up coins in the street. But go ahead, worry about who would take care of me. I like you to worry about that.’
    ‘You sound like you want me to make you honest.’
    ‘Maybe I’m getting domestic,’ she said. ‘Or just tired.’
    ‘That’ll do it,’ I said, ‘and don’t scare me.’
    ‘Would it scare you so much?’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s the part that really scares me. I might even like it.’
    ‘I wish I could put your arm back,’ Marty said.
    She was lying there in the dark of the big room, smiling at me from the far end of the couch. Face to face ten feet apart with our legs touching. I touched her leg with my hand. She sipped her martini.
    ‘No one can put back what’s missing, but you put me back into the world,’ I said.
    ‘Is that what I do?’
    She does. Sometimes Marty is the only reason I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes even Marty isn’t reason enough. I get out of bed anyway. There is a very big question in that fact somewhere.
    ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.
    It takes a one-armed man longer to undress. Marty’s bedroom is large, and the bed is king-sized. There is a radio on the bed table and a TV set for watching when she is alone. A neon sign in the street below blinks red and yellow most of the night. Marty likes the blinking sign below, and she likes the noise of a jukebox that filters up. She is afraid of the dark, of hearing no sounds and no voices. She is afraid of going to sleep. In bed she laughs a lot. She plays games. But when the games are over she holds me tight. I know the feeling. I know the need and the fear that fills our world. And now I found myself wondering what Jo-Jo Olsen needed and where he was. I waited in the bed for Marty and wondered if Jo-Jo, too, was lying in some bed somewhere needing voices, afraid to sleep.
    ‘Dan.’
    Her voice was low. I looked. I expected to see her face close in the dark with the expression that she wanted me. She was not close. She was at the bedroom window looking down at the dark street. I got out of bed and went to her. She held the heavy drapes open a crack.
    ‘There,’ she said.
    At this hour the street was all dark. The neon sign had gone off, the jukebox was quiet. It was the edge of morning, and a faint grey tinged the sky to the east. The street itself was the deep black that precedes the dawn. But I saw them.
    ‘Yes,’ I said softly.
    There were two of them. Shadows hidden in a recessed doorway across the street. I knew them. Not their names and not their faces, but I knew them. If we had been in some other country they could have been secret police or assassins waiting for some leader of men. They could have been the thin and starved rebels in too many countries where tyranny still rules. Here and now, on the Village street, they would be none of those things. They were hoods, gunmen, muscle boys; the soldiers of an underworld that was the shame of the country. And from where they waited they had a clear view of only one building – Marty’s building.
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘They must be after me. They won’t try to come in.’
    ‘Dan, I don’t like it.’
    ‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
    The ways of fear are strange. We wanted each other.
    Marty went to sleep just as the dawn came. I lay awake. The two men down there in the street made all this something else.
    I wondered what I had got into for fifty bucks and a kid who wanted to find his