And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) by Warren Murphy Read Free Book Online

You can climb on me and I’ll walk you around the pool. Or not walk you around the pool , whichever you prefer.”
    “Will you explain it to Chico? When she sends her family of Samurai warriors around to remove our heads?”
    Felicia sighed, a sigh that raised her bosom and lowered it again. Trace thought it was one of the two or three best sighs he had ever seen sighed.
    “Rejected again,” she said.
    “Not that I love you less but that I love life more,” he said.
    She threw her arms around his neck and tried to insert her breasts into his chest cavity.
    “Well, feel me up a little bit anyway,” she said and kissed him on the mouth hard.
    “How come your door’s open?” he asked “Your gate too?”
    She shrugged, one of the half-dozen really great shrugs. “Nothing left to steal,” she said. “You here on work?”
    “Yeah. You know, Felicia, I’m sorry about this, but once in a while my company gets a bug up its butt and I’ve got to check things out.”
    “Not your company,” Felicia said. “That horrible little Munchkin, what’s his name?”
    “Groucho.”
    “Marks. Right. Walter Marks. I hope he’s heavily insured.”
    “Who’s your company?” Trace asked, nodding toward the other end of the pool.
    “Usual crowd of hangers-on. Come on. If you’re not going to jump my bones, I guess I ought to introduce you. But listen, if you change your mind and want to trick, we can go inside. You piss me off, Trace. I’m a fucking countess. I can get any man I want and you keep turning me down.”
    “That’s why you keep coming back,” Trace said. “I’m different.” He looked down at her. “God, what, a set of knobs. I’m weakening.”
    “Eat your heart out, faggot,” she said, took his hand, and walked him toward the back of the enclosed patio, sealed off in the rear by a wooden wall that matched the rough unhewn wood of the stucco house’s exterior trim.
    As he walked alongside her, Trace looked past her bosom and saw the sliding doors that led to the living room, and before them the small square goldfish pond with the large ceramic fish sculpture alongside it. The pond itself was filled with plants and floating lily pads, and the water seemed green and murky. He wondered if it held any fish. He had had an aquarium as a young boy, and whenever the water turned that color, the fish went belly-up. He-heard a squawking sound near his head and looked up to see two parrots sitting in a tree.
    “Hey, they chained?” Trace asked.
    “No. They’re quite gentle,” Felicia said. “Eat right out of your hand.”
    “Yeah. Your palm. No, thank you.”
    They were at the feet of two people who lay side by side on a double-width chaise longue. The man was short and bald, but he made up for the scarcity of hair on his head by a surplus of it all over his body. Even his kneecaps were hairy. The woman next to him was short and dumpy. She wore a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt and her legs looked like the “before” advertisements from a cellulite clinic. If you are what you eat, Trace thought, this woman has been eating nothing but orange peels all her life.
    “These two things are the Neddlemans,” Felicia said. “They say they’re in shipping, but basically they’re just a pair of spongers who go anywhere there’s a free meal.”
    Neddleman removed a pair of red eye-shields that had made him look like an extra from The Village of the Damned . With his right thumb and forefinger, he made a mock effort to pry open his right eye, bloodshot and rheumy. He fixed his eye on Trace, mumbled “Charmed, I’m sure” in a basso-profundo voice, closed his eye, and replaced his eye shields. His wife lowered her sunglasses and looked at Trace.
    “Actually, we are in shipping,” she said. “Felicia just has a strange sense of humor. Who are you?”
    “Devlin Tracy.”
    “What are you in?”
    Trace hated people who asked him what he was “in.” “Ladies’ underwear, when I’m lucky. Most of the