Bad Medicine by Eileen Dreyer Read Free Book Online

toe. She wasn't about to walk inside and find that maybe the phone was ringing. It was much easier to ignore that way. Much better to sip tea with Sam than sling mud with the newsmen. Sam would have his tea, and Molly would have the regulation kind.
    "How's Myra?" she asked, slowing her step to match his, especially in the heat.
    "She sends her best."
    Myra, Sam's wife, had Alzheimer's. She hadn't made sense in five years. Sam's son and daughter took him to the nursing home to see her every day. At least once a week they begged Molly to talk their father into moving into the home himself. For his safety. Considering what a Bedouin tent the inside of Sam's house was, Molly couldn't ever imagine him surviving the sterile, tiled halls of a nursing home. She'd never told him what his children wanted.
    "Somebody needs to work the soil around your bulbs," Molly chastised the old man, knowing perfectly well that she'd be the one doing it while Sam sat in his wrought-iron chair offering tips.
    "Tea first," he said, patting her hand with gnarled fingers. "Then a nap. Maybe later, after dinner."
    They almost made it across. Down the street a couple of kids were roller-blading along the sidewalk. Pat Breedlove was watering her lawn, and two doors up, Allen Turner was trying to get a huge gilt mirror out of the backseat of his Volvo. The only real sounds came from traffic beyond the iron fence. Voices drifting on the breeze from outdoor cafes, music from passing cars. The air was close, hot, sticky as warm donuts. Molly was just beginning to feel better.
    "Excuse me, Molly? Molly Burke?"
    That took care of that.
    "Don't turn around," Sam suggested, holding on more tightly. "It's probably a salesman."
    But Molly knew that voice. She knew that no salesman was worse, or more persistent. She also knew she'd end up talking to him in the end. She'd just make him work for it, as was only proper.
    "You haven't been taking your medicine again, have you, Sam?" she accused as he puffed his way along next to her.
    "For what?" he demanded. "So the pisher druggist can send his son to school in a Porsche?"
    "You need to breathe, Sam."
    "I need to sleep. I can't with all that money going down the toilet. A hundred-thirty dollars for one month's worth of one prescription. One! I ask you, does that make sense?"
    "Molly, please! A moment, that's all I need."
    "You on something new?" Molly asked Sam as if she couldn't hear the slick-soled wing tips slipping over her lawn behind them like an uncoordinated angel of death trying to catch up.
    "Always something new. Something that lines pockets, you ask me. Something that makes the druggist rich, the doctor rich, the company rich. The poor old men eating cat food to survive."
    Molly chuckled. "Seems to me that this poor old man owns more pharmaceutical stock than Eli Lilly himself."
    Sam chuckled back and patted at Molly's hand. "Something's wrong with that? Somebody besides sharks should benefit from an old man's illnesses."
    "The Irish have a saying about that, you know."
    "They do?"
    "Yeah. Get what you can while you can. Then get out."
    Sam took a last, long drag from his cigarette, until there wasn't much left but ash, and considered Molly with shrewd eyes. "It's just not time to get out," he said.
    Molly couldn't answer. Not for Sam, or for her, not for Pearl. So she smiled and came to a stop so her pursuer could catch up.
    "She won't even talk to me," he complained in a voice that was somehow breathier than Sam's.
    Sam raised hoary, caterpillar-like eyebrows at the young man who had joined them on the cracked, weed-choked driveway that separated Sam's house from Molly's. "Maybe you should try roses."
    Finally, Molly felt like laughing. She did, which made Sam frown and the newcomer blush. "Sam," she said. "I'd like to introduce you to Rhett Butler, St. Louis's newest homicide officer."
    Sam squinted. Scowled. "You're going to interrupt my tea, aren't you, young man?"
    "If I'm lucky," Rhett answered