Best Friends by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

Where do you want to go?” Then, because she was still in motion, “Will you stop!”
    She did so, her back toward him, and lowered her dark head. Roy had come this far to avoid social embarrassment, but he would go no farther without good reason. However, she looked very small in the light of the nearest ornamental lamppost, and against his better judgment he was moved by what might prove a genuine distress.
    She turned toward him as he approached. She had as youthful a figure as the teenager to whom he had surrendered the footpath, though she had borne two children. This little girl and boy, seven and eight, played no part for Roy in his affair with their mother. He had seen them only once, at a distance, and he rarely thought about them, for to do so might lead to a reflection on whether he, after all, shared some moral responsibility for the breakup of their family. Francine claimed he was her one and only lover as wife, parent, and divorcée, even though the court had awarded her husband custody of the children.
    Roy suspected that she had always been promiscuous, though he had never caught her at it and never tried to. By the current phase of their association, he wished ardently that she did have other guys on the string and preferred them all to him.
    â€œ He’s inside,” she said now.
    Roy made an instant translation. “Your ex? Okay, we’ll go…let me think where.” He did not mind another trip so soon—he would have had to make the return later on anyway, and driving the little coupé was a treat—but he really was hungry at the end of a long day. But he could understand her wish to leave, and was himself not eager to be seen for the first time by Martin Holbrook though not being at legal or moral odds with the man.
    Francine immediately cast victimhood aside, which was her style. Throwing her head back, her eyes in shadow even larger than nature and cosmetic enhancement maintained them, she cried, “Race you back!”
    He had no taste for such a foolish contest. He would have to let her win it, in a Lincoln Navigator that was dangerously top-heavy on the twisting secondary roads, in the corners of which the MGA, at speed, was as if in the clutch of God.
    â€œBad idea. I saw cops everywhere on the way up,” he lied, then truthfully pointed out that with one more ticket her license would be suspended. “Where’ll we meet? La Boite?”
    Francine grasped him at the crotch and groaned savagely. “All I want to eat is this.”
    In the next moment a figure came hurtling into view, seized her shoulders, and ripped her away. It was a man whose approach had, though apparently at the run, been unnoticed by Roy, though, as he came to believe later on, it could hardly have been so to Francine, who faced the inn from which her assailant had come.
    â€œYou’re a piece of garbage,” the man shouted and, clutching Francine at the throat, forehanded her face with sufficient force to produce more thud than slap.
    He lost the opportunity for a backhand return. Roy spun him away from her and with a reverse punch hit him in the solar plexus with such force that, had it been applied over the heart, might well have stopped it: this according to his old karate master’s warning. He had never used the punch before on any target but the human-size swinging sandbag at the dojo.
    Holbrook (it was either he or an unknown madman), clutching his thorax, buckled to his knees on the asphalt. He seemed to be trying to cough but could not gather enough breath for it.
    To Roy, Francine screeched, “You’ve killed him!” But she stepped well away from her fallen ex-husband.
    Roy bent to Holbrook and told him to breathe as deeply as he could through the nose, expelling his breath by mouth. This was the best means by which to bring much-needed oxygen into the system after physical exertion. But the other man could not get further than a series of