Fool's Flight (Digger) by Warren Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

got to mean something.
    Question: Is a plane crash the best thing that ever happened to Timothy Baker?
    Answer: Take Jane Block to dinner and find out.
    She’s in the book.
    Where the hell is Koko? I don’t really like blondes and shouldn’t be driven into consorting with them. I’m too blond myself to trust another one. Let’s face it, Koko is short. She’s a full foot shorter than me, but she’s smarter than me. She says that’s not much because everybody is.
    Koko is always ragging me that I should have stayed with my ex-wife. I should have kept managing that small loan company instead of moving to Las Vegas and becoming a degenerate gambler. I should have stayed with my kids, What’s-his-name and the girl.
    I think that’s why I like Koko. When she wants to talk to me, she talks to me. My first wife used to want to talk about talking. "We’ve got to talk," she would say and I would say, "We are talking," and she’d say, "No, really talk." And then she’d talk for twenty minutes about talking. By the time she got around to what she really wanted to say, her time was already up.
    I hate that. I just want to talk and be talked to. I don’t like to have plans for talking laid out as if talking were some kind of cathedral to build or mountain to climb. You just open your mouth and let words come out and that’s talking. Koko understands that. She just talks.
    If love were possible, I’d love her.
    Just for that.
    Where the hell is she?
    None of these tapes would be complete without the best and most creative part of the day. Recapitulation of expenses. Don’t get upset, Kwash. I’m spending for two days and I’m spending for two.
    Yesterday: two phone calls to Las Vegas, fourteen dollars. Parking at the airport to pick up Koko, five dollars. Tips to skycaps, five dollars. Somebody had to carry all her bikinis and I’ve got a bad back. Took her to dinner at this fancy French diner, thirty-nine dollars with tip. Total, sixty-three dollars. Room and rental car by credit card.
    Today: phone call to my room, forty cents ’cause I hung on a long time letting it ring; lunch, nine dollars; phone call to Interworld Airways, ten cents; supplies for my room, eleven dollars, Finlandia’s not cheap; total, twenty fifty, hell, I’ll pick up the fifty cents myself.
    Car, room by credit card.
    Two-day total, eighty-three dollars.
    And so to drink.

Chapter Nine

    "Where have you been? It’s almost eight o’clock."
    "I’m not allowed out until eight?" Koko asked.
    "You didn’t leave me a note."
    "You never read notes. If I left one at the desk, you’d forget to pick it up. If I left one in here, it’d stay unread forever. You’d use it to empty your ashtray into. Get off my case."
    " Your notes I read. I always read your notes. I look for them and anticipate them with great pleasure."
    "This no-frills motel of yours cut out paper and pen first thing. This place is so fucking cheap that the Gideons didn’t even leave a Bible in the drawer. If they had, I could have left you a message by underlining key words. In lipstick. There isn’t any pen, remember."
    "All right. Where were you? Did you find the beach? You don’t look tan. You still look yellow."
    "I didn’t go to the beach," she said. "I was helping you. After you left this morning, a messenger came with a list from Brackler of all the plane victims and addresses and Xeroxes of their insurance applications and so I thought I’d go and check some of them out."
    "I knew you couldn’t help meddling. So what’d you find out?" Digger asked.
    "Nothing. I checked the first four names on the list."
    "You had to find out something. Remember Edison?"
    "Yeah, I know. Now I know nine hundred things that don’t work. I know all about that. I didn’t find out anything. Even Edison couldn’t find out anything about these four guys. It was easier to invent the light bulb."
    "How’d you get around?"
    "I took cabs. Sometimes I walked. Do you want to know what little