Forth into Light (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) by Gordon Merrick Read Free Book Online Page B

the shop. Leighton squeezed past the waiting customers and stumbled into sunlight and slumped into a chair. Even under the awning, the heat was dense. It clung to him so tangibly that he felt he could remove it, along with his sweat-soaked shirt.
    “Oh, Christ damn,” he muttered to himself, running his fingers through his hair. The money was gone. The money was gone . What was he going to do now? He forced himself to think bleakly about the subject that interested him least in the world—money.
    As the son and only heir of rich parents, he had never given much thought to creating an “estate” or whatever it was people were supposed to do. He had spent freely in the big years and his reserves had quickly dwindled when his last two books had failed to earn anything like what he had been accustomed to making. Still the picture wasn’t all black. He had provided for Jeff’s and Kate’s educations by setting up trusts for them. He carried a lot of insurance for Sarah. It had some cash-in value, but he was vague about just how it worked. It would take weeks of tiresome correspondence with the family friend who managed such things to realize anything from whatever assets he had left. The missing money was all the immediately available cash he had. What was he supposed to do until he found more?
    Work. That was what he wanted to do. He had to be free to work. How was he to finish the new book if he had to spend the next month or two trying to rake up more money?
    He felt the prickling of fear down his spine and turned restlessly in his chair, looking for his beer. A small boy with an apron flapping around his ankles approached the table and set down a bottle and a glass. George poured it out gratefully with hands that still shook. The first cold swallow soothed his spirit and he took a long breath of relief.
    At least they were here and not trying to be grand in some city. One of the things he had liked best about it here was that you could spend money all day without thinking about it and end up with change from a couple of dollars. If you had a couple of dollars. The shopkeepers would carry him indefinitely, but he still had to give people bits of metal and paper for certain things. Why not use leaves or blades of grass? Maybe the Mills-Martins would lend him some of the stuff. Jesus. Had it come to that? Sponging off friends? All his debts so far were confined to his professional sphere; they weren’t debts so much as options on his future.
    He wasn’t frightened of being poor; on the contrary, he welcomed it from a philosophical point of view. He had the house. He had put a lot of thought and effort into it, but it was the only material possession that he had ever really cared about. The hell with possessions—but that didn’t mean he was careless with money. Even drunk, he couldn’t have just left it on the table or thrown it on the floor. He had checked with Stavro because he had had to make sure, but he hadn’t really expected to find it. Obviously, it had been stolen.
    Facing it finally, after trying to suppress the possibility, brought with it a nasty shock. If it had been stolen, it had been stolen by somebody. He didn’t know anybody who would steal. There might be thieves among the beats who drifted through but he didn’t know them; he had been with friends.
    No Greek could have taken it. Greeks didn’t steal. The Mills-Martins, the Varnums, Sid Coleman and his girl—everybody was automatically ruled out. Yet the money was gone. Somebody he knew was a thief, somebody with a mental quirk, perhaps. He must make everybody understand how important the money was to him. Whoever had taken it would return it. Or perhaps somebody, seeing that he was drunk and risked losing it, had sneaked off with it as a joke and a warning. It was the sort of thing Sid might do to teach him a lesson, as part of his campaign to get him off booze in favor of pot.
    By the time he had almost finished the bottle of beer, he had