Heaven with a Gun by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online Page A

store that fit. Her real wardrobe was hardly suited to the role of adventuress she’d thought to be playing. Still, she didn’t want to provoke him.
    She emerged fifteen minutes later in a simple lilac- colored dress, only the deep keyhole neckline in the uncomfortably tight bodice worthy of comment. Jim didn’t comment.
    “Let’s try a different tack today, shall we?” he said.
    She nodded agreeably.
    “Let’s discuss opinions, not facts.”
    “Fine. What would you like to know?”
    “Why do you do these things? What makes a pretty young woman become a common hoodlum, robbing people at the point of a gun rather than earning a living? Why do you risk physical harm to pursue such an infamous occupation? Money? Thrills? Are you simply crazy, or do you have reasons for your antisocial behavior?”
    She squirmed on her seat. “That’s putting it rather baldly.”
    He raked his hand through his hair, sending the last of the obedient waves into open riot.
    “Is something wrong?”.
    “Look,” he said, “I’ve interviewed plenty of criminals: labor bosses, union heads, gang leaders. I ask a question, and they respond with either a threat or an answer. But in all the years I’ve been doing this—and yeah, that’s a lot of years—not one of them has ever complained that I didn’t phrase a question delicately enough.”
    She gazed wide-eyed at him, and he gave a sound of exasperation. “I’m new at interviewing bandits with delicate sensibilities, but just spot me a few errors and I’m sure somehow we’ll muddle through.”
    “Why are you here then?”
    “Huh?”
    “If you’re normally interviewing gang and labor bosses, what are you doing in Far Enough, Texas, interviewing me?”
    He plucked his paper and pencil from the table. “ I’m asking the questions.”
    “Sorry.”
    He threw up his hands, capitulating to the hurt in her voice. “I was exiled here, okay? I wrote an article about a palm-oiling deal between a city councilman and a sewage contractor. It was a deal that made two men rich and left an entire section of the city— albeit a poor section—with a substandard sewage system.
    “And they exiled you for that? That’s just not fair!” she said incredulously, her ire—and her fanny—rising at such an injustice. He pushed her back down in her chair.
    “Calm down, Gilly,” he said with a hint of amusement. “I didn’t get sent here for exposing wrongs. Papers love exposing wrongs. In fact, if we can’t find wrong, we’re encouraged to invent it. No. I got sent here for getting my paper sued for libel.”
    “Oh.”
    “Satisfied?” His blue eyes danced.
    “I was just curious.”
    “As am I. Now, Miss ... it is Miss, isn’t it?”
    “It’s Miss.”
    “You’ve never even been close to getting married?”
    “Yes.”
    He held up both hands, waggling his fingers invitingly. “Could you elaborate?”
    “I was engaged once.”
    “Yeah? What happened? Is he why you started rob—on your life of crime?”
    “Oh, no. He was a fine, honest man. That was the problem. I just couldn’t see explaining my, er, career choice to him. He was very ethical.”
    “Ethical men. God love ’em,” Jim muttered with such commiseration that she concluded a few had interfered in his past. “Why didn’t you just quit thieving?”
    She was telling too much. Her desire to tell him the truth, to have another person know her, to discover if he’d recoil, sneer, or even accept what she was, fought with her need for safety. Not her own but her family’s. The latter impulse won.
    “He was poor. Poor as dirt,” she said.
    Jim immediately noted the change in her tone. A savvy, hard note had entered it. She’s put on the Lightning Lil mask, he thought.
    “Poor and honest,” she continued flippantly. “Salt of the earth. A saint among men, but with no earthly possessions to call his own.”
    “Saints can be like that,” Jim said sardonically, unhappily aware that somewhere in the last minutes