Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

“All right, Senator. I’ll be glad to.”
    We finished lunch and played a set of doubles. Verisa and I stood the Senator and Bailey, and the sweat rolled down my face and chest in rivulets. My timing was bad, my movements uncoordinated, and I drove most of my serves into the bottom of the net. My head was thundering from the heat and exertion. The air seemed so humid that it was like steam on my skin. If Bailey hadn’t been such a bad player we would have lost the set six games straight, but Verisa managed to keep us only one game behind. I was even proud of her. In her short white tennis skirt and cap with a green visor she was the loveliest thing on the courts. Her legs and shoulders were freckled with suntan, her auburn hair wet and shining on the back of her neck, and you could get a good look at her lovely bottom when she bent over with her serve.
    We went into the final game five to four, and I wanted to beat the Senator very badly. He played confidently, controlling the back line with an easy sweep of his racket in either direction. His thick eyebrows were heavy with perspiration, and his blue eyes refracted a mean success every time he drove the ball into my shoelaces.
    However, I soon learned that the Senator’s revenge for yesterday wasn’t complete yet. I moved up to the net for the final point, Verisa served, and Bailey returned the ball in an easy, high-arching lob. I whocked it with all the strength in my shoulder straight into the Senator. The game should have been over and the set tied, but the Senator caught my drive with one short, forearm chop of the racket, and smashed the ball murderously into my face. My sunglasses broke on the court, my eyes watered uncontrollably, and I felt the blood running from my nose. Through the tears I could see him walking quickly toward me, his face gathered in concern, but there was victory in his eyes.
    Later, Verisa drove us back to the hotel while I held a blood-flecked towel filled with ice cubes to my nose. The bridge was already swollen, and there was a sickening taste in the back of my throat. I tilted my head back on the seat and looked with one eye out the window at the stream of angry traffic along South Main. At the court the Senator had apologized in his most empathic manner, the tennis pro arrived with a first-aid kit and tried to push cotton balls up my nose, a Negro waiter put another vodka and tomato juice on the table and left, and now Bailey sat in the backseat talking about going to the hospital for an X ray.
    “Do you think it’s broken?” Verisa said.
    “No, he just flattened it a little. A warning,” I said. My words were nasal and smothered under the towel.
    “It was an accident,” Bailey said. “You cut the ball right into him.”
    “Why don’t you get off the goodguymanship ethic? Leave the Boy Scouts for a while, at least till we get to the hotel,” I said. “He was out to tear my head off.”
    “That’s hangover paranoia.”
    “Oh, shit,” I said.
    “How many U.S. Senators would spend their time trying to help a thirty-five-year-old lawyer’s political career?”
    “Don’t you know a sonofabitch when you see one?”
    “You’re constructing things to fit some strange frame of reference in your own mind.”
    “You’re an amateur, Bailey. You better learn to recognize sophisticated viciousness.”
    “You’re really thinking foolishly.”
    “I don’t care if you want to look at the world like Little Orphan Annie. But right now I feel like someone took a shit in my head, my nose is full of blood, and if you say anything more I’m going to call the Senator from the hotel and give him my best delivery.”
    “You better take us to Herman Hospital,” Bailey said.
    “I’ve had my nose broken before and I know what it feels like. Just turn it off for a few more blocks.”
    “I’ll have the hotel doctor come to the room,” Verisa said.
    “Forget that, too,” I said. “I’m driving down to the Valley this afternoon.