(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

could be worse?”
    Childlike and stupid.
    “There’s lots worse things than a little bit of white paint,” Jerrell said grimly, but with a somewhat milder voice. “There’s people in this town that take a situation like yours so seriously, you wouldn’t believe it.”
    He was threatening her.
    Contrarily enough, I was all for it. As much as I now found I disliked Jerrell Knopp, any method that would scare Deedra into dropping her risky lifestyle was okay with me. The woman (and she was a woman in her twenties, though she often seemed much younger) would either contract HIV or another disease, or bring home someone who would brutalize her, if she didn’t alter her ways.
    “Now,” Jerrell was winding down, “I’ve already called the car place to get your paint redone. Just drive it down there. Donnie’ll give you a lift to work, I’ll drop by to take you home, and your car’ll be done in a couple of days.”
    “I can’t drive it down there,” Deedra whined. “I’d die.”
    “You may die if you don’t stay away from black men,” he said, and there was stark warning in his voice. Jerrell wasn’t just theorizing. He knew something.
    I felt the hair on my neck stand up. I stepped into the living room, my dust cloth in my hand. Jerrell and I had a good ole look at each other.
    “Would you drive my car to the paint shop?” Deedra asked, that little-girl look on her face that said she knew she was asking a lot, but it would be too much for her to do that thing.
    “No,” I said briefly, and went back to work.
    I don’t know how Deedra and Jerrell settled it. I buckled down to cleaning, thinking hard thoughts about everyone involved, including Marcus Jefferson. I was willing to bet Marcus was running scared by now. He worked at the same factory as Jerrell Knopp, and if he hadn’t seen Deedra’s car when he left for work that morning, someone at the factory would let him know about it. I figured Marcus was going to be anxious, if not out-and-out terrified.
    My oldest client, Marie Hofstettler, had told me it had been seven decades since Shakespeare had suffered a racially motivated lynching. If I’d been Marcus Jefferson, those seven decades would have seemed like yesterday.
    Deedra and Jerrell cleared out without speaking to me, which was just fine. I finished my work in peace, or in the little peace they’d left behind them. The apartment still echoed with various gradations of anger and fear. It seemed to me that currents of bad feeling were drifting like smog through Shakespeare. My little adopted town had generally been quiet and predictable and pokey. I liked it like that. I loaded my arsenal of cleaning aids back into my car, trying to stave away a gnawing worry.
    My new client, Mookie Preston, was next on my schedule, and I was able to feel a little more cheerful as I drove to her house.
    I’d never worked on Sycamore Street before. It was lined with small white houses with neatly raked yards, in a neighborhood that had sprung up in the fifties, a neighborhood generally considered a starting-out point for newlyweds or an ending-up point for seniors.
    The house Mookie Preston rented was in the middle of the block and indistinguishable from the others. A green Toyota was parked in the driveway. It had an Illinois plate. If the car was any indicator of the condition of the house, Mookie Preston needed me. Badly. The Toyota was dusty and mud-streaked on the outside and littered with papers and fast-food debris on the inside.
    I knocked briskly on the back door, and the same rich, fruity voice I’d heard on the phone called, “Coming, coming!”
    After a minute or so the back door opened and the woman on the other side of the screen door stood staring at me. She didn’t speak. We examined each other.
    Mookie Preston was younger than me, putting her somewhere in her midtwenties. She had very coarse, straight reddish hair skinned back into a ponytail, golden freckled skin, and big, dark brown eyes.