Like it Matters by David Cornwell Read Free Book Online

…
    Back at the top of the road, near the train station, I saw this special shadow coming through the night and it happened again.
    My breath came shallow and I could feel my heart had run right to the end of its chain already, and I stood there under a streetlight and I watched her come closer and I begged god that it’d really be her this time, not another mirage—
    And it
was
, it was definitely her—
    That was Charlotte and she was coming right at me.
    She had her head down and she wasn’t looking around. Somehow, I knew where she was off to
    And just when she went past me I said, “He’s not there, hey.”
    She stopped.
    “I mean, unless you’re on the list.”
    She turned around and I saw her face, it looked so soft and full of secrets, and she said, “Oh, it’s you. I remember you. The ice-cream guy? But it’s only seven o’clock.”
    I shrugged. “I just came from there.”
    “Ja?”
    “I wasn’t on the list. One of the dudes punched me.”
    “Okay, well. That fucks that plan then.”
    “Tell me about it,” I said. Then, “I didn’t know you could go out at night.”
    She didn’t say anything. She was chewing her lip and staring down the road. I looked at her wrist and she was still wearing her bracelet.
    I said the same thing again.
    “Huh? Oh, my dad thinks I’m at a concert.”
    “The one down the road there, at the church? I heard it. It sounded jangly.”
    “Ja.”
    “He’s kind of trusting, isn’t he?”
    “No, I’m proud of this one,” she said. “I planned this one all by myself.”
    “Ja?”
    She smiled and nodded.
    “Well, you have to tell me,” I said. “I’m your sponsor, aren’t I? What if I want to talk you out of it?”
    “I know this guy,” she said. “Wayne, this musician. And obviously he’s broke, like all the time, so then when my dad started telling me about this band night they had at the youth church, and how I had a beautiful voice and the Lord wants to hear me use it and whatever, at first I just kept telling him to fuck off, but then I got an idea.”
    She can sing, Ed!
    “I got him to call the church for me and I found out they paid the band, pretty well actually, way more than you’d make playing anywhere else around here. So I found Wayne at the beach one day and I hooked him up with the number, and I told him just not to show up there high, or if he was, just to sit by himself with his eyes closed and his hands together to throw them off his trail.”
    “Jeez. This is like a full-on scheme, hey?”
    “You have no idea. So I got Wayne in there, and then the first week after that I just mentioned to my dad that maybe the church band thing wasn’t such a terrible idea. And I did little things, like I started singing more around the house, Bible songs and hymns, and I’d pretend I couldn’t remember the words and I’d ask him to remind me. He
loved
that.”
    “I’m sure,” I said, and it was the weirdest thing, because she wasn’t trying to be sexy, she was being sort of evil, but this pressure came into my groin and I was dying to hear her go on.
    “And then the next week, this was last week, I asked him to take me along to watch the band, and when he picked me up afterwards I introduced him to Wayne, like as if Wayne was the guy who ran the show, and then in the car on the way home I made sure he saw I was playing with a piece of paper with a number on it. It said WAYNE in big letters on the paper, but it wasn’t actually his number—”
    “It was his dealer’s.”
    “Ooh, you’re smart. Anyway, now here we are tonight, my first gig.”
    Christ
, the way she was smiling when she said that …
    “But how’d you keep him from coming to watch?” I asked her.
    “Oh, that’s the best part. It’s a youth church, no over-twenty-threes allowed.”
    “Money?”
    “Twenty per cent of what Wayne gets, every time he plays.”
    “So what you’re telling me, Charlotte, is that you’re some kind of genius?”
    “Almost. I couldn’t