Little Boy Blue by Edward Bunker Read Free Book Online

who should get a switch across his
ass.”
    ‘Suddenly without warning, the alcohol
and fear worked on Alex’s stomach, and he retched. The rich food
he’d just gulped down spewed from his mouth, followed by a reflexive
cough. The sounds were a magnet. The footsteps grew loud; the light was coming.
It struck Alex in his eyes. He came out of his crouch, turning and running
pell-mell, crashing into displays. He plowed into a glass cabinet, his foot
going through it. It sliced through his pants and cut his ankle.
    The light and the man followed him
relentlessly. Alex ran down an aisle and reached a dead end—trapped. He
whirled, hearing the grunted breathing; the light was in his eyes now, with a
giant shadow behind it.
    “Little cocksucker,” the man
said, closing in on him slowly.
    Alex pulled the revolver from his waistband,
not thinking. “Stay away,” he said, his voice quaking—and at
the same instant the revolver exploded in his hand, sparks leaping from the
muzzle, the sound deafening in the close quarters. The flashlight somersaulted
and hit the floor, spinning its beam in a circle. The man went down, yelping in
shock. Then he said, quite clearly, “Well, I’ll be
damned…” He lurched into the shelf, and it toppled, spilling cans
and loaves of bread.
    The man moaned and writhed.
    “Phil! Phil!” the woman bleated, each call more shrill. Then she began to scream
when there was no answer.
    Alex scrambled over the fallen shelf, stumbling
as he stepped on things, the revolver still in his hand.
    The woman was in the back doorway, but she
ducked out of the way when the small figure came hurtling toward her.
    Alex bolted into the fresh air, running in a
straight line toward the beach. He reached the sand and it seemed to clutch his
ankles. The woman was still screaming somewhere behind him. He never saw Sammy.
He ran until the soft dry sand turned hard near the water. Twice he stumbled,
his panic overrunning his legs. The second time he paused and hurled the
revolver into the foaming surf. It sank without a splash, and he began running
again. The ocean was ahead of him, so he turned left, staying on the hard sand
just above the surf, which occasionally splashed his ankles. The beach was empty
for miles, bordered by an occasional house and the highway.
    A swath of moonlight—like a path across
the sea to the moon— raced beside him, but the lights that intersected
him were behind. He was half a mile away when the blinking red light turned in
the driveway. His lungs burned and his legs ached. He could run no farther
along the beach. He turned toward the moving lights on the highway, looking
back toward the house where three blinking red lights were gathered now.
    A house faced the highway where he approached,
a big old house with a yard and a dog. The dog began to bark. Normally a dog
would have frightened Alex, but he was beyond that now. His dilemma was how to
get across the eight lanes of highway without being spotted. He flopped on his
stomach on the slope beside the roadway, waiting for a break in the traffic and
a lessening of the pain in his side.
    Another blinking red light came speeding along the highway toward the store. The surf drowned the siren until
the light was close.
    It was an ambulance.
    The highway was empty.
    Alex rose up and ran—it felt like slow
motion, as if he were running in a dream. Would the highway never end? Then he
was on the other side, scrambling through bushes up an embankment, falling once
as he went down the other side.
    Looming everywhere were oil wells, a forest
of them, their pumps in silhouette like prehistoric birds scavenging the earth.
    Now he walked, driven by the blind instinct
to flee, not thinking rationally of his predicament but rather suffused with
it. He was in mental shock that insulated him from emotions, though flashes of
panic, pain, and guilty horror cut in for a second or two, pushed out before a
whole thought could form. The sense of destroyed hope was