Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard Read Free Book Online Page B

married to you, no wonder she wants to be somebody else.
    She was supposed to feel honored a judge wanted to sleep with her. Like she’d made it to the big time and could tell the lawyers who hit on her to kiss off. The lawyers in their nifty suits. “You’re a bright little girl, I might be able to do something for you.” Like what? “Oh, make your job easier.” How? “Oh, put in a word here and there.” She was supposed to see it as her big chance. Wow, get to go to bed with a lawyer.
    At hospitals it would be, get to go to bed with a doctor. A nurse at North Broward had liked the idea. The one Keith visited evenings, an hour or so at a time.
    It was her brother Ray, a surveillance expert, who found out. He said, “If he was clean I would never have told you. But he isn’t, so there it is. You want, I’ll have a talk with Keith, straighten him out.” Kathy said, “No, I’ll handle it.”
    A car rolled past, a dull shape, its exhaust rumbling, and stopped in front of Dale Crowe’s house. Two young guys got out with grocery sacks, one tall enough to be Dale but built heavier, broad through the shoulders. They walked up to the house talking in loud voices, flying high this evening, and went inside. A light came on in the front room, the door still open.
    There were lights in some of the homes along the street, single-story frame houses back among old trees and overgrown shrubs, a low-rent neighborhood no one cared about.
    The house where the nurse lived in Pompano Beach was like one of these. Three years ago—she might still be there.
    The two young guys seemed right at home. Maybe they’d know where Dale was, seven days before going to prison. She should have taken the time, had a talk with him after the hearing instead of going in to see the judge, sit there like a good little probation officer. Yes, Judge… Oh, really?
    Kathy got out of her car and locked it, thinking about the night she drove up to the nurse’s house, in the same car but didn’t lock it that time. She had walked past Keith’s Mustang convertible his parents had given him for graduation, went up to the door and rang the bell. She rang it six times and remembered thinking as she waited, they bought him a car but let her pay the rent, buy the groceries and she never said one goddamn word about it. The nurse opened the door frowning. A small blond nurse in a pink wrap and with a tiny white dog in her arm.
    Kathy said, “There’s something I’d like to tell my husband.”
    The blond nurse said, “Your husband ?”
    Maybe she didn’t know.
    “The one in the bedroom,” Kathy said, moving past her.
    He was out of bed standing naked, about to put on a pair of pale-blue briefs she washed whenever they were in the hamper. He looked at her and said, “Would you mind waiting in the other room,” in that tone of his.
    “I guess I don’t know how you’re suppose to act,” Kathy said, “you catch your husband fucking a nurse.”
    “Don’t be crude.”
    “That isn’t what you were doing?”
    “Why don’t you go home and wait for me. We’ll talk about it later. All right?”
    “I brought all your clothes, your books…”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I brought all your clothes and books. What do you think I mean? All your stuff, it’s in my car, loose, I didn’t pack it. I’m going to take it out and put it in your car. If it’s locked I’ll lay the stuff on your car or throw it in the street, I don’t know, whatever I feel like doing.”
    “You brought all my things?”
    “Everything you own, your books, your catalogues, anything else you paid for, which isn’t much. You can come out and help me if you want, or you can stay here and fuck your nurse or fuck the dog, I don’t care, you’re out of my life. And my apartment.”
    He made faces, frowns, standing there naked with his cute undies in his hand. He said, “I don’t believe you’re doing this.”
    “Hey, Keith, come on. We Latins are very emotional, man.