Short Squeeze by Chris Knopf Read Free Book Online Page A

him.
    He set me on my feet and stepped back a bit. I felt around my robe to make sure everything was still contained like it was supposed to be.
    “Hi, Jackie. Looks like you’re ahead of schedule. For you.”
    Harry was born with a clock in his head. It was so accurate I sometimes thought his head
was
a clock. And it mattered to him, being on time. Sticking to schedules. Executing exactly what you planned to execute before you launched your day.
    I understood none of these things.
    “My alarm went off at the wrong time,” I lied by reflex.
    “You have the worst luck with alarms. Coffee?”
    I cleared a spot for him on one of the couches and made a pot of so-called fresh ground bought at a supermarket a month before. Then I attacked my wet hair with the industrial-strength hair dryer my hairdresser had bought for me, probably breaking a solemn covenant that could banish him forever from Fire Island.
    When I got back to the living room, mostly dressed and ready to go, Harry was sitting with his mile-long legs nestled in a pile of magazines on the coffee table, reading a lingerie catalog I didn’t know I had.
    “Playboy’s
got nothing on this stuff,” he said.
    “You look great, Harry,” I told him honestly. “I’m glad you called.”
    He lit up a half-powered version of the Big Grin.
    “Me, too, Jackie. Let’s roll.”
    I spent the first half hour in the car messing around with stuff on the dashboard, adjusting my seat with little buttons that offered infinite variation, programming the radio to something beyond AM news and indie rock, setting the climate control to precise temperature and humidity, and testing the ability of the windows to suck out cigarette smoke.
    “I’m thinking of getting one of these,” I said. “Just checking it out.”
    “That’s okay,” he said. “My eight-year-old niece does the same thing.”
    I sat back and concentrated on looking at the Long Island scenery. We were going through the Pine Barrens, a lot of which had burned in a big fire in the 1990s. A carpet of new growth had formed, but it looked so new and the stalks of sizzled pines so forlorn. I said as much to Harry.
    “The sandy soil provides limited nourishment,” he said. “Trees grow more slowly, and can only reach a certain size. It’s like a bonsai forest.”
    “And now it’s all burnt up. How sad,” I said.
    “Why sad? The trees don’t think they’re deprived. They’re still alive, growing fresh new branches up from the root system. The carbon freed from the fire enriches the soil, and the burned-off canopy lets in lots of light, diversifying the undergrowth. Critters love it in there. It might look like a wasteland, but in fact it’s ten times more biologically vibrant than a mature forest.”
    For Harry, the glass is half full if there is a molecule of water vapor floating nearby. When we were together it got to be a private game show of mine:
Guess the Bright Side!
starring Harry Goodlander. I blamed it on his being an air force brat, growing up around can-do guys whose ultimate aspiration was to fly faster, farther, and more recklessly than the other guy or die trying–falling to a fiery death singing “America the Beautiful” and/or whooping loudly.
    “So, what’re we doing?” he asked as we crossed into the strip-developmentparadise of western Suffolk County. “Or is that client confidential?”
    I filled him in on every detail I could remember about the case with no effort to protect confidences, client or otherwise. I even told him how I felt about Fuzzy Wolsonowicz, leaving out my own wimp factor. I might’ve been more secure having him along, but I wasn’t about to reinforce stereotypes. Even with an enlightened guy like Harry.
    I’m terrible at finding my way when I’m driving, but I’m a homing pigeon if I can read a map in the passenger’s seat. There wasn’t much else to look at in that part of Long Island anyway. Dirty white, gray, and beige buildings, mostly grimy and