the Big Bounce (1969) by Elmore - Jack Ryan 0 Leonard Read Free Book Online

one-button Italian-cut suit on the floor, his stomach sucked in, and Scotch and Lea & Perrins on his breath.
    Unbelievable.
    And he can replace you in a week, she thought. Did you know that?
    Okay. She could pack her clothes right now and walk out.
    She could smash the lamps, the glasses, and the dishes and then walk out.
    She could have Ivory Brothers come in the morning and move out all the furniture and put it in storage.
    But she didn't. She got up and turned the radio on and started thinking about the beach house, wondering if she would like it and if there would be enough to do. After a year with Ray Ritchie the severence pay would have to be more than furniture and a few clothes. You bet your ass it would, Raymond.
    During the first part of June she was content to lie in the sun by the pool and work on her tan; but by the end of the month there had to be more to do than lie around or play house with Ray when he came up.
    The target pistol was fun for about a week. It was a long-barreled .22 Woodsman she had bought in Florida because she liked the look of it or just to have, to know she had a gun; maybe that was it. Her first target was the window of a grocery store way out the Shore Road. She would remember driving by in the early evening, then turning around and coming back about forty miles an hour, seeing it on the left side of the road, closed but with a light on, coming up on it and holding the gun extended in her left hand, arm resting on the door sill, not sighting but pointing in the general direction. She fired three times and heard the plate glass shatter as she sailed past, flooring the accelerator to get out of there. The game was to see if she could knock out a window without really aiming, with the right or left hand, at cottages, storefronts, signs, going by at speeds up to seventy: a shooting gallery in reverse. She had tried boats, firing at them from the trees or vacant frontage, but the boats were usually too far out and it was hard to tell when she scored a hit. Officially Nancy went shooting only four times in June, but it was enough to make front-page Phantom Sniper stories, with pictures of broken windows, in the Geneva Beach and Holden papers. She looked through the Detroit papers but never found a single mention.
    Once, she had almost told Bob Jr. about it but at the last moment decided not to. He wouldn't have got it. He would have frowned and said something dumb. It had been fun though, in the beginning, turning him on.
    While Bob Jr. worked on the new stairway down to the beach, putting in the support posts and nailing on the side rails and steps, Nancy sunbathed on the beach. It took him a week, though she was sure he could have finished the job in a few days. Nancy would lie on a straw mat in her faded light blue bikini and every once in a while look up at him: Bob Rogers Jr. bare to the waist with his cowboy hat and his apron full of nails. His body was dark reddish brown and the hair on his chest and arms glistened in the sun. He wasn't bad-looking at all, very animal, though his stomach was beginning to hang over his belt and in a few years he'd be a slob.
    The afternoon of the third day Nancy didn't go down to the beach. But about three o'clock she stood on the crest of the slope with a bottle of beer in one hand and a good crystal glass in the other, standing in sort of a slouch with her legs apart. He came up and they went over by the pool while he drank the beer and they talked. Nancy fooling around drawing things with her toe and then looking up at him and smiling, once almost losing her balance on the edge of the pool and reaching out to grab his arm and feeling him tighten his muscle. The jerk. He smoked two cigarettes and took little sips of the beer, making it last.
    Bob Jr. was wearing a clean sport shirt when he came back the next afternoon. He had mislaid his level and wondered if he'd left it here.
    After a trip down and up the stairs, acting it out, looking over the rail