The Bitch by Gil Brewer Read Free Book Online Page A

showing in a bright flash as he looked off toward the rear of the church, then back at me.
    “Why don’t you go home?” he said calmly, his voice deep and quiet. “What you running ‘round here for?”
    “Nothing,” I said, too loudly. “Nothing. I was just sitting—out of the rain. The top leaks, you see?”
    He did not so much as look at the top of the car.
    “I reckon,” he said, standing there in the rain. “You hiding, ain’t you,” he said softly, stating it. “You running ‘way from something.”
    I did not speak.
    His great black hand clamped on edge of the door, glistening wet. The whites of his eyes flashed again.
    “I was you,” he said. “I’d go on home. Running don’t get you no place—no place at all.”
    His face was quite sober, watching me, the eyes blinking. He turned abruptly, sloshed back to the wheelbarrow. He hoisted the barrow handles and began trudging off along the lane, down toward the road.
    I sat there a moment. Then I backed out of the lane, onto the road. The man was nowhere in sight. He had vanished.
    I drove around past the front of the church and looked up across the lawn. I recalled it as a Negro church. The man must have been the caretaker, but what was he doing, wandering around at one in the morning? Where had he gone?
    I didn’t know.
    I did know he was right. I started for home. I took the back streets, and once I parked at a stoplight beside a police cruiser before I realized what I’d done. They didn’t seem to notice anything. As it drove on, I noticed that it was an out-of-town police car.

CHAPTER 6
    The idea was to hide the money in our apartment. I worked on that all the way home. It would be best that way. More and more now, thoughts of the money began to come to me: what it was I had in that sack. Two hundred and sixty-some thousand dollars. It kept seeming crazier and crazier to me. It was double the Halquist plant’s regular monthly payroll. Driving down the alley behind the apartment house, I kept bursting into laughter. It was not humorous. Because in my mind was a very real picture of those two dead men.
    I knew I was running on fear. Fear in many different directions. I wondered if I was thinking clearly, and I couldn’t test myself in any way to find out.
    They wouldn’t figure I would head for home. They’d have no idea where I was headed.
    I parked the car on the opposite side of a fence across the alley from the apartment, beside a weathered aluminum trailer that had been there for some time. The convertible wasn’t easily seen.
    Our rear windows could be seen from down here and they were dark. I knew I could leave the money down here someplace, but I didn’t want to. Something drove me to take it along up there. Something else told me I had to tell Janet about it now, only I knew I wouldn’t do that.
    I got the money sack. It seemed heavier than before. I hurried across the alley and took the back stairs through the garage up to where we lived on the third floor.
    I had already settled on the hall closet. Back in the right hand corner, where our winter clothes were racked. We never went back there for anything during the warmer months.
    • • •
    The apartment was dark. I let myself in as quietly as possible. It seemed as if everything inside of me had gone to mush. Once inside, I could hear Janet breathing from the bedroom. The steady rise and fall of sleep.
    The instant I was inside, with the door closed, standing in the gray darkness of the living room, I knew I shouldn’t have come. I had the same feeling here as I’d had when that colored man had told me to come home. He had been right, and not right.
    Then the laughter started again. It rumbled in my chest and I stood there trying to smother it. It burst behind my lips and my whole body shuddered. I couldn’t breathe. Finally the agony went away, and my eyes were wrung with tears.
    I listened. There was no sound. Down on the street a car ticked past, and I listened for