The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallinan Read Free Book Online Page A

the dusk of her skin.
    â€œYes.” He manages to pry free a little clot of four filters, a minor triumph. He lets his hands drop to hide the palsy that seems to have seized control of them. “I was.”
    â€œAnd you had a present for me.” She tilts her head to one side, watching his fingers fumble with the filters.
    â€œAfter coffee,” he says, crimping the paper edges to loosen them. They are almost karmically inseparable.
    â€œIs that my present? In your pocket?”
    He meets her eyes and feels his face grow hot. “Yes.”
    She purses her lips. “Not very big.”
    â€œWell, it’s…no, it’s not very big.” His fingers feel like frozen hams, and the filters are resolutely glued together. His mind is suddenly a large and disordered room with words piled randomly in the corners like children’s toys. “I mean, it’s not—but you said that already—and it…it’s…”
    â€œLet me.” Rose crosses the room, all business, and takes the filters from his hand. She slips a nail under the edge and separates the bundle into two. Then she places the top two filters, still stuck together, between her lips and closes her mouth. When her lips part, the filterscome apart neatly, one stuck to each lip, and she removes them and extends them to Rafferty. Each of them has a dark red lip print on its edge. “The answer is yes,” she says.
    He has the filters in his hands before he hears her. “It is?” is all he can think to say. He stands there, a coffee filter dangling from each hand, the box with the ring in it exerting a supergravitational weight against his right hip. “It really is?” He has to push the words around the soft, formless obstruction in his throat.
    â€œI know what I said when you asked me before,” Rose says, and now her eyes are on his. “I remember every word I said. I’ve remembered it a thousand times. I’ve walked to work, I’ve shopped for dinner, I’ve cleaned apartments, I’ve cooked food remembering what I said, trying to find the place where I should have said something that wasn’t about me, about my family, my life, my problems, me, me, me. I was terrible to you. If I’d just stopped talking for one minute, if I’d just stopped being frightened that I’d eventually get hurt, I would have said yes.”
    â€œAhh, Rose,” Rafferty says.
    â€œI told you we were a million miles apart.”
    â€œWe were.”
    â€œThe only way you could be a million miles from me,” Rose says, “would be if I were a million miles from my own heart.” Her eyes go to the filters in his hands. “Just show it to me. Put those things down and show it to me.”
    â€œRight. Show it to you.” He sets the lipsticked filters on the counter, watching his hands from a distance, as through a thick pane of glass. Feels the cool cloth of the robe against the back of his hand as he reaches into his pocket, feels the plush of the box under his fingertips, but all he sees is Rose, although he doesn’t even know when he looked over at her, and then his hand comes into the bottom of the picture with the box in it, and she holds his eyes with her own as her long, dark fingers take the box and close around it.
    â€œIt’s going to be beautiful,” she says without looking down.
    â€œIt has to be,” he says. “It’s for you.”
    She puts her other hand over the box, cupping it between her palms. “Everybody wanted to marry you,” she says. “Every girl in the bar. They looked at you and they saw a house and a passport and money for life. And so did I.”
    â€œMost of my competition was a hundred pounds overweight.”
    â€œStop it. Just once, let someone say something nice about you.”
    â€œSorry. Thanks.” He can barely hear his own voice.
    â€œBut those girls didn’t love you,”