The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page B

the same time he felt ready to explode with the sheer animal joy of being alive.  He thought he might just wait up for the sunrise.  Why not?
    By the time he had made it back to the roadhouse and put everything away—orange juice, a jar of spaghetti sauce, in Beth’s honor a six-pack of Coors, two quart bottles of ginger ale, a pound of sweet butter, a couple of frozen dinners—his lungs were perishing for a smoke.  It was a filthy habit.  Beth didn’t smoke, although she hadn’t said anything.  Maybe he should give it up.
    But not tonight.  He didn’t feel virtuous.  He felt wicked.  He liked feeling wicked.  He was the T. Boone Pickens of sex, king of the hostile takeover.
    Balls.  There hadn’t been anything even remotely hostile about it.  She had just about handed herself over to him.
    He had never had a woman who really, really wanted him like that—just come into my bed, Big Boy, because I have this bad, aching need and only you will do.  There wasn’t anything life had to offer any better than that.
    He put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.  He decided he wanted to feel the cool night air on his face, and listen to the bullfrogs.  He would have his smoke out on the dance floor and then go to bed.  To hell with the sunrise.
    He walked through the main room, not bothering to turn on the lights, and actually had his hand on the latch of the glass door when he saw through it a flicker of reddish light.
    It was perhaps forty feet beyond the door.  The light hovered in the air for a moment, then moved in a slow arc, disappeared and them came into view again.
    It was the tip of a lit cigarette.  He was sure of it.  He couldn’t really see anything in that darkness, not even shapes, but he had a sense of someone sitting on one of the lawn chairs.
    He watched with a kind of paralyzed fascination for several seconds before it occurred to him that he had only to switch on the floodlights to see who it was.
    The light switch was on the wall opposite, about fifteen feet from the door.  He walked over, felt around in the darkness for a moment, and snicked it on.  When he got back to the glass door—how long did that take? a second? a second and a half?—he saw there was no one.  The lawn chair was precisely where he had expected to see it, but there was no one in it.
    “Nobody can move that fast,” he thought.  “Therefore there never was anyone.  Q.E.D.  Maybe what I saw was a firefly.”
    He had never seen a firefly, so it struck him as a real possibility.
    He opened the door and went outside.  Once he left the house, and had stepped into the area where the flood lamps made bands of hard, yellow light, he could see the traces of cigarette smoke curling up through the empty air.

     
Chapter 5
    June 21, 1990
    “Louise, I’m takin’ the dog.”
    Leo Galatina stood on his porch, hooking a chain leash to the collar of his ancient black poodle, waiting for an answer.  God damned woman, she might let someone know she was alive in there.
    “I’m takin’ the dog for a walk, dammit!”
    Still no answer.  Leo shrugged in resigned disgust and started down the porch steps.  It was the same each evening:  he and the dog went out for a little stroll after dinner, no more than forty minutes there and back, and Louise never came out to see them off.  She would wait until they were gone and then come out and park her fat ass on one of the wicker porch chairs so she could be there waiting like God’s vengeance when they got back, but she always hid in the bathroom when they left.  It was because of the dog—she was slighting the fucking dog.  Goddam stupid bitch.
    He paid her good money to look after them, but all you had to do was screw a woman a couple of times—just a couple of times—and she starts giving herself airs like she’s lady of the manor.  She didn’t like the dog because once in a while the dog forgot himself and did his business on the carpet.  Well, the dog