The Nomination by William G. Tapply Read Free Book Online Page B

smoke a cigarette, then turned and headed slowly back up the street.
    He took it all in as he drove back past her place: scraggly unkempt gardens, one shutter hanging loose on the front of the house, carport crammed with plastic barrels and cardboard boxes and green trash bags. An old sailboat was parked on a trailer beside the driveway, its hull green with mildew.
    Hypotheses automatically formed in Eddie Moran’s mind. The boat hadn’t been in the water for a year or more. It belonged to some guy who wasn’t around anymore. He figured Bunny wasn’t much for yard work or home repair herself and probably couldn’t afford to hire someone to do it for her. Or maybe she just didn’t give a shit how the place looked. She didn’t have her trash picked up or go to the dump very often. The house looked like it had maybe four or five small rooms—cheap and small, about right for a single woman who made a living giving the same speech about how great dolphins were over and over again.
    Back on Route 1, from the parking lot of a Burger King this time, he was able to watch the end of Bunny Brubaker’s dead-end street. He ate a chicken sandwich, large fries, chocolate shake, and kept an eye out for a maroon VW with a plastic daisy on the antenna until one in the morning. Then he drove back to his motel.
    He followed the same routine the next day. Bunny left for the dolphin place at nine-fifteen in the morning. She got off work at seven-thirty in the evening, drove past the supermarket parking lot where Moran was parked, turned south onto Route 1, and went home.
    On the third evening, the maroon VW turned north onto Route 1. Tonight she wasn’t going straight home.
    Eddie kept a discreet distance—Larrigan’s favorite word, “discreet”—between them. Three or four miles north, she pulled into the gravel parking lot beside a low-slung rectangular building. The neon sign over the door identified it as Jake’s Conch Hut. From the street, Eddie could see that it had an outdoor bar with three open sides and a thatched roof. He turned into the lot and parked in the far corner. He waited ten minutes after Bunny went to the bar, then went over to the bar himself.
    The bar was shaped like a semicircle, and Bunny was seated at the far end. Two guys and a woman were at the near end. That was it. Jake’s Conch Hut did not appear to be Key Largo’s most popular hangout.
    Moran hitched himself onto a stool, leaving two empty ones between himself and Bunny Brubaker.
    The underside of the thatched roof was festooned with old fishing nets. A stuffed tarpon hung on the one wall behind the bar, and a television mounted on a bracket was showing a baseball game with the sound muted.
    The bartender, a kid in his twenties with a neatly trimmed black beard and hoops in both ears, swiped at the bar in front of him. “What’ll you have?” he said.
    â€œBud in a bottle,” Moran answered.
    He took his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, picked one out with his lips, and placed the pack on the bar in front of him. He fished his Zippo from his pants, lit up, and put the lighter on top of the cigarettes.
    He glanced over at Bunny. Up close, he could see the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. But she still looked great. Nice skin, wide, sexy mouth, white even little teeth, and those big blue eyes. She could pass for about forty, Eddie thought. She was gazing up at the television and sipping from a glass of white wine. Christ, is that all women drank anymore? White wine?
    In the old days, Bunny drank beer from a bottle.
    A pack of cigarettes and a lighter sat by her elbow.
    The bartender slid a bottle of Bud and a frosted mug in front of him. “Wanna run a tab?” he said.
    Moran nodded.
    Out of the corner of his eye he sensed Bunny giving him the onceover. He poured beer into his mug, took a long draught, dragged on his cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray,