Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) by Warren Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

said. “Call tomorrow.”
    “I will. I just want to try this other thing first,” Trace said.

7
     
    “ Birinci. Ikinci. Ucuncu. Dorduncu. Besinci. Altinci. Yedinci .”
    “What the hell are you doing?” Chico asked. She was standing inside the doorway to their apartment. Trace was sitting on the floor, facing a bare wall, his knees folded up in front of him, his back to her. He waved a hand over his head, as if gesturing for silence.
    “ Sekizinci. Dokuzuncu. Onuncu. On …Dammit, you made me lose my train of thought,” Trace said as he lumbered to his feet.
    “Please tell me what you’re doing,” Chico said.
    “For your information, lady, I am improving myself.”
    “By mumbling at the wall?”
    “That is not mumbling. That is Turkish. I am learning Turkish and I was counting. Birinci, ikinci, ucuncu, dorduncu . One, two, three, four. Hah! And you think you’re so smart.”
    “Trace. Why are you learning Turkish?”
    “Because I think unless people continually learn things and stretch their minds, they get stale, they get old, they get fat, and their women leave them. Birinci, ikinci, ucuncu, dorduncu, besinci, altinci, yedinci .”
    “You’re making that up, aren’t you?” she said suspiciously.
    “I knew you’d say that, but for your information, I am making nothing up. I am counting in Turkish for when I go to Istanbul. Actually it’s very simple. You get to ten and then you start all over again. Nothing complicated like a new word like eleven. See, one is birinci and eleven is on birinci . Two is ikinci and twelve is on ikinci . You just stick ‘ on ’ in front of the numbers and that makes them ten higher. English should be so simple as Turkish. I’ll have this language down in two, three days at the most.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m doing it all for you,” Trace said.
    “I’m still leaving,” she said.
    “Turkish won’t do it? You mean, Turkish won’t do it?”
    “Not two days of Turkish so you learn just enough words to embarass me when we go someplace. It’s like when you exercise and you promise one push-up a day for a year, except you forget to do them after the first day. Or you stop drinking vodka and you promise to drink wine, and you do it for a day and then you forget and you’re back to vodka. Trace, you are a degenerate who cannot be trusted and that is that and why do we keep having this same conversation?”
    “What can I do to make you stay?” Trace said.
    “Nothing I can conceive of,” Chico said.
    “That’s it. Conceive. I’ll get you pregnant.”
    “Not as long as I’m in charge of that,” she said.
    She turned back to the hall, filled her arms with grocery bags, kicked the door shut, and brushed by Trace as she walked into the kitchen. With anybody else, so many groceries might have been a tipoff that she was planning to stay forever, but with Chico, it was just her usual precaution against hunger, famine, pestilence, plague, or worse yet, missing a meal. As she put the bags down on the kitchen counter, she saw a vase filled with the fresh flowers Trace had bought.
    “The cleaning lady must have forgotten her flowers,” she mumbled to Trace, who stood in the doorway of the small kitchen admiring her. He couldn’t help admiring her. Even more than her face, than her form, there was some-thing about her, something about the light way she moved, the way she seemed to command the air she moved through, that always touched his heart. It was time, he realized. Time to stop fooling around and to bite the bullet.
    “All right,” he said. He sat at the table in the kitchen, and without being asked, Chico filled a glass with ice cubes from the freezer and poured over it from the bottle of vodka that Trace kept in the freezer compartment. The liquid, slightly purple, burbled out heavily over the ice. She set the glass on the table in front of him.
    “Thank you. You like to see me crawl, don’t you?”
    “No, Trace. Just the opposite. I don’t ever want you to