Wild by Gil Brewer Read Free Book Online Page B

hate him?”
    “They didn’t get along, I’m afraid. Elk’s hardly dependable. Carl should have known that.” She told me briefly what Ivor had said about the two men going together in a contracting business, and how Elk had goofed. “You aren’t leaving?”
    “Yeah. The cops will probably be here any minute. I don’t want to be around.”
    “Cops?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Oh.”
    She got up and moved over to me.
    “I wish to hell you wouldn’t go, Baron.” I remembered that she sometimes used to call me by my last name. She looked at me steadily. “I mean it.”
    “I wish to hell I didn’t have to go. I mean that, too.”
    “Will you come back?”
    I looked into the shining, frantic eyes. “You’re lonely.”
    “Yes.” She smiled. “Kiss me, at least.”
    I took her in my arms and kissed her. She pressed tightly in against me, moving her lips, a lot of things. Time quivered. I released her forcibly, holding her by the slim waist, feeling the way she stirred. We looked at each other through the smoke. They were quite a pair of sisters.
    “Lonely,” I said.
    “It’s what you are of the moment,” she said. “The moment’s all that counts.”
    “You need a spanking.”
    “That’s not all.”
    I turned fast.
    “Lee?”
    I looked at her.
    “There’s more to it, Lee. It’s Elk—he keeps me cooped up here—I can’t—”
    “Can’t what?”
    “Nothing. Go away. But come back.”
    I looked at her for another moment. Her face had changed subtly. I turned and walked out along the marble hall. I could hear her breathing back there.
    In a short time I’d got to know Asa Crafford pretty well. Or was it not at all? Why is it, the minute you get rolling you find everybody hates everybody else enough to kill?
    I let myself out quickly. He was sitting on the outside steps, his feet in the drive. He was smoking his pipe, holding the bottle on his knee. He was middle-aged, and his hair was thinning. I wanted to talk with him badly. He glanced up at me, then down at his pipe.
    “Nice night,” he said gruffly. He had a growling voice.
    “It is a nice night,” I agreed. I couldn’t say anything else.
    “Never mind,” he said, thumbing the coal in his pipe. “Never mind.”
    I walked on out across the drive and started along the flags toward my car. Turning, I looked back at those glass doors. Elk Crafford was walking inside. I saw her standing in the hall where I had left her.
    Crafford slammed the outside door. The glass seemed to balloon. Asa Crafford turned, caught at her skirts, and ran toward a long low stairway at the end of the hall. She ran up the stairs. Elk Crafford walked deliberately down the hall, moving with long swift strides. His shoulders tensed. The faint sound of his shout reached me. He ran up the stairs.
    There was no sound. Not even a small wind.
    I walked back to the curb and stood beside the car. There was an easy way to read this thing. I couldn’t believe it was the right way. Too much dream stuff. You could say Yonkers did know Hendrix. Yonkers was Black. He came alone to the trailer after robbing a bank in Laketown, Florida. He needed a place to lie low. Hendrix found out about the money, or maybe he was even in on it. He might have been the unnamed guy the stoolie said Yonkers planned to meet after he crashed Raiford. So Hendrix killed Yonkers for the money. Then what? What would anybody do? They would take a fast plane for South America, or wherever, and that would be that It did not sound right.
    Because why was somebody trying to get me off this thing? If there was four hundred grand, where was it?
    I slid under the wheel of the car, and sat there a moment, with the door open. I lit a cigarette. The tobacco smoke was good. I ate it like a fiend. Finally, I reached out to close the door and a man spoke quietly.
    “Let’s talk.”

EIGHT
     
    H E HAD BEEN STANDING somewhere to the rear of the car, then stepped up as I got in. He was by the open door.
    “Go away,” I