A Red Death: Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Si (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

here?”
    “I saw you drive up when I was across the street goin’ door to door,” I said, stalling for time. “I’m sellin’ chocolate to build the house for our minister. It’s really good chocolate and cheap …”
    While I spoke I reached into the box as if I were going to show him just how good my candies were. But instead of chocolate I whipped out my .38 caliber pistol and hit him in the center of his forehead. As the cowboy fell backward I hit him again on the side of the jaw. He fell heavily and I knew that he was no longer conscious. I pulled the door closed behind me and presented the muzzle of my gun to the once smiling face of Misty.
    “This gun can shout a lot louder than you,” I said. “So I suggest you keep it down and do what I say.”
    Misty was not only pretty, she was smart. She nodded and glanced at her boyfriend.
    “You got some sheets somewhere?” I asked her.
    “In the bedroom.”
    “Show me.”
    She led me through a doorway into a room so small it would not have been large enough to contain a vain woman’s wardrobe. There was a single bed and sheets strewn around it.
    “Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded. She did as I said.
    “Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.
    “We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.
    “But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”
    She stopped cutting for a second.
    When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.
    “You gonna rape me?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”
    “How much they payin’?”
    “Who?”
    “Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.
    Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.
    “I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.
    “You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”
    “I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”
    “I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”
    “What if she do?”
    “Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”
    “You can’t prove that.”
    “Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.
    “D ID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.
    “What?”
    “Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”
    “No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was downthere. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”
    “So when did you get in with the plan?”
    “I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”
    “Yeah?” I prodded.
    “She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”
    “How they know when you gonna get there?”
    “They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”
    “But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”
    “I told you already.”
    “Told me what?”
    “She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”
    “So you wanted to steal