Big Goodbye, The Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t take her case, didn’t you?”
    “No case. Just wanted to know if I was following her.”
    “So you two were . . .”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Jesus, Jimmy. Tell me you ain’t gonna let some scarred-up two-bit broad that happened to marry well turn you all silly again.”
    I shook my head.
    “You sure?”
    “Her or any other,” I said. “I’m impervious.”
    He raised his eyebrows and laughed. “All that reading’s got you talking funny, fella.”
    “It’s true,” I said. “She’s not a temptation. She’s nothing.”
    “I don’t want to lose you,” he said, “but I can’t afford to have some love-sick sap selling out my agency.”
    “Won’t happen,” I said.
    “You sure? Sounds to me like she’s still got her hooks in you but deep. Maybe you should take some time . . .”
    My greatest fear was that Ray would let me go, that his charity would run out, he’d begin to see me as too much of a liability and give me the ole heave-ho, call me a casualty of a war I never got to fight in.
    “Ray, I swear it,” I said, sounding desperate. “Everything’s jake. There’s nothing—”
    “I don’t know. You sound a little too—”
    “Listen to me, partner,” I said. “It’s not just that I won’t do anything. I can’t. I’m no use to women, and I got no use for them.”
    He smirked and let out a harsh little laugh. It said he knew better. “Now you’re just bein’ silly. Some time would do you good, soldier.”
    “No, really.”
    “Just looking out for you. Who else’s gonna do it?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t want to have to tell him, not ever, but nothing else seemed to be working.
    “Ray,” I said. “I meant what I said. I’m impervious to women—especially Lauren Lewis. It’s no good. Trust me.”
    “How can I? Look how you’re already—”
    “Because,” I said, then paused to take a breath, “my arm wasn’t the only thing injured when I got shot up.”

Chapter 6
    “I saw Lauren Lewis today,” I said.
    Ann Everett nodded slowly, and I could tell she was attempting to keep the concern out of her expression.
    “It’s a small town,” she said. “I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”
    “We move in slightly different circles,” I said.
    She smiled.
    Ann Everett didn’t look like a psychologist—at least not how I pictured them. She reminded me of a co-star in a movie, attractive enough, but forgettable—a character actor, never a leading lady. She had short blonde hair, smallish green eyes, and black rimmed glasses.
    When I had reached her office, a small house on Grace Avenue, I had asked her if we could take a walk, and we were now strolling around the quiet streets of downtown in the soft tea rose glow of evening.
    “How’d you feel when you saw her?”
    “I thought I wouldn’t feel anything . . .”
    “But you did?”
    I nodded.
    I was happy to be outside, away from her small office where we had discussed so many painful and shameful memories.
    When I first came to her, shortly after getting shot, she had asked if she could record our sessions. She was doing a study about the effects of losing a limb on servicemen, and though I had been injured at home as a cop instead of overseas as a soldier, my experience was far more recent than most of the men she got the chance to interview. I had agreed, but always felt uneasy about it, and even after I quit the cops and she stopped making the recordings, I was never able to completely relax in that room.
    “Do you mean . . .” She trailed off, and I saw her eyes move down my body.
    I shook my head.
    “Like what then?”
    I thought about it, gauging how much I should reveal, the lies I was telling myself of far greater concern than any I’d tell her.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “I know you, Jimmy. I know you’ve thought about it. Don’t get cagey with me.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    The warm evening air was damp with moisture, and we both had a light sheen on our faces. Above us