Bluebottle Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning."
    "Hey, he'll appreciate it. Let him get an early start."
    She swung about and fairly steamed out of port.
    Hand against my elbow, Don guided me to the door without seeming to do so.
    "What do you think, Lew? Deal with paperwork later?"
    "Man after my own heart."
    We went down halls smelling of disinfectant, defecation and despair. Stood in a kind of lobby area, voices all a jumble, waiting
     for the elevator. "Take care, Mr. Griffin," Cindy said as the doors closed. I hadn't known until then that she was there.
    "Heading for LaVerne's, I assume," Don said.
    "Ifshe'llhaveme."
    Elevator doors whispered open.
    "Oh, she'll have you, all right. Fact is, we shut down your apartment, hope that's okay. Your things are in my garage. Didn't
     think you should be alone—for a while, at least. You okay, Lew?"
    "Fine."
    "Car's just over diere."
    His trusty Electra, Don took the suitcase from me, stashed it in the trunk among jugs of water, half a case of oil, jumper
     cables, medical kit, sheathed shotgun, as I climbed in the passenger door.
    He fired up the car and let it idle. Punched in the lighter.
    "Always room at my place for you, Lew, things don't work out."
    I nodded.
    He lit his Winston, which smelled like burning twigs, and eased the Buick around and down, past the pay booth, onto Prytania,
     then right towards the river.
    "Scenic route, huh?"
    He grunted.
    "Kind of wasted on me."
    "I doubt it Besides, the air's better over here."
    We planed slowly along the curve of riverand road. The occasional car passed. This is our new Chevy Occasional, sir. As fine
     a car as you'll find anywhere. Twice within a single block we bucked across railroad tracks. Then things grew quiet. Don and
     Lewis in the forests of night. Keeping order here at the edge of civilized space.
    "Guess I'll have to find this Dana Esmay person."
    A block or two later he responded.
    "Yeah. Figured that's what we might be doing. Already penciled it in on my calendar."
    Dawn broke about us as I cranked down the window and felt fresh air cascade over my face. Always new beginnings. Something
     in the backseat, a hat, a plastic cup, went airborne in the sudden tide and flew against a door.
    "Whatever works," LaVerne would say years later in similar circumstances. "You wait and see."
    So you do.

3
    Y ears later I wrote a book tided No One Looks for Eddie Bone. At the time I was laid up with multiple sprains and a couple of broken bones and I was bored. I'd turned my back on a man
     who borrowed capital to open an antique shop on Magazine and because the shop wasn't doing well thought he could lay off the
     payback. I'd been hired as a tutor to help him gain an understanding of basic economics. Knew better than to turn my back,
     of course, following the brief first lesson. I was thinking that even as the Thirties walnut wardrobe, a real beauty, fell
     on me.
    I'd been a fan of mysteryfiction since high school days back in Arkansas, back when I did little else but read, three or four books a day sometimes, Crime and Punishment lit off the smoldering butt of Red Harvest.
    Lying there years later, stove up as my old man would have said, one state east and another south, not so very much later,
     really, diough it seemed easily half a lifetime and altogether a different world, I read a paperback Don had brought me, Such Men Are Dangerous. It told of a sol dier who'd long ago lit out for the territory, away from civilization and all its Aunt Sallys, choosing isolation
     and a life so simple, so pared down to basic function, as to be virtually a human. But the world comes after him there on
     his tiny island and breaks his solitude, shatters the rigid simplicity that holds him in check.
    When I finished the book I didn't go on to another according to habit, but instead turned back to the first and began again.
     That time I reached the last page thinking maybe this was something I could do. It was not a thought I'd had before, and it was occasioned as much as