Dead Ringer Read Online Free PDF Page B

fast one, ‘Start Me Up.’ Something like that?”
    “ Got the one you want.” Brian was a six foot five weightlifter. When he wasn’t doing the music, he was the bouncer. He put on the song Gordon requested.
    “ Come on.” Gordon pulled her from the barstool to the dance floor and she started to work up a sweat.
    Two hours later they were still dancing, only now to Elvis singing the slow one Maggie loved the best, ‘Love Me Tender.’
     
    * * *
    Several hours and several cups of coffee later and the woman was still in the bar. What was she doing, drinking the place dry?
    “ You gonna be okay here, Virge, because I gotta go over there and do my job.”
    “ I think so,” Virgil said. He looked alright now and Horace felt a little better about leaving him.
    “ Just remember, don’t leave till I come back.”
    “ I won’t.” Then, “Can I have some more pie?”
    “ Sure.” Horace motioned for the waitress, then eased out of the booth.
    The woman had been over there for ages. All of a sudden his ass puckered up. He hadn’t thought about why she’d been shopping so far from home. Could the police have been following him? Could the meeting in the store have been a setup? All of a sudden he didn’t want to go into that bar. But he wasn’t a coward. Besides, it’d be dark. If there were cops there, he’d see them first and slide right on out, slicker than rat piss.
    He jaywalked across the street, turned toward an afternoon breeze, a slipstream of cool air on this miserable hot day. Ma would say it was a good sign. Horace sighed, Ma was nuts.
    He stepped into the bar and saw the woman straight away, dancing with some guy. They were the only couple on the dance floor. She had her head on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed. It looked like she was at peace, in love. Striker was supposed to know everything about her, how come he didn’t know she had a boyfriend?
    He passed through the crowd and took a seat at the end of the bar, careful to keep the mingling people between himself and her, in case she opened her eyes. He didn’t think she’d recognized him in the Safeway, probably because she’d been concentrating on Virgil, but his brother wasn’t with him now and he didn’t want to take any chances.
    “ You come in here often?” A girl’s voice.
    “ What?” Horace turned to the woman on the stool next to him. She looked like a hippy from the ’60s. She had waist length hair, parted in the center and she was wearing a kind of flower power skirt made out of that thin Indian tapestry material.
    “ I said, do you come in here often?” She had a voice like music.
    “ No, first time,” Horace said.
    “ I’m Sadie.” She had a boyish figure, small tits, but lips like a sexy model. Her mouth was all Os when she talked.
    “ Nice to meet you, Sadie, I’m Horace.”
    “ That’s your name, Horace? Really?” she said.
    “ Yeah.”
    “ I like it. It rhymes with romance. You look romantic.”
    “ It doesn’t, you know, rhyme with romance,” Horace said.
    “ It could if you wanted.” She leaned into him, graced him with the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen, a cross between an O and a pout. She was the hottest thing that had ever come on to him in all his forty-four years.
    “ I’ve been romantic,” he said.
    “ I bet you have. I saw you watching them dance. Do you?”
    “ What, dance?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ I do, but not now.”
    “ Why not?”
    “ You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
    “ Try me.”
    “ I’m working.”
    “ At what?”
    “ I’m a private detective. I’m watching the couple on the dance floor. They’re married, but not to each other.”
    “ Oh.” Then, “If you took me out there you could watch up close.”
    Horace thought about that for a second, leaned closer to her. “I’m wearing a shoulder holster. I wouldn’t want it to frighten you.”
    “ Why would it do that?”
    “ If we danced and you felt it against your, you know, your chest.”
    “