Dreams Die First Read Online Free PDF Page A

night.”
    “You were reading your poetry, the window was open and it began to rain. You were naked and you said that the Lord was washing away your sins. It was beautiful. Then you began to cry and said the world was all fucked up because of money and that if everyone had been born rich, there wouldn’t be any problems. That’s when I told you I was rich and I had problems. And you felt sorry for me. That’s when I fell in love with you. No one had ever felt sorry for me before.”
    “Oh, shit,” I said. “I must have been stoned out of my head.”
    “No,” he said quickly. “You were really cool. You made me see things more clearly than I had ever seen them before.”
    “I did?”
    He nodded. “I called my father and told him I forgave him.”
    I hadn’t the faintest notion of what he was talking about. He saw the expression on my face. “You really don’t remember anything, do you?”
    I shook my head.
    “You were on Hollywood Boulevard hitching a ride—”
    I had a sudden flash of memory. “The silver-blue Rolls convertible?”
    “Yes. I stopped to pick you up and we began to talk. I said I would drive you home, but you said a car like that in this neighborhood would get ripped off. So we put it in a garage a few blocks away.”
    It was beginning to come back to me. We’d stopped in a liquor store and he’d paid for a few bottles of wine; then we’d come to my place and talked. Mostly about his father and how his father could not accept the fact that his son was gay. And how he constantly tried to keep the boy hidden from his congregation. After all, the Reverend Sam Gannon was almost as famous as Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman combined. You could see him almost every week on television, preaching to the world that God cures all. Yet even God couldn’t straighten out His son. Jesus did His own thing and look at all the trouble He’d got himself into. I remembered telling the boy to tell that to his father. I also remembered something else. We just talked. We never fucked.
    “Okay, Bobby,” I said, finally remembering the boy’s name. “I just got it together.”
    “Good,” he said, smiling. “Now, relax while I finish dinner.”
    “We’re going to have to talk,” I said.
    He nodded. “After dinner.”
    I turned to Verita, who had been watching us. “We got a shot for nothing. I never fucked him.”
    She looked at me, relief in her eyes. “That proves one thing. Lonergan doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.”
    I slumped onto the couch and reached for a cigarette.
    She stood looking down at me. “Lonergan isn’t going to like it.”
    “Fuck him.”
    “Not that easy. He’s tough. He usually gets what he wants.”
    “Not this time.”
    A shadow came into her eyes. “You’ll hear from him.”
    She was right about that. The knock came just as we were finishing dinner. I started to get up.
    “Finish your coffee,” Bobby said, opening the door. Over his shoulder I could see the Collector.
    He pushed past the boy, his eyes taking in the room before looking down at me. “Got the best of both worlds, haven’t you?”
    “I’m trying.”
    “Lonergan wants to see you.”
    “Okay. Tell him I’ll be over later.”
    “He wants to see you now.”
    “There’s no rush. We’ve got nothing to talk about. Besides, I haven’t finished dinner.”
    I sensed rather than saw his movement. I was a lot slower than I had been in the Green Berets seven years ago, but a lot faster than he could have expected. My knee and elbow came up, the knee catching him in the balls, my elbow jammed into his Adam’s apple. He gave a weird kind of grunt and fell onto his knees. Then slowly he rolled over on his back. His eyes bulged in a face that had turned a strange shade of pale gray-blue, his mouth was open, gasping for air, and his hands clutched at his genitals.
    I looked down at him and, after a moment, saw the natural black color begin to return to his face. Without getting out