Joyride Read Online Free PDF

suggesting a movie?”
    “Why not?”
    “You could concentrate on that?”
    He smiled a little. “I suppose I could give it a shot.”
    “Jesus.”
    He didn’t like the way this was going.
    She looked bad for one thing. It was the booze last night and the lack of sleep. She sounded alternately depressed and jumpy—to him at least, though he supposed he was more attuned to her than most would be. But if she was still acting this way tomorrow and the police did want to question her you never knew who might get to thinking what, and that was not good for their…situation here.
    He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected of her. But he’d expected more strength. More firmness. More an acceptance of what they’d done and why it had needed doing.
    More sense of relief.
    She didn’t seem relieved.
    In fact there were times she looked like she’d lost her best friend.
    Which Howard sure as hell wasn’t.
    He supposed it was too early for that. Relief would come later. When Howard was officially an accident and they were safe again.
    Howard would be an accident.
    He willed it.
    He finished the coffee and stood, tightening the towel around his waist.
    “I’m going to go get dressed,” he said. “Think about it. If you come up with any better ideas I’d be happy to hear them. Honest.”
    In the bathroom he went to the mirror and checked the damage. The eye was a little puffy but it wasn’t going to go black on him, thank god. The lip was cut but not too badly, no worse than a cold and chapped lips could account for. The worst things didn’t show. He’d taken a deep nasty bite out of the left side of his mouth where Howard had hit him and his left upper incisor and two front uppers were movable inside the gum and they hurt like hell. He’d been popping aspirin since yesterday afternoon. He popped two now at the hand-cut marble sink.
    Dammit. I don’t like this, he thought.
    What in hell got me into this?
    Carole had of course. Who she was and where they’d arrived together.
    That very strange place indeed.
    The two of them. A pair of failed romantics wanting something back from lives that had each gone down the toilet long ago, wanting something they had missed for a very long time.
    Trying to help each other get it.
    That was what it was about, wasn’t it?
    Howard’s murder?
    He had yet to speak the word aloud.
    He still suspected it was going to be worth it.
    If they didn’t get caught.
    If she didn’t shape up soon they could very well get caught.
    He knew this much—the police always looked at the wife or husband first, and looked hard, if there was any question of homicide. He could only hope that either she’d rise to the occasion if and when it arose or that the police would assume Howard’s death was a hiking accident the way they were supposed to in the first place and let the matter drop. Howard was a hiker, a skier, a rabbit hunter and a sailing enthusiast. Every one of them accident-prone activities to one degree or the other.
    But what if they didn’t?
    Then Carole was going to have to carry the ball.
    And somehow he had to get her ready for that.
    He dropped the towel on the brass four-poster bed and went to the dresser for socks and underwear, to the closet for slacks and a shirt. Some of the shirts toward the back didn’t belong to him. When Howard had left (been kicked out, actually—she’d simply changed the locks on him) it all had happened so fast that a lot of his clothes were still in here, months after the divorce. In fact Howard’s things were everywhere, scattered throughout the house. It had been easy to find things, belongings of his, suitable for the backpack.
    Once this was over it would all have to go.
    He dressed. He felt calmer now.
    Not like her.
    The peak of his own anxiety had passed holding that goddamn bat over Howard’s head after the second blow took him down, and he realized that they had to kill him now, there was no turning back, that they were in it every