Lady Yesterday Read Online Free PDF Page B

purse in her lap. “Looking for my father for free is enough. Anything more would have to be interpreted as taking advantage. Somewhere there has to be a trade.”
    “Engaged goods are outside my reach.”
    She started to get up.
    “Sit,” I said. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you how big a jackass I can be.”
    “Remembering it and seeing it are different.” She remained standing. “I only came to ask if you’d dug up anything. The other thing just came out. Stick with Georgie Favor, please. It took a long time but I’m all grown up now.”
    “The bigger you get the more you need. No charge for the cracker-barrel philosophy.”
    “I’m glad.”
    “Did you drive the car here?”
    “It’s in the lot down the street.”
    I stood. “Let’s go down and look at the bullet.”

5
    I T WAS A BUTTERSCOTCH-COLORED Malibu, two years old, with a few parking dings in the doors but otherwise unmarked except for a clean hole in the windshield about where the eyes focused driving. The tip of my little finger just fitted it. A rip in the back of the driver’s seat where foam rubber was poking out through the tan vinyl said the gun had been fired at about a thirty-degree angle downward. The glass around the hole looked scorched. I leaned over and sniffed at it, jerking my head back involuntarily the way you do when sulfur puckers your nostrils.
    I looked around. Iris and I were alone at that end of the lot. The black attendant at the entrance was busy adjusting dials on the radio in his booth. Unclipping the Smith & Wesson from my belt inside my coat, I placed the muzzle against the hole. I had to do it with my left hand in order to duplicate the angle. That tied it to someone who was either right-or left-handed, or maybe he was ambidextrous; anyone can fire a shot with his off hand if accuracy doesn’t count. I holstered the gun and opened the door and got out my pocket knife. After ten minutes and as many curses my fingers closed around a hard lump inside the seat and I pulled out a conical piece of lead the size of a fat eraser. The tip was flattened slightly.
    “What will that tell anyone?” Iris asked.
    “Nothing, if our boy didn’t shoot someone with the same gun fairly recently.” I straightened, brushing pills of yellow foam rubber off my coat, wrapped the bullet in my handkerchief, and put it in my coat pocket. “If he did, ballistics will have it on file at thirteen hundred.”
    “Police.” She said it the way you might expect her to, given her background.
    “As a rule I don’t get any better treatment from them than you did when you were working,” I said. “Worse, probably. But I’ve got a pipeline of a sort. He doesn’t have to know where the bullet came from.”
    “I like that part.”
    I slammed the door. The attendant in the booth swung his head in our direction, then turned up the volume on his radio. The Temptations rattled the glass in the windows. I said, “Your admirer is still on a warning binge. He doesn’t want to hurt you yet or he wouldn’t be leaving notes and shooting into empty cars. He’s got to come out of the wings sometime to tell you what he wants, or doesn’t want. If we do this right we’ll know who he is before he gets around to it.”
    “We?”
    “Me looking, you staying put. Don’t go out unless you can’t avoid it, and then take somebody you trust with you. And make that list.”
    “You mean like nuts with guns? I had some of those.”
    “I’m not surprised. This town’s full of them. Some of them are judges. I mean like anybody dark or hostile or who acted like his brains boiled too long, or not long enough. You know the formula.”
    “That doesn’t leave many,” she said. “It wouldn’t help. Nobody ever gives his right name.”
    “See what you can come up with anyway.”
    “Do I rate a bodyguard?”
    “Do you want one?”
    She shook her head. The yellow beret was bright against the gray granite around us. “I’m sleeping solo these