Levon's Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

her face deepened to allow a toothy smile to open.
    “Home with her studies.”
    “This close to Christmas?”
    “She has to finish her language and math sections then she gets to take two weeks,” Levon said as he picked up a fistful of Merry’s favorite candy bars. Mallow Cups and Snickers.
    “Those for her?”
    “Stocking stuffers.”
    “Nothing for Dad?” she said with a conspiratorial wink.
    “This,” Levon said, holding up a Payday.
    “I think Dad deserves something better than that,” Cecile said and bent to root around under the counter. She came up with a black cardboard tube embossed with gold and silver letters.
    “Glenfiddich eighteen-year-old Scotch. Picked up a case at an estate sale. One fifty,” she said.
    “One hundred. Cash. When did you get a liquor license?”
    “Call the cops. They’ll be here in a week maybe. And you always pay cash anyway, Mitch. One twenty.”
    “Sold. I need something for Nate Fenton anyway. Forty for the pump and whatever I owe for the PVC pipes and candy,” Levon said and counted out twenties on the counter.
    “Candy’s on me. You give my love to your little one,” Cecile said and bagged the Scotch for him.

 
     
    Third Entry
12/25
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    Christmas was good.
    M was surprised by the skis.
    Will spend the winter reading the two-volume history of the Civil War she gave me.
    More snow on the way.

 
    8
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    A sound awakened Sefa in the night. A sound that made him think the owners of the house were home.
    He turned to the girl lying next to him on the king-sized bed in the master suite. He touched her naked shoulder. Sefa wanted to ask if she heard the sound, too. She was dead to the world, sleeping off the primo hashish they both smoked the night before out on the tennis courts behind the house. Try as he might he couldn’t recall her name. She was Dutch maybe?
    Sefa slipped from the bed and pulled a pair of baggy shorts over his skinny ass. If the owners were home he’d have to get himself and the girl out of here. Even through his hash-addled brain Sefa could recall the many contingencies he’d worked out for just this scenario. If only he could wake up the Swede in his bed. Or was she German?
    He’d been living here for over a year, rent free. Sefa was a Fijian, a local born on the north island of Vanua Levu. The first time he came to this big house at the end of Otu Point was as a worker in a gardening crew contracted to do regular maintenance on the ground for the absentee owners. On his second visit to the house he simply hid when the crew climbed onto the truck for the trip back to Nadi.
    No one missed him.
    He never left.
    That’s how Sefa Buwawa, bastard son of a shrimp fisherman, began life as a millionaire. The owners were far away and, from what he could tell by playing detective, had not been here since their second child was born. It served them right to have an unwanted house guest. Rich Anglo pigs having so much money that they could have a house thousands of times the size of the apartment he and his eight siblings grew up in and never even come visit. All he had to do was stay in the house when the gardeners came once every two weeks and all was cool.
    There was little food. The wall of freezers and refrigerators in the gourmet kitchen were long empty and shut down. The pantry had some canned goods and he’d lived on those for a few weeks. He put on some clothes from one of the walk-in closets and hitched a ride down to Denarau where the cruise ships came in. He didn’t realize that he’d chosen the wife’s closet to raid. But the silk pants suit fit him reasonably well and he cut a dashing figure; creamy silk against his dark skin set off by a royal blue blouse. He never noticed it buttoned from the wrong side.
    It was ridiculously easy to pick up foreign girls in the hotel bars that lined the streets and embarcaderos. Sefa was a good looking kid with an easy manner built upon the plain fact that he never had anything to lose and