Little Elvises Read Online Free PDF

and wait with my lights off as they rolled past.
    But I wasn’t depending on a driveway I could hide in. I was depending on my burglar’s memory.
    I slowed, too, resisting the urge to look at the rearview. I’d see their lights without looking at the mirror, and I didn’t wantto be blinded. But I needed them to be able to see me if this was going to have a chance of working.
    And then there they were, accelerating behind me and closing the gap, and I heard a cracking sound and something whistled past my head and punched a spidery hole in my windshield. I would have zigzagged, but Carol Way was too narrow now, barely wider than my car, so I just put my head down and ransacked the lighted curbside as it slid past, and
there it was
, the first Whitley driveway, and I accelerated past it to the second one and cut the wheel right, too fast, slamming against the curb and banging my head on the roof of the car, but I got it under control and powered up the driveway that pointed to the top of the hill, to the Southern colonial mansion I’d broken into about six months ago.
    And behind me, the Humvee made the turn and slowed, taking the narrow drive at a sane speed, because, after all, where could I go?
    Around
was where I could go. The Whitley’s driveway was a big U that ran behind the house, past a gravel parking area smugly populated by a Lamborghini and a Bentley, and then swung left and went straight back down the hill to Carol Way again, and within eight to ten seconds, that’s where I was, tires hitting high C as I pushed the car’s weight downhill, seeing the Humvee’s brake lights in my mirror, stuck partway up the second driveway, and knowing that there was no way it could get up and over the loop behind the house and back down again in time to catch me before I could turn off and lose myself in the web of streets that crisscross the hills above Ventura.
    I thought for a second about pulling in somewhere and waiting for them, then trying to track them to wherever they’d go to report, but then I looked at the bullet hole in the windshield and chose the better part of valor. I went home.

I said, “He said, ‘Some asshole shot him before I could.’ ”
    “Lemme get these pronouns straight,” Louie the Lost said. He was doing something mildly disgusting with his tongue to the end of a new cigar. Someday I’m going to videotape it and show it to him, and he’ll never do it again. “
He
, the first he, the one that’s doing the saying, that’s Vinnie DiGaudio, and the
him
who was shot, that’s the Brit reporter, Derek something—”
    “Bigelow.”
    “See?” Louie said, lipping the cigar in a way that made my whole face itch. “See how much easier conversation is when you use names? As I understand it, Vinnie DiGaudio told you that some asshole, we could call him X if we wanted—”
    “Let’s not.”
    “That some asshole shot Derek Bigelow, ace reporter, before he, Vinnie DiGaudio, could get around to it.”
    “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
    “And you didn’t,” Louie said. He was rummaging his pockets for matches. “And that the cops are going to come looking for him, Vinnie, I mean, because he told a bunch of people that he was planning to kill old Derek.”
    “Exactly.”
    “He tell you why he wanted to kill him?”
    “Ah-ah,” I said. “Pronouns.”
    “Why he, Vinnie DiGaudio,” Louie said, releasing the words into the air in precisely bitten syllables, “wanted to kill him, Derek.”
    “No. Said it shouldn’t matter, since he wasn’t the murderer. But that I should work fast because pretty quick somebody’s going to talk to the cops about him, Vinnie, yakking about wanting to kill—oh, hell, you know who he wanted to kill.”
    Louie had given up on his jacket and shirt pockets and was now searching his pants, the unlit cigar sticking out of his mouth like a miniature Louisville Slugger. “Always a good way to work up to offing somebody,” he said. “Tell as