Nobody Move Read Online Free PDF Page B

Log Inn. After thirty seconds listening to his own steps on the pavement he heard her tires screech, and next the sound of her engine rising and falling and rising again, and then coming up behind him.
Stopping for him, she nearly ran him down. While he got in the car the dome light illuminated her dimly, staring straight ahead, stupid-drunk. “I can do anything I want,” she said.

    The first two things she did on entering were to throw her purse on the bed and then go to the nightstand and pick up his checkered bow tie. She examined it and turned to him, holding it to her throat.
Luntz said, “Boy, I’d like to see you wearing just that and nothing else.”
She kicked her high heels off and said, “May I have a glass of water, please?”
He filled the plastic cup in the john and brought it to her and she drained it in under five seconds, gasping between swallows, and headed for the john herself, saying, “Refill.” She didn’t stagger, but she walked very carefully.
Luntz picked up his bow tie and stood staring at it.
On his bed, the woman’s purse started chirping. Luntz said, “Should I get your phone?”
She came out through the bathroom door, grabbed her cell phone from a side pocket in her purse, and went back into the bathroom and tossed the phone in the toilet. She hiked her skirt and yanked her pantyhose to her knees and sat down, all in one motion, and started peeing kind of musically.
Luntz said, “Hold my calls.”
He stood in the bathroom doorway watching, and as she reached back for the handle, failing to locate it, he said, “Welcome to my humble origins.”
“It does stink when it’s wet.”
She came out with another cup of water and drank it down and exhaled loudly. She kissed him wetly on the lips, tasting of booze and just a bit like something else even worse, puke, maybe, but he didn’t care. She drew back and said, “You think I’m just too hammered to know better.”
“Yeah, I do, and I thank God.”
“Nope. I know where I am. I know where up is.”
She stepped away from him and pointed at the ceiling.
“Good.”
“It’s just, it’s just, hey—it’s feeling good right now to be around somebody who’s not full of shit up to his eyeballs.”
“Are you kidding? I’m the most fulla shit guy I know.”
“Well,” she assured him, “you’re not the most fulla shit guy I know.” She grabbed the hem of her coffee-stained white blouse and wrestled it up over her head, but could only raise it so far, and she appeared to be lost in it, wavering side to side in her crimson bra. “Not even close,” she said. Fell backward onto the bed, her arms and head tangled in her blouse, one tit coming out of its red cup and the gray skirt hiked up nearly to her crotch and her feet dangling off the mattress.
Luntz grabbed her ankles and swung her legs around so she lay out straight. He hooked his fingers into the elastic waistline and pulled her skirt and pantyhose down both together. Her body seemed slack. She might have passed out. “Tough break,” he said. But he only meant for her.
He took off his tux, his checkered vest, the T-shirt, the pants.
She was conscious after all. She plucked at the blouse wrapped around her head and got it down below the level of her eyes and looked at him, speaking through its folds, stark naked below her waist. “So—are you a waiter?”
“What?”
“Is that what the tux is about?”
“No. I’m in a barbershop chorus.”
“Like a quartet.”
“No. Bigger, between eighteen and thirty guys, depending on who shows up. I’m in a quartet sometimes too. But the quartet’s not that good. We don’t practice.”
“But not your chorus. Your chorus is good, huh?”
“No. We’re not that good either.”
“Frankie Franklin, are you a loser?”
“Not when I’m lucky.”
“When was a guy like you ever lucky?”
He pulled her blouse over her head and a couple of buttons popped loose and flew at his face. “Shit, honey,” he said, “have you looked at