Plainclothes Naked Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened. You realize everybody’s gonna pretty much assume you did it, right?”
    Tina appeared to size him up for a moment, her face tightening, then did the exact opposite of what he thought she’d do. He expected denials, flight, maybe a milkshake flung at his head. Instead—and now he was really hooked—she laughed in his face.
    “What are we, on TV? You think I’m gonna roll over and say ‘Please Daddy Cop-man, don’t hurt me?’ ”
    “What I think is that a guy who was gonna drink drain cleaner wouldn’t bother to pour it over his cereal, you know what I mean? I’ve seen foamers before. A guy’s gonna go out that way, he doesn’t get gourmet about it. He just guzzles.”
    Tina shrugged. “Marvin was kind of a roughage freak. Maybe he wanted to make sure he was regular in the afterlife. Say what you will about Lucky Charms, they go right through you.”
    “Is that true?”
    “Well, I don’t know from experience. I don’t eat breakfast. I need to be up a while before I can chew and swallow. But from what Marv said, the stuff got the job done.” She paused to pull a pack of Viceroys out of her purse. She flipped one out, tore the filter off, and lit up in a single motion.
    “You know you can’t smoke here,” said Manny, though he loved that she’d just gone ahead and fired one up. A family of overweight towheads at the next table was already grumbling “Mickey D’s is a wholesome place.”
    Her response was a smoke ring the size of a Krispy Kreme blown straight at his nose, followed by another that floated through the first. “You’re about to bust me for breakfast food murder, and I’m supposed
    to worry about smoking in public? What’s that gonna get me, an extra half hour on top of life?”
    Manny smiled and sipped his transmission fluid. He was such a sucker for women with balls.
    Tina flicked ash in his coffee. “So you gonna arrest me or what?” Just then the McDonald’s manager, a serious Asian fellow with
    WING on his nametag, stepped smartly up to their table. He stopped cold when he saw the look on Tina’s face. “I’m on medication,” she said to him. “If I don’t smoke cigarettes I break things.” Wing looked at Manny, who busied himself picking ash out of his coffee. The man ager remembered him from his uniform days. People were always expecting the police to solve their problems.
    “Where were we?” she said, when the young fast-food exec was safely back behind his counter.
    “You asked if I was going to arrest you.”
    It was a question Manny’d been sidestepping since she’d told him he’d better have a hard ass.
    “Well are you?”
    “That depends,” he said, more cautiously than he’d intended.
    Tina picked up her shake and tipped the last of it down her throat, tapping the bottom. “On what?”
    He didn’t have an answer, so he just stared at her, furrowing his brows and squinting as though deeper meaning were just oozing out of him. In his mind he looked like Clint Eastwood, but something told him it stopped there.
    Tina fixed him with a mirthless smile. “That something you prac tice in front of the mirror, or they teach that ‘Look at me, I’m deep’ look at the academy?”
    “Tell you the truth, I forget,” he said. “I only went ’cause I couldn’t get into Clown College. I’m actually pretty fucking sick of it.”
    “You lookin’ to get out?”
    She regarded him as much with curiosity as anything else. If she’d reached under the table and rubbed his thigh, or licked her lips, he’d have pegged her as another perpette trying to slut her way out of a fall. But Tina was different. She was just laying it out. He got that tingle in the back of his head again. Only this time his fear had a friend. A little pal called lust.
    . . .

    After their snack, Manny steered back to Carmichael Street in a pre occupied haze. Tina must have been staring at him for a while before he noticed, and when he did, she still didn’t speak.
    “What?” said