Running Dog Read Online Free PDF

sunlight.
    “I don’t want to talk about the closed-door hearings.”
    “Truthfully, I’m not the least interested. I want to discuss your other activities, Senator. Your reading habits, your family, your thoughts on contemporary life. Your hobbies, your pastimes, your diversions.”
    She took a cab to the airport, and about a minute before the plane taxied out to the tarmac to be cleared for takeoff, Glen Selvy walked up the aisle toward her seat, spotting her and nodding. About fifteen minutes into the flight he returned, told her there was an empty row of seats toward the rear of the plane and asked her to join him.
    She gave him her limpest category of response, a visual autopsy, but eventually followed.
    “Travel to Washington often?”
    “Film gala at the Kennedy Center. I do some reviewing. In New York to see Lightborne?”
    “I may get around to seeing Lightborne, yes.”
    “Nice old turkey,” she said.
    She dozed the last ten minutes of the flight. When the plane touched down she was startled, coming awake abruptly, her hand reaching out to grasp Selvy’s on the arm rest. He looked at her without expression, making her feel he’d been observing her precisely that way all the while she was asleep, and she found she liked that.
    They shared a cab and sat in stalled traffic for a long time, finally reaching midtown just as daylight was fading. Moll suggested they find a jazz club she used to go to years earlier, somewhere in the stunned landscape of East Third Street. It turned out to be long gone but they found a dive around the corner and went in for a drink.
    Selvy took off his tie and jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He began drinking shots of Jim Beam. First he sipped a fraction of an ounce off the top, downing the rest athletically in one swallow. The grimace and flush of pleasure hard-earned. Moll started out with scotch and water. Feeling guilty about the water, she switched to rocks.
    They talked a while about various things they’d drunk in different places they’d visited around the world. A man sitting nearby, with a bandage around his head, said he was too drunk to go home by himself. This meant they would have to take him home. It was the code of Frankie’s Tropical Bar, he said. The man was Dominican. He said he didn’t care whether they took him to his home or their home, as long as they took him home. He said he knew who killed Trujillo.
    “I believe in codes,” Selvy said.
    They went out to find a cab. The man with the bandage around his head walked right into a fat woman. She hit him in the mouth. He looked around for something, a weapon. Hesaw a bicycle and picked it up. In the dark he couldn’t tell the bicycle was chained to a fence. He started toward the woman, intending to ram her with the bicycle or to throw it at her. He was jerked back toward the fence and fell on top of the bike, catching his hand in the spokes.
    Moll took Selvy by the arm and led him along a line of cars waiting for the light to change. At the end of the line they found a taxi and got in. They headed uptown and then west. Selvy dropped her in front of her building and then went on—somewhere.
    Early the next morning he turned up at her door. He strode in, a noncommittal look on his face, and scanned the premises.
    “Welcome to Falconhurst,” she said.
    Brown walls. Espresso machine. Silverplated telephone. Acrylic stepladder. Black banquette. Spherical TV. White plastic saxophone.
    “The walls are brown.”
    “I considered mulatto.”
    “Chocolate-brown.”
    “But finally decided what the hell.”
    “The previous tenant was gay, wasn’t he?”
    “They’re his walls,” she said.
    “You ought to put some plants on the stepladder.”
    “I kill plants.”
    “That type, are you?”
    “They die in my embrace.”
    She was wearing a floor-length rugby sleepshirt. On her feet were tennis sneakers, laces undone. The shirt accentuated her height in ways she thought interesting. She watched Selvy