Running Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

open the refrigerator and take out a bottle of Coke, which he drained in two quick gulps. He hadn’t shaved and looked alittle menacing. He stood with his back to the refrigerator, arms folded, watching her.
    It occurred to Moll he didn’t look much like the man she’d first seen at Cosmic Erotics, the junior exec with the crisp manner. The night of drinking had given him a strange pale aura, a quality of relentlessness. It was almost a form of competence, this ability to suggest a dark force in one’s own makeup. She’d sensed it while they were drinking at Frankie’s Tropical Bar but the aftereffect was even more telling, this spareness about him, a hard-edged overriding disposition, the kind of single-mindedness she didn’t confront in the course of an average day.
    Howard Glen Selvy. Second-level administrative aide. Assistant to the assistant.
    The small bedroom looked out on a vacant lot that might have been a Zen garden of rubbish. As she knelt at the edge of the bed, Selvy, behind her, put his hands under the long garment she wore and moved them along her calves, lifting the shirt as he did so. Moll bent back to raise her knees and he slipped the garment up over them and his hands moved to her thighs and hips as the phone rang, and to her belly then, and breasts, his forearms tight against her ribs, lifting her a little. She crossed her arms to pull the shirt over her head, the phone ringing, and then sat in the middle of the bed to watch him undress, which he did with a curious efficiency, as though it were a drill that might one day save his life.
    There was an element of resolve and fixed purpose to their lovemaking. He was lean and agile. She found herself scratching his shoulders, working against his body with uncharacteristic intensity. He began to sweat lightly, to take deeper breaths, and his stubble scraped her face and neck. She took her left hand away from his lower back and stretched the arm way back and began tapping on the brass post at the head of the bed, hitting it with her knuckles in time to the rhythm of Selvy’s breathing, and then her own, as the sounds they made began to blend.
    They were tied up in a ball. They were compact and working hard. Who is this son of a bitch, she thought.
    She sat naked in the dining area, her legs extended along the length of an antique church bench, or at least a section of one. Selvy stood leaning against a bookcase, wearing long johns and drinking another Coke. She hadn’t noticed the long johns when he was undressing; obviously he’d removed them in one motion with the trousers that concealed them. She thought he looked great like that, leaning as he was, head tilted to drink, in that archaic underwear, an English lancer on the eve of Balaclava. She took another bite of yogurt, glancing at the telephone as it began ringing once more.
    “Is that the office?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “What do you want to do?”
    “Play tennis.”
    “Great.”
    “Except it’s impossible without waiting for hours or joining a private club or suddenly coming into great wealth and building your own rooftop court.”
    “Ridiculous.”
    “You know where we can play?”
    “Last night in the cab after I dropped you off we went by some courts in this remote little area in Central Park, a hundred feet off the road but in a place where you can’t stop the car. We’ll walk. It’s easy from here. No problem.”
    “You’re crazy.”
    “Do you have an extra racket?”
    “Nobody plays tennis in Central Park just by walking out the door and making a left turn.”
    “Come on, get dressed.”
    She spooned a final bite of yogurt out of the carton she held between her thighs and then went into the bedroom toget some clothes on, hearing Selvy dial a number on the phone. When she was dressed she found him waiting by the bedroom door. He went inside to dress and she called her boss, Grace Delaney, at the office.
    “I couldn’t answer when you