Songs of Love & Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

moment, her cheeks pink, her lips a little swollen from the kiss, and said, “Right.” She closed her eyes and nodded. “Right. Work first.”
    “Then dinner?” I asked.
    “Dinner. My place. We can order in.”
    My belly trembled in sudden excitement at that proposition. “Right.” I looked around. “So let’s find this thing and get it over with.”
    We started moving again. A circuit around the attractions got me no closer to the source of the energy I’d sensed earlier.
    “Dammit,” I said when we’d completed the pattern, frustrated.
    “Hey,” Murphy said. “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Harry.” Her hand slipped into mine, our fingers intertwining. “I’ve been a cop a long time. You don’t always get the bad guy. And if you go around blaming yourself for it, you wind up crawling into a bottle or eating your own gun.”
    “Thank you,” I said quietly. “But…”
    “Heh,” Murphy said. “You said, ‘but.’”
    We both grinned like fools. I looked down at our twined hands. “I like this.”
    “So do I,” Murphy said. “Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?”
    “Beats me.”
    “Are we just that stupid?” she asked. “I mean, people, in general. Are we really so blind that we miss what’s right there in front of us?”
    “As a species, we’re essentially insane,” I said. “So, yeah, probably.” I lifted our hands and kissed her fingertips. “I’m not missing it now, though.”
    Her smile lit up several thousand square feet of the midway. “Good.”
    The echo of a thought rattled around in my head:
Insane…
    “Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”
    She frowned at me. “What?”
    “Murph… I think we got whammied.”
    She blinked at me. “What? No, we didn’t.”
    “I think we did.”
    “I didn’t see anything or feel anything. I mean,
nothing
, Harry. I’ve felt magic like that before.”
    “
Look
at us,” I said, waving our joined hands.
    “We’ve been friends a long time, Harry,” she said. “And we’ve had a couple of near misses before. This time we just didn’t screw it up. That’s all that’s happening, here.”
    “What about Kincaid?” I asked her.
    She mulled over that one for a second. Then she said, “I doubt he’ll even notice I’m gone.” She frowned at me. “Harry, I haven’t been this happy in… I never thought I could feel this way again. About anyone.”
    My heart continued to go pit-a-pat. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I feel the same way.”
    Her smile warmed even more. “Then what’s the problem? Isn’t that what love is supposed to be like? Effortless?”
    I had to think about that one for a second. And then I said, carefully and slowly, “Murph, think about it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know how good this is?” I asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “How right it feels?”
    She nodded. “Yeah.”
    “How easy it was?”
    She nodded energetically, her eyes bright.
    I leaned down toward her for emphasis. “It just isn’t fucked up enough to really be you and me.”
    Her smile faltered.
    “My God,” she said, her eyes widening. “We got whammied.”
    ....
    W E RETURNED TO the Tunnel of Terror.
    “I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t… I didn’t feel anything happen. I don’t feel any different now. I thought being aware of this kind of thing made it go away.”
    “No,” I said. “But it helps sometimes.”
    “Do you still…?”
    I squeezed her hand once more before letting go. “Yeah,” I said. “I still feel it.”
    “Is it… is it going to go away?”
    I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.
    The old carnie saw us coming and his face flickered with apprehension as soon as he looked at us. He stood up and looked from the control board for the ride to the entranceway to the interior.
    “Yeah,” I muttered. “Sneaky bastard. You just try it.”
    He flicked one of the switches and shambled toward the Tunnel’s entrance.
    I made a quick