THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

different setup from his houseboat where he and his dog ate mostly alone in his small cramped up kitchen. He’d met her boy, Benjamin who they called Benji, and several of his friends. The kid was tall, wiry, quite nervous like his mother with regular features. His entire life was surfing as his mother’d indicated and she had a difficult time just getting him to drive over the mountain to attend high school where he was to graduate in the fall.
    Though amenable, the kid in long Hawaiian trunks, brown-eyed and very tanned like his mother, kept to himself and his end of the house. He seldom ate with them but took his meals on the run, mostly leftovers from the refrigerator. Only gradually after Hartwig’d been there some time did he begin to join them for dinner. By then too, Hartwig’d declared the dire importance of going to school no matter what one did after it, and he had the kid commuting daily though it’d taken a motorcycle bought by his mother to get him to that point. And all too because of Hartwig’s insistence. She had been censoring that idea for some time simply because she thought if he got one, with the reckless way he conducted himself, he’d soon end up a statistic on a highway.
    “So,” said Hammond. “Hartwig was at least able to do someone some good even if … it was bad.”
    “Yes,” I said, “and quite a great deal of good I might add for someone like that.”
    He appeared to’ve moved right in and taken over. He’d found, in essence, a new household, which consisted of two dogs besides her son. One was her old golden lab named Suzie, who was so crippled from hip dysplasia she had to sidle down the beach like a crab. Her face was hoary and her coat interspersed with grey hairs much like an older human’s. You know, despite what Descartes said about such creatures, they’re being discovered to have moods and emotions just like our own, or greatly similar anyhow. Either nothing can be defined by such exact coordinates or we’re not as complicated as we think we are. I prefer to think the latter.
    The other dog of Sandy’s was an umber colored Dachshund named Shotzee, a feisty little devil who went after everyone or anything if it meant to protect his mistress, though strictly speaking it wasn’t hers.
    “Not hers …? Whose then if it was so loyal to her?”
    “You won’t believe this. It was Brochowitz’s. She’d bought it for him when he’d been living at the beach house. When he’d been taken to the funny farm she vowed to keep it for him until he was released rather than turn it over to the pound. Evidently the one love of the madman’s life besides her (his mother, which he firmly believed), was this dog she’d bought him. He claimed he couldn’t live without it.
    “I understand,” she’d told him. “I’ll bring him when I visit.”
    I don’t know whether to somehow deflect his strong attraction for her, for she’d also made it plain when he did get out he could no longer visit her, or so he’d feel he’d still have something she’d done for him so as to somehow relieve the man’s desperate loneliness. For, you see, as animals apparently have feelings, the mad can also be desperate for affection, or approval for if the two’re not the same thing they’re very close to it. And it’s (they’re) something we all need.
    “And so,” said Hammond, “did Sandy explain all this to Hartwig?”
    “All,” I expostulated, “exactly as I told you.”
    His attitude, of course, was as it almost always was with most things, wait and see. If by the time Brochowitz got out he and Sandy were strongly together he felt it’d be no problem. Like a scarecrow he could keep the madman away. He wasn’t as far as I could detect particularly angry then with the madman and he certainly didn’t disapprove of the little dog. He treated it with special kindness even if it meant to the disfavor of his own pooch that they’d hauled out there with them. The three dogs were soon