The Poison Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

that way confidence always does.
    “I think I ought to double the fee,” he said. He didn’t like it a bit, but he needed the money. “Did you have any strange phone calls today? Guys hanging around the house?”
    “No, and you can’t scare me off.”
    “The guys I’m thinking about will take care of scaring you all by themselves,” he said.
    She grinned. “Just think, if we run into bad guys, there’s two of us, and we can play good-cop bad-cop.”
    “What the hell is a good cop?” he said.
    I N the car he opened the sheet of paper he’d palmed out of the boy’s desk drawer. It was written in a scrawly boy’s hand.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
    It seemed familiar and he read it a second time before he recognized it. Kerouac, talking about Neal Cassidy—or Dean Moriarty—somewhere early in the book. He was surprised kids still read On the Road, and even more surprised that the boy would take the trouble to write out the passage in his own hand.
    He wondered if Jimmy Mardesich was embarked on what Kerouac had called the Holy Boy Road. If he was, his mother might not be able to get him back as easily as she seemed to think. He’d be too busy burn, burn, burning like a Roman candle or something.

3
    TOO MUCH BELIEF
    P ERRY M UTH SAT ON THE FRONT EDGE OF THE SOFA THE way big guys did when they pretty much wanted to be somewhere else. His bulk cut deeply into the gold pillows. “Mom, please. ”
    The thin woman hovered in the doorway holding a big flour-dusted wooden spoon like a scepter, rapping it absently on a knuckle to give off little white puffs. She looked like a goddess setting up to make some decision that would alter worlds. “We don’t have any secrets in this family,” she said imperiously.
    Oh, yes we do, the boy’s eyes said. He was handsome in a wholesome-looking all-American way, with blue-green eyes and a square jaw, and he wore a jacket with white leather sleeves and a big VN patch on it. Jack Liffey was glad to see they still had letterman jackets, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He’d never had enough of a stake in the way things were back that far to want very hard for them to stay the same.
    “If you could just tell me the last time you saw Jimmy.”
    Things had gone strange from the first, with Faye Mardesich striding up to the front door with him, blinking as the porch light came on and introducing him to the family, and then offering no rationale at all for her retreat to the car.
    “Practice last Thursday, after school. He’s offense and I’m defense, and guys from the two squads don’t usually hang together, but Jimmy and me did. You know, offensive players are your uptight kind of guys. They always want to keep things neat and all in order, and we’re a lot more hang-loose.” He grinned. “We like to bust things up. That’s what defense is all about, messing up the neat lineups and things. Anyway, right after practice Jimmy told me he and his girl had a fight and he was going over to NoHo to see her and straighten it out.”
    “What’s Noho?”
    “Would you like some juice, Mr. Liffey? As a good Mormon family, we can’t offer you anything stronger.”
    She hadn’t budged and didn’t really seem to be offering him anything to drink. Probably it was just her oblique way of trying to nose out if he was a good Mormon, too, or a good anything. He was beginning to see why the boy liked to bust things up.
    “No thanks.”
    “NoHo’s over in North Hollywood. They tried to make this arty area, you know like SoHo or whatever in New York. Most of it’s pretty lame but there’s some places you can go.”
    “Where would Jimmy go?”
    “Jill hangs at a girls’ coffeehouse called the Broom