Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

running, and after fifteen seconds had gone by, it gave him an impatient blast on its horn. He slithered back down the bank, and approached the passenger door.
    The window was rolled down. Feely smelled cigarette smoke and alcohol. ‘You looking for a ride?’ asked a dry, scraping voice.
    ‘Yes, sir. I’ve been standing here forever and I’m glacified. I’d almost surrendered all hope.’
    ‘Where are you headed?’
    ‘I don’t have any special destination in particular.’ Feely shielded his eyes with his hand but the driver remained in silhouette.
    ‘No special destination in particular? I like the sound of that. Why don’t you climb in, and we’ll go there together.’
    Feely cupped his hand under the door-handle, but as he did so, the central-locking system clicked shut.
    ‘One thing, before I let you in,’ said the driver. ‘I want your assurance that you don’t suffer from any unusual personal odors.’
    Feely tugged open the neck of his windbreaker and sniffed. He smelled of damp sweatshirt, and cooking fat from Billy Bean’s Diner, but that was all. ‘No, sir, I don’t think so.’
    The door clicked open. ‘Welcome aboard, in that case. Do you like Jack Daniel’s? Shot of Jack Daniel’s, that’ll make your bells jingle.’
    The Chevy snaked away from the roadside in a shower of slush, and the man put his foot down until the speedometer needle was hovering at sixty.
    ‘Hell of a day to be going anyplace,’ he remarked, cheerfully. ‘Let alone noplace at all.’
    They sped due northward with the snow battering the windshield like a swarm of locusts. Feely glimpsed a sign saying Boardman’s Bridge, but the only signs of human life were a few unlit farmhouses, and snow-covered cars, and fields, and then they were gone.
    The man drove so fast that he couldn’t possibly have seen anything before he hit it. A cow, a parked truck, a fallen tree: it made Feely’s forehead tingle to think about it. He tried to fasten his seat-belt, but he couldn’t find the buckle, so he twisted the belt around both hands like a bellringer and prayed to the Holy Virgin that the road was clear up ahead of them.
    ‘Am I scaring you?’ the man asked him, in that glasspaper rasp.
    Feely said, ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t have to lie to me, son. If you’re scared you should say so. But let me tell you that there’s nothing to be scared about. Once they’ve taken everything away from you, what’s death?’
    ‘I’m not nervous,’ said Feely. ‘I’m just speculating.’
    ‘You’re what?’
    ‘Thinking. Like, if I’m not going to any destination in particular, and you’re not going to any destination in particular, and the weather’s so inclement—why are we in such a hurry?’
    ‘Hah! Because we have to make tracks, my friend, that’s why. We have miles to go before we sleep; and we have a whole lot of very necessary things to do.’
    Feely hung onto the seat-belt as the man steered the Chevy round a long left-hand curve. He could feel the tires losing their grip on the road, and the tail-end of the car starting to slide away. The man frantically spun the steering wheel clockwise, and then counter-clockwise, and the car swayed and dipped and eventually straightened up.
    ‘ Hakamundo! ’ said the man, with satisfaction.
    Feely said nothing. He was scared, but not in the same way that Bruno scared him, after a bottle-and-a-half of tequila. One minute Bruno was laughing and cracking jokes and telling you what great buddies you were. The next he was screaming in fury and smashing the dinner plates.
    The fear that Feely felt in this car was much more abstract. It was like a dream, as if he wasn’t really sitting here at all. It wasn’t the fear of pain; but the fear of not being there any more, of the world going on without him.
    ‘You eaten?’ the man asked him.
    ‘I had a cheeseburger. They gave me beans with it but I have a disrelish for beans.’
    ‘They gave you beans with it, hunh?’ By the dim