Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) Read Online Free PDF

knuckles of a slim hand knotted into a fist. Without looking up she said, “I guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself. All I know is I’m trying to decide whether I should paint the bathroom in the condo pink and I get a call from Lasko making you sound like a dangerous criminal and he’s making me promise that I won’t let you do anything else stupid and all I can think is I’m almost thirty and I don’t need this shit.”
    “Nobody does,” I said. “Paint the bathroom pink and you can hang that velvet Elvis Presley in there. I’ll do it for you. Let’s go talk.”
    It was awkward. Even making drinks was awkward when it should have been a normal thing. A couple of Scotches on the rocks can be the most normal thing in the world, but the world had changed an awful lot between now and that last margarita.
    And the drinks helped only in the telling of the tale, not in accepting it. When I was done, she leaned back and looked stunned. “I can’t believe it, but I’m taking this personally,” she said. “You’ve been in trouble before, but so many times it was because you were trying to help someone out, or you were hanging around with some of your weird friends and some of their troubles became your troubles. But this time, Martin, this time it really seems like you did it to yourself.”
    “Why? How? All I did was go to a party with a semi-stranger. Maybe my troubles are connected with that decision, but I can’t imagine how my decision is connected with what happened to her. And why is it that Lasko thinks he can trust me, but you want to blame me?”
    “She was beat up with your bass, Martin. Maybe Lasko thinks he knows you, but I know you well enough to know that you don’t leave your instrument in strange places. You’re very careful with that thing. But I suppose if you were messed up enough to be careless with that thing, then maybe . . . Oh, God, I hate this.”
    “Ladonna . . .”
    “I mean, hell, you took a ride with her. If your bass was in her room, then you must have been, and . . .”
    “I’m not sure if you’re more worried that I might have almost killed her or that I might have had sex with her.”
    Her face went red. Every muscle in her body seemed rigid. I moved a little closer to her on the couch, and when I reached out to touch her, she shot straight up. “Don’t touch me , " she hissed.
“They’re doing tests.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. Her voice was icy, hard.
The building shook when she slammed the door.
    I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I just wanted witnesses. Almost as bad as I wanted a cigarette. I mean, I wanted one bad .
    It was stupid. Suddenly my decades-long addiction to smoking was foremost on my mind. It seemed to symbolize the whole situation. Everything seemed cloaked in a blue smoke haze. The road trip. Being back in town. Being a musician.
    Three weeks into the road trip I got a scratchy throat that turned into a stubborn throat infection. I thought about cancer, I thought about mortality, I thought about getting older. I thought about the possibility that I might not get much older if I didn’t give up cigarettes. And my singing voice, never much to begin with, was getting hoarser. Giving up cigarettes seemed like the right thing to do. So I did.
    Right away I became less tolerant. Sound checks that dragged on longer than they should became a supreme irritation, rather than just one of those things. Brain dead promoters struck me as candidates for flogging. Critics, whom I’d never had much patience for, got less and less of my time. And Leo. I had to wonder if his antics had gotten worse, or I’d just gotten less tolerant of them.
    Maybe it was my age. I didn’t worry about smoking six years ago, when I was almost that many years away from being past thirty. Maybe I was just older, and less tolerant, period.
    Cigarettes still seemed like a good idea. The situation I was in would be so much easier to sort out with an ashtray, a lighter, and a