Read Online A Time of Torment by John Connolly - Free Book Online Page A

watching their cash, he’d taken the second bed in the motel rooms, or sometimes just slept on the floor, and TP would gesture to the door when he wanted some quality time with Corrie, leaving Brown to wander until they were done, or smoke and read a book while sitting on a plastic chair, maybe catch a movie if there was a theater nearby. Brown hated having to do that. It made him feel about nine years old, and an inch tall.
    Brown was in love with Corrie. It had taken him a while to realize this, and attempt unsuccessfully to come to terms with it. He was self-aware enough to speculate if one of the reasons why he’d suggested using her as bait was to punish her for sleeping with TP and not him, but now that they were deep in the whole mess, Brown was starting to regret ever involving her. He could see the strain it placed on her. She was more jittery than before, and he knew that she was having trouble sleeping. He’d tried pointing all this out to TP, but TP was enjoying the money, and, as he pointed out to Brown, it wasn’t like they were whoring Corrie out.
    Except they were. That was the truth of it, but TP either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, recognize it. Just because he and Brown intervened before the main show had to commence didn’t make it any less demeaning and dangerous for Corrie. And so, after talking with her that evening, Brown was determined to find another way for them to make a little easy money. He knew some guys up in Bangor, and he and TP now had enough ready cash to be able to buy a decent quantity of blow. Screw weed: the economy looked like it was improving some, and to Brown that meant the demand for coke would increase. You just had to hang out in the right bars, and make the right connections with the Friday night asshole set, the young men in suits who started drinking straight out of the office, and were already whooping it up by eight p.m. Brown had begun laying the groundwork with TP as they waited for Corrie and the mark to emerge, and he thought that he’d made headway.
    Then Brown saw the guy with Corrie, and alarm bells began ringing in his head.
    ‘Hey,’ he said to TP.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I don’t like what I’m feeling here.’
    ‘Not again. Come on, I told you: I’ll think about the coke thing, and we already agreed this would be the last one for a while.’
    ‘Seriously, man: that dude is wrong.’
    ‘Everybody’s wrong to you.’
    ‘He’s not drunk.’
    ‘He looks drunk to me.’
    It was true that the mark was walking a little unsteadily, but Brown wasn’t convinced. He’d caught a glimpse of the guy’s eyes as he passed their car, and they’d resembled pools of polluted mud. And the way he’d looked at Corrie, like one of those slaughterhouse workers who enjoy torturing the pigs before they die …
    ‘I say we call it off,’ said Brown.
    ‘You’ve got to be kidding. They’re at his car.’
    ‘We drive up, we call out to Corrie, and we offer her a ride,’ said Brown. It was something they’d come up with at the start. Corrie always wore a scarf. If they saw her take it from her neck and put it in her bag, it was a sign that something was wrong, and she wanted to bail. So far she’d done that only once, with a company executive who’d whispered in her ear about what he was going to do to her once he got her back to his hotel room, and it wasn’t anything that Corrie wanted done to her, not even by TP.
    Scarf into bag; TP and Brown rolling up alongside, shouting out ‘Hey, Linda!’ – the name she was using that night, because she never used the same one twice – ‘What you doing? Want to hang with us?’; Corrie apologizing to the executive, because she had to go with her friends; the executive objecting; TP getting out of the car, the executive still mouthing off; TP just about keeping his temper in check, knowing that it could be bad news if they attracted the attention of a passing cop; Corrie getting in their car; driving away; Corrie telling