Read Online Blues in the Night by Rochelle Krich - Free Book Online

found myself back on Hercules, then detoured onto Zeus, a short, isolated thunderbolt of a street that comes out of nowhere apparently only to intersect Hercules. I braked my Nikes to a stop in front of a silver Toyota. A girl wearing below-the-navel, low-cut white short shorts and a yellow crop top was sitting on the side of the hood, her caramel-tanned legs and arms scissored around the lean, cut-off jeans-clad torso of the porcupine-black-haired boy whose lips were locked on hers.
    “Excuse me?” I called.
    They pulled apart and stared at me, unembarrassed. I stared back. She had curly strawberry blond hair, a constellation of freckles splashed across the bridge of her short nose, and a ring in the navel of a midriff as flat as a sheet of wood. He had a row of studs in his left eyebrow and nostril, more on his upper lip. I wondered how it felt to kiss all that metal and remembered that braces had never stopped anyone, including me.
    “A woman was injured in a hit-and-run around two o’clock Sunday morning,” I said, beginning my script.
    “Are you a cop?” Studs asked.
    “Freelance reporter,” I told him.
    “Cool,” he said, looking unimpressed. I didn’t take it personally.
    “A detective was here, but my parents were out of town that night,” the girl offered. “I was babysitting my sister, but I didn’t hear anything.”
    “Were you here that night, too?” I asked Studs.
    “He wasn’t,” the girl said, too quickly.
    I looked at her, then at him. “Is that right?”
    “Yeah.” He concentrated on digging a hole in the ground with the toe of his athletic shoe.
    “You’re lying,” I said, as if I were commenting on the weather, which was pretty damn hot.
    “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said. “You’re just a writer.” Back to his toe.
    How quickly they turn. “No, but Detective Connors—he’s handling this case—is going to ask you the same thing after I talk to him, and he’ll know you’re lying. Why, I can’t figure, unless you were driving the car that hit her.”
    His head jerked up. “No
way
!”
    I waited.
    He looked at her, eyes flashing panic like a neon sign. She sighed. Birds chirped.
    “I was here with Abby, okay?” he said, sullen. “I came around ten, after her sister was asleep. I left around three. But we didn’t see or hear anything. You can believe it or not, I don’t give a shit.”
    “My parents’ll kill me if they find out,” Abby said.
    “I won’t rat you out to your parents,” I promised. “I’m trying to find out if anyone saw a woman around here that night. She was wearing a cream-colored nightgown.”
    They exchanged startled looks. My white plume, I thought with a prickling of excitement.
    “Is she the same woman that got hit by the car?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “So is she, like, dead?” Studs asked.
    Like, “Yes.”
    “Jeez.” He blew out a deep breath.
    The girl licked her lips.
    “Where did you see her?” I asked him.
    “Who said I saw her?” Narrowing his eyes, trying to tough it out.
    I examined my nails.
    “Suppose we
did
see her,” he said a moment later. “Do we have to, like, talk to the cops?”
    “Probably.”
    “Shit,” Studs muttered.
    I wondered if the metal on his face was stunting his vocabulary.
    “Then my parents will know.” The girl was grazing on her upper lip with her teeth as if it were a snow cone.
    “So where did you see her?” I repeated.
    “She came running out of a house,” Studs said, his tone resigned.
    “Which one?” I started to look around me, but he shook his head.
    “Not here. Up there.” He pointed in the direction I’d come from. “On Hermes,” he said, rhyming the name with
germs
. “The wood one with the big windows?”
    My dream house, occupied by Jillian and fiancé. Interesting, I thought. Then I frowned. “You can’t see that house from here.”
    “We weren’t in my house,” Abby said, her face a becoming shade of pink that hid her freckles. “We went to this