Read Online Contemporary Gay Romances by Felice Picano - Free Book Online Page B

others do care a lot, don’t they?
    “Be a while before that sheriff comes by again,” I said.
    “I thought you kinda liked him?” Granny-Mama said.
    “I did. Kinda.” Nice-looking man. Big hands. “But he’ll be back. Know why?”
    “Because he never axed you who simonized and kilt that lil’ boy,” she answered.
    Granny-Mama may not know her words right—she can barely read—but she can be smart.
     
    *
     
    He did come by again, that Sheriff Longish, two weeks later, with this pretty little blondie woman all dressed up tight as she could be in a gray suit for men, except it was specially tailored for her. Right off I knew she was going to be trouble for me. You see, they carry dark spots on them, all those who are going to be trouble. It sorta stains their clothing like moss or something, alive and growing, nasty. Hey, I thought. This is interesting. No’s one been trouble for me in a long time. Not since Granny-Mama took me outta that hospital ward in that awful place near Stark. I was kind of excited, you see. It gets kind of boring around here. And she was something new.
    “So! You’re a Fed-er-al-ay!” I said to the blondie woman. “F.B.I.?”
    She looked at the sheriff and he looked at her. On the drive over here, he’d wondered if his stick is too fat to fit into her pussy thing. He don’t much like her attitude toward him and he hoped it would hurt like hell should he ever get the opportunity.
    “That’s right,” she said to me. “So you must know why I’m here.”
    “You’re here onaconna the serial killer…Underwear Man,” I added, giving the secret name her unit up in Birmingham, Alabama, called him, because of how after he’s done sexually molesting his children of both gender victims he always strangles them with the elastic of their unmentionables, just like he did with Kevin Mark Orange.
    “Now, this is a top secret operation,” Sheriff Longish said to me. “So everything you hear and say is among only us three. Understand?”
    I said I understood. Anyway, he was okay today. He’d calmed himself down before he got home that other day and he’d stopped “to think.” Which meant he’d allowed Tommy Thorn some time to get the hell out of the Longish house before he went in himself. The weed smoke was covered over with “Summer Rain” air freshener and Drew Longish was extremely occupied at that time doing his trigonometry homework, for which he only got a C+ and that only because he cheated from Suzanne Hillyer on the last pop exam. His father didn’t even notice the dried jizz on his son’s hairless chest, visible if he’d carefully looked through the half-unbuttoned shirt. I guess he was so relieved not to have caught the two of them in flagrante , as the newspapers write it.
    The blondie lady said there had been five others in her state and one up near Pensacola. The time between the crimes was getting shorter, she said. She knew I wanted to keep some other lil’ innocent kid from being done in. Would I help? Would I tell her whatever I saw?
    I said I would, though I didn’t give half a crap for any of those lil’ kids, in Alabama or Florida, for that matter. I did it for Sheriff Longish. Told him what I’d seen was an ordinary feller. Good looking. Very ordinary feller, just like everyone else, except he favored pale blue shirts for everyday use.
    I then asked to see blondie’s revolver and she showed me as she asked all kinds of questions that I gave her indefinite answers to, whether I knew them or not. Looking at her gun I knew then that a forty-seven-year-old black woman named Mariah Gregg who took in colored’s laundry for food money had been caught in a crossfire and had died two years, one month, and nine days ago with this very weapon up in Dunwoody, Mississippi, in an unrelated case.
    While she took a call on her cell phone out on the front verandah—as Granny-Mama grandly calls that lil’ porch—Sheriff Longish stayed with me and told me,