Read Online Flesh and Blood by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page B

was sitting across the small glass table which rested between them. She was wrapped in a thick sweater, her long, slender fingers tucked beneath its ample sleeves. “Nothing,” he said.
    â€œI don’t believe that.”
    â€œNothing important,” he added.
    â€œI don’t believe that, either,” Karen said. She drew her arms around her sides, hugging herself tightly. “A cold night,” she added. Then she smiled. “We could warm it up a little.” She drew out one of her hands and offered it to him. “Want to?”
    He took her hand and followed her into the bedroom, and for the next few minutes, they moved into each other with the sort of wordless, sweeping tenderness that had once touched him inexpressibly, which had altered the atmosphere around him, softened the hard corners of the world, made life for one electrifying instant worth every dime you paid.
    She was sleeping soundly, as she always did, by the time the last small waves of his contentment had ebbed away. He got up silently, his feet pressing into the lush carpet, as he dressed quickly and went out.
    It was a little past four in the morning by the time he got to Tenth Avenue. He made his way up to the second floor and knocked on the door. A large man with beefy red hands opened it immediately, recognized Frank, and stepped aside.
    â€œDelivery fucked up today,” he said. “Got nothing but some rotgut shit from over to Killarney.”
    â€œThat’ll do,” Frank told him as he walked into the room.
    The room was nearly empty, but Frank knew it would begin to fill up steadily as people made their way from the legal bars to the after-hours ones. Some people would go home, of course, take the closing of the bars as a signal to call it a night. But the serious souls would wander on, up this street, up these stairs, or others like them, and sit down behind their small square tables and order a few more rounds. It was not a place for Tequila Sunrises, of course, or Banana Daiquiris, or anything with a little pink umbrella stuck in it. But for a stiff jolt, it was as good a place as any.
    Frank took a small table near the back of the room and ordered a shot of Irish. He took it down quickly to rub off the chill of the walk, then ordered another and sipped it more slowly, carefully controlling his own strange uncontrol.
    The standing bar was to the left, and the owner was behind it. She looked Puerto Rican, but Frank had heard she was from Ecuador. She was close to sixty, and her hair fell over her shoulders in a ragged silver tangle. She spoke in quick, broken sentences. Everybody called her Toby, but no one knew why. It was said that the gin mill had put her two sons through college, and that one of them now worked downtown in the district attorney’s office, but that was the sort of ironic tosspot fantasy that Frank had often heard in such places but had never once believed. During all the months he’d sat at his table, she had never said a single word to him, but from time to time he would catch her eyes as they shifted toward him with a distant, odd affection, as if, through long experience, her heart had learned to trust the lonesome drinker best.
    Frank took a long pull on the glass, then tapped it lightly on the table and called for another. A tall thin man in dark glasses accommodated him immediately, and Frank leaned back in his chair and let his eyes wander from table to table. They wandered for a long time, as the minutes stretched one by one into the early morning hours, and the people came and went, singly or in couples, the tone of the bar changing by small, almost imperceptible degrees with each arrival and departure.
    It was nearly seven in the morning when the last of them had left, and the first grayish light seemed sadly stranded outside the front windows. At last, it seemed to sweep in suddenly, like something pushed through a door, and short black shadows thrust their way toward