Read Online Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips - Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    “Siegfried Line, huh? I guess you saw some action.”
    “It got a little noisy.”
    “How was that?”
    “Well, I don’t like it when people shoot at me. But they gave me a gun to shoot back with, so I guess it was okay.”
    “Combat didn’t bother you any?”
    “Sure. But it was better than sitting around. When you’re mixing it up, you’re too busy to get scared. When you’re lying around waiting, you’ve got nothing to do but picture different ways you could get it.”
    “What was the worst thing you ever saw?”
    “Out there? I dunno. I never tried stacking ‘em up against each other.”
    “Tell you what I mean,” Halliday said, turning his glass around bit by bit as if he was looking for something along the outside of it. “There are some things you see, they get under your skin like a splinter and just stick. You keep seeing them. Give you an example. When I was a kid, I had this sort of gang I ran with. I guess I was the leader, or anyway, the guy who always had an idea what we could do next. And there was one of these jerky little guys who used to try and run with us. You know the type. Funny-looking and never does anything quite right. We used to give him a pretty bad time. Anyway. One day we were allout somewhere north of town, and I noticed these three trees next to each other that had big branches pretty much at a level. And I said, I’m going to climb up that tree over there, and walk across the branches on that tree in the middle, and not climb down until I’m on that tree. So I did, and of course, then everybody had to try. We were all crazy for something to do. Well, some of the kids made it fine, and some chickened out partway and had to crouch down and wriggle back, and some decided they’d better stay on the ground. But Gavin, that was the kid’s name, Gavin was hell-bent to show he could do it, and halfway across he dropped like a stone, maybe fifteen feet, and broke his arm, the compound kind. Where there’s a little nub of bone poking out.”
    “Well, there you go,” I said.
    “No, wait. He broke his arm, and it was the best thing ever happened to him. We carried him back to town, even though we shouldn’t have, and he didn’t make a noise practically the whole way. When he was in the hospital, we all came to see him. It was more attention than he ever had in his life. And when he got out, he was one of us. Everybody just agreed that, without talking about it. And once he was in, you know? He wasn’t so jerky. He was pretty much one of the fellows from then on. He got what he’d wanted. But you know, not a week probably goes by that I don’t see that little nub of bone in my mind, and I’m not squeamish. I just think about Gavin wanting so badly to be one of the guys. And then him lying there with his bones poking out. And it seems as if, whenever things are going along nice and smooth, I’ll always see that sharp little nub again, and it — ” He made a hooking gesture with two fingers. “ Catches .”
    “Huh,” I said.
    “Well, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about,” he said.
    “That’s a good story.”
    “Your turn.”
    “Huh. All right. Well, I guess a lot of things over there happened that stuck with me. But what I think you’re talking about, that one’s just something I saw for thirty seconds out the back of a truck. It was just a guy slapping a woman around.”
    “That’s what you remember, huh?”
    “I know. We saw a lot of things out there. There were these things called tree-bursts, where the Germans wired a charge to a tree as they were retreating, head-high or knee-high or, you know, balls-high, and I saw one of those take a man’s head off who’d just been humping along next to me singing Bang Bang Lucy. And there were towns we came through that you could tell had been beautiful, and now they were just a few stone walls and a big sea of trash. And we’d done that. Helped, anyway. But the kind of thing you’re talking