Read Online Last Ditch by G. M. Ford - Free Book Online Page B

me?"
    Silence.
This
wasn't how it was supposed to go. You cur.
    After
a moment,
he said, "How you guys holding up over there?"
    "It's
a
ffffff . . . it's a state of siege."
    I
had him going
now. He shifted gears.
    "We
need
to get a lid on this."
    "I
don't
think the toothpaste is going back in the tube, Pat."
    "No,
but
we can certainly control the flow." "How's that?"
    "I've
got
a meeting set up for two o'clock this afternoon at the Cascade Club."
    "A
meeting
with who?"
    "Whom,"
he corrected.
    "Yeah,
so
whom's gonna be there?"
    I'm
not sure,
but I thought I heard him grinding his teeth.
    "The
PFs
going to send •their lawyer. I don't know who's coming to represent the
Price
family . . . probably another lawyer. Most likely Henry McColl."
    "And
you
want me to come?"
    He
hesitated.
"I thought you'd want to be there," he said.
    Roughly
translated, this meant that since I'd been sufficiently thoughtless as
to find
the damn body, I had an obligation to suffer along with the rest of
them. You
cur.
    "What
are
we going to meet about?"
    Now
I was sure
I heard his teeth.
    "What
we're going to meet about, Leo, is how to keep this thing contained.
How to
keep the journalism responsible. How to keep this thing from disrupting
our
lives any more than is absolutely necessary. Of course, if you have no—"
    I
cut him off.
"I'll be there," I said. He jumped in quickly, before I could hang
up. "And Leo ..."
    "Yeah?"
    "You
will
wear a suit, won't you?" You cur. "Fuckin' A," I said.
    One
second
after I replaced the receiver, the phone began to ring. Since the voice
mail
had done such a fine job last evening, I couldn't think of a single
reason why
it shouldn't get another chance, so I unplugged the phone and headed
for the
shower.
    On
a good day,
I can shower, shave and shinola in twenty minutes flat, start to
finish, out
the door. Today, it was a good thing I had a few hours. I had a bad
case of the
slows. I stood under the steaming shower until the hot water gave out
and then
cut myself twice while shaving.
    When
I padded
back into the bedroom looking for clothes, Rebecca was gone and the bed
was
made. The choice of attire should have been simple. After all, I only
owned one
good suit. Nope. Turned out the only thing simple was me. I stood in
the closet
for a good twenty minutes pawing everything I owned and then finally
selected—yup, you guessed it—my good suit.
    By
the time I
got downstairs Rebecca had already finished a pot of coffee and read
the entire
Sunday paper.
    "Oooh,"
she said. "Don't you look nice."
    "I
better," I said. "You look sloppy at the Cascade Club somebody'll
hand you a mop."
    "Really
.
. . the Cascade Club . . . dear me."
    For
want of an
option, I told her about Pat's call and the meeting. What followed was
a
twenty-minute ceremony, wherein I swore oaths up and down, back and
forth, sacred
and profane, that I would not lose my head and disgrace myself and
that,
furthermore, if I should be so foolish as to lose my temper and act in
an
unseemly manner, the effect of such actions on my future romantic
prospects
would be tantamount to being shipwrecked on a desert island.
    I
was still
mulling over that cheery prospect when I set the e-brake on the Fiat
and hopped
out into the driveway of the Cascade Club. The valet looked at the
little car
with undisguised disdain. I dropped the keys into his palm. "My other
car
is a piece of shit too," I said.
    I'd
only been
inside once before. Back in college, I'd taken an architecture class
and had
toured the building. The place may have been made from fire-flashed
clinker
brick and topped with Dutch gables, but what really constructed the
Cascade
Club was money. And not new money either. No. In these halls, the only
money
that counted was hand-me-down money. Money from so far back the family
no
longer recalled who it was had made the dough in the first place. That
kind.
    That's
how I
knew to ask the ancient attendant for the Price party. While many of
the
Watermans were certainly not