Read Online Now Let's Talk of Graves by Sarah Shankman - Free Book Online Page B

them behind her eyelids—like golden crowns. They’d be gone at first light.
    No one in the long limo noticed the car that pulled in right behind, making them a little caravan. Church in the lead, the long black car full of women now the filling in the middle of a sandwich.
    The limo crossed double yellow lines and ran red lights, following Church. Where were the cops, wondered Sam, when you needed them?
    Up ahead the taillights of the Mercedes flashed and flashed again as Church fishtailed around Lee Circle, coming into where St. Charles became a boulevard. He was just easing through, sliding by. This drunk was lucky tonight, wasn’t he? At least he had been this far, but he couldn’t count on Lady Luck forever.
    Sam remembered, it had been ten years since she’d driven like the man in front of her, her eyes struggling for focus but zeroing in on a little beam of light. She knew Church was holding on to a clear signal, a path that would lead him home. It had to, had to work, because the booze made him invincible. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could even touch him. With enough booze in him, like every other drunk, he was Superman. He was flying.
    Of course, he might fly right over a pedestrian. Or through a stop sign. Or blow an exit, misreading it to mean Come right on ahead, we like your kind.
    An incident like that had finally grabbed Sam’s attention. She had gunned it at 105 mph past a STOP EXIT WRONG WAY sign south of San Francisco. She liked to drive fast when she was drunk. She liked to bad-mouth cops too—like the highway patrolman who had run her off the road.
    “You could have killed me, you bastard.” She’d lunged at him as he pulled her out of what was left of her Austin-Healy.
    “I was trying to, you stupid bitch.” He’d thrown her into the back of his black and white, not caring if she was hurt, snapping the cuffs on her. “Before you kill a real human being.”
    Nothing had grabbed her attention before. Shattered glasses, lost shoes, rolled cars, broken friendships and promises, hangovers, dry heaves, hallucinations, black-outs—none of it had jerked her up and made her face the fact that she was an alcoholic. She couldn’t handle her booze, it was running her life, and that was a problem. But that next morning when she woke up in the women’s drunk tank in San Mateo County with her license lifted and narrowly averted disaster staring her in the face, she hit bottom. She called her lawyer, then her doctor. Get me out of here, she said, and into a treatment program.
    That had been her first step on the long road back.
    In front of them, Church was weaving over into the streetcar tracks in the neutral ground, looking like he might not make it till tomorrow.
    She wondered how many years he’d been drinking.
    She thought about Zoe too. The apple never fell far from the tree. Sam remembered the look on the girl’s face when she’d walked in on her earlier that evening in the ladies’ room at the Fairmont. Zoe, wearing the simple white slip of a gown she’d changed into for the breakfast, was startled. She spilled her coke, looking like a little girl with her hand in the cookie jar. How long would it take for Zoe to hit bottom?
    Then suddenly from behind them a car blinked its lights once, twice, and roared past.
    It was a heavy car, a very old Buick, a make Sam could identify from the little holes down its side.
    The Buick flew by, honking at Church, who swerved sharply to the right, missing another parked car by millimeters. Then the Buick kept going, squeezing past a cross street at the beginning of a red light, picking up even more speed and disappearing into the wet mist.
    “Oh, my Lord!” said Kitty.
    “Fool ain’t gonna see dawn,” said the driver.
    “You’re probably right,” Sam agreed. “How much farther till we’re home?”
    “Six or seven more blocks,” the driver guessed.
    “Pray.” Kitty punched Zoe. “Sit up and pray that your daddy makes it home in one