Read Online The Long Fall by Lynn Kostoff - Free Book Online

something approximating an idle, but it sputters and stalls out. Even with the windows open, the cab quickly fills with the smell of burnt oil.
    Jimmy watches Newt approach. He’s carrying a brown paper bag.
    Everything about Newt suggests something that’s been incorrectly assembled. He’s a big guy, with overlapping and awkwardly proportioned slabs of muscle covering a squat torso. His eyes are set too close together, lost between the wedge of bone running straight across the base of his forehead and the thick bridge of his nose. He’s sporting a long, thin bandito mustache and one of the most unfortunate haircuts Jimmy has ever seen on another human being—a seemingly impossible cross between a buzz and bowl cut.
    You open a thesaurus, Jimmy thinks, and look up
gruesome,
you’d find Newt Deems listed as a synonym.
    It’s the meaty right hand that always gets to Jimmy though. Covering its back is a minutely detailed tattoo of a tarantula, its head and bared fangs perched on Newt’s middle knuckles and its legs extending along the top of his fingers. Of the other three legs, one runs across the pad of flesh between thumb and index finger and down into his palm, and the other two curl over either side of his wrist.
    Newt has this way of flexing his hand so that it looks like the spider’s moving, the mouth even appearing to chew. The verisimilitude’s kicked up a notch, too, by the fact that the back of Newt’s hand is hairy.
    Newt walks up to the truck and opens the door. Jimmy follows him over to the El Camino. Newt perches on the hood and pulls out a cell phone, punches in some numbers, and says, “I got him,” and a moment later, “I wouldn’t count on it.” After giving directions, Newt slips the phone back into the breast pocket of a checked Western-cut shirt and opens the brown paper bag, taking out a nectarine.
    Without taking his eyes off Jimmy, Deems unsheathes a buck knife and begins peeling the nectarine, his movements deft and practiced, the reddish-orange skin curling in one continuous piece no thicker than a postage stamp and dangling from the blade like a Mobius strip before Newt flicks it to the ground.
    He holds up the nectarine. Its meat is wet and pulpy and glistens in the sunlight.
    From where Jimmy’s standing, the nectarine looks like a freshly dissected organ.
    Newt pops it into his mouth whole and begins slowly chewing, pausing along the way to work the pit to the front of his mouth and catch it in his teeth before leaning over and spitting it into the dirt next to the right front tire.
    Jimmy left his sunglasses in the truck, and the sun’s cranking it up, the orange hood of the Camino starting to shimmer and ripple around Newt’s bulk. Behind Jimmy is the insect drone of passing traffic.
    Newt scratches the back of his wrist and watches Jimmy. After a while he slides off the hood and wipes his hands on his jeans. “There we go,” he says, walking over to a blinding-white Continental that has stopped in the middle of the hard-packed dirt fronting the produce stand. Newt opens the rear passenger door and ushers Jimmy inside.
    Ray Harp glances over, then returns his attention to the woman sitting in a modified fold-down jumpseat across from him. There’s a small tray in front of her. She’s working on Ray’s nails.
    The driver pulls out of the lot and heads east and then south.
    Jimmy cranes his neck and looks out the rear windshield. The El Camino’s following them.
    “Get me a beer, will you, Jimmy?” Ray nods toward a small white ice chest on the seat between them. Ray’s got the Allman Brothers going on the CD player.
    Jimmy cracks a cold one and hands it over. He hesitates, waiting for Ray to offer him one, but it’s snake-eyes on that idea, so Jimmy replaces the lid and watches Ray drain the beer in one long swallow.
    You can’t take the biker out of the businessman,
Jimmy thinks. Ray’s in his mid-forties with thick salt-and-pepper hair fanning over his shoulders.