Read Online Wolf Point by Edward Falco - Free Book Online Page A

Bunch?”
    “The what?”
    “Never mind,” T said, realizing she probably wouldn’t even know Marlon Brando let alone the Wild Bunch. “I’m having a hard time visualizing this,” he said. “Where was your house? What do you mean bikers destroyed it?”
    “It was my mother’s house first,” she said, and pulled the quilt tighter around her. “I had just bought it in September; I had just finally gotten the money together…” She stopped a moment and shook her head, as if to compose herself and keep from crying yet again. “It’s outside of Chattanooga. It’s a small house, but it’s on five acres, which is why it was so hard to raise the money. It used to be a plantation a gazillion years ago. This is going back to the Civil War.”
    “You own a house on five acres of land?”
    “Wrecked house,” she said. “They tore it apart so bad it’ll have to be rebuilt.”
    “Because of Lester?”
    “They couldn’t figure out where the hell we were.” She paused and took a breath, as if gathering her thoughts, then gave him a look that announced she was about to tell the story, and he should just relax and listen. “Lester,” she said, starting off slowly. “Lester, who’s never had an entrepreneurial notion in his life, hatches this plan to steal money from these monsters and then he’s going to buy coke and resell it and replace the money, and nobody’s ever going to know about it. Of course he gets ripped off, and when it dawns on him that he’s now a dead man, he comes to my house looking to borrow money so he can run to Canada.”
    “This is a few days ago,” T said.
    “Three days ago now,” she answered. “He’s not there two minutes, at my house— I mean, he just came in the door, a half-dozen bikes and cars come screaming down the drive. I have no idea what’s going on yet, but Lester’s panicked, so I hide him, us, in the wine cellar, which goes back to Prohibition. It’s hidden under a trapdoor under a fake boiler. They never found it, but they tore the house down looking for us. They’re like,
We know they’re in here. We saw them go in; we didn’t see them go out
. We can hear it all from the wine cellar, where we’re curled up like a couple of rats, scared to death. Eventually they decided we slipped out somehow. After they left, we gathered a few things and ran. We hitched a ride with a trucker into Virginia, and then a perv insurance salesman who couldn’t keep his hands off me took us to Tully, where we spent the last of the money we had between us on breakfast. Then we stood there by the side of the road all day until you picked us up.”
    When she finished her story, T looked away from her, into the fire, at the growing bed of embers, its pulsing red surface crisscrossed with crackling white rivers of heat. He wondered if she would ask him for the money they needed to get straight with the bad guys outright at this point, or if she’d wait for him to offer it. And if he offered right now, he wondered if she’d decline and wait for him to offer again in the morning, to offer perhaps several times, until he was practically begging her to let him help, and then, only then, finally, taking the money reluctantly. He looked into the embers and consideredhow much he could give her. He knew he’d give her something. He just didn’t know how much yet.
    “Oh my God,” she said, and she touched her mouth with two fingers, as if she might blow him a kiss. “Oh my God,” she repeated. “You don’t believe me. You don’t believe any of it.”
    T was surprised and embarrassed. He lied immediately. “No. Of course I believe you,” he said.
    Her face seemed to collapse, as if a huge tiredness had overcome her. She lay down in front of the fire and curled up inside the quilt. “All right,” she said. “I need to get some sleep.”
    T watched her as she closed her eyes and laid her cheek on the balled-up fabric of the quilt. Above her head, one of the bear’s dog-like ears