Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 16

It is a fact that I have an I.Q. of 149. One point shy of Mensa acceptability. Yet, I have no High School Diploma - only a General Equivalency Diploma that I’d gotten in order to join the Army. Scored one-hundred percent on the G.E.D.

It is a fact that I wonder about this whenever I have idle time, waiting behind my desk with feet propped up and hopefully nice-enough weather to have the window open at my back. I didn’t really have nothing to do. I had a job that was highly motivated by a winning Pick 5 Lottery ticket just waiting to burn a hole in my pocket.

It was late afternoon, and the window behind me was yawning and a nice breeze tickled my neck. Lucy had left an hour ago. She’d spent two hours trying to sucker me in, and it was so fine a performance that now I sat in conflict with having to sneak into the woods behind her house and tape and record her life for the next few days.

I wondered what made Lucy Lucy?

I knew the why of me. Even with an I.Q. such as mine I was nothing more than a lowly Private Eye. Mechanics get more respect. Hell, presidents get more respect, even though these days I was as likely to be spying on their disgusting behavior as a Milkman’s miscreant sleeping with another man’s wife.

Even with that kind of I.Q., here I sat. Threadbare in lifestyle, nearly as much so in spirit.

At times like this I played ‘what if?’ Like, what if Mom hadn’t died? What if I had gone to that callback for the Texas Boys’ Choir? What if I hadn’t married at 17 and quit school? What if I hadn’t joined the Army? Become a Cop? Become a Dick?

Those are all the things on which I blamed my discrepant life. And of course I could only accept that they were - but for one - choices I had made.

But why was Lucy Morris Lucy Morris? What were the points in her life that resulted in a constant search for the destruction of other’s lives? Perhaps her paper trail didn’t portray her reality accurately.

I reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of my desk. I took out the unopened fifth of Tequila. I looked at it a hard long time.

Then put it back.

It was not that I was an alcoholic. It was just against my beliefs to use any type of drugs to soothe the pain of the spirit.

I thought about Lucy too much, and not enough about my client. I had a bad feeling wash over me. Utter darkness. Utter despair. Utter lack of the presence of God. Utter evil.

It only lasted a split second. Yet I broke into a hot sweat, and my body was wracked with cold chills.

My mind wandered as it did at these times of leisure. And I wondered if that split second was what a man named Yehoshua Ben David had felt in a certain Garden some nineteen hundred-or-so years ago. I thought of having that feeling for a solid hour.

I knew I could not make it to the bathroom, but a wastebasket was nearby - a gray metal can that matched my Government Auction desk - and luckily I managed to up-chuck the entire contents of my stomach into it, and not onto the floor.

Later, weakly, I made it to the sink to wash my face and mouth. I bent over, left the water running cold, and splashed my face again and again.

Yeah, you could say I had a very bad feeling about this whole mess.