Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 17

“Yeeee Hawwwww,” I screamed, laughing, as the van bucked me around after going a wee bit too fast through the dip where the Belknap Street bridge kisses flat ground again. Somebody ought to fix that thing. Then again, maybe the dip was designed to slow down cars zipping into downtown Fort Worth off the 121 Freeway.

Then a couple of rises and twists, and I came into downtown proper, the grand granite courthouse there, a hundred yards or less from the bluff that gazes north across the Trinity River, a hundred yards straight down. I hooked the first left past the courthouse, cut through the valley of buildings a couple miles ‘til I got to the Iron Works building, my office on the second floor.

I had to park in the motel garage next door. The manager, a nice blond lady who unflinchingly flirted with me at any opportunity. Perhaps she thought she had the right stuff to wipe the perpetual frown from my face.

I went upstairs to my office. The second floor was quiet. The new neighbor across the hall ran a dating service. Maybe if my relationship - if you could call it that (“I just need some room”) - with Beth didn’t work out, I could work out a deal with the dating service. Do background checks for her clients, in exchange for a run-through in her computer.

I opened the door to my extra room next to the office. An old Army bunk, dresser, closet, and an Army trunk with my special gear at the foot of the bunk greeted me with about as much enthusiasm one could expect from inanimate objects. I’d started taking pictures of my kids, hanging them on the ugly bare walls to make me feel like I had a normal life. I’d been copping pictures from the Ex when picking up my three sons for visitation, getting copies made. A pile of those photos on top of a pile of empty frames lay next to the head of the bed by the window. When I was in at night I’d rest on the bunk gazing at the pictures. Try to figure out when they were taken. Ashamed I couldn’t remember - or recognize - where we’d taken them. The Ex had been big on pictures. I’d always hated them, pictures, especially of me. A residue of losing my mother at a young age. Or so a shrink used to tell me.

I hauled up the trunk, set it by the door. Opened the door, walked into the hall to find a woman standing by my office door looking around, jiggling the nob.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” I asked.

She jerked around, surprised.Then a quick smile. Wild, muddy red hair with trickles of gray salted here and there, nearly as tall as I was, a body like a pear, breasts there but just barely a small handful. Cute face. Green eyes flaked with large chips of brown; her eye color could probably shift with just what she decided to wear that day. Dolled up in a power woman’s business suit with an ugly, multi-colored neck-scarf that she wore like a tie. It flanged out at the bottom, both ends big, and only served to accentuate her pear-shaped body.

“Yes, hello, how are you,” and then kept talking, like a salesman - er, woman, not pausing to see ‘how I was’, saying, “do you know whose office this is?”

I hate salesme — salespeople. Take take take. In their relationships just like their jobs.

“I’m Clyde Klick, yes,” and just stood there waiting. Dressed in jeans and tee-shirt, she probably wouldn’t believe I was a private eye. Sometimes I didn’t believe it myself.

She stuck out a hand as she walked towards me. I let it hang just long enough so she’d know I was shaking it only to be somewhat polite.

“Wow, I never met a real P.I. before. You’re sort of like Magnum on TV, huh?”

Meant as a compliment. She was working me for some reason. Okay, Clyde, stay cool. Pretend that flush in the face and twitching frown didn’t happen. I had to pull my hand away ‘cause she didn’t seem to want to let go.

She waited, still smiling, good at her job, conning people in some way or another, I’d bet.

To get things moving, I said, “Except I can’t afford the Hawaiian print shirt.”

She laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. “I’m Lucy,” she said. “Lucy Morris.”

I wanted to say a.k.a McGullicutty, but didn’t. She’d used her maiden name for some reason. Probably didn’t know her Ex had furnished me with plenty of papers from their past that I’d actually bothered to look at. Lucy was the kind of person that had nothing but for contempt for the ability of others, even though she was still scrabbling along….