DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox Read Online Free Page A

her
exasperation gave way to a smile, then to a laugh.
          "You're too
much, Streak," she said.
          I wiped at my mouth
with my napkin, then walked around behind her chair, put my arms on her
shoulders, and kissed her hair. It was the color of dark honey and she brushed
it in thick swirls on her head, and it always smelled like strawberry shampoo.
I kissed her along the cheek and touched her breasts.
          "You doin'
anything?" I said.
          "You have to go
back to work."
          "The
perps will understand."
          She reached behind
the chair and fitted her hand around the back of my thigh.
           The curtains in the bedroom, which were white
and gauzy and printed with tiny flowers, puffed and twisted in the wind that
blew through the trees in the yard. When Bootsie undressed, her body seemed
sculpted, glowing with light against the window. She had the most beautiful
complexion of any woman I ever knew; when she
    made love it flushed with heat, as though she had a fever, and
took on the hue of a new rose petal. I kissed her breasts and took her nipples
in my mouth and traced my fingers down the flatness of her stomach, then I felt
her reach down and take me in her palm.
          When I entered her
she hooked her legs in mine and laced the fingers of one hand in my hair and
placed the other hand hard in the small of my back. I could feel her breath
against the side of my face, the perspiration on her stomach and inside her
thighs, then her tongue on my neck, the wetness of her mouth near my ear. I
wanted to hold it, to give more satisfaction than I received, but that terrible
moment of male pleasure and solitary indulgence had its way.
          "Boots—" I
said hoarsely.
          "It's all right,
Dave. Go ahead," she whispered.
          She ran both palms
down my lower back and pushed me deeper inside, then something broke like a dam
and melted in my loins and I closed my eyes and saw a sailfish rise from a
cresting wave, its mouth torn with a hook, its skin blue and hard, its gills
strung with pink foam. Then it disappeared into the wave again, and the
groundswells were suddenly flat and empty, dented with rain, sliding across the
fire coral down below.
     
     
    I t should have been a perfect afternoon. But on my way out Bootsie
asked, almost as an afterthought, "Was there any other reason you didn't
want to go to the LaRoses?"
          "No, of course
not."
          I tried to avert my
eyes, but it was too late. I saw the recognition in her face, like a sharp and
unexpected slap.
          "It was a long
time ago, Boots. Before we were married."
          She nodded, her
thoughts concealed. Then she said, her voice flat, "We're all modern people
these days. Like you say, Streak, no problem."
          She walked down to
the pond at the back of our property by herself, with a bag of bread crusts, to
feed the ducks.
     
     
     
     
     
CHAPTER   3
     
     
    A t sunrise the
next day, while I was helping
Batist open up the bait shop before I went to work, the old-time gunbull called
me long-distance from Angola.
          "You remember I
told you about them movie people come see me? There's one ain't gonna be around
no more," he said.
          "What happened,
Cap?"
          "My nephew's a
uniform at NOPD in the First District. They thought it was just a white man
interested in the wrong piece of jelly roll. That's till they found the
camera," he said.
          After I hung up the
phone I filled minnow buckets for two fishermen, put a rental outboard in the
water, and pulled the tarp on guy wires over the spool tables on the dock in
case it rained. Batist was sprinkling hickory chips on the coals in the
barbecue pit, which we had fashioned from a split oil drum to cook chickens and
links of sausage for our midday customers.
          "That was that
old man from up at the prison farm?" he asked.
          "I'm afraid
so."
          "I ain't