Night My Friend Read Online Free Page B

morning.”
    “Yeah, I guess so, Harvey.”
    “Let me tell you some more about this business I want to start.”
    “Don’t bother, Harvey. It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
    He started to turn in at his office, but Harvey put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “I was out looking at your house this morning, boy.”
    “Stay away from my wife!”
    “Nobody’s going anywhere near your wife, Fielding. Don’t worry, I won’t tell her about Mason.”
    “There’s nothing to tell, anyway, I told you I didn’t do it.”
    “Did you tell her?”
    Dale was silent. Beyond Stout’s shoulder a traffic light turned red. Finally, like a man suddenly collapsing against the wind, he asked, “How much do you want?”
    “That’s better. That’s sounding more like a buddy.”
    “How much?”
    “I think ten thousand would do it.”
    “Ten thousand!” The light turned green. “Are you out of your mind?”
    “You’ve got a nice house, a business of your own. And I never met a starving insurance man yet.”
    “That’s out of the question. I was thinking of a few hundred, a thousand at the very most.”
    “Think a little harder, boy.” And then, with an expression on his face, a light in his eyes that Dale hadn’t seen since the Pacific, he added, too casually, “When I was out at your house I was noticing how close it was to the woods. Must be dangerous this time of the year, with the hunters out. Stray bullet could be dangerous to the kids.”
    He turned, and walked away, leaving Dale staring after him. Within a block he’d been lost in the noonday crowd, and there was nothing but a blur of faces confronting Dale. A blur like a jungle swallowing up the enemies, and for a moment he might have been back there, back on a Pacific island that time forgot, facing the gloom with a rifle in his hands and determination in his mind.
    “Marge?”
    “Yes, dear?”
    “I want to talk.”
    “Sure. Can you wait till I get the kids off to bed?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “You haven’t been looking good, dear. Are you coming down with something?”
    “I’m all right. I saw my old buddy, Harvey Stout, again today.”
    “That’s nice. You could invite him out for dinner some night if you wanted. Is he going to be in town long?”
    “I don’t think he really knows. We had a sort of long talk today, and…”
    “Excuse me, dear. I have to see what they’re up to now.”
    “Sure.”
    He sat down by the window and looked out across the irregular fields to the blackness of the twilight woods. Even now the hunters were still out—a figure moved, paused, then shattered the silence with a shotgun’s roar. Perhaps unseen a partridge had crumpled to earth.
    Yes, they were awfully close. A shotgun slug could carry almost to the house. He remembered how it had been in the jungle, then got up and went to the basement. After a time, Marge called.
    “Dear, what in heaven’s name are you up to?”
    “Thinking of doing a little hunting. I was just checking over my shotgun.”
    “You haven’t used that in years.”
    “This buddy of mine, Harvey Stout, wants to go. Maybe Friday night after work.”
    Yes, it would be Friday night. He took out his cleaning gear and began polishing the weapon.
    For most of the next day he was busy, and there was only a vague awareness of Harvey Stout in his mind. He no longer waited in dread for the phone call he knew would come. Rather, he glowed with an inner expectation, like a schoolboy anxiously waiting to give the correct answer.
    Stout, surprisingly, had not yet called at five o’clock. The glow by then was beginning to fade, and replacing it was a sort of uncertainty. Finally, at five-fifteen, he called home to make certain the children were inside, and warned Marge of the possible danger from the hunters. When he hung up his palms were sweating for the first time that day as his mind ran over the score of possibilities. Stout might have given up and already left town. He might be sick, or he