Retribution Read Online Free Page B

hedge. The air conditioner rattled to life above him and condensation dripped through the evergreen on to his head. He saw her shadow bouncing about in the bushes as she walked around the room, and then she closed the blinds and the light grew dim.
    He sat completely motionless for twenty minutes after all the lights went out. Thunder rumbled, louder thistime. The rain had started. Soft at first, but he knew that would change. The wind gusts were strong now, and the bushes swayed back and forth, dancing a strange dance in the dim streetlight. The storm was almost upon them. She had made it just in the nick of time.
    He grabbed his bag of tricks and snaked his way around the corner of the building until he was directly beneath the window with the broken latch in her living room. Then at precisely 1:32 A.M., the Clown pulled his mask on snug over his face. He stood and brushed off his now very tight blue jeans, silently lifted the darkened window and slithered inside out of the rain.

5
    Chloe watched from her window as Michael walked slowly back to the car, rejected, his head down. She waved half-heartedly, purposely closing the curtains on him as he waved back at her. Another message sent.
    She stood alone in her living room and looked around her. The apartment was silent, lonely, and unbearably hot. The small feeling of victory melted away as quickly as it had come. Now she almost wished that she had just let him stay the night.
    The gym had been a flimsy excuse at best. Who was she kidding? There was no way that she was going to get up at 6:00 A.M. to do aerobics. And if she wasn’t going to raise the ‘Where is this relationship really headed?’ conversation for another two weeks, then what would have been the harm in letting him stay the night?
    Because you were upset that you didn’t get what you wanted on this Happy Anniversary, and so you certainly weren’t going to give him what he wanted.
    Great, even her schizophrenic conscience now thought she was being a bitch. She knew, though, that if Michael had stayed the night she would have held a similar conversation with herself at 3:00 A.M., but this one would have been for being such a lily-livered weak pushover. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It was all too exhausting and depressing and she hoped a couple of Tylenol would fix the pounding in her head.
    The apartment was an oven. The windows had been closed all day, and everything in the place had just baked – even the furniture was still warm to the touch. She grabbed the mail that sat stuffed in the front-door slot and headed into the kitchen.
    She flicked on the lights, and the kitchen was instantly illuminated. Chloe sighed at the mess that was her table, littered with breakfast dishes from the morning, dinner dishes from the night before, parakeet seed, and feathers. Pete the Parakeet, temporarily blinded by the fluorescent light, fell from his perch on to the cage floor with a thud.
    She piled all the dishes from the table into the already overcrowded sink, squirted some green Palmolive in, and hosed down the mountain of porcelain with the sink nozzle. Pete, meanwhile, had mustered up some dignity and fluttered back to the perch, squawking angrily all the while at Chloe and sending tiny green and white feathers wafting through the air and back on to the table. Chloe gritted her teeth and quickly threw a towel over Pete. Then she took one last look at her kitchen, turned off the lights, and made a mental note to call the Merry Maids Emergency Cleaning Service in the morning. She downed her two Tylenol with a Mylanta chaser before finally heading for the air-conditioned relief of her bedroom.
    She tossed the mail on the bed, turned the AC on high, and searched her drawers for her favorite and most comfortable pink pajamas, pushing aside the collection of flimsy Victoria’s Secret lingerie that she had gotten as gifts from Michael over the past two years. She found them stuffed in the