Downward-Facing Death (A Matt Bolster Yoga Mystery Book 1) by Neal Pollack

Author:Neal Pollack
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Bolster wanted nothing more than to smoke a roach, take a bath, and go to bed. But when he got home, Chelsea Shell was sitting on the bottom step of the outdoor staircase leading to his apartment. This wasn’t what he needed.

“Hello, Matt,” she said.

“Just once I’d like to come home and not have someone waiting for me,” he said.

“We’d all like a lot of things.”

“Yeah. You know what I’d like?”

“Tell me.”

“For someone to explain why a couple of thugs in an SUV just tried to blow me off the road with a shotgun.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Because that seems pretty consistent with the modus operandi you and your friends have been using the last few days.”

“We’re yoga teachers, Bolster. We don’t use guns. And we certainly don’t drive SUVs. I have no idea who would have done that to you, but it wasn’t the Circle.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you mention the Circle,” he said.

“I figured you’d know by now.”

“I do.”

“We have our quirks, admittedly.”

“Like assaulting guys with guitars and knocking them out after sex?”

“We’re just trying to protect our interests,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Let me come upstairs, and I’ll tell you.”

Bolster sighed. Don’t invite the vampire into your house, he thought. But there Chelsea sat, head cocked, sucking on her lower lip just a little, her eyes glowing cerulean, reflected by the street lamps. He felt himself go soft at the knees again.

“OK,” he said. “But we’re just talking this time.”

“Sure,” she said.

When Bolster had been younger, he’d often entered the nighttime hungry for love, and he’d usually found it. A good-looking off-duty cop with a wad of bills in his pocket didn’t tend to spend the night alone unless that was his choice. All kinds of women took the lure. He lay with assistant DAs and bartenders, rocker chicks and sorority girls, English professors and functional illiterates. Bolster’s lovers had been black, white, brown, yellow, and well-read all over. One night he was the filling in a sandwich between two Filipina blackjack dealers from the Commerce Casino; the next night he was taking an agent from behind on an upper floor of a Universal City high-rise. Rough or gentle, Barry White slow or crackhead fast, Matt Bolster had owned bedtime like 1989 Jordan owned the court in the last two minutes of the fourth.

But he’d almost always woken up feeling undernourished and a little queasy, like he’d gotten drunk and eaten at Del Taco at three a.m. The women stayed around about as long as a rented umbrella at the beach. He’d never physically hurt any of them, but he’d been cold, cruel, indifferent, and quietly seething — an emotionless bastard who treated morning-after texts like pesky flies. Even the girl who’d taken him to his first yoga class at the Hollywood Y, thus ineluctably transforming his existence, had faded away like the marine layer. Bolster’s love life was a paragon of impermanence.

Though he still couldn’t hold down a relationship, yoga had definitely improved Bolster’s attitude toward women.

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