Punishment by Holliday Scott J

Author:Holliday, Scott J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503949058
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

John Barnes grew up in a trailer park called Flamingo Farms. The park was nestled deep in the trees of Whitehall Forest. There was no sign at the road, only a gravel two-track that you’d probably miss if you weren’t looking for it. As boys, Johnny and Ricky didn’t know they were poor. They lived in a forest, for Pete’s sake. All those suckers on the other side of Calvary Junction lived in subdivisions where the lawns were mowed diagonally and the neighbors shook fists at kids who ran across them. Those kids took vacations to the kind of place Johnny and Ricky lived year-round. They could keep their jet skis and campers; Johnny and Ricky Barnes had their imaginations, their rivers, their trees. They played in them every day, and each night, around five thirty, Mom would lean out the side of their trailer and clang a triangle dinner bell, just like in some old TV show. The boys came flying back home like boomerangs.

Barnes wondered whether Jessica had grown up having dinner at five thirty, too. He hoped so, because it was five thirty and he found himself on the steps of her apartment, a finger above the doorbell next to her name. The umbrella woman on the second floor had smiled when he came up the sidewalk. He pressed the doorbell. He had stopped at a convenience store and guzzled a coffee in the parking lot, then packed his mouth full of those painful mints that came in a tin. He had checked his eyes in the mirror, too, but decided they were beyond repair.

Jessica’s voice came through the speaker, only it was some kind of impersonation. Sounded like Julia Child. “Who is it?”

Barnes smiled. “Detective Mackey.”

She held the impersonation. “What seems to be the trouble, Officer?”

“I received a call from this address,” Barnes said. “Housewife in distress. Needs assistance.”

“Well,” she said, “in that case—” She coughed, laughed, dropped the impersonation. “My God, I can’t do that for long. Come on up.”

A buzzer sounded. The door latch clicked. Barnes pushed through and headed up the stairs. When he arrived on her floor, he found her peeking at him through her cracked-open apartment door. He could see just one eye, big and blue, and the scar on her eyebrow. A section of her smile was there, too. Her lipstick was red, her teeth a brilliant white. She opened the door fully as he approached. She was wearing an apron hand-printed in flour, and beneath that a dark-green blouse and blue jeans. Her skin glowed softly, backdropped by the light from inside her apartment. Her shape was accented by the middle tie of the apron.

“She’s amazing.” A lesbian’s voice.

Jessica was so slight, Barnes wondered how she’d gotten him up the stairs and to her couch last night without him remembering it. It felt strange that a woman he barely knew had taken care of him like that.

She backed away from the door to let Barnes through. Her smile was playful and somehow familiar.

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