Talk Talk by Boyle T. C

Author:Boyle, T. C. [Boyle, T. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Mystery, Crime, Suspense
ISBN: 9780670037704
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2006-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

Talk Talk

Three

HE'D FALLEN ASLEEP, couldn't help himself, so exhausted he might as well have been drugged, and when he woke the side of his face was pressed up against the window of the car and Dana was clinging to him like a spare set of clothes, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized with his own. There was a faint gray infusion of light. Nothing moved. The yellow lamp at the end of the lot was a blur, perched somewhere in intermediate space, the fog wiping away everything else. His left arm had gone numb where he'd slept on it, and his shirt felt damp and gummy, the price of sleeping in the car. Which smelled stale, as if they'd been living in it for months and not just overnight, and he wondered about that, about the odors of confinement, and for a moment he closed his eyes and the car was a bathyscaphe dangling over an abyss in the dark canyons of the sea, the twisting shapes of the deep fish, the wolf fish and coelacanth, passing in review. Then he opened them again on nothing, on a seep of grayness, and thought to check his watch.

Slowly, with exaggerated care--no reason to wake her yet--he extricated his dead arm and brought his wrist into view. He wasn't surprised particularly to see that it was just before six in the morning--a horrendous hour, an hour he encountered maybe two or three times a year when he lost his head partying with Deet-Deet or Pixel and fell into the old ineluctable videogame trance--but he did feel just the slightest tic of irritation with the fact that he wasn't in a bed in a motel sleeping till noon, noon at least. He'd been the one for giving it up the night before--they had the wrong condo; the guy had moved or died or been jettisoned into outer space--but Dana had been insistent. Even as he was wheeling out of the lot, bent on finding a place to eat and a motel with cable, she was brandishing her worn file folder, inside of which were the affidavit from the San Roque courthouse and the faxes with the thief's police record and photo. “This,” she said, spitting it out, “is all we need. Show this to the police and we've got him.”

“Right, but we have to find him first,” he'd said, exasperated, but still turning his face to her so she could see him form the words. “And when we find him, then what? Where are the cops? You think they'll just happen to be driving by?”

“I dial 911. As soon as I see him. I dial 911 and say there's a crime in progress, a--a burglary, okay? A crime in progress.”

“And then what?”

“Then I show them this”--the folder--“because isn't this a crime? In progress? Isn't it?”

They were out on the main road by then, the headlights of the oncoming cars illuminating her face in flashes, as if they were back under the strobe at Doge and he was seeing her for the first time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.