The Last Goodbye by Reed Arvin

Author:Reed Arvin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BLU WAS TRYING TO TALK through gasps of air, and it wasn’t working too well. “Mr. Stephens . . . Derek . . . very upset . . . Sammy . . .”

“All right, baby. Just sit down.” I had driven hard over to my office, wringing out whatever performance was left in the Buick’s engine on my way across town. When I walked in, I saw my secretary sitting in my office chair, her mascara ruined, her eyes puffy and red. “What’s this all about?”

“He just called,” she said. “Derek. He called and he was yelling.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. It was something about Sammy, and somehow he was upset at me, and I don’t know why.”

“But what happened with Sammy?”

She sniffled. “I don’t know. But he did something to make Mr. Stephens angry.”

“Why would Stephens connect that to you?”

“Because he knows Sammy has a crush on me.”

“How does he know that?”

“I told him.”

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“I met Mr. Stephens down at the courthouse, and Sammy walked by us. He gave Mr. Stephens a look, and a couple of minutes later we could see Sammy spying on us from behind a column.”

“God.”

“So I told Mr. Stephens about how Sammy had this crush on me, and we laughed about it. I think Sammy might have seen us laughing.”

“Not good.”

“And now something terrible happened, but I don’t know what.”

“All right. Stay here, baby. I’m going over to the courthouse to find Sammy, if Stephens hasn’t killed him yet.”

The drive toward the courthouse gave me plenty of opportunity to imagine hellish scenarios where Sammy—overweight, lungs exploding from years of aerobic underutilization, reflexes slowed by several emboldening shots of Seagram’s—suddenly discovers that Stephens, in addition to being a brilliant lawyer, is, unfortunately, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I pictured Sammy flat on his back on the highly polished linoleum of the courthouse floor, careening in surprise and humiliation, his body in a nearly frictionless recoil from a perfectly executed karate kick to his solar plexus.

These concerns, it turned out, were a waste of my already depleted supply of adrenaline. I didn’t have to wait long to find out exactly how Sammy had extracted a pound of Stephens’s flesh for having the temerity to be rich, handsome, and in possession of the affections of Blu McClendon. The courthouse was humming with it like a shorted electrical circuit.

I like to think the elegance of what Sammy did emanated from deep within his southern soul, but maybe that’s romanticizing things a bit. Probably spending all day in the Fulton County Criminal Court system had taught him a newly devious way of thinking. Wherever it came from, it was a textbook example of everything revenge should be: simple, effective, and scrupulously legal.

Ever since I told Sammy about Stephens, Sammy had juggled the case of a certain Burton Randall, getting the timing exactly right. Burton was a courthouse legend, a true object-specific kleptomaniac, and Atlanta’s most prodigious car thief. The consensus was that Burton couldn’t help himself.

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