A Girl Called Honey by Block Lawrence & Westlake Donald E

Author:Block, Lawrence & Westlake, Donald E [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

The bartender, standing down at the end of the bar, looked at Richie and obviously didn’t much care for what he saw. Richie was impaled by the look; he squirmed on it, his face got red, his eyes dropped. He knew what was coming.

With an exaggerated air of Job-like long-suffering, the bartender pushed himself off his elbow and came dirty-aproned strolling down the length of the bar. Stopping in front of Richie, he said, in a weary voice, “How old are you, kid?”

Richie met the barman’s eyes for just a second. In Richie’s eyes were pleading, in the barman’s implacability. Without a word, Richie slid off the stool and skulked, round-shouldered, back to the cold and sunlit street. He turned left, aimlessly, and walked along with his hands in his pockets, imagining himself, after an extensive course in judo, coming back and drop-kicking that bartender through his back-mirror.

The hell of it was, Richie was eighteen. And eighteen was legal drinking age in New York State.

But he just didn’t look eighteen. He was short and skinny to begin with, and that didn’t help. His face was weak and watery, and that didn’t help. And he’d been living soft. He’d put on over twenty pounds, and he’d spouted acne instead of whiskers, and that didn’t help. The twenty pounds didn’t make him look less skinny. It just made him look like a skinny sixteen-year-old with baby fat on his cheeks.

Nine chances out of ten, he could have shown his Air Force ID card (being on active duty, he had no draft card) and been served without question. But he was terrified to show that card anywhere, just as he was honestly terrified to try to get a job or to open a bank account (assuming he had money to put in it) or get to know anybody besides Honour Mercy. Richie Parsons’ concept of Authority was basically the same as George Orwell’s in 1984. Authority was a Big Brother, mysteriously everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing, waiting to pounce upon Richie Parsons the second he made a mistake, and bear him whimpering back to Scott Air Force Base, where the whole squadron would line up to kick the shit out of him, and then he’d probably go to Leavenworth or something.

The days, for Richie Parsons, were long and empty. And the nights were even longer. Staying in the apartment all the time, waiting for a Knock On The Door, was too much for his nerves to stand. And Honour Mercy was practically never at home. Her work now took her away, usually, in the early evening, and she was never back before two or three in the morning, and sometimes she wasn’t back until long after sun-up. She’d even been away over a whole weekend once, off on somebody’s yacht, she and a number of her coworkers, with a group of rich college boys and a photographer from a men’s magazine. That was only two weeks ago, and Honour Mercy was already haunting the newsstands, wondering if they’d used a picture of her.

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