Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) by Phillip Depoy

Author:Phillip Depoy [Depoy, Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

20. Clatter

Maybe it was the good night’s rest — I’d slept like the dead — or the hot shower. Maybe it was the calm air in the house; Dally had tidied up her living room. Or, most likely, it was the forty-five minutes I’d spent considering how absolutely correct our Ms. Oglethorpe had been about the nighttime sky. What I was so desperate to get ahold of — the big picture, the prize behind the golden curtain — was just another trick of light, a lie of the mind, a gander at the grand illusion.

So, with the pressure off, as it were, I had slipped more easily than I ever would have imagined the day before, right into a state of extreme relaxation. I was letting images float into and out of my field of vision as if I were watching fish swimming in a clear pond.

All you have to do really is breathe. If all you are is breath, the rest comes easy. In. Out. Nothing to it. Just sit, and the angel creeps up behind you and kisses you with light.

There was the hazy golden glow in front of my eyes. There were bright fish swimming.

Janey’s face. Beth Dane’s face. Old man Dane playing a familiar tune on his bass — which looked like a naked woman from the back — with a hacksaw. Joepye picking my pocket. Girls in a long line dancing the tango. Spiders crawling on a corpse. Beth hanging in one of Minnie’s photographs. Joepye being arrested over and over again. Mickey shooting me in the heart.

I felt the bullet inside me, but all the tissue and muscle and bone around it — all moved aside in order to accommodate the bullet. The bullet became just another part of my anatomy. It did me no harm.

Then I saw a gallery, a long line of photos in a darkened hall, like the tango hall. Only one of the images — I couldn’t see who it was — climbed out of the frame of the photograph and stole away, down the hall, laughing quietly. Then, a moment later, it brought another photo of another girl and hung it where the original had been, tossing away the empty frame.

More dance music, and all the photographs on the wall came to life, stamping, clapping, raising a banging clatter.

*

I snapped my head up. Someone was hammering on the door with the brass knocker. It had popped me out of my reverie.

I looked around, but Dally was nowhere in evidence, so I assumed she had slipped out while I’d been under. Damn. I finally got a good thing going, and then someone wrecked it.

The racket came again, only more insistent.

I stood up, skipped putting on my shoes as I ordinarily would have. I think it’s bad manners to answer a door in your stockinged feet, but the person at the door was obviously in no mood to wait.

I swung the door open just as the noise had reached a fever pitch.

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