Out On the Cutting Edge by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061803994
Publisher: HarperCollins

“I didn’t want to take any more money from him,” I told Willa. “The original thousand had put me under more obligation than I wanted to be. If I accepted any more of his money I’d have his daughter around my neck for the rest of my life.”

“But you’re doing more work. Why shouldn’t you get paid for it?”

“I got paid already, and what did I give him in return?”

“You did the work.”

“Did I? In high school physics they taught us how to measure work. The formula was force times distance. Take an object that weighs twenty pounds, move it six feet, and you’ve done a hundred and twenty foot-pounds worth of work.”

“Foot-pounds?”

“That was the unit of measurement. But if you stood and pushed against a wall all day and didn’t budge it, you hadn’t performed any work. Because you’d moved the wall a distance of zero, so it didn’t matter how much the wall weighed, the product was zero. Warren Hoeldtke paid me a thousand dollars and all I did was push a wall.”

“You moved it a little.”

“Not enough to matter.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “When Edison was working on the light bulb, somebody said he must be discouraged because he wasn’t making any progress. Edison said he’d made great progress, because now he knew twenty thousand materials that you couldn’t use for a filament.”

“Edison had a better attitude than I have.”

“And a good thing, too, or we’d all be in the dark.”

We were in the dark, and seemed none the worse for it. We were in her bedroom, stretched out on her bed, a Reba McIntyre tape playing in the kitchen. Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.

I hadn’t intended to drop in on her. I’d gone out walking after my call to Hoeldtke. I was passing a florist and had the impulse to send her flowers, and after he’d written up the order I found out he couldn’t deliver until the following day. So I’d delivered them myself.

She put the flowers in water and we sat in the kitchen with them on the table between us. She made coffee. It was instant, but it was a fresh jar of a premium brand and no killjoy had taken the caffeine out of it.

And then, without needing to discuss the matter, we’d moved to the bedroom. Reba McIntyre had been singing when we entered the bedroom and she was still hard at it, but we had heard some of the songs more than once. The tape reversed automatically, and would play over and over if you let it.

After a while she said, “Are you hungry? I could cook something.”

“If you feel like it.”

“Shall I tell you a secret? I never feel like it. I’m not a great cook, and you’ve seen the kitchen.”

“We could go out.”

“It’s pouring. Don’t you hear it in the airshaft?”

“It was raining very lightly earlier. What my Irish aunt used to call a soft day.

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.