Slow Burn (A Leo Waterman Mystery) by G.M. Ford

Author:G.M. Ford [Ford, G.M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Rebecca moved the last chanterelle mushroom around her plate in a clockwise direction, plowing little furrows in the last of the dill sauce.

“You look tired,” she said.

“Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

We were the only diners at Cool Hand Luke, a great little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Madrona Park, a section of Seattle which was, depending upon your outlook, either the best part of the ghetto or the worst part of the high-rent district. In Seattle, it all depends upon whether or not water is visible. In a single block, you can crest a hill, find one of the lakes or the Sound suddenly come into view, and move from Thunderbird in a bag to an audacious little ’93 zinfandel.

Four-thirty is a bit late for lunch and a bit early for dinner. In an hour or so, a table would involve a thirty-minute wait.

“Your lunch was good?”

Duvall put the fork down, leaving the mushroom to drown, and reached over, dropping her hand on mine.

“Not that I don’t appreciate it, Leo, but you seem to be very concerned about whether or not I liked my lunch.”

She was right. I’d asked her about six times. I hate it when women are observant. “I guess I feel like I ought to apologize for having all this crap going on right in the middle of when we’re moving.”

She shrugged. “So apologize.”

“You’d have to meet this group to know what I mean, but I really thought they were just a bunch of idiots with more money than brains. I took the talk of”—I drew imaginary quotation marks with my fingers—“ ‘mortal danger’ to be…you know…the worst sort of overstatement for effect. I mean these people take themselves pretty damn seriously. I figured what we had here was a bunch of habitual self-dramatizers.” My turn to shrug.

“But somebody’s dead.”

“Yeah. Somebody’s dead. The cops have pulled my license. They’ve got me for obstruction and tampering, if they want to pursue it. They’re probably out looking for the crew by now. Fearless Fosdick here has failed to stop exactly the kind of disaster he was hired to prevent. And on top of this crap, the whole thing makes me look like I’m getting cold feet about our move.”

“Are you?”

“No. Are you?”

“A little.”

“Me too.”

“Under the circumstances, I think a little apprehension is an appropriate response,” she said.

“You do?”

“Certainly. It’s a big move for both of us.”

“Good.”

“Good what?”

“Good that we’re of the same mind.”

“Are we?”

“I hope so.”

“Me too.”

I began to chuckle to myself. Duvall shook her head.

“Listen to us,” she said. “We sound like the Marx brothers.”

“Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First?’ ”

“You know, Leo, sometimes I worry that two grown people shouldn’t have this much trouble talking about their relationship.”

“I’m not good with ‘should,’ Rebecca. I mean, is there a standard out there someplace that we’re falling short of? I mean, like, are we being plotted on a graph somewhere?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good, because one of the first things I learned from being a private eye is that there are no perfect people out there.

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