Ugly Money by Philip Loraine

Author:Philip Loraine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

4

When Marisa saw Nick being led out of the Hartman blockhouse, saw him being introduced to the police, she was at first so stunned that her brain seized up – but only for a few seconds, because she turned, ran back to her station wagon and was sitting at the wheel, engine running, by the time the police car began its return journey. As it passed the end of Pine Grove she pulled out and followed. It seemed to her essential to discover, at the very least, which precinct her best friend was being taken to.

As anybody who has ever tried following another car in city traffic will know, every intersection is a death-defying challenge, every light an enemy. She realized that Nick had been right: only the fact that we’d stayed on the freeway until the required exit had made it possible for them to follow my Taurus all the way from Astoria to the mansion on the hill. Within a few minutes she had not only lost the police car, she was hopelessly lost herself. Portland is only a small city, but it has a system of one-way streets which can catch a stranger unawares and hold him like a fly in honey. When she finally found a place to park, and when she finally found a phone in good working order, she called my apartment for the first time. Two hours had passed since I’d driven away with her mother; if we’d gone back to Astoria we would by now have arrived there. No answer.

It seemed to her that EastWest Drive must be part of a specific police district, but she was by then a long way from it, with no idea of how to find it again – she wasn’t very good when it came to direction, and left such things to Nick, if he was around. She tried asking at a gas station, but the only men she could find there didn’t even know where EastWest Drive was located, and it was obviously their policy to keep as far away from the police as possible; her questions earned her some very funny looks.

Anxiety and her own determined character drove her to keep asking. The most sensible answer, given to her several times, was that the only people who could tell her what she wanted to know were the police themselves – look, wasn’t that a police car parked over there in that mall? Her unwillingness to approach the guardians of the law directly earned her another round of funny looks. She reasoned that the last thing she could afford was to alert more policemen; she’d probably end up in the cooler herself, and not the same cooler as her best friend either.

Once she found time to consider the situation more closely, and she had plenty of time for that, further complications began to multiply in her mind. For instance, supposing she did discover where he was, what was she going to say, what was she

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