Free The Blue Hour by T. Jefferson Parker Page A

ground-out piston head for an ashtray,
but the piston head was full and the ground was littered with her butts.
    Colesceau searched under
the counter for his lunch box but remembered he'd left it in the back. He was
going through the short hallway that connected the retail store to the work bay
when he heard Garry say something about tits, then the low-pitched, wicked
chuckles.
    Colesceau pretended he
hadn't heard, and grabbed his lunch box off the counter above which hung the
centerfolds of beautiful women in bathing suit bottoms and no tops. Today he'd
put his lunch under a brunette with a gorgeous smile. His heart was beating
hard and he could feel it against the tape. There was a heavy, clumsy silence
as he nodded to the men and headed out again.
     
    He stopped in his driveway
at 12 Meadowlark in the Quail Creek Apartment Homes and used the remote to open
his garage door. The faded little pickup truck chugged at idle while he waited.
A moment later he was inside the cool of the garage and the door was coming
down.
    Inside the apartment
Colesceau moved in the dim light. Lights off, drapes drawn. He was a pale man
who preferred a little shade with his sunlight, a little dampness with his day.
    The California sunshine
didn't want you to have secrets like that: just look at what those people had
done to him yesterday. How is your libido
. . . erection and ejaculation . . . physical sexual arousal ... do her with a
Coke bottle or your fist?
    Amazing, he
thought, just what people in the government would do to a man. Humiliation.
Control. Chemical castration. No better
than the state police who had executed his father, really, just different
methods, slower rates of extermination. And no dogs, so far.
    On the way past the
bookcases he glanced at the scores of eggshells, his mother's treasures. Most
of them were pastels—baby blue and pink and pale yellow. Sickening, infantile
shades he thought. The ones with the little skirts of lace and bric-a-brac and
lace were by far the worst. In his mother's hands, egg painting wasn't so much
a noble Romanian folk art as a garish display of inner imbalances too acute for
Colesceau to ponder.
    He didn't linger on the
eggs however, because he knew that a twenty-six-year-old man must have more to
think about than his mother. Not for the first time he wished she lived just a
little farther away. The idea that she might move in with him was distressing.
    He went into the kitchen.
Colesceau knew for a fact that if the police exposed him and the neighbors
rallied to have him removed, then his mother would move in to protect him. It
would be her duty. She would fight them like a bulldog. He shivered and felt
the tape up tight against his breasts. Thank God he'd looked ahead, seen the
possibilities, made arrangements.
    He made a very strong Bloody Mary. The vodka was in
the freezer and the mix was in his refrigerator. He loved his drinks cold. But
he liked them hot, too. So he ground half a teaspoon of black pepper, shook
four jets of Tabasco and three of Worcestershire sauce into the jar, then broke
off a stalk of celery and stirred it. It cooled and heated his lips at the same
time. Nice.
    • • •
    After dinner and two more
drinks Colesceau dialed Al Holtz's office number. He knew the fat PA would be
home by now, but he thought he might sum up his case for mercy with a brief
message on Holtz's machine. He always saved a little bit of old-world formality
for law enforcement:
    "Yes, hello Mr. Holtz, this is Matamoros
Colesceau. Moros. I want to say thank you for the interview of yesterday. I
will successfully satisfy my parole next week. I hope that you will allow me to
maintain my life and privacy here on Meadowlark. I will continue to live up to
my obligations as in the past I have done. I will never again harm any person.
Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with you. Good-bye."
    • • •

When
Colesceau hung up he was already brooding about women and his sexual capacity
and he