Free Fire Lake by Jonathan Valin

get hurt?"
    I sat down on the bed again and put my arm around her
shoulder.
    "If we assume that Lonnie didn't kill Jenkins-"
    "He didn't," Karen said with utter
certainty.
    "Then whoever did, whoever left Lonnie's license
at the motel and searched my apartment last night, may think that I'm
in it with Lonnie--whatever it is. And they may make the same
assumption about you. I don't want to scare you too much, but believe
me, if you saw what they did to Jenkins, you'd know why that worries
me."
    Karen shivered. "What could Lonnie have done to
make someone so vicious?"
    I'd been thinking about that ever since I'd
discovered the systematic wreckage in my apartment. A botched drug
deal was the obvious answer. Since Lonnie had only been out of
Lexington for a couple of weeks, the drugs couldn't have been his
own. Which meant that he'd been acting as a middleman for someone
else.
    "Has Lonnie ever acted as a mule in a drug
deal?" I asked Karen.
    Her face reddened. "We both have," she said
with embarrassment. "In '73 and '74, when Lonnie was down on his
luck, we use to go to New York regular to cop for a druggist in
Forest Park. It was a way to pay the tab for our habits."
    "Did he ever screw up when he was carrying?"
I asked her.
    She shook her head. "It was the one thing he was
absolutely reliable about."
    "What would have happened if he had screwed up?"
I asked.
    She stared at me for a long moment. "I see where
you're heading, Harry. But I don't know how to answer you. Back then,
heroin was a communal thing, the way coke is now. All the dopers more
or less knew all the other dopers on the block. No one ever tried to
take anyone else off." She turned her face away from me. "I
don't like talking about this in front of you. I think it makes you
hate me. It makes me hate myself."
    "It's old business," I said, touching her
on the cheek.
    She didn't say anything.
    I pulled her face around and kissed her on the mouth.
She resisted the kiss for a moment, then opened her mouth and kissed
me passionately. When we broke off, she smiled at me, as if the kiss
had made her feel better.
    "Look," Karen said, "I'll go back to
St. Louis tomorrow, if you think I should. I'll do anything you want.
But first I want one night with you. One whole night. Okay?"
    I smiled and said, "Okay."
 
 
    13
    When I came back out of the shower, Karen was sitting
on the bed, talking on the phone. She waved her hand at me, as if to
say that she'd only be another moment. She was partly dressed, in a
white cotton blouse and bikini underpants. I got an erection staring
at her. She noticed and laughed into the phone.
    "No, sweetheart," she said, still smiling
at me. "I'm not laughing at you. Mommy's got to go now. Take
good care of your sister. And I'll see you tomorrow."
    She hung up. "You need a hand?" she said to
me.
    "If we get started again, we'll never stop."
    "Yes," she said, looking a little
perplexed. "It's weird, isn't it. Like 1969 again."
    "Worrying about Lonnie has made us regress,"
I said.
    "You think?"
    "A little. But there's something else going on
here." I glanced down at myself and Karen laughed.
    "Face it, Harry," she said. "You've
got the hots for me."
    "Is that all right?"
    "I think it's great," she said with a
smile.
    Karen kept smiling at me as I walked over to my bed.
The only clothes I had were the ones I'd worn the night before. I
picked up the trousers and stared at the bloody cuffs. Karen's smile
died immediately.
    "God," she said, "is that blood?"
    I nodded. Reaching into my pants pocket, I pulled out
Lonnie's bloodstained driver's license. Karen turned her face away.
    "Why did they kill that man?" she said in a
shaken voice.
    "I don't know, for sure," I said. "But
if Lonnie was acting as a mule, and he got clipped at the Encantada
by Claude for the buy money or the drugs themselves, it could explain
a lot of things. What we really need to know is, who Lonnie was
supposed to be copping for."
    "Maybe it was somebody in St. Louis,"