Free Tengu by Graham Masterton Page B

Old Sonora Restaurant.”
    “I’m still
there,” Mack nodded. “The food’s better than most.”
    “Maybe we’ll
drop by,” said Skrolnik. “Meanwhile, I don’t want you to leave the city.”
    Mack looked up.
“Okay,” he said. Then, hesitantly: “Can you tell me what actually happened? The
television news didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. Was it really that
awful?”
    “Mr. Holt,”
said Skrolnik patiently, “did you love Sherry Cantor?”
    “Yes, sir, I did.”
    Skrolnik put on
his hat. “In that case, you’ll prefer it if I don’t tell you. As it says in the
Good Book: ‘ In much wisdom is much grief: and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’
    Tengu Mack
stared at him. “You surprise me.”
    “I surprise myself,”
said Skrolnik, and pushed Detective Arthur out of the living room ahead of him.
At the door, he turned around and said, “I want you to think about Sherry for
the next few days. Yes, I’m sorry, Mrs. Robin T. Nesmith, Jr., but it’s going
to be necessary. I want you to think about every possible angle of what she
was, all the people she knew, and everything she said. I want you to sieve
through your memory, Mr. Holt, because you’re the the only person who can. And
if you think of anything unusual, anything that jars, anything that seems out
of place, then give me a call.”
    Skrolnik took a
card out of his breast pocket and tucked it in the crevice behind the
lightswitch.
    “So long,” he
said. “Pleasant dreams.”
    He closed the
door behind him, and Mack and Olive stayed quite still, like a tableau in a
shabby small-town museum, as the detectives’ footsteps clattered down the
stairs. The front door slammed, and after a while they heard the whinny of a
car starter. Mack coughed.
    Olive stood up.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked Mack in a gentle voice.
    He shook his
head. “Not if you can stand a little mourning.”
    She smiled
sadly. “I lost my first man in Vietnam. There’s nothing you can teach me about
mourning.”
    “You didn’t
tell me about that.”
    “There wasn’t no need. I don’t know nothing about
you, and you don’t know nothing about me, and that was the way we were meant to
be.”
    Mack laid his
hand on her bare shoulder, and leaned forward and kissed her. “You’re very good
for me. You know that?”
    “Yes,” she
smiled, her eyes glittering.
    He was silent
for a moment. Then he said, “I guess I’ll go out. Maybe get some beer and some
food. We could have Dick and Lois around later, if you like.”
    “Come to bed
first,” she said. Her beaded black hair rattled as she shook her head.
    “I just got
up.”
    “This is
therapy.”
    “What kind of
therapy?”
    “Forget-your-sadness therapy. Come on.”
    She took his
wrist and led him back into the bedroom. He stood silent while she tugged his
Snoqualmie T-shirt over his head and then unzippered his Levi’s. She knelt on
the bedroom floor and pulled the pants down his legs.
    He felt as if
he couldn’t catch his breath; the way you feel in a high wind. Olive’s perfume
was strong and flowery, and there was something about the way her long
fingernails grazed over his skin that he found intensely arousing. She guided
him toward the bed and gently pushed him backward onto the red satin sheet. He
looked up at her, and the muted flare of the sun that shone through the blind
behind her made her appear darker and more mysterious than ever.
    He wondered if
her first lover had been black or white. He wondered how he had died.
    She unwrapped her sarong. It fell to the floor, pure silk, silent as a shadow. The soft sunlight gleamed on the brown skin
of her impossibly huge breasts, nippled with black. She climbed onto the bed,
and her breasts swayed.
    “You have to
forget everything,” she whispered. He wasn’t sure if her voice was far or near.
The room was dim and warm and funky from their night of love. He felt her
tongue run along the sole of his foot, and her teeth nip at his