Free Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

itself.”
    “You and Erickson—our junior crime fighters.”
    “Rich, you are too cool, you know that? Ain’t you curious? Don’t you wonder if it really was Wolfe?”
    They were walking past a fisherman, a heavy-set man in boots and a slicker standing in the surf, dejectedly watching his line moving slowly in upon him. In two years of running the beach Bone had yet to see a surf fisherman catch anything but minnows and kelp.
    “Why not this character?” Bone asked Cutter. “He’s about the same shape. And maybe he drives a full-size car and was by himself last night, no alibi. Could be he’s the one. Why don’t we investigate him?”
    “Oh bullshit.”
    “Why bullshit? It makes as much sense.”
    “Look, man, I know you. I was there, remember? The second you saw that picture, it was all over your mug—that first split second before you had time to think, to sickly the thing o’er with the pale cast of apathy.”
    They were at the car now. “You talk funny, mister,” Bone said.
    “Then laugh.”
    “Ha ha.”
    Cutter backed the car around and headed out of the lot, moving slowly, as if they were in a funeral cortege. “Are we gonna do anything about it?”
    “Not me. What would a man like that be doing with a cheerleader?”
    “What else?”
    “Bullshit.”
    Cutter nodded. “Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be bullshit. Except for one thing—you, friend. Mister Cool. Daddy Clear Eyes. I don’t know who I’d trust as a witness if not you. And what do you give us right out of the box? It’s him . You can’t explain that away, man. No way.”
    Bone said nothing for a time. He was as much exhausted as indifferent. But finally he responded. “So what do you propose?”
    Cutter shrugged. “We find out what we can. Check out his car. Check out where the girl was. Play it by ear.”
    “You got too much time on your hands, Alex. You’re going bananas.”
    “Maybe.”
    “And anyway, what’s the connection? If not for blackmail, how does all this relate to your—despair?”
    “I just want to know, that’s all. If it was him.”
    “Why him?”
    “’Cause I don’t like him, that’s why.”

3
    That evening Cutter’s old pal George Swanson came through for him as usual, dropping in at the house with a magnum of Mumm’s Champagne and a family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Bone joined him and Cutter and Mo at the kitchen table but ate hurriedly, adding almost nothing to Alex’s long sardonic account of the events of the last twenty-four hours, an account that unexpectedly avoided any mention of J. J. Wolfe and Bone’s reaction to the picture in the newspaper. At the time, Bone did not give the matter thought, probably because he was too tired to think about much of anything. When he finished eating he took his sleeping bag out onto the deck and zippered himself into it, and the sleep that came to him almost immediately was dreamless and timeless, a deep black hole he did not begin to work his way out of until ten the next morning.
    By that time Cutter was up and gone and Mo was already coasting on her first downer of the day, lying on the living room floor playing with the baby while a broken Seals and Crofts record kept repeating the same cloying phrase over and over. In the kitchen Bone found milk and Pepsis and a large cellophane bag of powdered doughnuts that tasted like uncut sodium propionate. They meant that Cutter, the Great Nutritionist, had already been shopping, undoubtedly with money from Swanson.
    Bone would have taken some of the milk—unlike Cutter he was not an aficionado of cola for breakfast—but he knew the baby needed the stuff more than he did, so he settled for another doughnut and some reheated coffee. Then, after shaving and getting dressed, he called the man Cutter had told him about, the mechanic who wanted to buy his car. Yes, the man was still interested, but he would not go higher than two hundred dollars, less the cost of getting the car back from