Free Gulf Coast Girl by Charles Williams

told me: be careful what you say. She was merely cueing me. There still might be something wrong.
    “When am I going to see you again?” I asked.
    “Do you really want to?”
    “You know I do,” I said. “How about right now?”
    “We-e-ll—”
    “Can I come out?”
    “Heavens, not here,” she said, coyly chiding. “Bill, after all—”
    After all, we have to be discreet. There was a strained, uncomfortable feeling in this talking to her as if we were lovers, and I wondered what she thought of having to do it.
    “Where can I pick you up?” I asked.
    “How about meeting me at that same cocktail lounge? In about fifteen minutes?”
    “I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.
    I was sitting in the car in front of it when she pulled up in the Cadillac and found a place to park. If she was being followed I didn’t want to go inside where they might get a look at my marked-up face. I eased alongside. She saw me, and slipped out on the street side and got in. It had taken only seconds.
    I shot ahead, watching the mirror. There were cars behind us, but there was no way to tell. There are always cars behind you. I was conscious of the gleam of the blond head beside me, and a faint fragrance of perfume.
    “Are you all right?” I asked quickly.
    “Yes,” she said. “But they searched the house again, while I was gone.”
    I turned and headed for the beach, wondering about that. Why would they search the house? And how would she know they had, if she’d been gone? If they were looking for a man they’d hardly have to pull out the dresser drawers and slice open the upholstery, the way they did in movies. Then I began to get it.
    We passed a street light. She looked at my face and gasped. “Bill! What happened?”
    “That’s what I’ve got to tell you,” I said. I swung the corner and headed west on the beach boulevard. It was beginning to darken now, at one a.m., as the crowds thinned and some of the concessions closed up shop.
    The pug stared at me with his unseeing eyes, just waiting for the buoyancy nothing on earth could stop. Tell her? What kind of fool would tell anybody?
    But how else was I going to explain what I had to do? I had to trust her. We had to trust each other. And the insane part of it was that I did. I considered that, puzzled. I’d known her less than 24 hours, she had never told me one word about herself, and yet I would have trusted her with anything. Maybe they shouldn’t let me out alone.
    I watched the mirror. There were still too many cars to tell. I picked up speed, checking them.
    “Bill,” she said urgently, “tell me. What is it?”
    “That thug, the one who was beating you. He looked me up at the pier, to work me over for slugging him. There was a fight, and an accident. I knocked him off onto the barge—”
    “He isn’t—”
    “Yes,” I said.
    She didn’t say anything. I glanced around at her, and her head was bowed as she looked down at her hands. Then she raised it, and her eyes were bitter with regret.
    “It’s all my fault,” she whispered. “I got you mixed up in it—”
    “Stop that,” I said. “It was nobody’s fault, except his. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
    I told her the whole story. We came down off the sea wall onto the hard-packed tracks going west along the beach. There was no moon, and it was very dark. I could hear the surf off to the left. There were three cars behind us. One of them stopped; I kept watching the other two.
    “I’ll never forgive myself,” she said. “But, Bill, won’t they be able to see it was just an accident?”
    “Not now,” I said. “It’s probably never an accident if you’re fighting, and it’s too late for that, anyway. But for God’s sake quit blaming yourself. You didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s about as sensible as blaming General Motors for it because he drove out there in an Oldsmobile.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    I checked the mirror again. The two cars were