Free Fidelity by Thomas Perry Page A

born. In the other direction was the high, narrow building of the Morongo Casino Resort that the Indians had built. Beyond the buildings was the gray line of freeway that stretched from the beach in Santa Monica across the whole country to the beach in Jacksonville, Florida. They reached the plateau and walked for a few minutes.
    Valerie said, “What happened to that guy you were working with last time I saw you? That Whitley guy?”
    Hobart walked on for a few steps, climbing higher. “He didn’t work out, so we went our separate ways.”
    “When did you split up with him?”
    “Not long ago. A week or two. Why?”
    “I was just curious, I guess,” she said. “I don’t see you all that often, and I like to keep current. Sometimes I make predictions. I didn’t like him much, and I was wondering how long it would take you to decide you didn’t, either.”
    Hobart said, “He was a pretty good salesman because he was a talker, I’ll give him that. People would start out thinking twenty bucks was a lot for a string of lightbulbs, but after a while they were thinking that twenty was damned cheap for getting him to stop talking and go away. The lightbulbs made a nice bonus.”
    Valerie gave the laugh she often gave as a comment, just “Huh!” once. When Hobart was away from her, even for a long time, he could always hear that laugh. When he closed his eyes at night and tried to picture her, he would see her begin to smile, then hear the laugh, the bright blue eyes wide and her mouth open just a little to show her perfect white top teeth. When they were young, Valerie’s teeth weren’t so good. He remembered them as small and oddly spaced. But in her twenties, while Hobart was in jail, she’d had them capped so they looked like a movie star’s teeth.
    He had assumed that she would probably get married to somebody else while he was in jail, and thinking about it every day in his cell was part of his punishment. Instead, she had spent a lot of effort making herself look better and a lot of time driving east to Phoenix or west to Los Angeles with a couple of girlfriends, or at least that was her story. Probably she’d had a lot of boyfriends, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, then or now. She’d had the right to do whatever she pleased, and probably she had.
    Sometimes she made vague remarks to hurt him. Once she said she was a whore with an expired “sell by” date on her. That was a couple of years ago. It was late in the evening when he was feeling sentimental about her, and he felt as though he had been stabbed. He hurt so much that he became enraged, looked at his watch, made a transparent excuse about a plane he had to catch, and left. He had done that to make her think he was lying and had a date with someone else. They had loved each other for so long that they knew the best ways to wound each other. She was smart enough to know that she could make him crazy by reminding him that she’d had sex with other men-probably more than a few of them. But she also seemed to fear that if she mentioned a name, she would learn later that the man had died suddenly. It had happened once, about ten years ago. Afterward, he had not wanted her to hear that the man was dead and get a feeling of undeserved power-that she could just say a name and the man would die-so he had made sure he didn’t come to see her for a long time. After six months, he had a postal service print up some cards that said he had a new cell-phone number, and sent one to her as though she were on a long mailing list. Since then, when she was in the mood to punish him for what happened to their lives when he went to jail, she would just imply that there had been other men. What she was implying was that the experiences had not been good-that they had ruined her-and that she considered every one of them his fault.
    They walked for a half hour or more without talking, going up into the hills where other people seldom went, and they