Free The Nightcrawler by Mick Ridgewell Page A

old. He looked over at the Charger. The sun glared off the glass and chrome. The red paint almost glowed. He concentrated on the hood. Thinking about Sarah, her hot naked ass had been buffing that hood just hours ago; he began to feel aroused.
    A slight thud brought him back to the present. Grace had returned and set his lemonade on the table. The tall glass garnished with a piece of lemon wedged on the rim already dripped with condensation.  
    “There ya go. That’ll pick up your spirits.”
    She leaned on the table to look at the sky. “The guy on the radio said we might get a storm today. Sure don’t look like it. Does it?”
    Scott agreed, not that he could tell anything about the weather. While she was leaning on the table looking toward the sky, he was gaping at her breasts thinking “Amazing Grace”. She noticed but didn’t seem to care. She just stood up and grinned.  
    “Your club will be ready in a minute,” she said and returned to the kitchen.
    Again, he watched her until she was out of sight, and then looked back to the pumps across the street. Sam was cleaning the windshield of a blue minivan. He looked like the Sam that Grace had described. Letting go of his paranoia, Scott looked around Charlie’s. He hadn’t noticed until now that he was the sole diner. The only sounds were the muffled sounds of the traffic passing by outside and Shania Twain coming from a radio behind the bar .
    “There ya go,” Grace said setting his plate down. “You ain’t touched the lemonade. I can get you something else if you like.”
    “It’s fine. So is it always this slow in here?” he asked as he sprinkled salt on his fries.
    “We do okay for lunch. Business really dropped when the McDonald’s went in just up the road.”
    “Grace, I really hate eating alone. Would you like to join me?”
    “Well, I could use a coffee break,” she replied with a mischievous grin. She walked away and returned moments later with a glass of lemonade. “Decided it was too hot in here to be drinkin’ coffee.”  
    Scott ate almost without speaking. Grace didn’t really need anyone’s help carrying a conversation. Scott would smile or nod at the appropriate moments and she would go off again. How she’s owned Charlie’s for seven years. That she was married once. It didn’t last as long as her marriage with Charlie’s. Scott thought she probably used that line more than once but he laughed just the same. Her look turned somewhat somber when she told him about her daughter. She called her Sandie. Grace had given Sandie up for adoption a month after she was born. Kids shouldn’t raise kids, she said.  
    “She’s twenty-seven now,” Grace said with pride in her eyes. “I bet she’ll be finishing med school next year.”
    “I bet she will,” Scott said.  
    Then he caught her wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “Sun sure is bright, isn’t it?” She mused, gazing across the street.
    When she looked back Scott was checking out her breasts again.  
    “Not bad eh?” She cupped her hands under them. Her voice had regained the jovial tone she had when she first sat down. “They cost me a pretty penny. Money well spent, don’t ya think?”
    Scott flushed a bit. He could feel his ears turning red. He looked at her chest again as if by invitation, and then looked into her eyes. She was smiling like a teenage girl, just asked to the prom. She sat up as straight as she could. Her shoulders pushed back. Her chest seemed to be crossing the table toward him. He had an urge to reach over to meet them. He had only ever been with younger women, no older than twenty-seven, maybe thirty. Nevertheless, as he sat across from Grace, forty-five years old, maybe fifty, he was aroused. He wondered if she knew how turned on he was.
    The door opened and a woman walked in. She was about thirty, tall with short dark hair, small on the top, and big on the bottom. Scott thought she looked like a walking pear. She was wearing a