Free Free Fire by C.J. Box Page B

with one hand before reaching for the handle with the other. Sheila D’Amato stood in the threshold with a large foam containerand a tray with two tap beers in mugs covered by plastic.
    “Why you?” McCann asked.
    “I offered.”
    “I don’t remember ordering two beers.”
    “I thought maybe I’d drink one with you.”
    He nodded, let her in after checking the street to confirm there was no mob, and shut the door behind them. He gestured to the sack with the six-packs. “I’ve got more.”
    “What you did to those people in Yellowstone,” she said, “it was just so baaaaad .” Her eyes glistened as she drew out the word. “And the way those people reacted in Rocky’s—wow.”
    Wow , he knew, was probably the best she could do.
    She drank beer after beer and watched him eat. He was grateful for her company, he admitted to himself, which was proof of his desperation.
    He’d represented Sheila after she was arrested for shoplifting$200 worth of makeup from the drugstore. That was when she’d been around town for a few months, long enough that merchants had learned to watch her closely. He employed a “high-altitude” defense, claiming to the judge that Sheila’s brain was out of whack because she came from New Jersey and her brain had yet to adapt to the altitude and lack of oxygen. It made her forgetful, he said, and she had simply forgotten to pay the clerk. The judge was amused with the argument but still would have convicted her if the drugstore owner hadn’t forgotten to show up and testify. Sheila credited McCann for her acquittal.
    Sheila D’Amato admitted to McCann after the trial that she was getting old and her clothes were too tight. All she wanted was her old life back, before she’d been dumped. She was pathetic,he thought, but he enjoyed her stories of being a kept woman in Atlantic City, being passed from mobster to mobster for fifteen years. She claimed she hated Montana and all the tight-assed people who lived here. She’d left town with men a few times since her arrival, but had drifted back after they cut her loose. She said she didn’t know why she kept ending up here.
    “Do you plan to stay around?” she asked him. Sheila had an annoying little-girl-lost voice, he thought.
    “Why are you asking?” But he knew why.
    She shrugged and attempted to look coy. “Well, everybody hates your guts.”
    “Not everybody,” he said, saluting her with his beer bottle.
    “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, letting a little hard-edged Jersey into her voice, but cocking her head to make sure he knew she was teasing.
    “I won’t be here long,” he said. He knew not to tell her too much. But she could be of use to him, even if he couldn’t trust her. She probably didn’t trust him either. They had that in common.
    “Where will you go?” she asked, trying not to be obvious.
    “Someplace warm.”
    “What’s keeping you?”
    That, he couldn’t tell her. “I’ll leave when the time is right.”
    She nodded as if she understood. He drank another beer and she started to look better.
    “What was it like?” she asked, her eyes glistening. She wanted him to tell her killing was a rush, a high. He wondered what the mobsters used to tell her it was like.
    “It solved the problem,” he said, measuring his words, lettingher interpret them however she wished. How could he tell her it meant nothing to him? That, in fact, it was hard work and unpleasant but simply a means to an end?
    He waited her out until she finally asked if he would take her with him when he left.
    Of course not , he said to himself, not in a million fucking years . To Sheila, he said, “It depends.”
    “On what?”
    “On you.”
    She had paid her legal bill to him for the shoplifting charge in blow jobs. They’d haggled and determined $50 per. She was pretty good. He’d been in jail for three months. He’d make her keep those too-tight clothes on.
    Early the next morning, after shaving in his office and