Free They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee by Reed Farrel Coleman

sort of a dance we did that went back to when we were kids.
    As I picked up the phone to do my part of the cha-cha there was a knock at the door. I put the phone back in its cradle and answered the door: “Who’s there?”
    â€œI have come to show you what the night has brought.” Kira stepped shyly into my room. “I didn’t want to come.”
    â€œWhy did you?”
    â€œMy heart gave me no choice.”

Ice Fishing
    I hate this part of me, the part that could stand back and rub its white-gloved fingers along the edges of perfection looking for hidden dust. I don’t know if I was born with it or if it is the Brooklyn in me, but my nature runs towards distrust. Well, that’s not exactly true. To be precise, I more readily accept the wrong, the failed, the negative numbers. It isn’t affection, but comfort. It is easier to believe deformity.
    I was hating myself a lot right then, Kira sleeping softly beside me. She had come to me in spite of herself, kissed me until I lost all sense of time and place. She stunned me with the eloquence of her surrender. And there I was—my lips and beard wet with her, her scent filling every corner of the night—unable to sleep as I looked for the fault lines along the gentle curves of her torso. And what wrong had she done other than to like me and my silly books, to enjoy the feel of me inside her?
    I thought back to the previous night, my pulp detective suspiciously poking through the woman’s handbag with the barrel of his gun. Wasn’t that what I was doing now, sorting through Kira’s every nuance: the way she threw back her head when I licked her breast, her every sigh and shudder?
    Wasn’t I as cheap and hollow as my own detective, searching for duplicity not in a handbag, but where shadows fell across the breathing landscape of my lover’s body? No, I was worse.
    â€œUrnmm.” Kira rolled over in my arms, stretching. “You’re still up?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œIs anything the matter?”
    â€œNothing,” I lied.
    â€œUncle Dylan is a bad liar.” She ran her finger over my mouth. “Lies are transparent in the dark.”
    She replaced her finger with her lips and rolled me over onto my back. Even as she kissed me into forgetfulness, I fought a quiet battle with my own suspicions. Suspicions which said much more about me than their target.

    Kira was up already when I opened my eyes. She was dressed and seated on the edge of the bed reading my fax. When she noticed I was awake, she smiled, putting the papers down on the desk.
    â€œCome on,” she said, “I want to take you to breakfast.”
    â€œWhat about class?”
    â€œI’m a diligent student, but even I give myself a rest on Saturday.”
    I showered. Before we headed downstairs, I let her in on my new found life of crime and my run-in with Dean Dallenbach. I told her we were going to be followed and that I would understand if she didn’t want to be seen with me. She could, she said, handle Dean Dallenbach’s wrath, but that if she didn’t get some food in her soon, I’d have a corpse on my hands.
    â€œForget that,” I said. “The hotel charges extra for heavy-duty cleanup.”
    My pal was back at work behind the front desk. When I stopped to ask him how the coffee delivery went, he was inexplicably cool to me. He barely managed an; “Okay,” before turning his back on me. I figured it had to be my morning breath or Kira’s presence at my side. And since I’d brushed and gargled, I supposed it was Kira. I was really beginning to hate this town. When I opened my mouth to call the desk clerk on his attitude, Kira tugged me by the elbow and urged me out the door.
    â€œWhat an asshole!” I hissed as we walked out into a snow shower. “What was it, you think; the difference in our ages or your being Japanese?”
    â€œNeither.” She winked. “I