Free Dark Maze by Thomas Adcock

in Brooklyn.”
    “Brooklyn,” I said flatly. “As in Coney Island.”
    “Yeah... Hey, what do you know?”
    “I know I’m taking a trip out to Coney Island, for the first time since I was a kid.”

    Off and on through the day, I had certain thrilling ideas about being back at my place with Ruby. She said she would wait, did she not? I did not want to spoil these thoughts by calling up my place even once to see if she was still there. This is the pathology of a man who has been cut off at the knees once in his life, which is a lot like being divorced.
    Back when I was married, I would miss my wife Judy during the day—and sometimes at night—and I would call home and she was usually not there. And when I came to find out some of the reasons she was never there, I stopped calling home altogether.
    You would think that a man as bright as I enjoy believing I am would know the difference between one woman and another, especially when the women are as highly contrasting as Judy and Ruby. But no. Along with all those thrilling angles I had considered during the course of the day, there was a sour note: the lasting memory of being sandbagged by wounded vanity.
    So I had not telephoned.
    And now I was sliding the key into the lock, opening the door, taking the chance, again.
    And there was Ruby Flagg, sitting on my couch under the window, one leg curled up beneath her hips, a book open in her lap and a teapot and cup on the side table along with a glass full of flowers she must have bought at the Korean greengrocer on the comer. She wore spectacles I had never seen, spectacles that betrayed her as very nearsighted. She yanked them off.
    “I don’t like you seeing me in these,” she said. “They make me look funny, like a bug.”
    I said, lamely, “You’re still here.”
    “Like I said—I mean it, buster.”
    Outside, it started raining the sort of soft rain that comes late in the afternoon on April days, the sort of rain that takes away all the shrillness of the city. I could hear foghorns out on the Hudson River, and cops on horseback down in the street.
    “When you say, I mean it ’, you mean?...”
    “Both of us have been around the block. And we both have probably been run over a few times. We are both slightly past the prime of youth. Do you know what Fm saying?”
    I said I was not at all sure, even though maybe I was.
    “Fm saying you and I are at the age when we should take it easy, but we should take it.”
    Then Ruby got up off the couch and walked to me and put her arms up around my neck and pulled my head down to hers and kissed me on the lips. Afterwards, she said, “Now this is what I call throwing my whole self at you, buster. For better or for worse. How about paying me some attention?”
    “Maybe we could go for drinks and talk, then go to dinner someplace nice,” I said.
    “We’re having dinner someplace nice,” Ruby said. “Right here. Drinks, too.”
    She sat me down and poured from the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the sideboard. One for me, then one for herself, I mixed with water. Then she read my mind.
    “You took that murder case, didn’t you?”
    I said yes. And I told her all about my talk with Neglio, my : futile checks on Charlie Furman, my talk with Dr. Reiser and the call to Logue.
    And one other thing. Which was my developing hunch that Charlie Furman, if he killed his wife, had only just begun.
    “Have you ever been to Coney Island?” I asked.
    “No. But I’ll bet it can wait until tomorrow.”
    That settled, I gave Ruby my fullest attention for the ; balance of an evening’s long, slow dance.

    Morning was bright-skied and cool.
    We made an early start of it, with eggs and bagels down at the spoon I see out my window—Pete Pitsikoulis’ All-Night
    Eats & World’s Best Coffee. Then a brisk walk over to the F train at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second. We both mostly dozed during the long trip out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn.
    A curly-headed young woman was