Read Lucky You for Free Online Page B

half-nibbled biscuit.
    When Krome returned to the porch, the door stood open. The radio was off, the house was still.
    “Hello!” he called.
    He took a half step inside. The first thing he noticed was the aquarium. The second thing was water on the hardwood floor; a trail of drips.
    From down the hall, a woman’s voice: “Shut the door, please. Are you the reporter?”
    “Yes, that’s right.” Tom Krome wondered how she knew. “Are you JoLayne?”
    “What is it you want? I’m really not up for this.”
    Krome said, “You all right?”
    “Come see for yourself.”
    She was sitting in the bathtub, with soap bubbles up to her breasts. She had a towel on her hair and a shotgun in her hands. Krome raised his arms and said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
    “No shit,” said JoLayne Lucks. “I’ve got a twelve-gauge and all you’ve got is a tape recorder.”
    Krome nodded. The Pearlcorder he used for interviews was cupped in his right hand.
    “Sure is tiny,” JoLayne remarked. “Sit down.” She motioned with the gun toward the commode. “What’s your name?”
    “Tom Krome. I’m with The Register.” He sat where she told him to sit. She said, “I’ve had more company today than I can stand. Is this what it’s like to be rich?”
    Krome smiled inwardly. She was going to be one helluva story.
    “Take out the cassette,” JoLayne Lucks told him, “and drop it in the tub.”
    Krome played along. “Anything else?”
    “Yeah. Quit staring.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t tell me you never saw a woman take a bath. Oh my, is it the bubbles? They sure don’t last long.”
    Krome locked his eyes on the ceiling. “I can come back tomorrow.”
    JoLayne said, “Would you kindly stand up. Good. Now turn around. Get the robe off that hook and hand it to me—without peeking, please.”
    He heard the slosh of her climbing out of the tub. Then the lights in the bathroom went out.
    “That was me,” she said. “Don’t try anything.”
    It was so dark that Krome couldn’t see his own nose. He felt something sharp at his back.
    “Gun,” JoLayne explained.
    “Gotcha.”
    “I want you to take off your clothes.”
    “For Christ’s sake.”
    “And get in the bathtub.”
    “No!” he said.
    “You want your interview, Mr. Krome?”
    Until that moment, everything that had happened in the house of JoLayne Lucks was splendid material for Krome’s feature story. But not this part, the disrobing-at-gunpoint of the reporter. Sinclair would never be told.
    Once Krome was in the water, JoLayne Lucks turned on the lights. She stood the shotgun against the toilet, and knelt next to the tub. “How you feeling?” she asked.
    “Ridiculous.”
    “Well, you shouldn’t. You’re a good-enough-looking man.” She peeled the towel off her head and shook her hair.
    Tom Krome roiled the water to churn up more soap bubbles, in a futile effort to conceal his shriveled cock. JoLayne thought that was absolutely adorable. Krome fidgeted self-consciously. He reflected on the difficult and occasionally dangerous situations in which he’d found himself as a reporter—urban riots, drug busts, hurricanes, police shootouts, even a foreign coup. Yet he’d never felt so stymied and helpless. The woman had thought it out very carefully. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
    “Because I was scared of you.”
    “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
    “Oh, I can see that.”
    He laughed then. Couldn’t help it. JoLayne Lucks laughed, too. “You gotta admit it breaks the ice.”
    Krome said, “You left the front door open.”
    “I sure did.”
    “And that’s what you do when you’re scared? Leave the door open and wait buck naked in the bath?”
    “With a Remington,” JoLayne reminded him, “full of nickel turkey load. Gift from Daddy.” She ran some hot water into the tub. “You gettin’ chilly?”
    Krome kept his hands folded across his groin. There was no sense trying to act casual, but he did. JoLayne put her