Read Pale Gray for Guilt for Free Online Page B

silent, and all she wants is for you to pretend she isn't there."
    "She has a very soft look for you, Travis. When you're not looking at her."
    "Troublemaker!"
    I tried again and couldn't get an answer out of Tush. I had the long distance operator run a check on the phone up there, but it was reported in order. At a little after nine I thought I'd better see if Puss wanted to say her good-bye in person or let me relay it. I went in and sat gently on the bed. She was breathing faster. Her hand and arm were twitching as she dreamed, and she made a little whimpering sound. I gently thumbed the red hair back away from her face and saw a wetness of tears leaking out of the closed lids.
    I put my hand on her bare shoulder and gave her a little shake. "Hey," I said. "It's not all that bad, is it?"
    She opened wide blind eyes and snuffled and said in a little-girl voice, "But they keep saying…" She shook herself like a wet red setter. She focused on me, snuftled again, smiled and said, "Thanks, pal. They were about to cut me off at the pass. Whassa time?"
    "Nine fifteen."
    "Hmmm. If I'm reading you, McGee, I admire your thinking. It's very good. Stay right where you are while I go brush my teeth first."
    "Mick and Barni are taking off in a half hour. I wondered if you wanted to wave bye-bye."
    She gave a leonine stretching yawn. "Yes I do indeed. And if you had any sense at all, you big brown knuckly idiot, you'd have come smirking in here at quarter of, not quarter after. Haste makes waste, and what I have is not to be wasted, lad. So set your little clock for siesta time."
    "At siesta time we're going to be up in Shawana County visiting some old friends of mine with a problem."
    "Really?" She sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts. "Hmm. Then hustle the lady some coffee while she showers. And set your clock ahead."
    ***
    "… on location like that," Mick was saying, "It's the time lag that drives you nuts, not getting to see rushes, and see how the color values stand up until you're three days or four past that particular point."
    And from the giant shower stall, above the sound of sloshing like unto that which a small walrus herd might make, the three of us could hear Puss in good voice:
    "With 'er 'ead tooked oonderneath 'er arm, she 'awnts the bloody tow'r. With 'er 'ead tooked oonderneath 'er arm at the midnight hour.'

    "So I turned around," said Barni Baker, "and there was that sweet little old man yanking away at the lever on the cabin door thinking it was how you get into the men's room, and we're at twenty-eight thousand feet over the Amazon basin. So I got to him at a dead run and steered him gently where he wanted to go. Then he came out and stared at the cabin door and the big lever and rolled his eyes up and fainted dead away. A passenger helped me get him back to his seat and I gave him smelling salts and then I explained to him how the doors are designed so the pressurization clamps them shut so tightly ten men couldn't open them. But he just kept shaking his head and saying O Dear God."
    Puss appeared just in time, wearing her big white wooly robe and carrying the half cup of coffee left from what I had taken her as she was stepping into the shower. The ends of her red hair were damp. She gathered little Barni into the big white wooly arms, hugged her, smacked her on the cheek and told her she was all doll. We went out the aft door of the lounge and waved them off, and watched them get into the car and drive away.
    "Nice ones," said Puss. "For such a raunchy old beach bum, you know a lot of nice ones. Like me, for example. I was nice enough to leave our coffee and my cigarettes right beside the bed." She went over to the phone and switched it off. She went frowning to the record bin, made a thoughtful selection of two and held up the sleeves so I could see what she had picked. George Vari Eps guitar, and the Modern Jazz Quartet on Blues at Carnegie Hall. I took them from her, put them on the changer, fixed the