Read Running Dog for Free Online Page B

help me get at the collection, great, fantastic. If not, I understand. I may be able to manage it myself.”
    She watched his eyes come open.
    “I even know your first name,” she said.
    Before she knew what was happening, he was kneeling between her legs and hefting her up toward him, his hands at her hips, making her arch, and then was in her, cleanly, and driving,using his hands to force her body tighter onto his. Her head back on the pillow, pelvis way off the bed and knees up, she watched him grimace and stroke and then had to close her eyes, abandoning the visible world to enter this region of borderline void, his nails burning into her hips.
    When she woke this second time it was the middle of the night. She half dreamed various things, a run-on series of images, and slept, and woke again. She kept picturing Selvy in a military setting, a barracks usually. He’s standing around in white cotton boxer shorts, a dog tag around his neck. Maybe she was mixing Monty Clift into it, in
From Here to Eternity
. She pictured Selvy doing a hundred pushups in his white shorts. She pictured him sitting on a cot, spit-shining his boots. She pictured him running laps, his rifle at high port, sweat beginning to dampen his combat fatigues.
    Without turning his way or reaching an arm across the bed, she knew he was no longer there.
3

    People who don’t make the trip every day have a tendency to grow silent as the train passes through Harlem. It isn’t shock or gloom so much as sheer fascination that brings on the hush. The pleasure of ruins. The eye’s delight in finding instructive vistas. It’s so interesting to look at, so numbly colorful, especially from this distance, and while moving through.
    Selvy got off at the Bronxville station and took a cab along Palmer Road. They turned left across an overpass and into a quiet street in the less expensive section. Klara Ludecke lived in a small attractive house on this street.
    His instructions weren’t specific. She’d been traveling in Europe. Why and precisely where. He didn’t care to get involved in side issues, such as her husband’s murder, beingconcerned only with the dead man’s connection to the Senator and the leverage it provided.
    Her face was a near circle, though pretty. She was somewhat broad of figure, maybe thirty years old, and spoke in an accent that was pleasant to hear even in its odder journeys through certain words. She led him to a dark parlor and then sat waiting in a straightbacked chair, hands folded on her knees.
    “You’ve been away, Mrs. Ludecke.”
    “To Aachen, in West Germany.”
    “Your husband was born there.”
    “Yes, in 1944, I believe.”
    “Why this particular time to travel? Your husband had just been murdered. You spoke once to the police and then disappeared.”
    “My husband has relatives there, still. I wished to see them. You must understand I needed to be close to people who loved him. I was not capable to deal with things.”
    “You’ve come back—why?”
    She made a sweeping gesture to indicate the house, possessions, legalities, disengagements.
    “You’re not staying.”
    “It would be impossible.”
    “Are you going back to Germany?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps that’s what I’ll finally do. At least my husband’s family is there. His own father died seven months ago but there are brothers and sisters who have been very kind to me, and Christoph’s mother as well.”
    “Your husband was a systems engineer—correct?”
    “You’re not one of the policemen I talked to after it happened.”
    “No,” he said.
    “Who are you?”
    Clipped to his belt holster was a device called a field-strength meter. He took it out, raised the small antenna attachedto it, and then tuned the meter to sweep the frequency band. Checking the needle he probed the north side of the room. From the bookcase he took a 1961 World Almanac. Embedded in the narrow space between the spine and the binding was a small audio device. Selvy