Read Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me for Free Online

there, honey, and we’ll see where that ambulance is goin’. Hurry, now. More dramatic than Tv, cheaper than the movies. And they were just now pulling up, forming a semi-circle around the cars of the churchgoers. They were practiced enough at all this to leave plenty of room for the official vehicles to get in and out. And they were bold enough to go right up to Muldaur’s flock and ask them questions. They were sure this just had to involve snakes, and what could be more exciting than something that involved snakes and was cheaper than going to the movies?
    But it wasn’t all front-porch types, and that surprised me. Reverend Thomas C.
    Courtney was there, for one, the first minister to look as if Esquire had dressed him. I wondered if the apostles had worn starched blue dress shirts, white ducks, and deck shoes. And driven green Mg’s. I always enjoyed driving past his church to see the titles of his forthcoming sermons. “You, John Paul Sartre, and The Crucifixion” was still my favorite. We used to parody that title. I came up with “You, Gabby Hayes, and The Heartbreak of
    Hemorrhoids.” (i was reading Mad
    magazine a lot in those days.) Courtney appealed to what we call, out here anyway, the gentry. He’d angered a lot of Catholics lately by preaching a piece written by Dr.
    Norman Vincent Peale, the most
    successful Protestant minister of our day, who claimed that Jack Kennedy was, as a Catholic, beholden to Rome and that a vote for Kennedy was thus a vote for papal rule.
    Finding Sara Hall here was even more surprising. A fading country-club beauty who’d been to the Mayo Clinic several times for what was locally called “a little drinking problem,”
    Sara was a friend of my employer, Judge Whitney, and a woman I liked. Her hands twitched sometimes, and she was known to have had a couple minor breakdowns in very public places a few years back. One day, seeing me on the street and having met me only once, she asked if I’d have a cup of coffee with her. I was surprised but I went. And when our coffee came and she’d had a couple of swallows, she said, “I was just afraid I might pop in somewhere and have a drink. But instead I can sit here and talk to you.
    I really appreciate this.”
    Muldaur’s people had gathered in front of two battered Chevrolet trucks, from one of which issued the plaintive cry of hill music in its purest form, not steel guitars but slide guitars, the kind of music first heard on these shores a couple hundred years ago when Irishers landed on the shores of the Atlantic.
    The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.
    I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.
    They were easy to see.
    It was just at that moment that Cliffie started baying orders for all the people who’d been inside the church to start giving statements to his men—first cousins, second cousins, shirttail cousins—who were now moving among the flock with ball-point pens and nickel back-pocket notebooks. Cliffie had once seen Bci agents do this and had
    forever after imitated it. Hey, this idea of interviewing witnesses seemed like a pretty neat-o keen idea. Boy, where was this scientific detection stuff going to end, anyway?
    “You mind if we leave? I’m getting kind of tired.”
    Kylie’s voice broke somewhere in the middle of that last sentence and then she did something I’d never