Read The 37th mandala : a novel for Free Online Page B

looked sort of familiar, as if she had seen it before in exactly this way but never remembered till now, and would probably forget it all over again—which scared her more than anything that was actually happening yet.
    "Tucker!" she said. "Get off!"
    He pulled back, looking hurt, as if surprised that she would really object. "Hey, girl. ..."
    She tried to crawl backward. "What are you doing?"
    "What do you think? You said same deal as last time. You want the weed or not?"
    "The weed?" She stood up, swayed, stumbled but caught herself on the doorframe.
    "Well, there's the rent too, but I wasn't gonna get into that yet."
    "What, were you gonna come down later and try'n collect?"
    "Lenore ..."He shook his head, coming back off the bed. "Shit. Don't do this."
    "I gotta go." She turned out into the hall, or thought she had. The edge of the doorframe slammed into her face. She stood there with her eyes closed, holding very still but spinning anyway. Just then, from downstairs, she heard the bell again. Michael was finishing up. He could probably hear them up here; he might assume it was Scarlet and Tucker; he was good at wishful thinking. She had to get away—somewhere she could straighten out.
    Tucker was right on her, putting a finger to his lips. "Shush, you hear him down there?"
    "I hear him. We're both fucking idiots."
    "Well, baby, takes two to you-know."
    She swerved away, free now. Hoping her clothes were all on, since she didn't want to have to come back for anything later, she made her way to the kitchen, then out the door into the cold. Her coat.
    "Hey, girl, don't forget this." Tucker had it; he was right behind her, looking stone sober. "Now don't be mad at me. You're a pretty little thing, I'm only doing what comes natural. Besides, I thought we had an agreement."
    She snatched the coat from him.
    "I'll hold onto that Baggie for a while," he called. "In case you change your mind. But I can't wait too much longer for the rent. You tell your old devil-man I said so, okay?"
    She hardly knew she was going down the steps; her kitchen was empty but she flew on past it. Somehow she got off the driveway and into the bushes, where she had to fight her way through tangles to the Cutlass. The Cutlass was unlocked. She got in and started the engine, put the heater on high, and sat there shaking as if with cold, though really she just felt numb. Same deal as last time, he'd said. What last time? Why couldn't she remember? What had she done last time? What the fuck was wrong with her mind? She closed her eyes and felt herself spinning as if the car were out of control on a patch of black ice. She put her head down, gripped the steering wheel, and held on tight.

3
    The Sisterhood of Incarnate Light had paid Derek's flat speaking fee up front, before the program. Only now that the show was over, his lecture delivered, did he discover they wanted to cheat him out of his part of the take. That wasn't quite how the Sisters put it, but Derek knew their scam, time-honored no matter how New Age.
    "Your talk was certainly valuable, Mr. Crowe," one was telling him now, trying to lubricate his goodwill with her buttery Southern tones while another Sister went to enlist the aid of a superior, "but we're a nonprofit organization. We're all volunteers here."
    Derek, while seething, was unwilling to waste his rage on an underling. " You might have volunteered to bake cookies and tear tickets," he said, "but I'm the one who filled this hall tonight, on the strength of my research and hard work, and I did not volunteer."
    Fill was an exaggeration, but one he did not linger over. The only reason the hall had come even close to capacity was because the Sisters had wisely rented a smallish auditorium, something suited to the showing of a midnight movie. Even so, he had no doubt the Sisters had never drawn such a crowd.
    "I appreciate that but—"
    "You took ten dollars a head and I expect my cut."
    "But that was a donation—it goes toward