Read The Ghost Wore Yellow Socks for Free Online

and hard as a ship’s figurehead. His chest muscles rippled as he tilted the heavy iron pan. Perry warned himself not to stare.

    22 Josh Lanyon
    Nick possessed a great profile too, maybe not typically handsome, but strong and symmetrical. There was both character and toughness in his face. Perry wanted to sketch him.
    He could imagine what Reno would say to that idea.
    “How long were you in the SEALs?” he inquired, breaking the silence.
    “Ten years. Fourteen years in the navy altogether.”
    “That’s a long time.”
    Nick shot him a wry look. “More than half your lifetime.”
    “Did you like it?”
    “Why? Thinking of enlisting?”
    The sarcasm caught Perry off guard, and he hid himself in his coffee cup.
    Maybe Nick thought that was ruder than called for. He said, “What do you do with all those paintings in your apartment?”
    “I try to sell them.”
    “To who?”
    “To anyone. Why, want to buy one?”
    Nick gave him a level look and then grinned. The smile was very white in his olive face and unexpectedly youthful. It transformed him, just like smiles in books were supposed to do.
    “Maybe,” he said. “You’re not bad.”
    At this unexpected praise, Perry felt himself flushing. Nick seemed like someone whose idea of art would be girly calendars or plastic-framed posters of hot cars. But that wasn’t fair, because there was that moody seascape hanging over his fireplace.
    Perry volunteered, “A couple of gift shops carry my work. I’m trying to get one of the galleries to consider me. So far, no luck.” He shrugged.
    “Did you go to art school or something?”
    Perry’s stared down at the patterns in the grain of the tabletop. “No. I wanted to go to art school, but it…fell through.”
    “Yeah?” Nick didn’t sound too interested. He set a plate in front of Perry heaped with fried eggs, bacon, and hash-browned potatoes. A lot of food.
    Perry faltered, “I usually don’t eat breakfast.” He was pretty sure Nick would not consider the delicious offerings from Kellogg’s a proper kick-off.
    “Big mistake. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Nick said it deadpan; clearly daily nutritional requirement was not something he took lightly.

    The Ghost Wore Yellow Socks
    23
    Perry tried the eggs. They were good. Why wouldn’t they be, coated in a heart attack’s worth of butter? He picked up a slice of bacon, wondering what Nick’s cholesterol level must be.
    Sitting down with his own plate, Nick asked, “Have you been thinking about who might have known you were supposed to be gone this week?”
    Back to business. It was nice of him to take an interest, though.
    “Janie, like I said. And I think I mentioned it to Mr. Teagle. And Mrs. MacQueen.”
    “Anyone else?”
    “Here, no. I told them at the library because I was taking my vacation.”
    “You work at the library?” The dark eyebrows rose as though Perry had confessed to being an exotic dancer.
    “I like books.” Perry added defiantly, “I like people who read.” There were no books in Nick’s apartment, not even a cookbook. No magazines. There was the morning paper, but did that count?
    Nick’s mouth twitched a little as though he found Perry’s defensiveness amusing.
    “Someone decided to use your apartment for cold storage while you were gone, that’s obvious. What doesn’t make sense is all this lugging a corpse around. Why not leave him where he died?”
    “Well, because it would have been incriminating.”
    “Sure, but because of how he died or where he died? Could you tell how he died?
    Could you tell if he’d been murdered?”
    Perry remembered that green-toned face, the gaping mouth, the hollowed cheeks, and sinister slits of eyes. Nausea rose in his throat. He spoke around it. “I didn’t see blood, but I didn’t look carefully. I didn’t touch him.”
    “Could he have been strangled?”
    Perry shook his head. “No.” He’d read enough detective novels to know what that would look