The Glass Highway by Loren D. Estleman

screwing the Olds into a space behind the one Fern pointed out. The lights of Windsor showed across the oily black surface of St. Clair. I unlocked the front door with her key and helped her, still wobbling on her stilts, up a broad staircase to the second floor. I used another key, found the wall switch, and stepped inside with her hanging on to my arm.
    The living room was fifteen feet by ten with a brown-and-beige Oriental rug under a couple of modular sofas, a dark walnut table with curved legs and gold inlays all around the top, and a stereo console with a color TV screen hidden behind doors like a chamber pot. A casement window at the far end opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. A door to the left led into a room that was probably a study when it wasn’t full of stacked cardboard cartons, and a hallway to the right gave access to two bedrooms and the aforementioned one and a half baths. Something that might have been called a kitchenette, containing the usual round of built-in cupboards and appliances and a square of red linoleum large enough for one person to stand on, jogged left just ahead of the balcony window. Light found its way in somehow through frosted panels in the ceilings. The apartment took up the whole floor.
    When I finished the grand tour, I found Fern curled up at the end of one of the sofas. She had flung both her shoes in the general direction of the window. One of the straps that held up her gown had fallen down over a white shoulder from something less than neglect.
    “Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything corny like that,” she said dreamily. “I’m still unpacking. There’s a bottle of something in the kitchen cupboard, though, and glasses.”
    “We’ve both gone the distance with stuff that comes in bottles tonight.” I dragged smoke down into my lungs. “You look a little green to me yet.”
    “I’m all right. Why don’t you sit down over here?”
    “Thanks, I’ve been sitting all night.”
    The raw silver in her eyes took on a hard glitter. “I guess my losing my lunch killed the mood. I do lots worse things. What do you want, Evening in Paris and candles?”
    I took the Winston out of my mouth and looked at the end. “It doesn’t happen very often,” I said, “but every now and then in my work, someone gives me a horse I just have to peek at its teeth. Odd considering my virile good looks and gorgeous build, but I still haven’t come around to thinking of myself as the type a rich and attractive single lady would call up on Christmas Eve because she can’t find a man to stack up against me. I ask myself, am I worth six hundred bucks in dress and two hours at the grooming station, and I have to answer no. Then I have to ask why me.”
    “Could be I’m slumming.”
    “Could be you are. I still have to ask why me.”
    Her expression softened. She reclined slightly, and stretched a leg. The gown had a slit there that fell open to expose a rod and a half of silken thigh. “You’re different, that’s why you. You have wit—sort of. You don’t mess with empty chatter, which is rare in my circle. And you don’t believe it, but you are very good-looking, in the same way that a puma I saw once in the Detroit Zoo looked very good. Dangerous. I had a sudden craving for the exotic.”
    I wrinkled my nose. “What do you mean, I have wit—sort of?”
    She laughed and patted the sofa next to her hip. “Take a load off your brains.”
    I finished my cigarette and went over and took a load off my brains. As I did I snatched a glimpse of myself in the casement window. You good-looking puma, you.
    I got back on the road at 2:30 a.m. I didn’t meet another car for miles. Colored lights hung in windows and on trees outside, casting elongated red and green reflections on the glossy street surface. The radio was playing “Silent Night.” I started to sing along but forgot the words after “virgin mother and child.” My mouth was dry. I thought of the bottle of good Scotch