The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

advantage. “I’ll bet your father used to say that to you. ‘Grow up, Justine.’”
    “You’re a bastard, you know that?”
    “C’mon. You’re not going to start another fight now, are you? I told you—”
    “Bastard!” She leaped across the intervening coffee table, her body crashing against his, her hands flailing against him, but he caught her slender wrists without difficulty, pinioning her.
    “Now, listen,” he said. “I don’t mind horsing around with you, but I told you, I’m not Chris and you’re not going to provoke a fight with me every time you want some attention. There’re other ways to get it. For instance, you could ask.”
    “I shouldn’t have to ask,” she said.
    “Oho! So that’s it. I don’t have ESP. I’m just a human being. And I don’t need psychodramas.”
    “But I do.”
    “No,” he said, “you don’t.” He let her go.
    “Prove it.”
    “You’re the only one who can do that.”
    “Not alone, I can’t.” She stared up into his face. Her hand lifted. Her fingertips grazed his cheek. “Help me,” she whispered. “Help me.”
    His mouth covered her open lips.
    It seemed highly improbable that Billy Shawtuck would have gotten the nickname “Wild Bill” but nevertheless there it was. He was a ruddy-complexioned man in his early forties, shortish and not even stocky. He always wore long-sleeved shirts, even in the dead of summer when, even out here near the shore, there was more sweat than wind around.
    Ask his buddies at Grendel’s and they would tell you that was because he didn’t like to show off his enormous biceps. Of course, if pressed, they would also tell you he came to his nickname by way of eschewing beers for a double scotch on the rocks every time. Apparently the heat didn’t bother him much.
    Billy worked for Lilco, riding power lines, and, he always said to those he beat at arm wrestling off-hours at Grendel’s, he came by his muscles honestly. “I didn’t have to go to no fag gym every day to get these,” he’d say, downing the double scotch on the rocks in a swallow and raising his arm to order another. “Shit, my job does all that. Honest work you can sweat at.” Then he would shake his head full of sandy hair. “I’m not one of those goddamned desk jockeys.”
    Grendel’s was a local watering hole—almost exclusively blue-collar (the writers had their own favorite)—several miles outside of West Bay Bridge, roadside to Montauk Highway.
    Late in the evening, Billy Shawtuck stood in the doorway to Grendel’s preparatory to leaving. The sky was turning from indigo to black, the traffic from the highway taking on a spectral quality as headlights and taillights flicked by like the inquisitive eyes of nocturnal animals.
    On the top of the steps, Billy took a deep breath and cursed the summer influx. We’re all gonna die of carbon monoxide poisoning one of these days, he thought.
    Not four paces away, his Lilco truck stood waiting for him, but this evening he was reluctant to leave the cheery warmth of the bar. Music blatted at his back from the juke inside. Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
    You could take San Francisco, Billy thought, take the whole of the West Coast and shove it up your ass. He’d been out there in the Army and had come to hate it. I didn’t leave anything there but a good case of the clap. He laughed. But, damn, I’m sure sorry I took this late job. Time and a half is all well and good but some days—well, some days it just wasn’t worth it. He had a feeling that this was one of those days.
    Sighing deeply, he went down the stairs but not before giving the finger to Tony Bennett and his shit-ass city.
    His mood changed, however, as he banged down one of the dark side roads and he began to whistle tunelessly. He didn’t think this job was going to take too long.
    And, of course, by that time he was thinking of Helene and the stuff he had bought her from the Frederick’s of Hollywood