Bad Monkey Read Online Free Page A

Chase was a schoolteacher in Tulsa who’d been convicted of extorting sex from one of her students in exchange for giving him an A on his report card. The boy was fifteen at the time; she was twenty-seven. On the day of her sentencing she’d disappeared.
    “The judge was a shriveled old prick. I was looking at ten years,” Bonnie recapped. “So instead I hopped a plane to Lauderdale. Cliff’s medical office was advertising for a receptionist, and the rest is history.”
    “Does he know the truth?” Yancy asked.
    “Of course.” Which explained why Bonnie had stayed with him.
    Yancy eyed the headline on the article: WARRANT ISSUED FOR TEACHER CONVICTED IN SEX-FOR-GRADES SCHEME . He wasn’t sure whether he should act shocked or jealous. Certainly he had nothing as sensational in his own past.
    He said, “May I offer a couple of observations? One, you’re even more beautiful today than you were then.”
    “That’s a mug shot, Andrew. And, FYI, a dyke named Smitty had just given me a full-on cavity search, which is why my eyeballs are bulging in that photo.”
    Yancy plowed on. “Number two, ‘Bonnie’ is so much sexier than ‘Plover.’ I don’t think I could ever be intimate with a Plover—it’s just not a name that can be seriously howled in the heat of passion.”
    “Cody had no trouble,” Bonnie said.
    Yancy raised an eyebrow. “The teenage victim of your seduction?”
    “Yeah, some victim. He knew more positions than I did.”
    “Actually, Cody’s a good sturdy name. He would be, what, about thirty now?”
    Bonnie said the young man had sat in the front row of her AP English class. “I have no defense for what happened. He flirted with me, fine, but so did lots of the boys. Our … whatever … only lasted a couple of weeks, and of course he blabbed to everybody. His mother was the one who went to the cops.”
    “Even after you gave him an A?”
    “There was no trade! Cody was an outstanding student.”
    “I assume he took the stand.”
    “His parents threatened to sell his Jet Ski if he didn’t testify. Apparently he’d kept a journal of everything we did and how many times we did it. His writing was quite jaunty and explicit—I should never have turned him on to Philip Roth.”
    “So what was the final tally? How many trysts?”
    “The jury was a horrid bunch, Andrew, leering like gargoyles.”
    Yancy said, “I can only imagine.”
    “Anyway, I wanted you to know the full truth, now that we’re closing the book on each other’s lives.”
    Like a buzzard coasting through clouds, the thought crossed Yancy’s mind that his lawyer might be interested to learn that the wifeof the man Yancy was accused of assaulting—and a key witness against him—was herself a fugitive from a sordid felony rap. He let the notion glide away.
    “Whatever happened to Cody?” he asked.
    “How the hell would I know? He was a dumb mistake, that’s all.”
    “We all make ’em.”
    “I’ll talk to Cliff again tomorrow. Promise.”
    Yancy said, “Thank you, Bonnie. I like being a detective.”
    “In the meantime you’re still getting a paycheck, right? So go fishing or something.” She returned the newspaper article to her purse. Then she stood up and stepped into her denim cutoffs. “I need some ice in my wine. How about you?”
    “I’m good.”
    Yancy lay back on a pillow and watched Bonnie button her blouse. She always did it without looking down, her gaze clouded and faraway and dull. After she left the room, he shut his eyes and tried not to think about the supernatural frequency of erections enjoyed by fifteen-year-old schoolboys.
    “Andrew!”
    He lifted his head and through the doorway he saw Bonnie rigid in the glow of the open freezer. Her fists were pressed to the sides of her head.
    “My God!” she said.
    Yancy sat upright, thinking: Oh fuck .
    “Andrew, what have you done?” she cried. “What on earth have you done?”

Three
    After that night, Bonnie refused to come back