Garden of Evil Read Online Free Page B

bomb blasts at foreign embassies, resulting in an overwhelming fallout of banana bread, cake, shakes, splits, and puddings along with bananas frozen, fried, and chocolate-coated.
    â€œHere.” I groped for the hose in the wet grass and picked it up. “I’ll finish. Listen,” I whispered, “if you water at dawn, just before daylight, who will know? And if the water police swoop down, I promise to bail you out.”
    I hugged her, sent her inside, soaked the trees, then hung the hose on the side of the building. Inside my apartment, the light winked on my answering machine.
    â€œCall me when you get in, babe. No matter how late. Miss you.”
    McDonald answered on the first ring.
    I began to fill him in on the heat and Miami’s news stories of the day, but he interrupted with an important question. What was I wearing? Being a basically truthful person, I had to tell him I had cranked up the air conditioner to its coldest setting and stripped down to nothing in front of it. We talked for a long time.
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    I forced myself to walk Bitsy early next morning before the fiery sun rose too high and the pavement grew too hot for her little paws.
    A tiny white mop of a poodle, she is delighted to go anywhere, at any time, no matter what the weather. Her original owner, my friend Francie, used to smuggle Bitsy onto the midnight shift, to ride shotgun in the passenger seat of a Miami patrol car.
    Billy Boots, the cat, normally trailed us at a discreet distance, but today he watched from the shade of the frangipani tree outside my door.
    I glared at the pitiless blue sky, willing it to rain. My senses felt numb, my body sluggish, as though the unrelenting heat had shriveled the circuitry in my brain like Mrs. Goldstein’s banana trees.
    Bitsy, at the end of her lead, lunged fiercely at lizards, as I fantasized about McDonald and what our life might be like if we merged. Would Bitsy get along with Hooker, McDonald’s old hound dog? The temperamental Billy Boots might pose more of a problem. I envisioned us all in a house shaded by trees and pink hibiscus, maybe even a pool, and my T-Bird parked next to his Jeep Cherokee. Was I hallucinating, still dazed from phone sex the night before, or had I begun to believe for the first time that it really could happen? The old obstacles remained. I could not give up my job anymore than he could his, but perhaps we were finally ready to resolve the conflicts, or at least hammer out a way to coexist with them.
    I studied the morning paper over Cuban coffee and an intoxicatingly perfumy mango sliced into cold, crisp cereal. The Dominican and Haitian stories, with their group bylines and more staff credits at the bottom, got solid front-page play. My story was buried back inside the local section with no byline. Brieflys don’t warrant them. Still frustrated, I had to admit the headline was an eye-catcher:
    HEADLESS DRIVER CRASHES AFTER WILD MILE RIDE
    By far the best work in the paper were the page-one photos accompanying the story of the nursing home evacuation. They focused in tight on the eyes of bewildered and frail seniors, heat-exhausted and frightened, being spirited into an uncertain night by strangers whisking them away from all that was familiar. The credit line read Lottie Dane/News Staff. Damn, she is good, I thought.
    The story on the slain sheriff ran unchanged on the state page. No late-breaking developments.
    I showered, dressed in cool blue cotton, and sipped my second coffee while making telephone rounds of Miami, the Beach, the county, and Hialeah police. The last had a 10 A.M. press conference scheduled.
    â€œWhat’s it about?” I asked Camacho, the public information officer.
    â€œJust get over here.” His voice dropped to a confidential pitch. “You’re gonna like this one.”
    â€œGimme a hint,” I said, “to tell my editors.”
    â€œThe chief told me not to get into it, just tell everybody to be