Guns [John Hardin 01] Read Online Free

big bowl of corn flakes Real crispy, with cold milk and about four spoons of sugar. You speak in italics, you know?”
    “You go get me a damned pack of Salems now.” And she stamped a foot on the carpet.
    “Okay, okay,” he said, swinging his long legs down and using his toes to hook his boxer shorts up from the piles of hastily-shed clothing scattered around the bed.
    When he was dressed he said, “How about a fond kiss?”
    She aimed her squinted eyes at him and said through clenched teeth, “I’ll be ready to leave by the time you get back.”
    So he trudged down the outside wrought-iron stairs, the wind howling and the blown rain spattering him as he jogged to his beat-up Toyota Corolla and got in quickly. He sat there for a minute thinking.
    He had not quite believed it when Samantha had accepted his invitation for this getaway weekend, she the gorgeous co-anchor of the Channel Six news, he the slim, casual, bearded, rising-star reporter for the Raleigh
Sentinel.
He thought of himself as slim and casual. His mother called him an anemic hippie and constantly goaded him to eat more—even though he always ate like a horse right after galloping through the Kentucky Derby—and to go visit this certain decent men’s shop in the Crabapple mall, where she worked as a security guard. He could use her mall discount card.
    He had run into Samantha a number of times over the past three years while they were both covering some story or other, and she had always treated him as a princess might treat, say, her royal dung-shoveler. They were both of the same kingdom, you might say, but Ira was clearly the tabloidal digger-of-dirt, whereas Samantha performed a type of high docudrama.
    So when she had agreed to let him buy her a few drinks one day last week, after they had both covered the release on bail of the deputy state treasurer, and then when she had further agreed to this weekend tryst, he had been more than a little incredulous at his sudden good fortune. And the thirty bucks for flowers, the ninety-eight for the big third-floor room overlooking Silver Lake Harbor, and the seventy for last evening’s dinner and drinks, plus gas and oil and ferry tickets, had seemed as nothing, even though he figured if he were to hold his VISA card up to the light just so he’d probably see little wisps of smoke rising from it.
    Then, after they had made love with abandon, at one point him likening a particular pose of hers in the glow from the bedside lamp to the way she smiled at you intimately out of your TV, clutching the microphone close to her lips…
    Anyway, after all that, when they were sprawled panting in the shadows, her slender fingers lazily twisting his chest hairs, she had asked, “So, what’s the real story on Senator Farcotton?”
    Aha. I should have known
, Ira thought.
It wasn’t that she has a thing for slim and casual, after all.
    He offered her a tidbit. “Well, he had a little affair with Wanda Williams, the state attorney general’s daughter, the one who’s married to that big paving contractor Ezra Williams who sort of lucked up and got the Raleigh beltway improvement job last year…”
    It was like trying to offer a cheeseburger to a great white shark. Nothing less than clear up to his shoulder was going to even come close to satisfying her.
    “Everybody
knows
that,
silly,” she said. “I mean about the excess campaign contributions from the Tobacco Institute.”
    It was a story that Ira had been working on for three weeks now and his first installment was due to break on the front page of the
Sentinel
in four days. He’d heard that even the point people from “Sixty Minutes” had been sniffing around and he should have been more on guard against local reporters.
    “Campaign contributions?”
    “Oh, come on, Ira. You can
trust
me. I won’t breathe a word of it until
after
your piece comes out, next week is it? I
promise,
darling.”
    They had sparred verbally for twenty minutes before she had