Prudence Couldn't Swim Read Online Free

more. To tell the truth I was a little insulted they had me as a penny-ante pusher—the kind who stuffed a thimble full of coke in a toothpaste tube. Back in the day, I moved weight or I didn’t move at all.
    The biggest pain was all the dirty boot prints on the carpet. I had some spray for that as well. Never Stain, they called it. Took a whole can to restore the cream-colored elegance to my thick-pile broadloom.
    After about six hours of cleaning and Re-Nu spraying I collapsed in a stupor on the bed. I woke up at two in the morning with my shoes still on and my wrists feeling like they’d been squeezed with piano wire. As I rolled over I thought I heard someone in the living room. I got up to have a look but it was nothing. Probably just the wind or the neighbor’s cat, Toodles. She was always up to something.
    I had a look in Prudence’s room but didn’t really want to go in there. Maybe the following morning I’d get up the nerve. As I pulled the door to her room shut, I heard the lock click. I’d have to look for the key. We had an understanding that I didn’t go into her space. But given the circumstances, I figured it would be okay if I broke that agreement.

CHAPTER 2
    T he first thing I needed to find out was Prudence’s real name. I knew Deirdre Lewis was an alias because I’d gotten her that passport through a connection. The photos on the Internet only said, “Prudence, a lovely Londoner, can cook, clean, and love you to death.” She cost me $5,000 plus a few grand more along the way. That’s not how I told the story though. I always said I was doing her a favor, that she was paying me to be her husband so she could get that precious green card.
    Whatever the arrangements, when Prudence came along, I was ready for a change. I’d been through three marriages and had nothing to show for any of them except a scar on my neck, lawyers’ fees, and restless nights. A black Brit was definitely going to be something new.
    She turned out to be even more beautiful in person than in the pictures, the first black woman I ever met who spoke with an accent like the Queen of England’s. Not that I’d ever met that many black women. They waited on me at McDonald’s, took my money on the Bay Bridge. There was a CO named Washington at Santa Rita County Jail when I passed through there. She used to talk to me about the Raiders. She was Raider Nation all the way.
    But to sit down and talk to a black woman in my house, that just had never happened. The closest I ever got was my Luisa. Not very close at all but life is strange. After a while I got used to Prudence being five inches taller than me. Her love for life and sense of humor brought us to the same level.
    â€œI don’t know a soul in this flippin’ city,” she’d say. “It’s quite perturbing.” That’s how she talked.
    When we went out for drinks, she kept saying “cheers” and touchingmy glass before each round. She told me she was “infatuated with America” and was so grateful to be here.
    I’d always succumbed to the quest for excitement. I started as a con man. Bad checks, three-card monte on the street, petty flim-flam. No one ever thought a scrawny little harelip could outsmart them. Then I went to the next level: running drugs and people from Mexico to California for more than a decade. I made enough in the first two years to retire. The dope was where the big money was but I liked being a coyote better. I was actually giving people something they wanted, something that would improve their life—a ticket to America. I wasn’t like these
polleros
today. I fed my people, gave them blankets to sleep under. We usually traveled in a mobile home, with bicycles tied to the back like the family gone camping. I could pack twenty-five people into that RV. As long as they laid low, they were comfortable.
    Today these guys rape and beat up their