The Passenger Read Online Free

have liked to give those good
smooth thighs a squeeze but there was no excuse for that with the girl
bare-legged, though the ass was fine and the tits were especially fine and
those he did squeeze and when she
gasped and the two burly men who saw him do it started forward he reached for
the pool cue and pointed it at them.
    “Don’t even think it, gentlemen.”
    The room was quiet now except for Patsy
Cline and the girl, who had started to cry. Emil stepped away from her toward
the men and watched them back down in front of the cue and move silent and
sullen back to the wall.
    “Okay, miss,” he said. “Get your purse.
Officer Short here and I will escort you to the station. Billy? Officer? Let’s
go.”
    Again the girl did as she was told and
bent and retrieved her purse, and Ray had her by the arm and was starting to
move her along when the kid she’d just beat muttered something to his buddy
across the room.
    “What’s that?”
    “I said you guys ain’t cops. You didn’t
read her her rights.”
    “You’re interfering with an officer of
the law, sonny. Put your quarter on the table and let somebody else whip your ass before I take you along and
read you your rights.”
    He took her other arm and Billy trailed
along behind while they marched her out of the room and into the bar, weaving
their way through the tables and only then was he aware that the barman and
some of the guys at the bar were watching all of this, so he stopped in front
of the barman and pointed at him.
    “ You I’ll be seeing a little later, friend,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
    The barman frowned and turned his head
away, all of a sudden paying very close attention to the glasses in the sink.
    Offensive action. Worked every time.
    Lieutenant Paul Wellman picked up his
Dewars and finished it and turned to the bartender.
    “You know those guys?” he said.
    “Nope.”
    “That’s interesting. Neither do I.”
    He tapped the three singles in front of
him. “Yours,” he said. “And thanks. They’re right about one thing though. You
shouldn’t have served her.”
    He got off his stool and walked out of
the bar, stood on the porch steps and lit a smoke. They’d moved fast. He could
hear them laughing across the lot, but at first he couldn’t spot them. If they
were cops at all, which he doubted, they were not from around here and thus had
no jurisdiction. He knew that because he did have jurisdiction. Then he heard more laughter caught in the warm summer breeze
and muffled screams and protests from the girl and by the light of the moon saw
them standing in a tight half-circle around her behind a beat- up Jeep.
    Christ, he thought. Right here out in the lot . When he was a boy his dad had talked
about how stupid criminals were, but he hadn’t really believed him because
there had always been their behavior on television and in the movies to
contradict him. It was only when he followed in his footsteps and became a cop
himself that he realized what he should have known all along.
    Father knows best.
    He moved off the stairs and casually
across the lot as though he were headed for his own car, the Colt unholstered
and held to his leg slightly behind him. He tossed away the Marlboro, wondering
why in hell he’d lit it in the first place. Nerves, he guessed. At cigarette prices these days I can’t
afford nerves .
    The guy who’d spoken to the bartender had
one hand inside her tank top and the other cupped over her mouth and must have
been squeezing pretty hard because she was wriggling and pushing at him and
trying to yell, her back arched against the hood of the Jeep and the other two
were watching, leaning against the Ford Maverick parked beside it as he
approached them. Waiting for sloppy seconds, he guessed. So that at first they
didn’t see him. And then of course they did.
    And then everything went to hell all at
once because a car pulled into the lot and flooded all five of them with sudden
rolling light.
    “Police!”