The Smoke Jumper Read Online Free

resolutely grim.
    They liked him to show up at the bar at eight even though the place never got crowded until much later, so around seven-thirty he again braved the rain out to his car and set off across town in one long and gloomy crawl of traffic.
    The bar was called Ralff’s, though who Ralff was and why he spelled his name like that, Ed had never been able to discover. It stood near the waterfront on the fringe of a jauntily revamped area that was thronged with tourists in summer but on a winter’s evening such as this seemed like a sad mistake. Apart from Ralff’s the only reason for going there was the movie theater just across the street, which was good for business but bad for parking. Tonight, however, Ed was in luck.
    Through the smear of his windshield as he came around the corner, he could see a Jeep pulling out of a space right outside the bar. He signaled right and stopped to let it leave. The car behind honked though it must have been obvious why Ed had stopped. He looked in his mirror and saw a beaten-up white VW bug. It honked again.
    Ed shook his head. What a moron. The Jeep vacated the space and Ed moved forward so he could reverse into it. He assumed the VW would either pass him or wait for him, but as he shifted into reverse and turned in his seat he saw it nip sharply into his space. He couldn’t believe it. There was no way he was going to take that kind of asshole behavior from anyone. He switched on his hazard lights and got out.
    Two people were getting out of the VW. The driver was a young woman and as Ed stomped toward her, she flashed him a smile of such dazzling innocence that he thought for a moment she must be looking at someone behind him. He looked briefly over his shoulder to check but there was no one there. The woman was wearing a red ski jacket with the hood turned up over a mass of thick, dark hair. The passenger was a man, taller and broader than Ed, a fact that perhaps should have struck him as relevant but didn’t. All Ed noticed, through his rainstreaked glasses, was that the guy was grinning. Which didn’t do much to endear him. The rain was now a monsoon.
    ‘Excuse me,’ Ed said in as level a voice as possible. ‘That’s my space.’
    The woman looked at her car then looked back at him with that same infuriating butter-wouldn’t-melt smile.
    ‘No. It’s ours.’
    She locked the car and zipped up her jacket. Even with steam coming out of his ears, Ed recognized that he was confronting an extraordinarily good-looking woman. She was olive-skinned, with a wide mouth and perfect teeth. Her eyes were big and dark and flashing now with amusement. And because there was no other likely cause for it but himself, this served only to fuel Ed’s rage.
    ‘Listen, you knew darn well what I was doing. I stopped to let the guy out, I signaled, I pulled forward so I could reverse in and you snuck in behind me. You can’t do that.’
    She shrugged. ‘We can. We did.’
    ‘Damn it, you can’t!’
    He was sounding shrill now and to restore an appropriate posture of manly threat he shot a withering look at the woman’s creep of a boyfriend who was still grinning like an ape as he came ambling around the back of the car toward them. Ed could feel the rain soaking though the back and shoulders of his coat. An icy trickle ran down his neck. He could hardly see a thing through his glasses now, but he thought he caught a first faint look of embarrassment on the woman’s face. She turned to the ape boyfriend for support.
    ‘Please don’t become abusive,’ the ape said.
    ‘I’m not!’
    ‘You just said “damn it.”’
    ‘Jesus—’
    ‘Nuh-uh, please.’
    He held up his hands, palms out, in warning. Then suddenly he smiled and frowned and looked maddeningly sympathetic.
    ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry. But listen, life’s a jungle. In a few thousand years the only drivers will be those whose ancestors first learned how to nip into other people’s parking spaces. It’s called survival