Trace (Trace 1) Read Online Free Page B

it?”
    “An obscene call. Keep going; you’ve got about eight hundred dollars more to work off.”

3
     
    “I’d forgotten how much I hate to fly with you,” Chico said as they waited for their bags at New York’s Kennedy Airport.
    “I was the model of propriety,” Trace said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Why did you tell that stewardess you were on a strict Muslim diet?”
    “Because otherwise you get codfish or chicken and I wanted lamb,” Trace said.
    “So you had to convince her by spreading a blanket in the aisle and salaaming toward Mecca?” Chico asked.
    “I thought it might help my case. I wouldn’t have tried it if I wasn’t so sure that we were heading east. I just had to pray to the nose of the plane. Actually, I was praying that the pilot was sober. Pilots drink like fish.”
    “And why did you keep asking for magazines and then sending them back?”
    “’Cause they had all those goddamn cards in them,” Trace said. “I’ve got this new rule I live by. I’m not reading any more magazines that have postcards in them. They always fall out in your coffeecup. What’s on those cards anyway? I never even look at them. If advertisers are spending money for that crap, they’re getting taken.”
    “I hate to fly with you,” Chico said.
    “Well, you’re not much either. You aren’t really a bundle of fun at forty thousand feet.”
    “Because I didn’t want to ball under a blanket?”
    “You wouldn’t even go into the bathroom with me,” Trace said, then made a lunge as their luggage came roaring by on the carousel. He got Chico’s three bags but missed his own and had to wait for it to come around again.
    Chico called a skycap, gave him her ticket, and he wheeled her bags away.
    “I’ve got to go,” she told Trace. “You be careful.” She stretched upward to kiss him on the lips. For a moment, he thought about putting his arms about her and hugging her, but instead he just pecked at her mouth.
    “Where can I reach you?” he asked her as she turned away.
    “I’ll call you,” she said. And then she was gone.
    Trace watched her walk off, neat, trim, exquisitely beautiful. Whenever she left, he always had a sinking feeling that when he saw her again, things would somehow be different between them. His eyes followed her as she walked through the terminal, oblivious to the stares of men passing by, and he thought about the three years they had been together. He had gotten Chico—Michiko Mangini, actually—her first job as a blackjack dealer when she came to Las Vegas. Her added job, helping the casino out by “entertaining” visiting high rollers in town, she had gotten on her own.
    It was her decision and he had never been really able to understand it, but at least it had kept things between them simple.
    She was a whore and he was a drunk and half a crazy, but at least they were honest with each other about it.
    Until now. Until this sudden interest in visiting relatives in Memphis, Tennessee.
    Trace turned and missed his bag again as it went by.

4
     
    New Jersey got a bad rap from the world, Trace thought as he left New York and the George Washington Bridge behind him and headed out, in his rented car, toward the New Jersey countryside.
    Most people who passed through the state did just that: they passed through, usually along the New Jersey Turnpike, which sliced through the heart of some of the most unredeemedly ugly industrial areas ever, devised by man, and so got the idea that that was what the entire state looked like.
    Trace, after getting his divorce, had moved from New Jersey to New York City and spent the most dismal three months of his life there. It cost him $31.75 to park his car in a lot on East Forty-eighth Street for five hours. After two days of driving in the city, he realized that the only effective way to get from West Side to East Side was by National Guard airlift. New Yorkers didn’t mind that because New Yorkers, he realized,