Wicked City Read Online Free

favorites on the jukebox. More Hit Parade. He tried out some Eddie Fisher and Tony Bennett, and “Come On-A My House” by Rosemary Clooney.
    That’s when he heard her call his name.
    Lorelei.
    Billy smiled, his face turning red, and his voice shook as he said hello.
    “Where you been?” she asked.
    “Nowhere.”
    She was cute in her boy’s western shirt, high-water blue jeans, and saddle oxford shoes. She wore her black hair up in a ponytail; her bangs had grown longer since he’d last seen her and shadowed a good bit of her blue eyes. She didn’t have makeup on or anything like that.
    “I wasn’t waitin’ around or nothin’.”
    “I had to go home and change,” she said. “I’d been at the pool and had to put on something dry.”
    And, man, that was a hell of a thing to say to a teenage boy, because the thought of Lorelei in a wet bathing suit — something Billy could imagine a great deal and had — was perhaps just too much for him to take. Her pale skin had a red, healthy flush to it, and she smelled like sunshine.
    “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
    “Nothin’.”
    “Well, your face is turning funny colors.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    The corny organ music came from over in the skating rink, and they heard people clapping in time with it.
    “You want a shake?”
    “I just had one.”
    “I’ll buy,” she said.
    “Sure.”
    He’d met Lorelei just a few weeks before school had let out, over on the Upper Bridge from Columbus, and helped her carry a sack of groceries home. Billy figured her for the daughter of a mill worker — a Linthead, is what they called them — and they ended up talking till it grew dark out back of the Riverview Apartments, nothing but government housing, smoking cigarettes on a swing set. He’d never felt more comfortable with a girl in his entire life and finally got up enough nerve to ask her to a picture show at the Broadway.
    “I went to that house where you were staying last week,” he said.
    “We don’t live in the Riverview no more.”
    “Where do you live?”
    “My folks’ over in Bibb City,” she said. “Got some good mill jobs.”
    “How ’bout you?”
    “I’m over there some, too,” she said.
    “You gonna go back to school?”
    “Not now,” she said, rolling her eyes and pulling the straw from the shake. She sucked out the frozen bit of shake and tucked it back into the glass. “It’s summertime, dummy. It’s all as cool as a breeze. You ain’t supposed to do nothin’ now but swim and skate and not worry about a thing.”
    Billy looked at her and rolled up the white T-shirt over his skinny bicep and wished he’d had a pack of cigarettes to tuck inside.
    “What movie we going to see?” she asked.
    “Hondo,” he said.
    “What’s it about?”
    “Apaches.”
    “I like Apaches,” she said.
     
     
    IT WASN’T LONG UNTIL BILLY AND THE GIRL SAT IN THE cool air-conditioning of the Palace Theater watching Hondo, Wayne playing a cavalry rider protecting a woman and her son from some Apaches. There was never any question if Wayne would get the woman or if he wouldn’t whip some Apache ass. They were no match for Wayne armed with a rifle he could work with one hand. It was a good picture, and Billy’s head was still kind of in it as they milled through the crowd down by the Elite, the girl at his side, watching the world through the 3-D glasses he refused to take off.
    Billy figured the crowd had to be on account of some cockamamie street brawl between a couple of GIs or some poor slob of a woman with her lip busted and some man crying and telling her he was sorry nearby. Growing up on the river, he’d seen it all before. But then he saw all the squad cars and the ambulance, and as he stepped out on the street a PC cop told him to get back on the curb just in time for the ambulance to pop into gear and slowly drive to Homer C. Cobb Memorial.
    The girl watched as it passed and put her hand to her mouth.
    They followed the street