Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Half in, half out of the booth, I grabbed the receiver and planted it back on its hook.

Far off in the windy darkness, that other phone stopped ringing.

Which still proved nothing.

I dropped my nickel back in and redialed.

A deep breath and …

That telephone in its glass coffin, half a light-year away, started ringing again.

It made me jump and hurt in my chest. I felt my eyes widen and my breath suck in cold.

I let the phone ring. I stood out of my booth, waiting for someone off there in the night to run from the alleys or out of the damp canvas or from behind the old Knock the Milk Bottles game. Someone, like me, would have to answer. Someone who, like myself, jumped up at two in the morning to run in the rain and talk to the sunlight in Mexico City where life still walked and lived and seemed never to die. Someone....

The whole pier stayed dark. No shack windows lit. No canvasses whispered. The phone rang. The surf wandered under the boards, looking for someone, anyone, to answer. The phone rang. It rang. I wanted to run answer the damn thing myself, just to shut it up.

Jesus, I thought. Get your nickel back. Get …

Then it happened.

A crack of light appeared swiftly and went out. Something stirred down there, across from that telephone. The phone rang. The phone rang. And someone stood in the shadows listening to it, tentatively. I saw a whiteness turn and knew that whoever it was was loo

king along the pier, fearful, careful, searching.

I froze.

The phone rang. At last the shadow moved, the face turned back, listening. The phone rang. The shadow suddenly ran.

I leaped back into my booth and grabbed the receiver just in time.

Click.

On the far end, I heard breathing. Then, at last, a man’s voice said,

“Yes?”

Oh, my God! I thought. It’s the same. The voice I heard an hour ago, in Hollywood.

Someone who loved you, long ago.

I must have said it aloud.

There was a long pause, a wait, an in-sucked gasp from the far end of the line.

“Yes?”

It shot me through the ear, then the heart.

I know that voice now, I thought.

“Oh, Christ,” I said hoarsely, “it’s you!”

That must have shot him through the head. I heard him seize in a great storm of breath and blast it out.

“Damn you,” he cried. “Damn you to hell.”

He didn’t hang up. He just let the red-hot telephone drop, bang, dance on its hangman’s noose. I heard his footsteps rush away.