Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

Something inside me flinched at her accuracy. I poured a short drink into the bottom of the glass.

“I bet you’ve gone to bed with me, not knowing whether they had given you one of their diseases,” she said.

She was really tightening the iron boot now.

“Do you want a highball? I’m going to change clothes.”

“Oh Christ, you’ve probably done it,” she said, and put her fingers over her mouth.

“I never did that to you.”

“You probably don’t even remember. You have to wait two weeks to know, don’t you?”

“You’re letting it walk away with you.” But she was right. I didn’t remember.

“It happened to a girl I knew in college, but she was a dumpy thing who did it in the backseats of cars with Marines and sailors. I didn’t believe it ever happened with your husband.”

“You’re deliberately upsetting yourself,” I said.

“I wonder that you didn’t give me sulfa tablets.”

I fixed her a drink with a squeeze of lemon and set it on the table in front of her.

“I’m sorry that you got strung out today,” I said. “I thought Bailey would take you to lunch if I didn’t make it.”

“Tell me if you really did it to me.”

“Look, it was a shitty day for you. I should have been here to eat lunch with those bastards, or I should have called Bailey and told him to take care of it. But I’m going to change clothes now. We should go downstairs in a few minutes.”

“You must have a very special clock to go by. It starts to work correctly when you feel the corner at your back.”

“You ought to drink your highball.”

“Why don’t you drink it? It makes you more electric and charming in public,” she said.

“You’ve gotten it out pretty far in a short time.”

“I might stretch it out so far that you ache.”

“Isn’t this just spent effort? If you want to believe that you’ve won the ball game in the ninth inning, go ahead. Or maybe you would like me to kiss your ass in apology.”

“You’ve done that without a need for apologizing. An analyst would have a wonderful time with you.”

“I won’t go into embarrassing descriptions, but as I recall you enjoyed every little piece of it.”

“Yes, I remember those sweet experiences. You tried to enact all the things you had learned in a Japanese whorehouse while you slobbered about two boys who died in a Chinese prison camp.”

“You better shut it off in a hurry.”

“What was the boy’s name from San Angelo and the Negro sergeant from Georgia?”

“You don’t listen when I tell you something, do you?”

“It’s just a little bit of recall from things you brought up. Didn’t you say they were buried in a latrine? In your words, to lend more American fertilizer to the Korean rice crop.”

“Stop trying to fuck me over, Verisa.”

“Are you going to hit me? That would make a perfect punctuation mark in my day.”