Corona. She was walking on the wild side now, at least for her, but a
third beer gave her an excuse-even if a flimsy one to stay and argue
with him.
She had downed three bottles last night, at the motel cocktail lounge in
Dubuque. But then she had still been saturated with adrenaline, as
superalert and edgy as a Siamese cat on Benzedrine, which canceled out
the alcohol as fast as it entered her bloodstream.
Even so, she had hit the bed as hard as a lumberjack who’d downed a
dozen boilermakers. If she passed out on Ironheart, she’d no doubt wake
up in her car, out in the street, and she would never get inside his
house again. She opened the beer and returned to the table with it.
“You wanted me to find you,” she said as she sat down.
He regarded her with all the warmth of a dead penguin frozen to an ice
flow. “I did, huh?”
“Absolutely. That’s why you told me your last name and where I could
find you.”
He said nothing.
“And you remember your last words to me at the airport in Portland?”
“No.”
“It was the best come-on line any guy’s ever dropped on me.”
He waited.
She made him wait a little longer while she took a sip of beer straight
from the bottle. “Just before you closed the car door and went into the
terminal, you said, So are you, Miss Thorne.'”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a come-on line to me.”
“It was romantic as hell.”
” So are you, Miss Thorne.” And what had you just said to me.
You’re an asshole, Mr. Ironheart’?”
“Ho, ho, ho,” she said. “Try to spoil it, go ahead, but you can’t.
I’d told you that your modesty was refreshing, and you said, So are you,
Miss Thorne.” My heart just now went pitty-pat-pitty-pat again,
remembering it.
Oh, you knew just what you were doing, you smoothie. Told me your name,
told me where you lived, gave me a lot of those eyes, those damned eyes,
played coy, then hit me with So are you, Miss Thorne,’ and walked away
like Bogart.”
“I don’t think you should have any more of that beer.”
“Yeah? Well, I think I’ll sit here all night, drinking one of ’em after
another.”
He sighed. “In that case, I’d better have another one myself” He got
another beer and sat down again.
Holly figured she was making progress.
Or maybe he was setting her up. Maybe getting cozy over Corona was a
trick of some kind. He was clever, all right. Maybe he was going to
try to drink her under the table. Well, he’d lose that one, because
she’d be under the table long before him!
“You wanted me to find you,” she told him.
He said nothing.
“You know why you wanted me to find you?”
He said nothing.
“You wanted me to find you because you really did think I was
refreshing, and you’re the loneliest, sorriest guy between here and
Hardrock, Missouri.”
He said nothing. He was good at that. He was the best guy in the world
at saying nothing at just the right time.
She said, “You make me want to smack you.”
He said nothing.
Whatever confidence the Corona had given her suddenly began to drain
away. She sensed that she was losing again. For a couple of rounds,
there, she had definitely been winning on points, but now she was being
beaten back by his silence.
“Why are all these boxing metaphors running through my head?” she asked
him. “I hate boxing.”
He slugged down some of his Corona and, with a nod, indicated her
bottle, from which she had drunk only a third. “You really insist on
finishing that?”
“Hell, yes.” She was aware that the brewski was beginning to affect
her, perhaps dangerously, but she was still plenty sober enough to
recognize that the moment had come for her knockout punch. “If you
don’t tell me about that place, I’m going to sit here and drink myself
into a fat, slovenly, alcoholic old crone. I’m going to die here at the
age of eighty-two, with a liver the size of Vermont.”