The guy from the pickup came past my car, skirting carefully past my spot in the woods. He got in his truck and pulled forward next to my car. The truck paused for a minute, then he threw something against my car. Glass broke and fire flared. He put the truck in gear and the wheels pulling away. The sedan went too and I stood alone in the woods and watched my car burn.
Chapter 10
It was maybe a two-mile walk to the Reservoir Court, which took me a little less than half an hour. When I got there, Susan was sitting in the lobby with her feet on her suitcase.
We kissed.
She said, 'They wouldn't let me into the room because I wasn't registered.'
'Can't be too careful,' I said. 'Once you got in there you might have undressed.'
'I think they were fearful of that,' she said.
She was wearing a brilliant yellow coat of some glossy material that looked like a $700 slicker. Underneath was a suede suit the color of a green apple. She smelled of perfume and lipstick and her large dark eyes were full of knowledge and excitement. I'd never met anyone like her, and I didn't expect to.
I picked up her suitcase and took her hand. 'Stay close to me, little lady,' I said. 'I'll get you through.'
The desk clerk looked stiffly past me as Susan and I went to the stairs and up to my room. I unlocked the door, and went in ahead of Susan. The room was quiet and empty. I turned on the overhead. Susan came in and closed the door behind her. She looked at me in a way that made me know she'd seen me go first. She glanced around the room.
'Isn't this an ugly hotel room,' she said.
'It's got a bathroom. It's clean. Don't be so demanding,'
'If I were demanding would I be weekending in Wheaton, Mass.?' she said. She took her coat off and dropped it across the back of a chair and opened her suitcase and began to hang up her clothes.
When she travels, Susan packs for all eventualities. An intimate dinner at the White House; a barbecue at the King Ranch; cocktails with Halston; white-water rafting. She had all of them covered. Not only outfits for all possibilities but full accessories, panty hose, shoes, lingerie, jewelry, hats, coats, gloves, belts. Her suitcase was like the clown car at the circus that keeps degorging occupants far beyond any possible capacity it might have.
While she unpacked she was entirely involved in it, fully taken with the task as she was with all tasks. It was one of her attributes as a psychotherapist, her capacity for laserlike concentration. She brought the concentration to everything she did.
'Isn't it a sign of something,' I said, 'when everything is equally important?'
'Anal compulsive,' Susan said without looking up. She was carefully refolding a blouse around some tissue before she put it in the drawer.
I sat on the bed and watched her. I loved to watch her. I loved to watch the bend of-her arm, the attitude of her head as she paused to consider something. I loved the way she looked with everything exactly right. Her clothes fit just right, her makeup was flawless, her thick dark hair fell against her neck the way hair is supposed to fall. I loved the way her calf tapered to her ankle. I loved the way she chewed slightly on her lower lip as she decided which blouse to put on top. Watching her was timeless. Sound seemed to stop. Light seemed clearer.
Then she was finished.
'Now,' she said, 'do we have a plan?'
'We were going to stay in and have a gourmet Italian dinner,' I.said. 'But it got burned up,'
'You were cooking?'
'No, it was in my car and a fat guy in a pickup truck set it on fire.'
'Your car?'
'Yeah, he didn't know the gourmet Italian dinner was in it, though.'
Susan looked at me for a moment. 'I expect you'll tell me all about it in a while,' she said.
'Yes, but meantime I think we're faced with the Reservoir Hunt Room for dinner.'
She bit her lower lip gently. 'Okay,' she said, 'here's what I want to do. I'll go in and take a bath and come out and seduce you. Then we can go to dinner refreshed and face the cuisine together.'
'That seems sensible,' I said.
Then she smiled at me and leaned forward. 'I love you very much,' she said, and kissed me and went into the bathroom. I put my gun on the bedside table and took my shoulder holster off and hung it on a chair and then I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head. In fifteen minutes Susan appeared from the bathroom naked holding a thin bath towel in front of her.
She said 'Ta da,' and dropped the bath towel, and seduced me. Easily.
It was after nine o'clock when we got down to the Hunt Room. Virgie was behind the bar with another bartender, a grayish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a red face. The bar was crowded and most of the tables were taken in the dining room, but there was one open near the back by the front window with a sweeping view of the driveway leading up to the front door.
When we were seated, the waitress showed up and took our order for drinks. I ordered beer, Susan asked for a vodka martini on the rocks with four olives in it.
The room was loud, people were drinking bourbon and eating roast beef and the surf and turf special at a boisterous pace. We looked at our menus. The waitress returned with our drinks.
Susan ordered a salad with house dressing and, when I had my entree, a shrimp cocktail. 'That's all,' the
