Buzz Cut by James W. Hall Page B

eyes, let her head slump forward. Made a small croon of pleasure.
    The bay still dazzled, boats left their luminous signatures across it. The sky was an empty, perfect blue, and butterflies making ditzy gyrations around the geraniums at the far end of the porch. A glorious day. A beautiful, alluring, and highly intelligent woman groaning beneath his hands.
    But Thorn was not there. Thorn was not anywhere.

CHAPTER 5

    Irma Slater. That's what she called herself. The ugly name she'd plucked out of the air. Grating, off-key, a handful of sour notes. Irma Slater. She'd considered Earlene, Eunice, briefly toyed with Brunhilda. But no one would believe those. Even Irma was pushing it, not a name you heard anymore. Someone born in a tarpaper shack, had pine twigs for toys, illiterate and malnourished. Ozarks, Appalachia, one of those hill women who looked twenty-five years older than she was. Washed clothes against the river rocks. Lucky to get out of the hollow once a year.
    The young woman known as Irma Slater was having her Friday evening fish sandwich at the Mangrove Bar on Sugarloaf Key, seventeen miles up the road from Key West. Feeling the usual salty crust on her arms and throat from the day's accumulated sweat. She wore a blue denim shirt, washed so often it was fragile as cobweb, faded pink Bermudas, and a pair of rubber flipflops she'd picked up for seventy-nine cents at the Price Mart.
    Hell, if she amortized the cost of her five identical outfits over the three years she'd worn them, frayed cotton panties included, her whole damn wardrobe probably worked out to something like point zero zero two cents a day. Maybe she should sit down, do the math, have the exact number ready. A good conversation killer.
    Add in all the money she'd saved these last three years in the Keys, no makeup, jewelry, perfume, manicures and facials, no panty hose or bras, purses or cashmere sweaters or Armani suits. Throw in the hundreds of sad, hollow afternoons of impulse shopping at Neiman-Marcus she'd missed out on, and she'd probably saved enough money to put a dozen kids through college. Buy each one a Ferrari.
    As it was, she'd saved four hundred and eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents in the last three years. Hid her stash in a Tampax box under the lavatory. Her nest egg. Her run money. In case she had to leave in a hurry, hit the road again, bus tickets, a few weeks' food until she got established somewhere else.
    And it was a damn good thing she'd learned to be thrifty, because on what she made at Sugarloaf Retreat she barely had enough to cover her seven fish sandwiches a week. Coffee for breakfast, skipping lunch so she could splurge on Heineken instead of Busch at dinnertime.
    It was the seventeenth of the month, middle of November, less than a week till Thanksgiving, the tourists just beginning to trickle down the highway again, shed their sweaters. Tonight, like every night, she sat on the corner bar stool, her razor pen, her drawing pad lying beside her dinner plate. An empty space on either side where the waitresses gave their drink orders. Jesse called her spot the cockpit.
    Jesse was the bartender, chief bottle washer, and owner of Sugarloaf Retreat. Kinky gray hair in a ponytail. He was in his mid-fifties, from Indiana, retired real estate broker who'd scored big in shopping plazas, retired early, bought this broken-down motel. Now he spent his days roaming the ten acres of his bayside property in a red thong bikini, no shirt, barefoot. Nights he played bartender, and as a concession to the tourist crowd, he put on a flowered shirt. Like most everybody else in the Florida Keys, Jesse was going through a very public second childhood.
    Reason he saved the cockpit for her was to help her ward off the bozos—the turkeys who slugged down a couple of courage beers and came sidling over to hit on the lonely lady with the short blond hair. Between the waitresses coming and going and Irma Slater's sour tongue, the bozos were