The Fifth Script: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book One by Ross H. Spencer Page A

time—check it out, and remind me to show you my old switchblade gashes.”
    “Then you have no regrets for those Mexican boys?”
    “None that I can think of.”
    Erika Elwood got leisurely to her feet, tucking her big blue handbag under her arm, winking at him. “When you show me your old switchblade gashes maybe I’ll show you my butterfly tattoo.”
    He got up to see her to the door. He ushered her ahead of him, liking her perfume—expensive stuff, whatever it was—vague. He said, “You see one butterfly tattoo, you’ve seen ’em all.”
    “Not so! Mine’s special !”
    “Okay, I’ll bite. Why is that?”
    “It’s perched on my appendectomy scar.”
    “What’s perched on your hysterectomy scar—a vulture?”
    “I don’t have a hysterectomy scar. Do you like butterflies?”
    “Depends. What color?”
    “Blue.”
    “I was attacked by a blue butterfly once. It was a frightening experience.”
    “You should have shot it.”
    “I did.”
    She threw back her head and laughed her musical laugh. He’d hoped that she’d do that. She turned to stand on tiptoes, stretching to kiss him on the cheek—just a lukewarm peck, but better than no peck at all. She whispered, “Oh, but you’re precious !” At close range her perfume was heady stuff, nearly buckling his knees. She went out and he wished she hadn’t.
    He watched the silver Toyota Cressida pull away before he postponed the Pepper Valley baseball game.

12
    There comes a time in the life of every mortal when he must take inventory of his life, reckoning his pluses and minuses, deducting his past from his future, providing that he has a future, and facing the results. That time had come around for Lacey Lockington on numerous occasions, and it’d just come around again. He sat at his Barry Avenue window, contemplating the ebony clouds that stalked the city, musing, nursing his tenacious case of snakebite, making his computations, and coming out no better than he’d come out at the conclusions of his earlier inventories—still a few digits short of zilch.
    Then the rain struck, a hissing, snarling, gray wall of fury, a real tail-twister, even by Chicago standards. He listened to the storm for more than an hour, waiting for it to abate, then he turned on his radio. The bulletins were coming—Schiller Park’s viaducts were impassable, this development failing to impress Lockington because Schiller Park’s viaducts became impassable every time a dog pissed on an evergreen, but the situation was worsening, spreading like wildfire. Railroad underpasses were being closed on North Avenue, the already swollen Des Plaines River had topped its banks, submerging River Road under six inches of muddy water, the Chicago White Sox game had been postponed, Maywood Park had scratched its nightly harness-racing program, flash flood warnings were going up from Lawrence Avenue south to Roosevelt Road, from Harlem Avenue west to York, power failures were reported in numerous sections northwest of the Loop, that area having been converted into a fifty square mile quagmire, and Lockington’s earlier plans for monumental achievement fizzled and drowned in the muck of that sodden August afternoon. No great loss, Lockington thought, he hadn’t taken them seriously.
    It was shortly before eight o’clock in the evening with the deluge continuing to hammer the city and Lockington approaching the dregs of a second bottle of Old Anchor Chain, when he threw in the towel, turning off the radio and killing the lights to stumble, crocked to the gunwales, into his bedroom where he flopped face-down on the rumpled bed, listening to rain claw at his windows. It was a horseshit world, he’d decided—it’d probably wash completely away before dawn, and Lockington just didn’t give a damn.
    He sprawled in the darkness, pulling a pillow over his head and plummeting into the dreamless, untwitching sleep of the chaste and the naive, a singular experience for Lacey Lockington