A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,44
feet of her.”
“Sounds useful.”
“It’s no fun if you don’t play.”
“Dork,” Sam said as he passed Rufus and headed along the path.
“Weak comeback. We’ll work on it.” Rufus hurried past Sam and took the lead again. He spun and walked backward, saying, “I have a pretty good idea of where she’ll be. Don’t ask me why I know—I just do, ok? It’s not because I cruise.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m serious, you prick.”
“We’ll work on that,” Sam said. Then, before Rufus could respond: “Snake!”
Rufus’s response to the threat of a wild animal—though a snake wasn’t anything like a bear—involved yelping about three octaves higher than usual, while tripping forward as he’d been walking backward. His arms flailed for purchase as he simultaneously looked down for the snake. He mistook his shoelace for danger and fell into Sam’s arms while trying to escape.
“You sonofabitch!” Rufus shouted. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Sam was holding him, keeping him from falling, and the big man’s body was trembling; it took Rufus a moment to realize it was suppressed laughter. This time, Sam wasn’t quite as quick to separate, although he did disentangle himself faster than Rufus might have liked. When they were both standing again, Sam had a hand over his mouth, looking surprisingly boyish as he very carefully studied something off in the middle distance.
Rufus adjusted his jacket and T-shirt with what little dignity he could salvage before pointing a finger at Sam. “If you tell anyone I made that noise, I’m going to shove you off Bow Bridge.”
Hand over his mouth, Sam arched his eyebrows. After a moment when he seemed to be struggling to control another burst of laughter, he managed to ask in a relatively normal voice, “What noise?”
Rufus growled, spun on one heel, and took the first right they came upon, the woods of the Ramble swallowing them whole. He didn’t say anything for a while, just trekked deeper through the maze of walking, running, and biking trails that made the steel-and-concrete part of the city feel so very far away. At length, Rufus asked, “Do you know how you can gain your bearings if you’re lost in the park?”
“Walk in a straight line?”
“No.” Rufus slowed to fall in beside Sam. “The streetlamps are numbered. The first two numbers indicate the closest street, the others—even or odd—mean you’re on the east or west side.”
As they passed the next streetlamp, Sam glanced at it, then at Rufus. “Cool.” They made it another yard before Sam asked, “How’d you know that?”
“The streetlamp thing is practical, I guess. But I like to read. Passes the time.”
Another yard of the soft whick of their shoes on the pavement. “What’s a good book I should read?”
Rufus exhaled what might have been a very soft laugh. “What do you enjoy?”
“When we walked past that bookstore, the one with the books out on the sidewalk, you stopped to look. Were you looking for something in particular?”
Rufus jutted his thumb toward a left path as they came to a juncture. “Something I don’t know anything about.”
“Where’d you go to college? What’d you study? Something hard, I bet.”
Rufus looked at Sam that time. “I dropped out of high school when I was sixteen.” He shrugged, tried to roll the bitterness off. “What about you? Did you go to college?”
“Not right out of high school. I enlisted in the Army. Got one of those Bachelor’s of Whatever-the-Fuck you can get by taking enough gen ed classes at the local college. I couldn’t get into OCS until I had one, so I did it, although it took plenty of time. Christ, I sound ungrateful, I guess. It wasn’t really my thing.” His hand came up; he scratched the stubble on his cheek. “So, you’re just really, really smart, huh?”
Rufus stopped walking. He asked, with an obvious note of wariness, “Why would you say that?”
“Those books in your apartment—” A ghost of a smile flitted across Sam’s face. “—I saw some of the titles. I don’t even know what half the words mean. And you knew about the streetlamps. And the way you talk. The way you look at things, people, problems. When we were trying to find Jake’s phone, for example. And I know you said you were just looking at those books, the ones we walked by, but I saw your face. You were… I don’t know, hungry. We had a guy in our platoon like that. Loved books. Disappeared into them. So damn smart, I never knew what he