Born To Be Wild

SIX

Goddard Bay , Oregon

No way I can do this. No way. I’m an idiot.

There, good, he finally had a functioning brain again. He’d finally admitted it to himself. He didn’t love her. Actually, now that he examined it, he really didn’t like her all that much either.

He smiled as the crushing weight toppled right off his head. He was ready to yell with relief when, in the next instant, the weight jumped back on.

Wonderful, just wonderful. I’ve got to tell her before her mother books the Methodist church and it’s all over town. He pulled the velvet box out of his inside jacket pocket, flipped it open, and looked with fear and loathing at the three-carat diamond winking up at him. It was the direct result of an early morning towering inferno of sex, a shake-the-rafters event that had cannonballed him onto his back when it was over, grinning like a loon, his brain waltzing in the ether. Surely, he thought, sex like that could get a man to do more than torture ever could. He’d have been willing to say anything, do anything for her after that brain-deadening, camel-humping sex, state secrets be damned.

And to prove it, by the time he’d finally talked his brain into crawling back inside his skull, he’d already bought the ring.

Thank God he had to focus on the mayor’s daughter this morning-she’d been arrested for drunk driving the night before-so he hadn’t been able to run right over to her house, a marriage proposal ready to pop out of his mouth.

But she was expecting him to propose, probably tonight when he took her to dinner at Le Fleur de Beijing. It was a new Asian/French restaurant in town that had the word fusion on every page of the menu, which meant, his father had told him, that you could get snails with sweet and sour sauce. It was expensive, though, and to quite a few folks in Goddard Bay and the environs, that meant it had class.

He’d been sleeping with her for close to four months now, at least four times a week. What had made that last time different? Didn’t matter. He’d presented himself that morning at the jewelry store when the doors opened.

He happened to glance at himself in the mirror. He could still see the residue of wild fear in his eyes. He looked down again at the engagement ring, and thought he’d be better off without sex like that ever again in his life. It was too dangerous.

John McInnis Goddard, the great-great-great-grandson of Joshua Barrington Goddard, founder of Goddard Bay nearly a century and a half before, and a tough-as-nails district attorney referred to by local defense lawyers as a major shitkicker, was thinking he’d prefer a long winter’s stay in a Siberian gulag or a campout in the Galápagos to a fusion dinner with Kelly Beverly.

John pulled out his cell phone. He had to talk Goon Leader into helping him.

But before he could punch in the numbers and grovel for the favor, his cell rang and Jack, the man himself, told him to get his butt over to the Jason Maynard house on Westview. His wife, Marci, had just found his body in the garage, lying in a pool of dried blood.