You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) by Stuart M. Kaminsky

She might just have given Costello a call, claimed a reward or amnesty, and gone back to the dice.
    “Wake up and open the door,” she whispered. “You took my only key.”
    I opened the door, holding the gun behind my back. She came in and threw her coat on a chair.
    “You always sleep with that?” she said, walking to the kitchen.
    “This,” I said looking at the gun. “I don’t know what this is.”
    She touched the coffee, found it cold and turned the heat back on. Then she turned and looked at me. I had taken my clothes off and stood in underwear and a tee shirt with the .38 in my hand. I looked down at myself and shrugged. She laughed and drank her coffee.
    “You alone?”
    “Peters,” I said. “Toby Peters. If you mean do I have a family, just a brother. Nothing else. I once had a wife.”
    “I know how that is,” she said, biting her lower lip.
    “You want to talk about it?” I said.
    “No,” she said. “I want to finish my coffee and admire your droopy drawers. Then I want to get in bed.”
    “I remember,” I said sadly. “You don’t want a cold, and I stay on the sofa.”
    “It’s too late,” she said, pulling a napkin from a cabinet and dabbing her nose, “I already caught your cold.”
    “Really,” I grinned.
    “Really,” she grinned back, a kind of sad, friendly grin.
    Ten minutes later we were in the small bed, sneezing, laughing, exploring and coughing. It was love time in the pneumonia ward. Her body was small and perfect. Mine was hard and scarred and imperfect—an attraction of opposites.
    “What happened to your nose?” she said, kissing it.
    “It put up a gallant but losing fight three times too many.”
    “I like it.”
    “It’s hard to breathe through it, especially when I have a cold.”
    “Are you always this romantic?”
    “Only when I’m inspired by royalty.”
    An idea hit me, and I rolled over on top of her and we both tumbled off the bed. We bounced together against the wall and stayed that way till someone knocked at the door. She squeezed away from me and called, “Who is it?”
    “Ray.”
    “Just a second.”
    She put on an oversize purple robe and rolled her sleeves up. The bottom of the robe trailed on the floor. She padded barefoot to the door, looking like a kid trying to play grownup. I rolled over and pulled on my shorts.
    “Peters,” beamed Ray Narducy, a cab driver sans protective muffler. His hack hat was pushed back on his head and his glasses had a film of steam over them.
    “Hi kid,” I said.
    “Find anything?”
    “A little,” I answered. “Our friends in the Caddy caught up with me, and I’m trying to keep out of their way.”
    He walked comfortably to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked for something to eat while we talked. Merle reached over his head, standing on tiptoe to pull down a box of cookies and hand it to him.
    “Need any help?” he said.
    “Maybe later,” I told him, “but not while they might be able to link your cab with me.”
    We sat around eating cookies and sneezing, swapping stories about the good new days, listening to Narducy’s imitations of Herbert Marshall and Lum Abner. Merle yawned. I said I was tired. Narducy ate cookies and drank a quart of milk. Merle went to bed, and I told Narducy I had to get up early. He said he did too and stayed twenty minutes more, giving me the plot of the last episode of “Lights Out.”
    When he left, I flew back into the bed with a grunt and a wheeze.
    “Asleep?” I whispered.
    “No,” she said. She leaned over in the dark and kissed me. “But I’ve had enough action for the night, on top of a fever. Let’s sleep on our memories.”
    I dreamed something, but I don’t know what. When I woke up in the early morning light I held it in the palm of my memory, but it flittered away on dusty moth wings. Merle was still asleep, snoring through a congested nose. The room was full of romance and germs. I got dressed, shaved in the kitchen sink to be quiet, and