LITMIR.BIZ

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      Taggart couldn’t mistake Bonn’s voice. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Just the usual, a couple of supermodels.”

      “Slow day?”

      Taggart was strung tight, but Bonn’s joke had an effect. Even as aggravated as he was, he grunted out a half chuckle. “Maybe a little slow for Bonner Wittering, but I’m only pretending to be you. Why in Hades are you calling me at…” He squinted at the fluorescent dial on his travel alarm. “Nearly one-thirty in the morning? It must be, what? Almost three-thirty there?” He had a horrible thought and drew up on one elbow. “Tell me you’re not in jail!”

      Bonner’s laughter rang through the phone. “Stop being an old woman. I’m a regular choirboy, sitting here in my condo watching a fascinating infomercial. Did you know you can buy a belt with electrodes that will exercise your abs while you sleep?”

      Taggart didn’t need this right now. “Great. Order one and go to bed.”

      Bonn laughed, his unquenchable good nature magically taking Taggart’s annoyance down another notch. “Okay, okay, I’ll get to the point,” he said. “I just wondered how it’s going. When you didn’t call, I decided I’d better check on you—see if they’d strung you up.”

      Taggart swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “I’m still breathing. But I have a feeling Mary O’Mara has a hanging on her agenda.”

      There was a pause. “She’s an old busybody with a bad attitude. Ignore her.”

      Taggart ran a hand through his hair. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

      Another pause. “I know it’ll be hard, with her right there underfoot.”

      “Yeah. That, too,” Taggart muttered, pushing the memory of a pair of smoke-gray eyes from his mind.

      “Huh?”

      “Nothing.”

      “Well, tell me about ol’ Miz Witty. She swallowed it, right? Hook, line and sinker?”

      “I guess so.” Taggart hunched forward, resting a forearm on his thigh. “She’s not very deaf or blind. Was that your embroidery or Miss O’Mara’s?”

      Another pause. “Miss? Is she a Miss?” Bonn asked, sounding like his playboy antenna was up and operational. “Is she pretty? Nah, probably one of those hateful, old-maid-types, right?”

      Here we go again! “Try to focus, Bonn,” Taggart said, pained at the reminder of how very pretty—and, as far as he was concerned—hateful, she was. “Did you lie about the deaf and blind thing or was it Mary?”

      “Okay, okay. Let’s see. I guess—maybe a little of both.” He chuckled, sounding sheepish. “You know my motto: life’s no fun if you can’t embellish.”

      Taggart wished he could reach through the phone and throttle his friend, but he fought the urge. “You’re damn lucky it’s been a long time since she’s seen you.”

      “But she really is sick, right? Mary told me she’d had a couple of strokes, and something else. I forget.”

      “Pneumonia. She can’t walk, due to the strokes, but she seems to be on the mend. I’m no doctor, but she doesn’t look like a woman on her death bed. Personally, I’m glad, because she’s a nice lady.” He paused, then decided he had to add, “You’re a dirtbag for the way you’ve treated her.”

      “Look, I know that,” Bonn said, sounding contrite. “I’m trying to make up for it, aren’t I?”

      Taggart frowned, took the phone from his ear and stared at it, astonished at Bonn’s view of the situation. When he put the phone back to his ear, he grumbled, “You are sitting in your Boston condominium watching an infomercial about an electric belt. I am in Colorado, trying to make it up to her.”

      “Sure, sure. You’re right,” Bonn said. “You’re doing—a lot. And I love you for it, bro.” His apologetic tone sounded sincere. “Remember, it’s her seventy-fifth birthday. That’s a milestone. She is in fragile health, and I am stuck here, a slave to my bail bondsman. None of that’s a lie. What you’re doing is above and beyond the call.”

      “Yes, it is.” Taggart needed sleep, and didn’t want to start the same shopworn lecture over again, but by now it was such a reflex, he found himself saying, “You’ve got to start giving more thought to the consequences of your actions, Bonn, before you plunge in. If you’d only—”

      The long, theatrical yawn he heard made Bonn’s boredom clear. “Yeah, yeah. I’m reading you loud and clear, Tag.” A pause. “Whoa, a new infomercial just started. Looks good. Something to do with women’s thighs—”

      “Go to bed!” Taggart cut in. “And don’t call in the middle of the night for updates. If news of my murder doesn’t show up in the national headlines, assume I’m okay. Remember the adage, ‘No news is good news.”’ He snapped shut the phone and tossed it aside. “I hope that goes for you, too, Bonn,” he muttered, lying back.

      Wide awake now, he laced his fingers beneath his head and stared into the darkness. He worried that infomercials about electric belts and thigh exercisers wouldn’t hold Bonn’s interest for long. He hoped his oldest friend would use his head for something beside scaffolding for the latest designer sunglasses.

      Even as rash and immature as Bonn was, Taggart couldn’t picture his life without him. Sure he had his faults, but he was an eternal optimist, always laughing, generous to a fault.

      Taggart threw an arm over his eyes, vivid pictures of the long past flashing into his mind. Visions of himself and Bonn spooled by, as they were at the age of nine when they’d been thrown together by happenstance.

      Taggart had been sent away to the Swiss boarding school when his parents died in a freak bridge collapse. His guardian and only relative was a crotchety, seventy-year-old great-uncle, a United States Supreme Court Justice, who smelled of stale cigars and old paper. Justice Lancaster might have been a great legal mind, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to take in an orphaned child. Bonn, on the other hand, had been sent away because his parents couldn’t deal with their imaginative, uninhibited, prankster son who refused to conform to his father’s rigid, humorless temperament.

      So, as young boys, Bonn and Taggart bonded in their loneliness. Taggart was Bonn’s strength and Bonn was Taggart’s exuberance. Bonn had always been able to make Taggart laugh, one of the few people who could. Being left alone at the remote school when the other boys went home for vacations and holiday breaks, Taggart was grateful for a friend who could bring humor to their abandonment. That’s why he had never minded Bonn leaning on him.

      Now they were both thirty-five, and Bonn was still leaning, not only as his longtime friend, but also as a legal client. After so many years, Taggart had to admit if only to himself, it was starting to wear thin. Taggart knew always being there to snatch Bonn out of the frying pan before he got burned wasn’t helping him be a man, responsible for his own actions. The sad fact was, Bonn was an expert at manipulating Taggart with his humor and poor-pitiful-me act. Not to mention the inescapable coup de grace, when he reminded Taggart just who had introduced him to Annalisa, the love of his life.

      Taggart experienced a gut punch of grief at the memory of his adored wife, lost five years ago in a fire at the hospital where she had been a pediatric surgeon. He still owed Bonn more than he could ever pay for Annalisa alone. Had it not been for his friend’s impulsiveness, making plans with both Taggart and Annalisa that fateful evening, then forgetting them, running off to New York on a whim as they waited at his apartment door, Taggart would never have met Annalisa. He wouldn’t now have the precious memory of three blissful years loving her.

      Unable to deny the fact that for all the rest of his days he would owe Bonn for giving him Annalisa, here Taggart was, in the small Rocky Mountain town of Wittering, for nearly two weeks—pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

      Taggart had been aware for some

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