Sacred: A Novel by Dennis Lehane

Author:Dennis Lehane [Lehane, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780062224040
Amazon: B000UOJTVM
Barnesnoble: B000UOJTVM
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-10-13T05:00:00+00:00

He took us to an all-night diner in downtown Bradenton. The streets around it were deserted, devoid of even the memory of human life, it seemed, as if a neutron bomb had hit an hour before we arrived. Blank, dark window squares in the few skyscrapers and squat municipal buildings around the diner stared down at us.

There were a few people in the diner, night owls by the look of them—a trio of truck drivers at the counter flirting with the waitress; a lone security guard with a patch for something called Palmetto Optics on his shoulder reading a newspaper with a pot of coffee for companionship; two nurses with wrinkled uniforms and low, tired voices two booths over from our own.

We ordered two coffees and Jay ordered a beer. For a minute we all studied our menus. When the waitress returned with our drinks, we each ordered a sandwich, though none of us sounded particularly enthusiastic about it.

Jay placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and stared out the window as a clap of thunder ripped a hole in the sky and it began to rain. It wasn’t a light rain or one that grew heavy gradually. One moment the street was dry and pale orange under the streetlights, and the next, it disappeared behind a wall of water. Puddles formed in seconds and boiled on the sidewalk, and the raindrops hammered the tin roof of the diner so loudly it seemed the heavens had dumped several truckloads of dimes.

“Who’d Trevor send down here with you?” Jay said.

“Graham Clifton,” I said. “There’s another guy, too. Cushing.”

“They know about you coming to get me out of jail?”

I shook my head. “We’ve been shaking their tails since we arrived.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like them.”

He nodded. “The papers release the identity of the guy I supposedly killed?”

“Not that we know of.”

Angie leaned across the table and lit his cigarette. “Who was it?”

Jay puffed on the cigarette, but didn’t withdraw it from his mouth. “Jeff Price.” He glanced at his reflection in the window as the rain poured down the pane in rivulets and turned his features to rubber, melted his cheekbones.

“Jeff Price,” I said. “Former treatment supervisor for Grief Release. That Jeff Price?”

He took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash into the black plastic ashtray. “You’ve done your homework, D’Artagnan.”

“Did you kill him?” Angie asked.

He sipped his beer and looked across the table at us, his head cocked to the right, his eyes swimming from side to side. He took another drag off his cigarette and his eyes left us and followed the smoke as it pirouetted from the ash and floated over Angie’s shoulder.

“Yeah, I killed him.”

“Why?” I said.

“He was a bad man,” he said. “A bad, bad man.”

“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad women, too.”

“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to pay.

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