The Man Who Risked His Partner by Donaldson Stephen R

Author:Donaldson, Stephen R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

14

From the old part of town, I went back to Ginny’s apartment. Funny how I still thought of it as her apartment, even though I’d been living there for six months—and taking care of it. I didn’t find any cops staking out the place, so I let myself in.

Its impersonal tidiness felt safe to me, made me want to go to bed and not wake up again for about six weeks. But I fought that off. Instead I took a shower. Ran water as hot as I could stand onto my face until the marks of Gail Harmon’s nails burned like stigmata and the bones of my skull felt like cracked glass. Then, trying for a little self-respect, I shaved and put on clean clothes.

After that I packed a suitcase for Ginny and me. Since I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I had to go through it like a catechism several times before I could believe that I had everything we were likely to need for a couple of days. Her prosthetic hand I left where it was. At the time, it didn’t seem like my responsibility.

By a little after three I was ready to leave. I couldn’t come up with anything useful to get done in the time I had left, so I decided to go to the bank and wait for Haskell.

Left entirely to myself, my personal approach to this case wouldn’t have involved trying to solve it myself. Instead, I would’ve asked someone else for the answer. Somewhere in Puerta del Sol—if you knew where to look for him, and how to talk to him—lived some old Mestizo or Chicano drunk with a grizzled face, cirrhosis of the liver, and no experience at all with personal hygiene, who knew exactly why Pablo was killed. He also knew what Roscoe Chavez had done to get himself thrown in the river. He might even know who wanted Reg Haskell dead. And he might sell that information, if he trusted me—and if I offered him the right price.

I knew how to find men like that. And I’d spent enough time lying in my own puke with them to be trusted. Unfortunately, they only came out at night.

Since I didn’t seem capable of solving the case by reason or intuition, I spent the drive wondering why it wasn’t snowing yet when the weather looked as angry as a high sea and the wind coming down off the mountains made the Olds rock like a rowboat. That kept me awake until I got up into the Heights and reached the ice cream parlor.

The Continental wasn’t there—which didn’t exactly surprise my socks off. The fact that I had no idea what Ginny might be doing made a small worm of fear crawl across my stomach, but I figured I didn’t have the right to complain. I could stand a little fear for the sake of recovering my partner.

Unfortunately, when I’d parked the Olds I still had almost an hour to kill. Saying to myself that I would sit there and wait was easy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.