Cast of Shadows - v4 Read Online Free Page A

discount.”
    Davis laughed.
    “Let’s do something,” Anna Kat proposed. “The three of us. This Saturday. Before I start. How about we go into the city? Eat at Berghoff’s. Maybe do the architecture tour.”
    He had appointments on Saturday. Three of them. In his periphery, he could see them on his computer screen, highlighted in blue. Many of his patients couldn’t take time off during the week to see him. He’d explained it to Anna Kat a hundred times.
    “All right,” he said. “That sounds like fun.”
    “I’ll make the reservations.” AK jumped to the flat treads of her tennis shoes and walked around his desk and drew his cheek next to hers. When she pulled away Davis could see red scratches on her cheek, already fading, transferred from his half-day stubble. He was lucky to have a teenaged daughter who wanted to spend any time with him at all. “I’m gonna hit the Beast for an hour before Old Orchard. Then I’ll be at Libby’s. Don’t wait up.”
    AK walked down the hall and Davis could hear her call good-bye to Ellen, the receptionist. He turned toward the window and a half minute later he saw her bike accelerate into frame as it turned from the sidewalk onto the street. Her hair had grown about six inches below her helmet and it flared above her shoulders as the air drafted past.
    “I love you,” he said quietly, which he often did in those days, just to hear the words said.
     
— 4 —
     
    In the parking lot outside a football stadium some years ago, Mickey the Gerund saw a friend (this one a like-minded friend, a friend to the cause) pull down the backseat to give him access to a cooler of soda pop in the trunk. Mickey’s Cutlass didn’t have such a feature, but he immediately saw its usefulness, and constructed one of his own. With a hacksaw, he cut a piece from the middle of the backseat about the size of a box you’d buy boots in, and he cut a slightly smaller piece from the metal frame behind it. When reassembled, it looked like an armrest recessed into the back of the seat, although if somebody sat against it, the odd piece would probably come loose. Fortunately, no one ever sat back there anymore.
    His sons used to sit there in the days when he so arrogantly put himself and his family before God. We are all born sinners, he realized now. Specifically, we are born with the animal instincts to survive, to seek pleasure, and to reproduce. If you are a God-fearing, God-loving man, you are obligated to act on the last of these urges and to sublimate the first two. This is a paradox of sorts: God wants us to live and to procreate in order to spread His gospel on earth. But ultimately, life here in this bodily dimension means very little to the Lord or to His truest followers. Death here means nothing. What did John Lennon say about dying? “It’s like getting out of one car and into another.” Something like that. John Lennon was an agnostic or a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna or some crazy damn thing, but that part he got right. Too bad he didn’t know Jesus so he could find out just how right he was.
    Mickey’s guns had never bothered his wife, Bev. Her father had been a hunter and she grew up in a house full of rifles and bows. Oddly enough, she became alarmed only when Mickey wanted to learn how to use them right. He joined a gun club and went there for target practice three days a week. When Jim, their oldest, turned ten, Mickey started to bring him along. Before he’d let Jim shoot, he taught the boy how to carry a gun and how to store it safely. How to check to see if it’s loaded, and how to clean it. He taught Jimmy
respect
for guns. Bev didn’t see it that way.
    “I don’t like having all these weapons around,” she said. “I don’t like you getting Jimmy all excited about them. He buys the magazines now. And the catalogs. I want him to have other interests. I want him to play sports and have hobbies he can share with his friends at school, not just his