Detour to Death Read Online Free Page B

little white sign at the edge of town that read:
Cooperton, pop. 997
. Charley Gaynor belonged to Cooperton, and so, in quite another way, would his slayer.
    Danny could feel the tension in the streets as soon as they pulled up to the sheriff’s station. He’d gotten his ride to Cooperton after all, a fast, easy ride in a smooth-running sedan with an emblem painted on the door; but he hadn’t noticed how the motor sang or how the shock absorbers took the dips. It was a short ride, ten miles by the meter on the dashboard, and a couple of miles beyond Mountain View the sheriff slowed down a bit and seemed to be watching Danny’s face as they passed an angling side road that forked in out of a pass through the hills. Danny trembled without knowing why.
    But in Cooperton he knew why. The streets weren’t exactly crowded, but they were busy. They whispered as the sedan drove by, and they murmured when it parked. And then down the highway behind them came the racing ambulance with its silly siren clearing the way for an old man who wasn’t in a hurry any more.
    “Get along inside,” the sheriff said, and Danny didn’t need a second invitation.
    The sheriff’s office was the front room of a long, flat-roofed building that served the disciplinary needs of the community. Behind the office a short hall led to a few cells for the overnight guests (seldom used unless the boys got too free with their bottles), and the rest of the building was given over to the simple living-quarters of the sheriff and his wife. There was the smell of frying food coming from someplace beyond that hall, and then a scrawny little woman in a long percale apron appeared in the doorway with a bread knife in her hand. Maybe the knife was accident, but Danny couldn’t help feeling the woman was disappointed when she looked at him. She wiped her free hand on the apron skirt and murmured, “Why, he’s just a boy!”
    They were the first words Danny heard from Ada Keep, and they were sad and regretful like her eyes.
    Virgil shoved a straight-backed oak chair at Danny and muttered a terse, “Sit down.” Then he went back to lock the front door against the group of curious spectators already clustered about the entrance. “Go on home and eat your suppers,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do here.” Maybe that would send them away, maybe not. Virgil didn’t much care, because with that bolt shot home he wasn’t going to be disturbed, anyway. Danny watched the whole procedure with unbelieving eyes. It couldn’t be true. In a minute he’d come out of this nightmare and stop sweating, but in the meantime that giant in the suntan twills had shoved the wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head and was telephoning a man named Jim Rice. Rice drifted into focus again—the tall man with the too easy laugh.
    “You did? Two hundred. Yes, that’s what Walter said.” The sheriff was talking about that money again, and Danny was at the edge of his chair. “All right,” Virgil finished. “That’s what I wanted to know. You’d better get down here right away, Jim, and see if you can identify that money.”
    “How can he identify my money?” Danny screamed. “It’s my money! I’ve been trying to tell you, it’s my money!”
    Virgil hung up the phone and sat down behind his desk. He pulled Danny’s billfold out of his pocket and dumped the contents on the table top. It came to about two hundred and seven dollars altogether—money sure didn’t last long on the road. There were a few other things, too. A driver’s license, a couple of snapshots of cute, empty-faced girls, a social security card.
    “I worked for that money,” Danny said. “I worked in a garage—after school, Saturdays, Sundays. When school was out I worked all day.”
    “And saved your pay,” Virgil added. He’d heard all this before.
    “I saved what I could.”
    “You didn’t spend it on these pretty girls?”
    “What girls? They don’t mean anything.”
    “Vernon