Dressed to Kill Read Online Free

over the kid. One day I’ll plug the coffeepot into the wall and — wham! Frazzle City. You’ll see. She put her hand on the doorknob, still hesitant to go inside. A mess, a great mother of a mess; and yet there was a curious sense of order about the room, as if the chaos had been planned meticulously, as if the boy had followed a blueprint of disorder.
    She knocked lightly, then she went inside.
    He was sitting at his worktable. In one hand he was holding a smoking soldering iron, in the other a printed circuit board, a jumble of skeletal lines that meant nothing to her. He didn’t look up, didn’t even seem to be aware of her standing in the doorway. She stared at his black hair, unruly, ruffled, and the way his spectacles gleamed in the sunlight that came through the window. Suddenly it seemed to her that he was a replica of Thomas: the angle of the head, the lips pursed in concentration, the brow lined. A fifteen-year-old replica of a dead man. She felt a dry thickness in her throat, a pulse beating faintly in her skull like some dying bird’s wing. A dizziness, a feeling she’d known before when she saw Peter in a certain light from a certain angle.
    We buried Thomas just before the snows came, she thought. On a day the color of slate. We buried him just as the frigid dark of winter was covering everything. Another Vietnam statistic. One of the late ones . . . She remembered a blur of things suddenly, the terrible telegram, the feeling of a scream locked up in her heart, the way she’d held Peter as if nothing were more precious to her now than the dead man’s son. It came back, it came back like a black flood. She held the side of the door, waiting for the dizziness to ebb away from her. Eight fucking years, she thought. A widow with a seven-year-old son. Eight miserable fucking years ago. The lonely empty nights when the hunger was dreadful and all she could think about was the flesh decaying in the ground, and she’d understood the way to madness lay in that direction, that she was making a descent into the crazy inferno of her own macabre imagination. Dreams. Dreams of Thomas putting his foot down on a land mine. Dreams of explosions, the sky filled with rage, with the redness of blood, the tendrils of torn flesh.
    She shut her eyes for a moment. It would pass, she knew. Once, she would have gone for the Valium or the Equanil or whatever salve Elliott might think fit to prescribes—but now she’d learned to control it without chemicals. It would pass. All you had to do was hold on.
    Peter looked up at her. “I didn’t see you come in,” he said.
    There were small dark circles under his eyes. She said, “You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?”
    He nodded. “I’ve got to get this thing finished. The science exhibit is next week.”
    “I know. You keep telling me that. As an excuse, kid, it’s pretty threadbare.” But she couldn’t bring herself to scold him; she lacked the cutting edge in her voice. And he knew it, because he was grinning at her. “What’s your secret, Peter? You ever sleep? I mean, like us common folks, you ever settle your head on a pillow and kinda close your eyes and just drift off into the land of nod, huh?”
    She stood over him now, putting her hands on his shoulders, massaging him very gently. He said, “Who needs sleep? I read someplace we spend about one third of our life in bed. Can you imagine that? I mean, one third of a whole lifetime spent in bed? It’s a waste of time.”
    She smiled down at him. “What’s that you’re doing anyhow? Cracking an atom or something?”
    “It’s a microprocessor,” he said. “You wouldn’t really understand.”
    She was amused at the way he sometimes patronized her. What the hell, he was right. She wouldn’t know a microprocessor from an acorn. She stared at the printed circuitry, then at the tangle of things on his table. Insane, like a mad scientist.
    “Suppose, egghead, you explain to me.” She folded her arms