Everything but the Squeal Read Online Free

saying good-bye. He always does. He learned it from the movies.
    Mommy and Daddy were both watching me with a kind of repressed anticipation that made me feel like a broken TV set. It was time to disappoint them.
    “Listen,” I said. “I don't really think I can help you. This just isn't the kind of thing I do.”
    “I told you, Mommy,” Daddy said with grim satisfaction.
    “But Janie . . .” Mommy said. She wasn't going to give up.
    I held up a hand. “Janie was a couple of years ago. I found her because she wanted to be found. Her mother, I hope this doesn't offend you because you're related to her somehow, her mother is a bucket of loose marbles. She'd driven everyone else in her life crazy enough to leave, so she aimed it all at Janie, and then Janie left too. I brought her home twice because she was living wrong when she was on her own. That's the end of my experience with missing children.”
    Daddy got up. “Let's go,” he said.
    “Sit down, Al,” Mommy said. She pointed to his chair with an arm that was all muscle tone and electrical energy. Al sat.
    “There are about twenty-five thousand missing kids in L. A. at any given time,” I said. “I'm one man. The cops are better at this than I am. Have you gone to them?”
    “They made us fill out a report,” Mommy said. “As long as they have a report, they seemed to say, they'd done their job. They didn't even dial the number. At least you dialed the number.”
    “I'm going to get you an address, too,” I said. “But I'm afraid that's it.”
    “That's it, all right,” Daddy said, getting up again. “Look at this dump.” He glanced around my living room. It looked okay to me, but I could see his point. He hadn't seen it the night before. “You can stay and waste your time if you want,” he said without giving me a look. “I'll be in the car.”
    “I'll walk you down,” Mommy said, “but I want to talk with Mr. Grist for a moment or two more.” She took his arm and steered him to the door, throwing me a glance over her shoulder as she went. The glance said wait .
    I used the time to drop the coffee cups into the sink and to put the copy of Gibbon under the woodburner where it would dry more quickly. Five minutes later I'd decided on a jog at the beach followed by a sauna at UCLA, and she was back.
    “He's resting,” she said.
    “He looks like he could use it.”
    “Be quiet,” she said. “Just clam up.” She sat down again, reached into a pocket, and tossed onto the table three bright, hard little color Polaroids. I knew before I picked them up that I didn't want to. After I looked at them, I let out a slow, labored breath. “Oh,” I said.
    All three pictures showed Aimee, naked, standing up against a wall. There was a man's hand in the picture. The hand was reaching up, doing something obscene. Her eyelids in one of the shots drooped lopsidedly, one much lower than the other.
    I knew that look. It was the blink of someone who's deeply stoned. The eyes come down at different rates of speed. She had bruises on her arms and an angry, swollen mark in her navel that looked like a burn. The man's hand was just a man's hand. No watch, no rings, no tattoos, just five nasty fingers sprouting from the end of a hairy forearm. The wall behind Aimee was white and featureless.
    “He doesn't know about these,” I said, meaning Daddy.
    She held my eyes with hers. “No. They'd kill him. He had heart bypass surgery a few months ago. He weighed two-eighty then. There isn't enough of him left for something like this.”
    “When did they arrive?”
    “Last week. I was home when the mailman came. I'm always home. I had to leave so I wouldn't be there when he got back. I drove around for hours before I could face him without giving it away.”
    “Was there a note with them?”
    “It just said, ‘Don't do anything stupid. I'll be in touch.’ Nothing since.”
    “Have you got it?”
    She pulled a wallet out of her purse and a piece of paper out of