Everything but the Squeal Read Online Free Page A

the wallet. It was a single line, printed on what looked like a cheap dot-matrix printer, the most anonymous of all printing media. No envelope.
    “Who's seen the pictures?”
    “No one.”
    “No cops?”
    “Why would I show them to the cops in Kansas? She's here. And if I had showed them to the cops here, Daddy would have learned about them, wouldn't he?”
    “So you're carrying this alone.”
    She flicked the edge of the top picture with a painted nail. It made a sharp click. “I'm stronger than I look.”
    “I guess you are.” There didn't seem to be anything else to say.
    “But I don't know for how long,” she said. She made a sudden stab at her hair with her right hand, and her nails scraped her forehead. She was bleeding immediately. The phone rang.
    “Go into the bathroom,” I said, picking it up. “Press toilet paper to the cut until it stops. Hello?”
    She walked toward the bathroom as though her spine were made of steel. She took very small steps. The blood ran in a thin red line down her cheek.
    “Missing kid, huh?” Hammond said.
    “Why?” I could barely understand him. I was fighting the ghost-image of the photographs.
    “Tommy's Oki-Burger. Fountain, near Gardner. That's one of the places the kids go. It's a pay phone. And it's no place for somebody's baby. You plan to talk to your friendly neighborhood cop about this?”
    “Later.”
    “Whatever you say, pal. Got to go. The sheep's bleating.” He hung up again.
    I stacked the Polaroids into a neat little pile and aligned their edges precisely. Then I picked up the top one and studied it. Aimee's hair, so meticulously unfashionable in the yearbook photos, was matted and greasy-looking. There were dirt smudges on her wrists and elbows and a scab on her knee. She'd traveled a long way from Kansas City.
    After Mrs. Sorrell came out, tissue pressed to her forehead, I told her I'd do what I could. I forgot to ask about the fee. When she was gone, I studied the Polaroids again, trying to learn anything I could about Aimee's first starring role.

3 - One After Thirty-nine
    “T  he problem,” Bernie Siegel was saying as he stood on one leg, closed his eyes, and tried to touch the tip of his nose with his index finger, “is that the amount of intelligence on the planet is a constant, and the population is increasing.” Then he frowned in concentration and stuck his finger into his eye. He'd just failed the roadside sobriety test.
    Neither the gesture nor the sentence was as precisely articulated as Bernie might have liked, but most of us were three or four notches beyond the point where we would have noticed. The one exception was Bernie's girlfriend and sole source of support, Joyce, who was pregnant. She was following her doctor's advice, or maybe it was her own advice, since she was a doctor, and not drinking. She had the glow that comes with early pregnancy. The rest of us had the glow that comes with advanced intoxication.
    A fortieth birthday party is like trying to cut your wrists with an electric razor. It takes longer than you'd hoped it would, and there's no payoff. Although most of us had been doing our best, this evening was no exception.
    The candles were burning in Wyatt and Annie's living room, just as they had in the late sixties and early seventies, and the food, most of it fearsomely healthy, smelled the same as it had then. The birthday cake was carob. Annie thought that carob tasted like chocolate. She also thought that near-beer tasted like beer. The cake was enormous and slightly lopsided, and it said Forty is better than nothing . Most of us in attendance, if we'd been polled when Wyatt was twenty-five, wouldn't have put small amounts of money at favorable odds on his reaching twenty-six, much less forty. When Wyatt was twenty-five, any vampire sufficiently ill-advised to bite into his neck would have OD'd long before sunrise.
    Of course, that was before Wyatt had married Annie and straightened out his act. It had been