Homicide My Own Read Online Free

took us to a one-lightbulb landing and an eight-car ferry left over from the mosquito fleet days and of questionnable seaworthiness. I paid our fare, tucked the receipt behind the visor, and rolled aboard, the sixth car on, and nobody behind us. A few walkaboards came out of nowhere and huddled on deck, exposed to the weather, which tonight was just a little chilly. Everybody else stayed in his car.
    I put my head against the window and went right out.
    Fifteen minutes later. Odd woke me up by gently rubbing my arm. It felt nice. “Wake up, Quinn,” he whispered.
    I awoke and heard motors starting up.
    “We know where we’re going?”
    “I don’t think we can get too far lost,” he said. “It’s an island, you’ll run into water eventually.”
    We left the ferry and fell into the slow pace of a crawling caravan of six cars.
    “How did you know there was a 12:45 ferry?” I asked.
    “Huh?”
    “Back on the Interstate…you said, we should make the 12:45. Was that written down?”
    “You got the paperwork.”
    “I didn’t see that written down.”
    “What did I say?”
    “That we could catch the 12:45 ferry.”
    “The lieutenant must have said so.”
    “I didn’t hear him say that, what time the ferry left.”
    “I don’t know, it just came into my head, I guess.”
    There was more than the one road on the island, we discovered, as the other cars from the ferry turned off and disappeared into the tall firs and cedars. We stayed on what we thought was the main road until it made a sweeping right turn and there in the still dark night where America blended into Canada sat an Indian’s vision of a bit of Las Vegas.
    A free-standing marquee, large and imposing, in front of a series of three quonset huts bolted together, promised more than the place could possibly deliver. Lavish buffets at giveaway prices, liberal card-operated slots, a rock and roll group from the sixties that I knew for a fact had long ago lost three of its four to the natural failing of internal organs. On either side of the curve in the road, both sides of the casino, was a scattering of crosses marking the demise of drivers who had been in too great a hurry either to get to or to leave the place.
    “Here’s where Charlie got busted.”
    “We should stop,” said Odd.
    “Why?”
    “See how it went down.”
    “How it went down?”
    “Yeah, Charles and Stacey.”
    “What do we care how it went down?”
    It felt silly, talking like that, how things went down.
    Odd said, “Duh? We’re cops.”
    “The cop stuff has already been done. We’re pick-up and delivery.”
    By that time we had passed the casino.
    “We could eat,” he said. “It said buffet.”
    That did it, of course. There has never been a cop who could resist a cheap smorgie. I turned around and pulled into the lot, which was near full, out there in the middle of the night, middle of nowhere.
    Sometimes you forget you’re in the uniform and you walk around like an ordinary person. We strolled in, and every head turned from the dice or the cards to see us standing at the entrance. It was a small place and shabby, and the people in it looked sad and lost.
    A boonda guy with a face like this side of the moon and wearing a powder blue blazer came up to us, walking with a limp. His name tag said KING GEORGE. It might have been last name first. He could have been George King. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t call him anything.
    “You from Spokane?”
    We said we were.
    “We don’t have ‘em here. They’re over at the Tribal Police Station.”
    “Yeah, well, we wanted to check out where it went down,” I said.
    He looked at me the way I had looked at Odd, who was looking at me that way right now. How it all went down.
    “Where they were busted. And, besides, we’re hungry. We’ve been on the road all day and missed supper.”
    So the security guy with the moon face led us to the eats and told the cashier we were compted and handed us each a large oval plate, which