Love Kills Read Online Free

damage.
    â€œThey had to open Red Cross shelters for a thunderstorm, for God’s sake, two months before hurricane season,” she said.
    Traffic fatalities had become nightmarish, outnumbering murders, which themselves had doubled since last year.
    â€œâ€™Member, you grew up there. Never was like this before. Even when I first got to Miami, there’d be maybe one spectacular major wreck, like a giant exploding tanker truck, every two weeks or so. Now it’s every rush hour. Just before I left, there were two major unrelated tanker-truck crashes in less than an hour, ten miles apart. Same ol’ story: fishtail, jackknife, topple over. Nine thousand gallons of gasoline splashing across the Golden Glades interchange at the height of rush hour. At least neither of those killed a whole carload of tourists like the one the day before.
    â€œThat happened the day after workers drilling a fence posthole ruptured a natural-gas line on Collins Avenue. Buildings were evacuated. People panicked. Businesses closed. Total gridlock for four hours. Some drivers abandoned their cars and ran. Wasn’t pretty, I can tell you. No wonder Florida has three times the national average of mental illness.” She daintily sipped her drink while I gazed dreamily at the red-violet sunset, watched the palms sway, and wished the waves could carry my worries out to sea.
    The long-planned $450 million Center for the Performing Arts had actually opened. “Downtown’s still a mess,” she said. “Sidewalks all tore up. Small businesses going bankrupt. Latest tally on the Center’s cost overrun is another $102 mil, and of course they never did plan for parking.”
    The project had been on the drawing board for three decades or so. I was surprised it had actually opened. “I thought it would be like that church in Sweden,” I said.
    Lottie blinked and cocked her head curiously.
    â€œThey broke ground in 1260, in Uppsala, Sweden. None of their children or grandchildren lived to see it finished—a hundred and seventy-five years later in 1435.”
    Lottie wrinkled her nose and scratched her sunburned shoulder, bright red despite all the sunscreen. “Where do you find all those obscure stories that never fit into newspapers or cocktail party conversations?”
    â€œI read a lot,” I said testily.
    â€œI’m not criticizing. It’s part of your girlish charm.” She ordered another rum drink and continued bringing me up to speed.
    â€œMore construction workers are getting killed on the job than all the cops, firemen, cabdrivers, and convenience-store clerks put together. Three men drowned in tons of hot quick-drying cement, buried alive at a luxury high-rise oceanfront site. They were pouring concrete on the roof when a frame broke. It buried the workers on the floor below and hardened before anybody could pull ’em out.”
    I hate when people go to work in the morning and never come home. It’s always painful to write about a man or a woman who meets a violent sudden end only because he or she is at work—which, at that moment, is the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s lousy to die trying to earn an honest living and care for your family.
    â€œWho were they?”
    â€œTwo Haitians and a Mexican,” she said. “Came to join the boom, find their piece of the dream, and feed their folks back home. The apartment prices on that condo project start at a million five. They died building a place they could never live in, or even be welcome at, except maybe as busboys in its rooftop restaurant.”
    â€œThey’d have lived longer busing tables,” I said.
    â€œExcept as busboys they’d have no place to live, ’cause all the affordable housing is being torn down or converted to pricey condos…. We’re living in interesting times, Britt. I feel like a character in a horror flick. Floods, fires, monsters crawling out of the