No Cure for Death Read Online Free Page B

excuse to bullshit ya. Her starting point. That’s probably something else, out of her real past, something her own fault, something less sensational. Maybe he’s her boyfriend—or maybe her pimp!”
    “Not her,” I said, draining my beer. “Not a chance. She was no hooker. It was the truth—it was all there. In her face.”
    “Really got under your skin, didn’t she?”
    I ignored that, got up and went over to my turntable and turned the record over. When I came back and got settled on the couch again, I said, “Seems to me we’re due for a change of subject again. So what the hell’s been happening with you in the last couple years?”
    The next few hours went fast, and talk of old (and new) times almost pushed Janet and her fantastic story out of my head. But she was there, occupying a small corner of my mind, sitting patiently, silently, just as she had in the bus station.
    I was turning on the television so John and I could catch the ten o’clock news when the phone rang. Thinking it might be Janet, I jumped for it.
    “Yes?” I said.
    “This is Brennan. Where the hell’s my son?”
    Brennan. Damn.
    “Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “Been hogging him, haven’t I? We got to drinking beer and talking, you know how it is.”
    “Put him on.”
    “Okay, okay, keep your badge on.” I looked over at John. “He sounds even more belligerent than usual.”
    John took the phone and said hello and listened for a while and said yeah a few times and hung up.
    “What’s the deal?”
    “Been an accident or something out on Colorado Hill. Says if I want to see him tonight I probably ought to forget it—he’ll be tied up with this.”
    “Did he sound pissed off?”
    “Yeah. He figures I should’ve stopped in to see him first.”
    “You should’ve.”
    “Why don’t we drive out there and keep him company?”
    “Won’t we be a bother?”
    “What? An Army sergeant and an ex-cop?”
    “Well, okay,” I said, “it’s your homecoming. You got a right to spend it any crazy damn way you want. Let’s go.”

FIVE
    There are two paved highways leading from Port City to Davenport, and Colorado Hill is on the older, less traveled of the two, a narrow strip of deteriorating concrete winding along the Mississippi. The only advantage of the older road—called by locals the River Road—is its scenery: Colorado Hill, for example. Since the Hill is only ten miles from Port City, most sightseers drive out there, sightsee, and turn back, not even thinking of using the River Road as a route to the nearby Quad Cities, though it remains well-traveled because of various factories and a stone quarry located along it.
    “Damn,” John said, working his voice up over the noise the Rambler made as it chugged along. “No moon, wouldn’t you know it?”
    “Dark night like this doesn’t do much for the scenery
or
the driving.” I was hunched forward, clutching the wheel, peeling my eyes for stray chunks of concrete, potholes and any bridges that might be out.
    “I always liked this drive,” John said. “I was looking forward to the view of the river.”
    “Try it on foot next time. At noon.”
    “Something up ahead, Mal.”
    “Yeah, I see it.”
    A quarter mile up two small dots of brightness were moving along either side of the road. As I neared them, the dots became flares, shooting off red-orange light, their bearers a couple teenage boys. I watched the boys set their flares to the left and right of the road and waited as one came running up to the car on my side; I rolled the window down and listened to him.
    “Accident ahead! Accident ahead! You better turn back.”
    I nodded to the kid and rolled the window back up and crawled forward. In another fifty yards we came to a man setting another pair of flares, bigger ones, and he held out his palm for me to stop.
    “Yeah?” I said.
    It was Oliver DeForest, a guy who worked in a shoe store downtown, one of the Sheriff’s Patrol—a group of citizens who worked as