No Way Home Read Online Free Page B

and turned left onto a street vaulted by maple trees. Mailboxes stood on posts meshed in ivy. MacGregor stared through the windshield with violent concentration.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Nowhere,” Morgan said and went left at a fork. The road narrowed and curved past the Girl Scout camp and straightened as it approached Paget’s Pond, which lay flat and undisturbed some five miles from the center of town. It was where he and his wife used to take winter walks with their dog, a shepherd Elizabeth swore was wolf. Certainly the size of the animal and the blunt shape of the nose were lupine, but the rest was gentleness. Morgan slowed, swerved, and parked near the pond.
    “You’re right, this is nowhere,” MacGregor said, which irked Morgan, but only for a moment.
    They left the car, followed a path, and sat opposite each other at a weathered picnic bench in sight of a No Swimming sign. The air tasted of new needles on the pines. A haze blurred half the pond, which Morgan fancied as the juncture between now and then. He said, “I thought you might’ve come up with something by now.”
    “You mean something I done could’ve pissed somebody off?” MacGregor crimped his brow. “Nothing big. Only little things.”
    “Tell me about ‘em.”
    MacGregor’s voice was an official drone. He had dispersed nighttime gatherings of youths drinking beer behind Pearson Grammar School, rousted couples making out in the cemetery, busted the Barnes boy for possession of marijuana, threw a hammerlock on Lester Winn, who was beating on his wife again, and just the other day … “You listening, Chief?”
    Morgan was watching two squirrels, one pursuing the other. A breeze loosened the cooler air roosting in the pines and brought down stray needles. “Just the other day what?”
    “I ticketed Thurman Wetherfield for speeding. If he hadn’t given me lip, he’d have got only a warning.”
    Wetherfield was a firefighter feigning disability and cheating his estranged wife out of proper child support. For a mere second Morgan considered the duplicity of the man’s character, its two thin sides. Then he watched the sun return and spread a net over the pond. As a boy he had skimmed stones here. No Swimming the sign said, but he had swum. “Anything else?” he asked.
    “Yeah, but it was more than a month ago — that hot day in late April, remember, got to be eighty.”
    “Broke a record,” Morgan said, remembering the day well, especially the afternoon in the prideful home of the Bowmans, where casement windows overlooked a swimming pool and Arlene Bowman’s terry robe opened on two estimable legs certain to coerce him into a state. He had suspected she was trouble, but at the time it hadn’t mattered. “Tell me about that thing with Junior Ray ball.”
    “Hell, that was more than a month ago. I told you about it.”
    “Tell me again.”
    “I responded to a call from the high school,” MacGregor said with elbows planted on the table. He gave Morgan a picture of girls in sweaty T-shirts competing on the playing field, kicking a ball from one end to the other, their school letters undulating across their young chests and the sun shimmering off their healthy legs. The snake in the grass was Junior Ray ball, undersized and unemployable, who had been warned in the past. Teachers had shooed him away. “This time he had his pants off,” MacGregor said. “He was in the weeds on the sidelines, thought he couldn’t be seen.”
    “You chased him.”
    “Ran him down,” MacGregor said, giving Morgan an image of Junior flopping breathlessly on the ground like a caught fish gulping air when it wanted water. “Grabbed him by the scruff and gave the girls a laugh. Marched him bare-ass back to his pants while he kept his hand over his dicky.”
    “You didn’t bring him in.”
    “Didn’t see the sense. Figured he learned his lesson.”
    “Still think that?”
    “I know what you’re getting at, Chief, but I think you’re