Promised Land Read Online Free Page B

learn in the police academy. I followed the head jerk into a square shabby office. One window looked out onto the lot where the cruisers parked. And beyond that a ragged growth of lilacs. There was a green metal filing cabinet and a gray metal desk with matching swivel chair. The desk was littered with requisitions and flyers and such. A sign on one corner said CAPTAIN SLADE.
    Slade nodded at the gray metal straight chair on my side of the desk. “Sit,” he said. Slade matched his office. Square, uncluttered and gray. His hair was short and curly, the face square as a child’s block, outdoors tan, with a gray blue sheen of heavy beard kept close shave. He was short, maybe five-eight, and blocky, like an offensive guard from a small college. The kind of guy that should be running to fat when he got forty, but wasn’t. “What’ll you have,” he said.
    “Harv Shepard hired me to look for his wife. I figured you might be able to point me in the right direction.”
    “License?”
    I took out my wallet, slipped out the plasticized photostat of my license and put it in front of him on the desk. His uniform blouse had short sleeves and his bare arms were folded across his chest. He looked at the license without unfolding his arms, then at me and back at the license again.
    “Okay,” he said.
    I picked up the license, slipped it back in my wallet.
    “Got a gun permit?”
    I nodded, slipped that out of the wallet and laid it in front of him. He gave it the same treatment and said, “Okay.”
    I put that away, put the wallet away and settled back in the chair.
    Slade said, “Far as I can tell she ran off. Voluntary. No foul play. Can’t find any evidence that she went with someone. Took an Almeida bus to New Bedford and that’s as far as we’ve gone. New Bedford cops got her description and all, but they got things more pressing. My guess is she’ll be back in a week or so dragging her ass.”
    “How about another man?”
    “She probably spent the night prior to her disappearance with a guy down the Silver Seas Motel. But when she got on the bus she appeared to be alone.”
    “What’s the guy’s name she was with?”
    “We don’t know.” Slade rocked back in his chair.
    “And you haven’t been busting your tail looking to find out either.”
    “Nope. No need to. There’s no crime here. If I looked into every episode of extramarital fornication around here I’d have the whole force out on condom patrol. Some babe gets sick of her husband, starts screwing around a little, then takes off. You know how often that happens?” Slade’s arms were still folded.
    “Yeah.”
    “Guy’s got money, he hires somebody like you to look. The guy he hires fusses around for a week or so, runs up a big bill at the motel and the wife comes back on her own because she doesn’t know what else to do. You get a week on the Cape and a nice tan, the husband gets a tax deduction, the broad starts sleeping around locally again.”
    “You do much marriage counseling?”
    He shook his head. “Nope, I try to catch people that did crimes and put them in jail. You ever been a cop? I mean a real one, not a private license?”
    “I used to be on the States,” I said. “Worked out of the Suffolk County D.A.‘s office.”
    “Why’d you quit?”
    “I wanted to do more than you do.”
    “Social work,” he said. He was disgusted.
    “Any regular boyfriends you know of?”
    He shrugged. “I know she slept around a little, but I don’t think anybody steady.”
    “She been sleeping around long or has this developed lately?”
    “Don’t know.”
    I shook my head.
    Slade said, “Spenser, you want to see my duty roster? You know how many bodies I got to work with here. You know what a summer weekend is like when the weather’s good and the Kennedys are all out going to Mass on Sunday.”
    “You got any suggestions who I might talk to in town that could get my wheels turning?” I said.
    “Go down the Silver Seas, talk with the