Rough Cut Read Online Free

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        I had no desire whatsoever for heroics. I didn't give a damn if she waited in the shadows watching me. I just wanted out and away.
        I stood up, without much self-confidence, my head hammering, my eyes having trouble focusing, my bladder filling again, and somehow made my way out of the room and down the hall. The stairs I had to be extra careful with- didn't want to take a tumble down those. I used the banister judiciously.
        The driveway was empty. She'd gone.
        I stood in the frosty night, sucking in air, listening to distant animals settling in against the cold, and to a forlorn train punishing the darkness.
        Finally, I got into my car, turned on the heater full blast, and backed out of the long drive.
        I knew where I wanted to go, whom I needed to talk to. At the first sign of a phone, I'd find the address and head there promptly, knowing that soon the police would be involved and I would have to have a story prepared.
        The first phone I came to was attached to a convenience store that stood like a monument to plastic civilization in an otherwise rambling section of fir trees. When I got out of the car, I was dizzy a moment and staggered. The effects of being struck on the head were still with me. I saw the kid behind the counter in the store look at me with a mixture of pity and superiority. Obviously he thought I was drunk.
        Inside the store, the lights bothering my eyes, I went to elaborate lengths to prove I wasn't bombed. But I moved so self-consciously I probably only looked all the drunker.
        I wrote down Stokes's address-this was far too important to trust to a telephone-and went back out into the night.
        Back in the city I found the expressway that would take me to Stokes's neighborhood. I drove toward it like a homing missile. I felt so many things-horror and fear, regret and a terrible nagging sense that somehow Denny had gotten what he'd deserved-that actually I felt nothing; I was really blank as the city rolled by on either side.
        I had taken Stokes's name from the Yellow Pages when I'd first contacted him three weeks ago. I hadn't wanted to ask anybody for a recommendation because then they'd be curious as to why I'd wanted a private eye. But now-as I left the expressway and pulled into a neighborhood ashen with factory soot and a bitter sense of its own demise-I wondered if I shouldn't have gone to one of the big, prestigious investigative agencies. The neighborhood clarified many things about Stokes. He was a tall, fleshy, ominous-looking man who usually wore black. His thick glasses gave him the look of a comic-book World War II German spy. It made sense coming from this part of town, with its whispered white ethnic secrets and its battered pride and its obvious hostility. He would take pleasure from prying into the lives of people like Denny and myself, and feel a power over us for knowing what we were really all about. For the first time I realized that I should not have hired Stokes, but the day I saw the note indicating that Denny and Cindy Traynor were having an affair, I'd gone a little crazy, thinking of all the things Denny was jeopardizing. So I ran my finger down the list of private investigators and chose him simply at random.
        And now here I was-in so deep I had to turn to a man I didn't trust for advice. I had the feeling that Stokes would know what to do, had the feeling that Stokes had lived on the edge of the law all his life.
        It was an old two-story frame house that had once been white but for over a decade or two had evolved into gray. An unlikely red neon sign burned in the gloom, announcing FEDERATED INVESTIGATION SERVICES. I supposed in a neighborhood like this one he got many calls. I parked and went up to the door.
        Three knocks brought me nothing. I looked past the front door and across the screened-in porch to a lace curtain beyond which a small color TV glowed. I