Rough Men Read Online Free Page A

will be caught?” said Will. The edge was back in his voice; he tried to temper it as the words came out, but it didn’t work.
    “It’s highly likely that some manner of evidence will make itself known. That could be through Alex’s associations behind bars or his friends on the outside. Someone knows what happened to him, and they had to have been pretty tight if they trusted him enough to rob a bank with them. That person is stillout there, and I will find him, I truly believe that. Do you have any more questions for me?”
    Alison shook her head, and Will muttered a barely audible no.
    “If you come up with anything later, please, let me know. Also, if you can think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your son, or who he may have associated with in the past, let me know.” Detective Van Endel stood. “I’m truly sorry about your loss.”
    Will stood and shook Van Endel’s hand and then led the detective out into the blowing snow.

W ill woke just after 6:00, surprised that he’d been able to sleep. Alison gone from their bed was confirmation that none of it had been a dream, that Alex really was dead. He pulled on a pair of warm-up pants, brushed his teeth, and went downstairs.
    Alison was waiting for him at the kitchen table, in the seat she’d been in when they’d talked to the detective the night before. She was drinking the coffee that he’d made, then had forgotten to have or share with the detective. She looked at him and said, “I hope you don’t blame me for any of this.”
    “You?” said Will. “Why in the world would I blame you?”
    “I’m the one who raised him. I was his mother, whether I birthed him or not. He’s my only child, and now he’s dead. You put me in charge of one thing—the most important thing—and now he’s gone. We could have done more; I should have done more!”
    Will sat and moved to grab her hand, but she snatched it away. “Look,” he said, “there’s no blaming you or anyone else that wasn’t there when he died. Alex made some bad choices, and as hard as this is going to be, we don’t need to beat each other up over it.”
    Will didn’t say what he thought then, which was that the media wasn’t going to need their help to beat up what was left of their family. Alex was going to be a scapegoat for the crimes that had taken place before his death, and nothing was going to change that until his murderers were caught, and even thatwouldn’t be good enough for those who really knew the victims. Nothing was ever going to be the same, and there was nothing he could do about it.
    “I’m going to wait a couple of hours,” Will said, “and then I’m going to call my brother and Lou. I need to give Isaac a heads-up about Alex, and I want to talk to Lou about getting our ducks in a row, legally speaking. Before I do any of that, though, we need to talk about what we want to happen.”
    “You mean with Alex?”
    “Yes.”
    She sipped from her coffee. Will could feel her hollow eyes looking through him. Alex had been her son more than his, even though she shared no blood with the boy. It was at that precise instant that he realized just how awful a father he’d been and that there never was going to be a moment when Alex turned his life around or when the two of them could make things right, to correct the sins of the father and of the son.
    “You mean like, what are we going to do with him, once the cops release the body? Because we had a plan. Do you want to change it? He’s still your son! He’s still my son, and nothing he did changes what we wanted for him, dead or alive.”
    “I guess it seems weird,” stammered Will. “With what happened to him, I feel odd going through with a cremation. It seems morbid, almost cruel, and even if we do, are we still going to want—”
    “We have had a will written since you turned thirty,” she said, her voice slowly rising, “and nowhere in it does it say that if our son does something too awful, we