Serpents in the Cold Read Online Free

touch her before he sensed she was aware of him standing there. Still she gave no response. Melting snow from the rooftop thumped the glass and slid down the window, making everything blurred and indistinct. Claudia stirred and blinked, turned her head at last and looked at him. “Oh,” she said, but showed no surprise or curiosity.
    Cal came and stood beside her, squeezed her shoulder before pulling out a chair from the table and settling into it. Looking at her, he knew he wouldn’t tell her about Sheila; she was in no condition to hear about murder.
    “I tried calling,” he said and nodded toward the black phone resting in its cradle on the wall, “but they’ve shut your phone off.”
    Claudia took a last drag from the cigarette and pressed it down into the tin ashtray. A breeze from somewhere turned the smoke and pushed ash across the table. Claudia looked at the phone on the wall.
    “I’m waiting for Dante to call. He said he’d call.”
    Cal nodded. “He’ll probably call soon, Claudia. Any time now. If I see him, is there anything you want me to tell him?”
    “We need coffee. Bread, too. And toilet paper. Milk and eggs would be nice.”
    “I’ll take care of it, Claudia. Don’t worry about it.” He touched her shoulder, so cold it made him shiver, and went to the foldout couch in the living room and returned with a throw blanket, placing it around her shoulders. He considered putting on water to make her some tea, but as he watched her turn back toward the window, he decided against it. At the door he turned up the thermostat to sixty-five, waited until he heard the furnace kick in and water flowing through the radiators. At least they hadn’t turned that off yet.
    On the street, Charlie, the newspaper hawker, was counting change in his newsstand beside the Rialto. Above them, on the second floor of the theater, the neon cross of the Calvary Rescue Mission glowed, a blue nimbus in the frozen air. Outside the newsstand, pinned to plywood, the covers of Sports Daily, Bettor’s Weekly, Men’s Club, and various local and national papers fluttered and flapped against their pins. The Globe was revisiting the Brink’s robbery of a year before, what the New York Times had called the Crime of the Century, and showed the Superman masks the robbers had used and that now every kid from Charlestown to Quincy wore on Halloween.
    Cal held up the paper, looked at the headline: POLICE ASK PUBLIC’S HELP IN BOSTON BUTCHER CASE. NO LEADS IN MURDER OF FOUR WOMEN. At the bottom of the page he read STILL NO SIGN OF $2.5 MILLION SEIZED IN BRINK’S ROBBERY and then turned to the back of the paper and the sports section.
    Charlie watched him and chewed on his frayed cigar. There was always cigar pulp around the old man’s mouth, and with his deep-set eyes he looked like some manner of mole poking its head out into the sun.
    “They think that guy they’re calling the Butcher might be a foreigner off the boats coming in,” he said. “Maybe a sailor docked over in Charlestown. That’s what I’m thinking too. Only a foreigner could do something like that. You know, a Russian or one of those Slavic types. Are Polacks Slavic? You don’t think it was a Polack, do you? My mother was Polish.”
    Cal shook his head. “No, not a Polack off a boat anyway.”
    “Four girls cut up like that. It’s a crying fucking shame. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
    He glanced over the top of the sports page in Cal’s hands.
    “Bruins lost again,” he said.
    And before Cal could ask, Charlie said, “The Canadiens won.”
    Cal scanned the results himself, sighed. “Still, we face Montreal tomorrow night. We can make up some ground.”
    “Like hell. I’m just waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.”
    “Baseball?” Cal shook his head. “Too early for baseball. I still have faith in the Bruins.”
    “This year? Are you shitting me? We’ve got no offense and our defense stinks. Better